World Socialist Radio - The Magic Gadget IRL (2026)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

The Magic Gadget IRL by The Socialist Party of Great Britain

This episode reflects on life before smartphones and social media, describing how children in the 1990s experienced the world directly, without digital pressures such as FOMO (fear of missing out), sexting, cyberbullying, and addictive “attention economy” features designed to maximize engagement. It highlights growing concerns about the mental health impacts of ubiquitous device use among young people and discusses recent policy responses such as Australia’s ban on major social media platforms for under-16s and widespread bans on phone use in schools, though evidence of real benefits remains mixed. It also notes how pervasive smartphone ownership even among very young children blurs safety with surveillance, and that regulatory efforts may simply push kids toward less regulated, potentially worse online spaces.

Taken from the January 2026 edition of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

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Featuring music: ‘Pushing P (Instrumental)’ by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Pathfinders: The magic gadget IRL (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

30 years ago in 1996, some were learning to use email, home computers and the embryonic worldwide web, but most families still shopped in the high street, looked up numbers in the phone book and watched ‘terrestrial’ telly together in the sitting room. Kids who wanted alternative amusement ended up hanging out with mates on park benches or outside supermarkets in the winter cold. Gay teens had no local community of peers to turn to. Neither did those with hobbies, or growing-pain problems. For them, the world in real life (IRL) was limited and limiting.

But, IRL, there was also no FOMO, no sexting, no doxing, no doomscrolling, no cyberstalking or cyberbullying, no revenge porn or ‘nudifying’ of classmates, and no pro-suicide chatrooms. Smartphones and social media (SM) have revolutionised the childhood experience, and not necessarily in a good way, as BBC Radio 4 reported (7 December): ‘Alongside the widespread adoption of smartphones has come a tidal wave of adolescent anxiety, depression, loneliness, and a spike in suicides’. Now Australia has banned access to ten of the biggest SM sites for under-16s. Communications Minister Annika Wells explains: ‘Teenage addiction was not a bug, it was a design feature, and on 10 December there are going to be withdrawal symptoms. […] With one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by predatory algorithms described by the men who created the feature as “behavioural cocaine”‘.

Many countries now ban phone use in schools. Australia started doing this back in 2020, with support from teachers and parents alike. All claimed a degree of success. However the bans were not well coordinated, and subjective reports of greater engagement and improved mental health may be the placebo effect at work. A Birmingham University study looking at 1,227 students in 30 secondary schools found no evidence of changes in grades, amount of sleep, class behaviour, or even time spent on phones.

Australia’s latest action, with popular support, could trigger a global cascade of similar legislation. SM firms already face a landmark US trial this month. China, with basilisk totalitarian vigilance, uses spyware to restrict SM use and game playing by its youth, with a 40-minute daily limit for SM and 3 hours gaming per week. The UK 2023 Online Safety Act (OSA) instead demands that SM companies take ‘reasonable steps’ to protect children. Good luck with that. SM lawyers will have a field day.

It’s not just teens. Ofcom estimates that 1 in 4 UK children aged between 5 and 7 have a smartphone. Parents say they buy these phones for safety reasons to do with the child being contactable and trackable. But satellite-tracking a five-year-old is not the way to keep them safe. In truth, overworked adults managing multiple jobs and kids may well find the magic gadget of infinite games and videos hard to resist, given that it shuts their child up like nothing else and besides, if all the other kids have one, their child runs the risk of being victimised for looking poor.

Radio 4 interviewees speculate that the Australian ban could be a useful research opportunity. That’s if it works, but it probably won’t. One 13-year-old got round the ban in less than five minutes. And if one kid can do it, they all will, because of peer pressure, and because the industry wants to lock them in, not out, and because it will regard regulatory fines as the paltry cost of doing business. The new OSA age-verification rules for porn sites are also probably doomed. There has been a huge increase in downloads of VPN apps which hide the user’s IP address. With a conservatively estimated 240,000 online porn sites, Ofcom regulators face an uphill struggle to ensure compliance. So far they’ve taken action against just 70, leading insiders to argue that the new rules are effectively unenforceable.

And then there is the law of unintended consequences which produced this generational mental health crisis in the first place. Regulating the top SM sites might end up funnelling users to even worse places, like regulation-exempt gaming chatrooms, notorious as extremist rabbit-holes.

But, one might argue, why pussyfoot around imploring SM firms to take responsibility, why not just ban smartphones for kids altogether? The UK’s Education Select Committee last year recommended exactly that. But capitalist governments have bigger things to worry about, and unlike China, are generally leery of voter blowback for ‘nanny-statism’.

Even so, some young self-styled neo-Luddites are opting to downsize to ‘dumbphones’ that have no social media, with a view to clawing back their free time. As one manufacturer puts it, SM entrepreneurs are obsessed with monopolising their users’ engagement time, whereas users should be saying ‘What about me? What about my time?’ He continues: ‘The problem is not the device, it’s the business model: the attention economy. Every free app, every social media platform, every browser, is trying to maximize engagement so they can make money collecting data and categorizing people into different groups so they can sell it to advertisers’.

Unfortunately for neo-Luddites, dumbphones offer a near-zero margin, so tech firms ‘have little incentive to cater to dumbphone users, whose revenue potential is relatively miniscule – that is, if they can even make the economics of manufacturing the devices work at all’.

It’s a tragic indictment of capitalism that social media started by connecting people, and is now arguably complicit in global disinformation and child abuse. Now, encouraged by Trump, SM firms are even ditching their fact-checkers. Perhaps Gen Z parents, having seen the damage for themselves, will refuse to allow their Gen Alpha kids to go through it. The bigger long-term tragedy for Gen Alpha, whether they’re on social media or not, is that their future IRL will be one of relentless capitalist exploitation and wage slavery. If we really want to stop not just child abuse, but human abuse, abolishing capitalism IRL is the only way.

Paddy Shannon

(Facebook review, page 20)

Proper Gander: Heading down stream (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two reports published around the start of August described troubles for the BBC, while also highlighting the trajectory television in general is following. The BBC itself didn’t draw attention to figures which show that for the first time, BBC News has lost its place as the most-watched news channel in Britain. According to the official ratings collator Barb, GB News had a higher share of viewers across July than BBC News (with Sky News trailing not far behind). Although both only had just over 1% of the audience share, reaching this point is a symptom of the increased popularity of right-wing media overall. Switch over to GB News and there’s likely to be content about immigration, ‘wokeism’ or ethnicity and crime, its tone not-so subtly reinforcing patriotism and nationalism, reflecting the uglier effects of alienation. The channel has more pundits and panel discussions than BBC News does, and because their banter seems more authentic than the comparatively staid tone of the BBC, the channel has more ‘personality’, even though the main trait is self-righteous smugness.

Another threat to Auntie Beeb comes from a different direction, as described in Ofcom’s annual Media Nations report. Google-owned YouTube has become the second most-watched media service in the UK, behind the BBC and ahead of ITV. The video-sharing platform’s popularity is not only due to its smorgasbord of vlogs and clips, but also because it has adopted formats from traditional TV: half its top-trending videos comprise long-form interviews and game shows. YouTube’s success lies partly in how it morphs itself into whatever is most appealing to each of us. Its algorithms create what looks like a personalised channel, with often eerily accurate recommendations based on what we’ve each previously viewed. One search for a Duran Duran video may also prompt suggestions of Spandau Ballet and lists of ‘80s fashion disasters. The data about our preferences gathered along the way is of use to advertisers in particular, to know the audiences at which to target their products. Much of YouTube’s revenue comes from the adverts which interrupt its videos at annoyingly random points, which on old-fashioned commercial TV channels are at least inserted more predictably so we know when to put the kettle on. Paying for YouTube’s Premium service avoids its adverts, but otherwise once you’ve got online YouTube is free to access. There’s still a price, of course: ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product’, as said by technology ethicist Tristan Harris in the 2020 docudrama The Social Dilemma, referring to the wealth of data captured about people.

The Social Dilemma was broadcast on Netflix, which like other streaming channels such as Amazon Prime and Disney+ has a different business model, requiring viewers to pay for a subscription alongside some income from adverts. Advertising funds most of the traditionally broadcast channels, while the BBC has a subscription of sorts in its state-enforced licence fee, although its BBC Studios division is profit-driven. While the BBC tries to move with the times (such as with its iPlayer), its infrastructure, having been established long ago, is less adaptable to the modern climate compared with the newer channels more aligned to newer trends. Despite this, broadcast TV still makes up most of what people watch, at 56% overall according to the Media Nations report, although younger viewers tend to prefer streaming services. The trend is nearing a tipping point of streaming becoming dominant.

Perhaps the growth of streaming services helps explain why, despite encroaching on the BBC, GB News isn’t profitable, having lost more than £105m since its launch in 2021. Its revenue from advertising was reduced after campaigns by groups such as Stop Funding Hate prompted brands including Ikea and Specsavers to withdraw from using the channel to promote their wares. To try and increase income, membership and branded tat can be purchased from GB News’ website, and presumably chasing the American dollar is motivating plans to launch a programme based in Washington DC. Its owners, Dubai-based investment firm Legatum and hedge fund tycoon Sir Paul Marshall, have propped the channel up with millions of pounds, which they would only do if GB News was aligned to their interests. While GB News may be a challenge to the BBC on one level, the bigger picture is that both are being overtaken.

The shift in viewing habits away from traditional broadcast media with a schedule you have to follow, and towards pick-and-choose streaming services is made possible by advances in technology, from cathode-ray tube all the way to YouTube. These developments aren’t driven by what is best or most popular, though. Because tech and media companies are owned by the capitalist class (or, as with the BBC, by the state which represents them) they are run to further their privileged position. So, advancements in technology and media come through what is most profitable for capitalists. To some extent profitability is connected to popularity, in that more viewers equals more market share. To attract and hold on to audiences, data is harvested and used to manipulate our choices through adverts and algorithms. So, at every step, what we watch is moulded by money.

The wide choice of channels available disguises how ultimately they are run in the interests of a tiny minority. The gradual decline of the BBC demonstrates that other models are becoming more promising for the capitalist class. Streaming channels commodify television in a different way, made more intrusive by how our preferences are turned into market research. There’s room for a little optimism, though, in that there’s something socialistic about streaming’s potential for quick access to any programme, without the constraints and dictates of the capitalist system. And even now, platforms such as YouTube can be used by anyone to broadcast their views, including us.

Mike Foster

Will information goods undermine capitalism? (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Information goods are goods whose value derives not from physical characteristics but from the information they convey. In many cases they can simply be copied or downloaded without any cost to speak of (apart from the time spent doing this). Moreover, there is no obvious upper limit as far the volume or quantity of these goods is concerned. They are intrinsically non-scarce or non-rivalrous and, also, ‘non-destructible’ – unlike a physical good.

For instance, by accessing a piece of music on YouTube or an article via Google, you are not denying anyone else the possibility of doing the same. This may very well not be true of a physical good. If I take the last loaf of bread off the supermarket shelf you will, sadly, have to go without at least until the next delivery.

A further characteristic of information goods is that while they have very low or zero marginal costs, their fixed or amortised development costs tend to be particularly high. This cost structure is rather different from the traditional cost structure pertaining to physical goods and, thus, calls for a somewhat different pricing strategy.

Given the non-rivalrous nature of information goods, their zero marginal costs, and the technical ease of capturing or pirating such goods (perhaps in contravention of copyright law), an internet-based business might decide that the most pragmatic thing to do would be to simply abandon the idea of charging for the information goods or service it makes available to its customers. However, while it costs you nothing to have a Facebook page or use the Google search engine this does not mean these commercial entities don’t generate enormous revenues (and profits) for themselves in some other way. In fact, both these entities currently make billions of dollars in profits and even more in revenue. Primarily their revenues derive from advertising (and the copious use of algorithms to more effectively target individual users to benefit their advertisers) though there is also a growing secondary source of revenue in the form of various ‘virtual goods’ or Cloud-based services.

The point is that unless a business like Google was able to make a profit under capitalism it would simply not exist. You and I would not then be able to use its search machine. Being able to freely make use of this facility is contingent upon Google making a profit in the first instance.

As a matter of fact, making this facility free to its users is actually a rather clever way of generating a massive revenue flow through advertising and thus securing a handsome profit into the bargain. People using this facility are a captive audience as far as the advertisers are concerned with adverts being tailored via algorithms, as mentioned, to our own particular tastes and online viewing habits. How many of us would even consider using a Google search engine if we had to pay for it? One suspects only a miniscule fraction of its current users.

Dominated by Big Tech

It is not difficult to see why this kind of commercial activity based on the provision of information goods has come to be absolutely dominated by a tiny handful of very large corporations that have nearly all become household names in their own right. These corporations have the wherewithal to afford the very high development costs incurred. They have the economic clout and reach to shape the industry to suit themselves. For advertisers too, the large size of these corporations has distinct advantages; it provides a platform that enables them to cast their net much more widely – and efficiently – than would otherwise be the case.

Of course, not all information goods are free to the public. Far from it. Internet-based corporations, like Meta (Facebook) and Alphabet (Google), may be able to provide a free service to the public but only because they can cover the enormous, fixed costs all this involves, and make a profit, by making an even larger sum of money primarily in the form of advertising revenue.

However, in the case of other internet-based businesses we see a somewhat different model in place. The information goods and services they provide are not free but are commodified. This is apparent in the case of paywall sites for some online journals or newspapers or else, streaming services like Netflix or Disney. Still other internet-based businesses such as Amazon are engaged in the retailing and distribution of actual physical goods and thus depart even more from the conventional cost structure of businesses purely concerned with the distribution of information goods and services.

However, regardless of the kind of business we are talking about or the type of good it is peddling, the bottom line for any business in a capitalist economy is the need to make a profit. There is no such thing as a free lunch in capitalism. Somebody somewhere ends up having to pay the bill.

Developments like artificial intelligence, the internet of things, robotics and even 3D printing and desktop manufacturing are revolutionising the costs of doing business and shifting the emphasis from tangible to intangible assets. Physical goods are, so to speak, increasingly taking on or incorporating more and more of the qualities or aspects of information goods even though they obviously can never transcend their essential status as physical goods. Or to put it in a nutshell – you can´t have software without the hardware that goes with it

For this reason (and others) information goods are not, and can never be, free in some absolutist sense in a capitalist society as might be inferred from the fact that they – or some of them – can be downloaded effortlessly and without cost to your computer screen; they come with a price (even when the price is not necessarily paid by the consumer but the advertiser in this case).

Too easily beguiled

Some are too easily beguiled by the notion that we are moving, or already have moved, into something called an ‘information-based’ economy. It is the very nature of such an economy, they imagine, stemming from the intrinsic nature of information goods themselves, that has somehow supposedly changed the basic rules of the game, so to speak.

Tom Stonier, for instance, argued in The Wealth of Information: A Profile of the Post-Industrial Economy (1983) that:

‘Whereas material transactions can lead to competition, information transactions are much more likely to lead to cooperation. Information is a resource which can be truly shared’.

Superficially, this sounds all very plausible. One thinks of the crucial role of R&D in industry. A lot of the work of scientists involves collaborating with other scientists and sharing information through peer-reviewed journals and so on. This comes across as all very cooperative and civilised, indeed. Being a ‘non-rivalrous good’, information can be universally shared at virtually no cost. No nasty competition is required.

Its very abundance, goes the argument, means that an information good fundamentally breaks with the logic of the market itself. ‘Plenty’ undermines the rationale for attaching a price tag to a product and, thus, the idea of exclusively owning this product – in this case an information good. Insofar as a price tag is still attached to such a product this can only be explained, it is argued, by the fact that the provider is seeking to perversely, and quite unnecessarily, exclude others from freely using it. The motive of the provider is simply one of self-gain to be achieved by such means as patents and copyrights. In other words, they are asserting an unjustifiable monopolistic hold over the product in question in an age of potential plenty.

Indeed, this, it is sometimes suggested, is precisely why ‘late-stage capitalism’ is today dominated by the existence of virtual monopolies – or, more precisely, oligopolies. Prices are no longer explicable in the conventional terms of supply and demand. Rather they are imposed by diktat by the price makers – namely, those industrial giants striving to enlarge their share of the market in which they operate – to the detriment of price takers, the consuming public.

The basic idea that information technology is – allegedly – more and more bent on subverting the rationale for a market system is a recurring theme in books like Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski´s The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (2019). Capitalism, according to them, is being progressively hollowed out from within and what remains of it is but a brittle shell that seeks to needlessly confine and imprison the new life forms it has given birth to. These represent its arch nemesis: in particular, information technology.

Such technology, goes the argument, by enabling the application of so-called ‘centralised planning’ within the corporation and, by extension, the suspension of market principles – has the potential to transform society along ‘socialist’ lines or at least, provides us with a model of what such a future society would look like. This in itself is a questionable proposition in some ways, but it is also one that seems fundamentally at odds with the pre-eminent role of big corporations today in promoting market imperialism and commodity fetishism.

We should be more cautious in our assessment of the potential impact of information technology and not get too carried away with fanciful notions of the imminent arrival of what has been dubbed ‘fully automated luxury communism’ (FALC). There is no reason to think that information technology or the enhanced role of information as a factor of production, will somehow in and of itself pose some kind of existential threat to capitalism.

This should be obvious from the standpoint of capitalist businesses. The idea that they would somehow resign themselves to economic suicide seems inherently implausible. Under capitalism, generally speaking, technological innovations tend not to be taken up and developed by businesses if there is no prospect of making a profit by doing so.

Robin Cox

Blogger's Note:

Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski´s The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism was reviewed in June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Pathfinders: No Man is an Island . . . (2011)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism won’t be got by evolution but by intelligent design, though it would be nice to think there was an easier way. The political shortcuts turned out to be circular, but some people never give up hope that technology might open up some fast track to the Promised Land.

It was always so. Probably when the plough was first invented there was some Neolithic version of futurist Ray Kurzweil running around the Fertile Crescent gibbering about the Coming of the Singularity, while autodidactic peasants sat around in the smoke-filled back rooms of tribal longhouses discussing the revolutionary implications of the social democratisation of agriculture. Much to their chagrin what they ended up with was kings, wars, plagues and a lousy diet. With the later invention of the printing press some people no doubt foresaw a new flowering of subversive thought and the imminent rising of the masses, just prior to being drowned in a tidal wave of pulp fiction and religious junk mail.

Of course there has been huge progress, but behind each screaming wave-front of optimism trails the long, Doppler-shifted whine of hindsight. For all the smart phones and sushi bars we’re still slaves chained to the day job, compared to whom the playboys and girls of the Neolithic seem to have enjoyed great diet and health, endless holidays and free art classes.

The plough and the printing press were key technological developments in two of the most essential human activities of all, production of material goods and distribution of information. The whole trajectory of capitalism has been towards the efficiency and economy of scale of mass production and distribution, together with their correlates, state-imposed mass ideologies. When the horrors of Nazism and Soviet Communism turned people off ‘mass’ concepts, and rising affluence meant people couldn’t be fobbed off with production-line uniformity, a new cult of the individual was born.

At first this ‘lifestyle’ capitalism was little more than a marketing scam. We could ‘individually’ commute to our individual replica jobs, eat our individual replica food in our individual replica residential boxes, while watching mass-entertainment on our individual idiot-boxes. Advertisers called us princely consumers and we bought the flattery along with the products. The more we acquired a bit of individual ‘class’, the more we forgot the collective power of class consciousness. The more the notion of individualism was fostered, the more sheep-like we became. We didn’t mature into a society of individuals, we fractured into an atomised mass, our former commonality too vulgar to preserve.

Technology is embedding the illusion. Under Soviet rule dissidents were forced to resort to self-publishing their own material, a difficult and risky business known as samizdat, or self-made. The desktop publishing and internet revolutions have given us all the technology for this kind of independent self-expression. But people forget we are all products of society and therefore not so very different, so the upshot of all this self-publishing, blogging, Facebook and supposedly interactive Web 2.0 is that we have ended up with infinite versions of uniformity. Homogenous variety, samizdat become same-as-that.

If we don’t see the illusion it’s because we don’t have the attention-span to look at the big picture but only into a mirror. Instead of opening the doors to infinity we are mostly using the internet to create a narcissistic bubble around ourselves, a self-promoting solipsism which closes out every fact or idea which contradicts our own world-view. And the advertisers are slavering to make it more so. People now get different results for the same Google search due to ‘personality’ filters they don’t even know about (New Scientist, 23 July). Each person’s information environment is determined not only by their own conscious likes and dislikes but also by automated trackers deciding what is good for them.

Astoundingly, a similar thing could happen in the world of production, with the development of individual 3D printing, now being called by some the second Industrial Revolution. When the Socialist Standard first reported on this (August 2005) it was at an early stage, able to turn out fragile trinkets. Now it is possible to ‘print’ sophisticated equipment using composite materials with complex circuitry. The first 3D-printed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle has just been successfully flown (New Scientist, 30 July) and enthusiasts predict that in the future robots will walk out of printers, fully functional with batteries included.

If they were only foreseeing a revolution in new research and development at the lab-bench, the optimists could well be right. The lag between plan and prototype is certain to decrease by at least an order of magnitude. But no, they are talking about nothing less than the ‘democratisation’ of production, just as the digerati talked about the democratisation of knowledge through the internet. Even supposing 3D printers one day become as cheap as computers, this is still to confuse democracy, where people act together, with the cult of the individual, where people act alone en masse.

While the new parochialism of the internet involves huge waste of heat and storage in order to deliver infinitely slight variations of the same thing, so each person under the illusion of personal choice may end up printing separately what they could have produced collectively. This would be like boiling a single serving of rice in separate pots, one grain at a time. Capitalism is quite capable of this sort of stupidity if there’s money in it.

Most of the benefits of progress have historically percolated up like champagne bubbles to the rich, instead of downwards like loam deposits on the poor. If the rich can afford to print whatever they want, it follows that whatever mass-production still remains must exist only to cater for the poor, with all the quality and variety that implies. The poverty gap could then become unimaginably wide. In response to this, the poor majority might use the technology, with ‘hacked’ designs to get round regulations, to print their own guns and ammunition.

The most significant aspect of 3D printers is that they can ‘print’ themselves. They can’t print food or organic compounds though, or things larger than themselves. If 3D printing is the second industrial revolution, then nanotechnology is potentially the third. Eric Drexler is famous for his inspirational writing about the possibilities of nanotech, but even he overlooked the obvious political implication of a means of production that can reproduce itself. Not only would it abolish material scarcity (which has already effectively been done) but also any possible artificial barrier to individual abundance (which certainly has not). What worker would consent to slavery when they had the means to provide all their material needs through a domestic replicating device, which itself could be infinitely replicated? Capitalism would collapse, practically overnight.

No need to get too excited though. Nobody has come close to creating a self-replicating nano device, and like nuclear fusion it may remain permanently years away. Even if it could be done, such a replicator could run away with itself and convert the entire Earth into ‘grey goo’. Even if it were made safe, the ruling class would have every reason to ensure that the technology was never developed. Even if they couldn’t suppress it, material abundance does not imply socialist consciousness any more than knowledge implies wisdom. It’s no use to live as a king in an empty palace. One way or another, socialists have still got work to do.

Paddy Shannon

British fascists online (2022)

From the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few weeks ago, YouTube’s algorithms carried me towards some video essays made by the alternative media commentator known as Morgoth. I’d been vaguely aware of Morgoth and similar reactionaries, such as Richard Spencer, Millennial Woes and Keith Woods, for some time, but hadn’t paid too much attention to them. After all, I knew that they called themselves ‘traditionalists’, ‘racial nationalists’ or ‘third positionists’ – in a word, fascists – and I only have so much time to devote to the ramblings of people who would happily deport or kill my non-white friends and family. On the other hand, it’s good to know your enemies, so I resolved to trawl through some of the videos and livestreams made by Morgoth and his cronies in order to get a sense of what the far right are saying and doing online these days.

Racial nationalists

Morgoth’s worldview is a macabre one. In between garbled references to right-wing philosophers, Morgoth rails against the ‘liberal elites’ and ‘globalist’ technocrats whom he sees as running the world – all controlled and funded, of course, by rootless cosmopolitans like George Soros. According to Morgoth, these elites are set on crushing the ‘Western Spirit’, subjecting the population to their nihilistic ideology of hyper-individualism, hedonistic consumerism and, worst of all, racial diversity. By promoting mass immigration and miscegenation throughout the Western world, the elites, according to Morgoth, want to undermine and ultimately eradicate the white native stock. To stop this from happening, Morgoth proposes that whites should unite to reactivate the Faustian spirit of the West by creating a racially pure ethno-state. As he puts it at the end one of his videos: ‘We’re going to be the masters in our own land again!’ (YouTube, ‘Roger Scruton & Words of Power’).

For obvious reasons, Morgoth never appears on camera. Judging by details contained in his various monologues, he seems to be a Generation X factory worker from North-East England. He has a blog, Morgoth’s Review, and a large number of video essays on YouTube and other digital platforms favoured by the far right, such as BitChute and Odysee. He also occasionally pops up as a guest on other so-called ‘dissident right’ social media channels and has now started to consolidate his oeuvre on his Substack page. His video essays, which are often illustrated by footage or photographs from his countryside walks, address a wide range of topics and Morgoth often sweetens the red pill of ethno-nationalism with discussions of contemporary popular culture. In recent years, far-right organisers have been using online gaming as a recruitment tool, pipelining young men towards racial supremacism during in-game chats and associated livestreams, and Morgoth himself often combines his political rants with analyses of videogames, fantasy novels, television dramas and films.

Many of Morgoth’s videos rhapsodise about the wonders of Nature, although even these are shot through with expressions of hatred towards minority groups. In one video (YouTube, ‘A Tale of Two Country Walks’), for example, Morgoth laments that, on a visit to the Norwegian fjords, he was obliged to share his authentic appreciation of the awe-inspiring landscape with ‘cripples’ and ‘fat slobs’ who were able effortlessly to enjoy the same scenery from the comfort of an adjacent car park. Morgoth’s main business, however, is racial hatred and his regular attacks on racial minorities often contain elements of so-called scientific racism or ‘race realism’. In a 2017 blog post (‘Equality is a Cruel Mistress’), for instance, he cites a table of national IQ rankings to argue that the black Labour politician Diane Abbott, as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, is too unintelligent to be the Shadow Secretary of State.

Morgoth, and the British far right in general, are obsessed with the so-called ‘Asian grooming gangs’ that have come to light in English towns such as Rochdale and Telford in recent years. Research produced by the Home Office suggests that the sexual grooming of young girls in Britain is not a disproportionately ‘Muslim problem’, but Morgoth, like other far-right figures in Britain such as Tommy Robinson, talks exclusively about Pakistani men preying on white English girls and defiling the racial purity of the nation. There’s an all-too-familiar racist fantasy at work here. In his memoir Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote luridly about the ‘satanic joy’ of ‘the black-haired Jewish youth’, who ‘lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people’. The image of a racialised Other who enjoys what is rightfully ‘ours’ and stands in the way of our own satisfaction is deeply imprinted on the fascist imagination.

Paranoid

Indeed, Morgoth, like the rest of the political far-right, is very paranoid. To justify his sense of victimhood, he conflates completely different traditions of political and philosophical thought into a single straw-man enemy. Liberalism, leftism, postmodernism, neo-liberalism and socialism are lumped together and presented as the more or less interchangeable snares of the Machiavellian globalists. Unsurprisingly, this leads Morgoth into incoherence and self-contradiction; in one video he even makes the bizarre claim that socialists have been responsible for ushering in ’a globalist, capitalist society’ (YouTube, ‘The Good, the Bragg and the Stormzy’).

The question therefore arises: why should we pay any attention to confused bigots like Morgoth? One reason is that there is clearly a receptive audience for their ideas. Research findings published by the organisation Cybersecurity for Democracy last year showed that far-right news stories produce far more user engagement, in the form of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, than other types of online content. Some of the key figures on the far right, meanwhile, have significant numbers of followers. At the time of writing, Morgoth himself has nearly 50,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. He has also been given mainstream credibility – if that is the right word for it – by featuring as a guest on the podcast of the British conservative hack James Delingpole. In 2019 the singer Morrissey even shared a Morgoth video on his website. All in all, it’s a level of exposure that socialists could only dream of. It’s therefore worth considering the reasons for the popularity of this type of content.

It has to be said that some of Morgoth’s material is quite entertaining. Morgoth can turn a good phrase and knows how to appeal to his listeners’ interest in popular culture. In one video, for example, he indulges in a fairly amusing rant against the 90s television chef Jamie Oliver, suggesting that the ‘middle-class’ neo-liberal multiculturalism that arose in the New Labour years was ‘forged in the basket of Jamie Oliver’s moped, alongside the quail eggs and Japanese lager’ (YouTube, ‘Do Millennials Dream of Jamie Oliver’s Moped’). This combination of comedic sarcasm and pop-culture awareness gives Morgoth’s content a certain piquancy.

Phoney radicalism

Another dangerous aspect of Morgoth’s work is its phoney radicalism. Morgoth’s philosophical touchstones are the fascist favourites Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Evola, Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger. But he is canny enough to acknowledge some leftist thinkers, too. In one video (YouTube, ‘My Trip Down South’) he alludes to Jacques (sic) Deleuze and he often refers to the leftist philosopher Mark Fisher. For example, to support his own critique of cultural decline under neo-liberalism, he draws on Fisher’s concept of the ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ – the interesting claim that cultural innovation has stagnated since the 1990s and that popular culture today is merely recycling the themes and styles of earlier periods.

In fact, like so many fascist writings, Morgoth’s musings often appear to be consistent with socialist understandings. For example, he attacks the commodification of human life that capitalism produces (although he contradicts himself by warning white women to be mindful of their declining ‘sexual market value’, which sounds pretty commodifying to us). He is also critical of contemporary liberal catchwords such as ‘white privilege’ – as are socialists, since such notions tend to undermine working-class solidarity. Morgoth’s critique of Extinction Rebellion (YouTube, ‘Extinction Rebellion: Worst Controlled Opposition EVER!’), meanwhile, also has a superficial affinity with socialist arguments. Morgoth makes the point that XR are not a truly radical group and that their demands essentially amount to a call for working-class austerity; again, socialists would be inclined to agree. But Morgoth predictably blames the environmental crisis on overpopulation and ignores the fundamental role of capitalist production and over-production in generating global heating and other environmental threats. In fact, it’s not clear whether he even accepts the reality of human-made global heating, as he seems to reject the notion of scientific consensus; when it comes to understanding the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, he places his faith in the mumbo jumbo of the discredited scientific crank Dolores Cahill (YouTube, ‘A Letter From The NHS’). As always, the fascist mind rejects the scientific, materialist analyses of social phenomena in favour of scapegoating and irrational conspiracy-mongering.

As already noted, Morgoth is far from the only racial nationalist at work on the internet today and regular debates among nationalists of various stripes sometimes attract thousands of viewers. And while these men sometimes trade in outright lies and misrepresentations – for example, Morgoth suggests in one video that Marx and Engels might have been funded by the Rothschild banking family (YouTube, ‘The People vs The Gammon’) – their ideas are often couched in radical-sounding language, providing critiques of capitalism, ‘neo-liberalism’, consumerism and commodification. This is, of course, the socialism of fools. But what gives far-right ideas their traction and plausibility – at least among some white working-class people – is that they identify and seem to provide an explanation for real problems affecting our class, such as declining living standards and the lack of stable, full-time jobs and affordable housing.

How much of a political threat the far right pose today is another question. On the one hand, as we know, fascism is always over-diagnosed by left-wing commentators. While recent years have seen the establishment of neo-Nazi political organisations in Britain such as Patriotic Alternative, such groups often have a relatively short shelf-life – for example, the English Defence League, which sprang to life in 2009, has been relatively inactive for the last ten years – and some more recent groups, like National Action, have been banned by the state and forced underground. On the other hand, right-wing, authoritarian and often explicitly racist governments have come to power in recent years in several countries around the world. Then there is the question of far-right violence. Across the world, far-right terrorist attacks have become more common in recent years and are notoriously hard to predict, because their perpetrators have often been ‘radicalised’ online and are not part of any monitored group.

In recent years, the far right have largely been purged from mainstream tech platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. But it’s not clear how effective the censorship of far-right ideologues has really been: it has arguably only pushed them towards the more loosely-regulated ‘alt-tech’ platforms and handed them a propaganda advantage by allowing them to pose as victims. What we can say for sure is that, from the socialist point of view, far-right arguments need to be combated with better ones. Like all reactionaries, Morgoth is disdainful towards the academic subject of Media Studies (YouTube, ‘Clapping for Stalin and The Burnley Banner’); but the popularity of his ideas suggests a need for robust media literacy and political clarity.

Racial nationalism needs to be exposed for the nonsense it is and anybody attracted to it should know that whatever they may claim, Morgoth and his fellow Aryans don’t represent the interests of workers in Britain or anywhere else. They claim to be ‘traditionalists’, but their right-wing brand of identity politics is completely at odds with the working-class traditions of mutual aid and solidarity and with the history of working-class struggle against wage slavery. They also describe themselves as politically incorrect ‘dissidents’ or the ‘dissident right’, but in fact they are defenders of the status quo. They reproduce the dominant ideology, dividing humanity along national and racial lines and obscuring what almost all of us have in common: our membership of the exploited class.

SH

More FALC: The Walmart hypothesis (2019)

Book Review from the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Can Walmart Tell Us Anything About Socialism?

Internationally, there is a resurgence in discussing socialism, not just in the American sense of faintly looking at a welfare state, but credibly and seriously taking on the idea of a co-operative democratic abolition of market allocation of goods and resources. Books like Four futures: life after capitalism by Peter Frase have already lead the way, including among the options a world of abundance without money (although reading the text, it seems the author’s preferred or most likely future was some sort of regulated market in a post-ecological-collapse world). That book sprang from Jacobin magazine, and it seems that other contributors to that magazine are beginning to produce other useful examinations of the way towards a market-free world.

The latest example is Philips and Rozworski’s The People’s Republic of Walmart: how late-stage capitalism gives way to early-stage fully automated luxury communism. This book puts forward the simple case that firms like Walmart are in effect massive planned economies, close to the size and scale of the Soviet Union in terms of the number of products and processes they have to employ to run their enterprise. They also note how 3rd party firms that trade with them are effectively locked into their productive ecosystem.

Much of this is achieved algorithmically, with resources being poured into tracking stock through the system, knowing where it is at all times, and using vast storage capacity. The algorithms calculate what resources are available nearest to the point at which they are required, and how to get them there quickly. The authors give the counter example of Sears, which imploded after implementing an internal market and competition within its firm (under libertarian ideological commitment from its directors).

Of course, Walmart and Amazon are planning to exploit, and get the most out of, their workers and advantages over commercial rivals. It is not so much an example to be emulated, but a living demonstration that wide-scale economic allocation via planned structures works. Further evidence is found in a nuanced description of the history of the NHS, noting how it has gone from an ad hoc replication of existing structures, without conscious planning to serve community needs, to being carved up by an internal market. The authors note that it has always existed as a hybrid between the firms of GPs and the hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry, and that attempts to implement society-wide input and control were stymied at Westminster.

Democracy is seen as an inherent good and a necessity for wide-scale planning in an economy, if it is to serve people’s needs. Phillips and Rozworski note that a significant part of the failure of the Soviet Union’s planned economy was because of dictatorial intervention preventing the free flow of information between productive units, and removing their capacity to respond. The other living example they cite is Project Cybersyne in Chile.

British cyberneticist Stafford Beer was called in to help the Allende government implement a planned economy. Given the state of the country at the time, he had to improvise a system of telex and phone lines. His systems were credited with enabling the government to defeat a crippling lorry drivers’ strike, by routing key resources around disruptions and allocating available lorries. The principles behind Beer’s cybernetics were thus not all about enslaving people to the machine, but allowing distributed horizontal decision-making between relatively autonomous units with oversight and regulation to achieve common ends.

If all of this sounds remarkably familiar, it is because this is what we have been saying in our slightly less fashionably way since we were formed. Indeed, our pamphlet Socialism as a Practical Alternative, largely written by the late Pieter Lawrence, based a description of socialism on using the regulated stock control models already developed by the likes of Walmart, coupled with formation clearing houses to allow communities and groups to work to enable production for needs.

It’s clear, though, that while technology has advanced, along with the experience of wide-scale economic organisation, this is not a prerequisite for socialism. Pencil and paper-based systems could have handled the work (and probably still could), but the fact that machines and computers allow us to do it faster, and are increasingly presenting the possibility of co-ordinated democratic production in people’s minds, is making the topic more popular.

Philips and Rozworski cite the work of Scottish academic Paul Cockshott with his demonstration that an economy-wide plan is computable (especially if we exclude millions of null combinations of goods, arguably Walmart does not compute all the possible combinations of goods, but works with what it has and approximates efficient allocation-adjusting over time). Cockshott is not alone in academia, and he and collaborators have made impressive inroads into the possibilities of computational planning through vertical integration of sub-systems. It would be well to think what would be the result of the combined efforts of the best and brightest computational minds being directed towards co-operative economics and the satisfaction of needs, rather than algorithmic stock trading.

We have discussed in these pages before the types of innovations in thought and process that will enable us to make socialism work on a worldwide scale: Leonid Kantarovich’s linear programming; Gale and Shaply’s stable matching algorithm; Brams and Taylor’s envy-free cake-cutting algorithm, etc. The intellectual progress for the machinery of co-ordinating activity is improving, even if the political co-ordination to pick it up and use it is not yet as developed. It is good that these obscure and complex lines of enquiry are beginning to get serious popular attention.

Some commentators have begun to compare capitalism (and/or corporations) to a vast out-of-control Artificial Intelligence, programmed to maximise profit. This is potentially a powerful way of depicting capitalism: but the risk is, in coming up with algorithms and procedures to create a planned economy, that we would end up replacing capitalism with simply a rival AI, rather than returning to a human-centred system.

Demonstrating that we can plan and rationalise resources in the way that capitalism can and does is not a clincher for socialism: it could be argued that in an ends-based economy, using labour inefficiently could well become a goal (as William Morris pictured in his utopian novel News from Nowhere). The most powerful message we can send is that there is not one way to run an economy, and the only real limit is the power of our imaginations.

The tag-line of ‘fully automated luxury communism’ that is gaining some popularity may help raise the profile of consciously planning the economy co-operatively.

Pik Smeet

Learning machines: Algorithmic Dreams (2020)

From the March 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The apparent brains behind the Johnson ministry, Dominic Cummings, has been ruffling feathers with a blog post [since deleted by the looks of it] calling for ‘data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos’. Tellingly, the posts are advertised via his blog, rather than the usual civil service recruitment routes, and applicants are asked to apply to a Gmail address. Cummings has form for trying to use personal accounts to circumvent freedom of information rules. This is all part of his ‘disruptive’ persona, looking to shake up the stuffy old civil service, and get things done:

  ‘We need some true wild cards, artists, people who never went to university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole, weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand “diviner” who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger or that Chinese-Cuban free runner from a crime family hired by the KGB. If you want to figure out what characters around Putin might do, or how international criminal gangs might exploit holes in our border security, you don’t want more Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers and spread fake news about fake news’.

It is a bit strange to complain of liberal arts graduates via citing a work of fiction, and tellingly, Cummings remembers the name of Hubertus Bigend, the uber-capitalist anti-hero of Gibson’s Blue Ant series, but not Cayce Pollard (‘that girl’).

He also wants data scientists to look at models of system change and dynamic modelling of viral information. Seemingly, Cummings wants to bring systems analysis and mathematical thinking into the heart of government. He’d have to be prepared to pay well, since those skilled with such talents can find good work in automated trading and business analysis in the City.

Maths not everything

The mathematics populariser Dr Hannah Fry took issue with Cummings’ call:

  ‘There is some truth to this – there are a host of government questions that could benefit from a more mathematical take. In everything from bin collection timetables to Brexit policy, I’d love to see more decisions made on the basis of evidence over instinct. The big-data revolution has transformed the private sector, and I wholeheartedly believe it has the potential to profoundly benefit broader society too’ (Guardian, 5 January).

She points out there are limits to using maths to model society, and that an understanding of humans must go alongside any such scientific modelling.

As Noam Chomsky has pointed out:

  ‘A vision of a future social order is in turn based on a concept of human nature. If in fact man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for the “shaping of behavior” by the state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community’ (Language and Freedom).

Fry herself had addressed these questions in the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (which should be available via YouTube by the time this article comes to print). In one of them she addressed the:

  ‘decade in which we learned the lessons of charging ahead without first carefully thinking about the ethics of forcing equations on to human systems. There were the stories about racist algorithms in the criminal justice system, and sexist algorithms designed to filter job applications. YouTube was accused of unwittingly radicalising some of its viewers. Indeed, some would argue that the world is still reeling from the consequences of mathematical equations gone awry, both during the time leading up to the 2008 financial crash and Facebook failing to consider the consequences of its newsfeed algorithms’.

She also explained, however, how algorithms are being taught to learn, through deep reinforcement learning, being ‘rewarded’ for successfully finding the correct result in their task, and ‘punished’ for failing. She demonstrated this via a pile of matchboxes that had been ‘taught’ to play noughts and crosses.

The problem, as with the racist and sexist algorithms, is that if the original data used to teach the algorithm is skewed: Fry, in her Guardian article, linked to an example of how Amazon’s recruitment algorithm had learned that most successful applications came from men, and thus decided that being male was a desirable quality in an applicant.

Resource allocation

Deep reinforcement learning, though, is a powerful tool. AlphaGo defeated a human grandmaster at the immensely complex Japanese boardgame ‘Go’ after teaching itself the game (this is radically different from when human programmers helped Deep Blue to defeat Gary Kasparov at chess).

‘Systems employing this approach have already been used to optimise system performance in areas including resource management, device payment optimisation and data centre cooling’ (Gemma Church, The maths problems that could bring the world to a halt).

Such systems are beginning to solve problems that have hitherto been considered computationally intractable: involving too many permutations and requiring too much processing time to be realistically solved using traditional computing techniques.

The capacity of such algorithms, Church points out, brings into play the possibility for them to handle resource allocation, to actively supply human wants in a real-time fashion:

  ‘Over the last few decades, researchers have developed a range of pretty effective mathematical solutions that can allocate resources across a variety of industries and scenarios so they can attempt to keep up with the daily demands our lives place on them. But when an allocation made at one time affects subsequent allocations, the problem becomes dynamic, and the passing of time must be considered as part of the equation. This throws a mathematical spanner in the works, requiring these solutions to now take into account the changing and uncertain nature of the real world’.

Amazon is already using the data it collects to train algorithms to anticipate what it needs to stock and ship. Amazon has to solve optimisation problems, trying to maximise use of its warehouses, while minimising its delivery routes and matching that with courier availability and flights, trains, etc. The trick with such immensely complex problems is not to solve them absolutely, but to approximate as closely as possible in a computationally realistic amount of time. It is this non-absolute characteristic that enables algorithms to steadily improve. The solution to the millions of variables in a delivery system is to look for good enough, not the perfect.

The algorithms that YouTube and Amazon use to recommend content to customers are changing and evolving in an ecosystem that drives them to improve and ultimately provide us with the goods and services we want. Effectively, producing a profit-driven, private planned economy.

Algorithms are unhuman, as per Serle’s Chinese room (see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room) they can learn to follow a set of rules and respond to inputs, but they lack intentionality and the inherent structures of feeling and humanness that people possess. Humans are essential to working with algorithmic artificial intelligence to make it serve our needs, rather than that of the special form of Artificial Intelligence that is the capitalist firm. The computing resources are there to enable us to better model and predict chaotic systems, but they need a political determination on the part of us all to avoid them being used to service the needs of the ruling minority. We don’t need Cummings’ technocratic weirdos to change and shape our world, but we can use their ideas to improve our lives: but only if we are running society on our own behalf.

In the words of D.H. Lawrence:

For God’s sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.
Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

Pik Smeet

Proper Gander: YouTube And You (2020)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the five-or-so minutes it’ll take to read this article, some 2,500 hours of new videos will be uploaded to YouTube. The website hosts videos of just about anything which anyone with the facilities wants to post. This means that we have instant access not only to obscure pop videos from 40 years ago and films of cats playing pianos, but also to views and experiences outside those of the mainstream media. YouTube is one of the most useful parts of the internet. But in practice, it’s tainted by having to be a money-making machine which uses sly methods to draw in more viewers. Videos often get rudely interrupted by adverts and there’s the vaguely unsettling way the site seems to know what else we might like to watch. Our previous searches for videos are turned into algorithms which then find similar content to suggest back to us. While this can be handy, it also has its downsides, especially with political content. Being prompted to watch more and more of the same set of opinions without comparing them to others can reinforce dodgy ideologies among any naïve viewers.

This has been exploited by right wing groups and individuals, whose YouTube content seems to heavily outnumber that of the left and often has slicker production values. It’s easier to find videos mocking ‘social justice warriors’ than videos by ‘social justice warriors’ themselves. Fearing that association with far right wing views might tarnish its brand, and therefore its profitability, YouTube has adjusted its algorithms to reduce bias towards far right content, stopped some uploaders from getting money through adverts and banned others.

But as well as the political dross, YouTube has a wealth of videos exploring revolutionary and radical ideas. A good enough starting point as any is a quick and brief debunking of the most common arguments defending capitalism, found in the video Top Ten Capitalist Arguments . One of these is the claim that ‘capitalism promotes innovation’, refuted by research saying that financial incentives don’t really work and that more creativity happens when people believe their activity has intrinsic value, rather than just being a means to get money. Another argument is that ‘markets [are] a rational means of organising economic life’, disproved because about a third of food produced is wasted while people are starving, and also because some commodities have built-in obsolescence, being designed to stop working so we’ll go out and buy a replacement. The video also counters the notion that ‘capitalism is a result of human nature’ by pointing out that humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years whereas capitalism has only been around for a few hundred. 

The ‘human nature’ issue is addressed in more detail in Wired For Culture – The Natural History of Human Co-operation, a lecture from the RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). In this, evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel explains how ‘human nature’ is fundamentally co-operative, rather than competitive. Both these traits developed from our distant ancestors living in and protecting their tribal communities. Although these early communities could be hostile to other groups, overall, co-operation has won out because it benefits us more than competition does.

But our drive to co-operate is frustrated by the divisions built in to capitalist society, and one way to explain this is through Karl Marx’s theory of alienation, covered by several videos on YouTube. Alienation is the way that capitalism, and especially employment, distances us from important aspects of our lives. The four types of alienation which class society leads to – alienation from the products of our labour, from our labour itself, from others and ourselves – are succinctly explained in a five minute video from Sociology Live. A more emotive short introduction is K is for Karl – Alienation, presented by journalist Paul Mason. He explains how the roots of alienation are in how capitalist institutions are privately owned, straight away estranging workers from them, further reinforced by their hierarchies.

Of course, the antidote to alienation is a society based not on the private ownership of production, but on it being owned in common and democratically managed. Such a society would not need money, and would instead be based on free access to goods and services. A world without money is explored in a video of a TED talk at the University of Edinburgh given by political writer Jade Saab. He gives an engaging summary of SPGB-style views about the benefits of a moneyless society, but then he goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid about governments. He doesn’t use the word ‘state’ but he seems to assume that governments can remain in a moneyless society. This might be sloppy wording on his part, as articles on his website suggest a more progressive view. For example, he says a moneyless society ‘would require a fundamental change in our economic system away from the private ownership of the means of production, towards a democratic model where citizens and workers can determine how the means of production are managed and what is done with them. Only through the democratic control of the means of production can we then democratically decide how access to goods and services produced can be managed’. He adds that a moneyless society would ‘challenge our very notion of what ‘countries’ are and how they function. I do not believe that a ‘world government’ will evolve but collaboration would naturally lead to forms of federation where resources, their extraction, transformation, and distribution is discussed through democratic systems. The UN and the EU provide interesting templates of what these collaborative ‘super-structures’ may look like’ [LINK]. Saab’s viewpoint would benefit from a bit more class consciousness and imagination to think beyond capitalist structures, but otherwise much of what he says is familiar to socialists. As YouTube shows, radical ideas are out there waiting to be found, helping to counter reactionary views from both the right and left. The Socialist Party’s own videos can be found on the YouTube channels ‘TheSPGB1904’, ‘pfbcarlisle’ and ‘Liverpool SPGB’, among others. However, searching for ‘SPGB’ occasionally also brings up videos of SpongeBob SquarePants, presumably thanks to a stray algorithm.

Mike Foster

Pathfinders: Capitalism’s Holy Grail (2019)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here’s an easy question – what’s your view of censorship? If you’re a socialist and a democrat, you’re probably against it. After all, you argue, the only really effective way to combat bad ideas is to bring them out in the open and put them up against good ideas, and you can’t do that if the bad ideas aren’t allowed to circulate in the first place.The battle of ideas must be fought in public or it becomes totalitarianism.

So how fares this public battle today? Not well, actually. Everyone knows that society has changed rapidly in the last two decades. The mass-market passive consumerism of the twentieth century has given way to the individualistic, two-way street of the internet. But instead of this opening up debate it seems to have done the opposite. Very few people would include a public political meeting as part of their normal week’s activity. Street-corner debates are a distant memory for the oldest among us. Now ideas don’t normally challenge each other in large open auditoriums. Instead they exist in largely separate and closed worlds where each person sees what they want to see.

This is not to say that the concern over social media echo chambers should be overstated. Social media groups tend to reflect the organic composition of friendship networks, which don’t typically consist of one exclusive type of belief or idea. Sure, you may not be besties with a Tory, but you probably know one or two, and you may have friends or relatives who think differently from you on a lot of issues. Social networks are like Venn diagrams, overlapping each other in a multi-dimensional nest. Comfort zones they may be, but most people don’t want or expect them to be hermetically sealed. At least, not reasonable people.

But in the pressured depths of the web where reasonable people don’t go there are unmoderated groups where something quite different is going on. Here the most one-dimensional views are expressed, and there are no dissenting voices to challenge them. Here is where a macabre game of Dare is played out. Far-right bedroom trolls take over a forum and use it as a playground to make violent death threats against black people, Hispanics, Moslems, Jews, gays or some other minority. It’s just talk at first, but the feedback loop ramps it up as each participant tries to outdo the last. Finally someone ups the ante to the limit, thereby winning the kudos and respect of all participants. What is this limit? Carrying out the death threat in reality.

This is what is thought to have happened on the 8chan discussion forum prior to the shootings in El Paso in August, when 22 people were killed and 24 injured, and the next day in Dayton, Ohio, where nine people were shot dead and 27 injured. 8chan was also used by the shooter in April’s Poway synagogue shooting in California, and in the mosque massacres of Christchurch, New Zealand, in March, where 51 were killed and 49 injured, and where the shooter live-streamed the massacres on Facebook.

Let’s take a moment to revisit that ethical question on your view of censorship. Given the track record of 8chan, if it was in your power to close it down by pressing a big Kill button, would you do it? Or would you defend 8chan in the name of free speech, saying as some US Republicans did at the time, that’s the price you pay for liberty?

Of course there was no shortage of hackers keen to take 8chan down. One easy way to do that would have been to launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on it by bombarding it with traffic until its servers ground to a halt. But this wasn’t possible because the site was protected by online security firm Cloudflare. After the Dayton shootings however, the owner of Cloudflare finally pulled the plug, saying: ‘8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate. They have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths’ (BBC News, 5 August – bbc.in/2lX1r6T).

8chan duly went offline almost immediately, however its users will certainly migrate to a different forum and continue as before. Even if you agree that ‘free speech’ has limits and such sites need to be stopped, the question is how. The internet is just too big.

Artificial Intelligence is held up as the great unbiased censor, the thing that might save society from its own worst nightmares, however the hype around AI is a good deal more advanced than the technology itself. AI is good in situations with finite options and clear rules, which is why it can beat the world’s top game-players. But ask it to make a value judgment or an ethical call, and it won’t have a clue.

Εven so, it’s good enough to ‘benevolently’ censor you. AI manages what you see on the GAFA big four (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon), sifting your data to serve up what it thinks you will like and hiding what you won’t. That’s why two people doing the same Google search will get different results. Meanwhile YouTube’s algorithms attempt to keep users on-site by serving up material on a ‘same-but-even-more-so’ basis. With an estimated 500 hours of material loaded every minute, YouTube can’t possibly keep track of its content. Thus, right-wing extremists end up being offered ever more extreme right-wing material, so that the site may be upping the ante in the same way as 8chan. Some people are demanding that it changes its algorithms in favour of more balance, while others are calling for it to be shut down altogether (New Scientist, 24 August).

There is, though, another reason to be highly resistant to any kind of censorship. What if they turn it on us? In China open dissent is impossible. People have to use secretive Virtual Private Networks to hide their identity when accessing forbidden western resources like Wikipedia. No wonder Hong Kongers are fearful. Who’s to say other states wouldn’t adopt Chinese tactics if it saved them money and created more docile populations?

What’s worrying about certain one-dimensional internet trends and also calls for more censorship is their general intention to disable the human critical faculty. They’re not interested in debate, they are engaged in whiter-than-white brainwashing, and never mind the victims or the collateral damage. In a way that’s the holy grail of capitalism too. It aims to create the perfect customer, even at the cost of the perfect storm.

Paddy Shannon

Pluses and Minuses (2018)

Book Review from the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy’, by Cathy O’Neil (Penguin. £9.99)

Computers may hold massive amounts of information about individuals, and can process this information to come to decisions which affect people’s lives. But it is often unclear what the basis is for the programs that do this processing, and their consequences can often be quite dire. The mathematical basis of the processing leads O’Neil to call them ‘weapons of math destruction’ (abbreviated, of course, as WMDs). Her book mainly relates to developments in the US, though that does not excuse a reference to ‘the British city of Kent’.

As an example, many job applications and their accompanying CVs are not examined by people at all, but only by WMDs, which among other things make use of personality tests which, for instance, ask applicants whether they are best described as ‘unique’ or ‘orderly’. If you have a bad credit score, that is likely to make you an unreliable worker, as reliable people pay their bills on time. If having a bad credit score stops you getting a job, then naturally that will not help your credit record, so the whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Moreover, what is used is often not a real credit score but what is termed an e-score, a kind of rough estimate that may use information such as where you live, rather than whether you pay bills on time.

This illustrates a general problem with WMDs, that they analyse you by looking at ‘people like you’, rather than truly dealing with you as an individual. Also, rather than dealing with truly relevant data, they rely on proxies, substitute information that may or may not be accurate, such as a supposed correlation between a person’s postcode and their likelihood of paying back a loan. Add to this the fact that much information that is held on computers is inaccurate: you may be in real trouble if someone with the same name as you, or even a similar name, has a police record.

In a slightly different area, Facebook determines what its members see on its social network, though the algorithms that lead to these decisions are opaque. This is particularly important when people get a lot of their news on Facebook. O’Neil says that Facebook is not a political WMD, as its network is not used to cause harm, but ‘the potential for abuse is vast’.

It is clear that WMDs, and much computer processing of data, emphasise efficiency and cost-saving over any concept of fairness or treating people equally. In this respect they are really just the latest extension of how capitalism works. O’Neil suggests that they could in principle be used to, for instance, identify and help problem families, but that is not what the profit system is interested in. 

Paul Bennett