On Understanding ‘The Situation in Ukraine’

Honestly, if I have to hear another person tell me how the situation in Ukraine is ‘bad’ I will probably end up without any further enthusiasm for how to navigate a ‘day’ ever again.

I do not understand how people have not figured it out, yet, that whatever gets published on the news is simply made up. I have to live my meager existence through the lens of what appears on a news application installed on my mobile telephone, a device miraculously handed to me by the gods of Apple. Can anyone explain to me, outside of sticking a sim card into a metal box, how a mobile phone works? Does anyone know, outside of ‘subpar labour conditions in China’, how the device is formed? Where do these strange pieces of metal come from, and who worked out how to sequence them in the correct order to allow me to purchase fish and chips on a cold Tuesday night, delivered straight to my door?

It certainly wasn’t me.

To that end, how can I then know for certain that the images appearing on my device are ‘true’, and indeed acting in my own best interest?

I can’t, because there’s no way of actually verifying this information. We trust, and we believe.

Why we trust and believe these devices is another matter entirely.

But the topic at hand is ‘On Understanding the ‘Situation in Ukraine”, so the rest of this will need to go through the lens of current affairs, instead of more meandering thought. It will relate to memes, ridicule and trying to have an honest crack at living a life that isn’t dictated to me by anyone else aside from me (whatever ‘me’ is).

I wake up in the morning, I brush my teeth, ‘get ready’, and enjoy a coffee while I turn on my portable electronic device and receive my information. Here I am fed a narrative, written by a stranger, that explains to me how the world is. There are clear sides, established through imagery and persuasive language, with a hero and a villain. I will only be fed information that confirms these roles.

I can then access forums of discussion where I can post my opinion on the latest story that my portable electronic device has fed me. Of course, due to the hero/villain dynamics of the narrative programming, if I voice a dissenting opinion from the mainstream story, I will be ridiculed, either by being labelled some kind of insult, or indeed banned from the platform itself. I have no input to how the platform is managed, and indeed how the initial opinions are formed.

This is life in tech-earth 2022. It’s not great, because even if you’re the biggest fan of one of the sides, the news is still bad. Who wants to watch an infinite stream of war? This is absurd. We did not come into the world in order to experience bad events. If we believe this, we’re being silly. There is nothing in base evaluation of life that would indicate that our general experience of life ought to be ‘bad’. In fact, being fed more and more content that confirms our own bias will inevitably lead to some form of mental defect where we lose the ability to form coherent and independent thought, thereby becoming totally dependent on our portable electronic devices in order to make sense of the world.

The portable electronic device in and of itself has the potential of actually being a positive force here, but unfortunately this context of not being able to affect any form of input into the governance of the platform will lend itself to the user becoming the mind-slave of whoever is operating the platform. Your thoughts will not be your own, they will belong to the person who has fed you that information.

See the easy reaction to analysis such as this is to ridicule me as a ‘conspiracy theorist’, an invented term in order to further confirm the user’s bias in their own opinions. You become fearful of stepping outside of the conventional narrative because you do not want to become one of the ‘untouchables’. Of course, this is immensely problematic because the user themselves has absolutely no idea who or what is programming the information they receive.

The default answer, when doing a bit of research is an ‘algorithm’, but further research into ‘ai work’ indicates that there’s no such thing as an objective ‘algorithm’ that pushes information on us, but a group of low paid workers who label, monitor and react to different information. Indeed, I can get $4 per task to verify information by correct sources as a professional ‘fact checker’. Lovely, in theory, because who doesn’t want a strict diet of factual information..?

But then the problem is further compounded due to the nature of subjectivity when dealing with situations that have no objective ‘truth’ to the matter, so the facts become facts if they adhere to the instruction manual that the professional fact checker is working to.

So then whoever writes the instruction manual controls truth.

And we just scroll and scroll, becoming better informed about events happening miles and miles away that we will never be able to verify with our own eyes.

Which leads to further trouble, because we can’t even verify if the events being presented to us are even real!

Do you know that I can generate an artificial voice that will read out my script in a convincing fashion? That I can speak into one particular app for 15-20 minutes, give or take, and the app will read out infinite words subsequently fed in? So what if I were to capture many different voices, I could convincingly create any amount of audio information in any accent at any time.

Then there is video. I am a professional video editor. I am particularly well aware of the power one has when taking somebody’s words and sequencing them in the ‘correct’ order that tells the narrative I am looking to present. All it takes is moving a couple of blocks around on a piece of software, and I can make my talking head say anything I like. If I cover my tracks with related footage, nobody will realise that they are looking at fabricated images.

This goes to the heart of fact/fiction documentary/narrative etc, and I’m not criticising the filmmaking process in itself, but instead the appreciation of video without any critical information to allow the viewer to discern that they are not watching the Word of God when they turn on BBC News.

I could go on to image morphing technology, holographics and what not, but we would be here all night and it’s not that interesting. What’s actually interesting is the principle that the only person who verifies that this information is true, is you!

We wake up every day and decide that yes, the world is bad, in spite of the world actually being, you know, quite alright. There is no logical reason why we would exist in 2022 on planet Earth, in all of the absurdity of that statement, and the only true barometer of truth is the BBC News app.

How many arguments have been started round the family table as a direct consequence of the programming displayed on news apps? How many attentions will be distracted to events that they will never see in their lives, ignoring pressing matters in their immediate families?

Far too many, and I suppose the true allegory is Boris Johnson traveling to Kiev to have a chat with Zelenskyy, in spite of his own nation being a little less than utopic, and his own conduct being a little less than ‘statesmanlike’.