Ethical A.I.?

We’ve all watched, read, and heard the stories: humans create intelligent robot – robot decides to kill humans. At this point the A.I.-gone-haywire trope has become the centre piece of a stock narrative; sapped of the novelty it had in the classic era of sci-fi – see Isaac Asimov’s short story I, Robot – it is now a lazy Hollywood formula, used as a Mcguffin to cover up unimaginative story telling.

But is the anxiety behind the trope valid? Is it realistic to think that, after giving birth to A.I., humanity will be devoured in its ravenous metal maw? To answer that question, it’ll be useful to look at a successful usage of the A.I.-gone-haywire trope, the breakdown of the HAL 9000 supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

During the course of the film, HAL slowly declines, culminating in a tense, drawn out scene where he is slowly unplugged, just before the film’s psychedelic finale. HAL’s slow disintegration starts off with errors while playing chess and ends with the murder of most of the crew members. However, not all is as it seems. HAL’s malfunction is not due to inherent malevolence, but due to human error: he is given conflicting orders (one: relay all information accurately, and two: don’t tell the crew about the end goal of the mission) which results in the A.I. version of a nervous breakdown.

Although obviously a fictional example, it is an example of the primary danger with A.I. – not computers suddenly turning “evil”, but human error itself. Without foreseeing all future problems and putting the correct constraints on a super intelligent computer, there is bound to be a catastrophic fallout.

A thought experiment can demonstrate this further. Suppose there existed a supremely powerful A.I. with the adequate data and resources that could eradicate the common cold. Among other constraints, it would be necessary to program the A.I. to not kill every human being with the common cold. It may sound extreme, but killing everyone with the common cold may be the most rational solution to the problem.

Proposing rules for artificial intelligence is nothing new. In the aforementioned I, Robot, Asimov proposed the now famous 3 laws of robotics. My contention is that the primary danger to humans with regards to A.I. is not the malevolent agency of the technology itself, but not applying adequate constraints on the technology, i.e., human error. If the constraints are adequate, there is no reason to be afraid of the technology.

Our everyday experience of morality is not unlike a set of constraints imposed upon an A.I. These constraints – imposed by biology, culture, or a mixture of both – govern our day-to-day actions, often unconsciously. But human beings make mistakes, we are inconsistent, capricious, and solipsistic. Our moral values tend to change from situation to situation and we often lie to ourselves about how moral we are. How we view ourselves and how we act are constantly at odds. The advantage of A.I. is that, with enough careful deliberation, it can have morality programmed into it. Unlike human beings, if programmed correctly and given enough information, we can expect A.I. to act consistently.

In order for this to work, scientists and technicians would have to apply a cautious approach when developing new technologies. Constraints would have to be deliberately drawn up and tested with A.I. in low risk situations. A.I. would have to operate in such a way as to allow human guidance and interaction with its systems. If all this is done correctly, there’s no reason why we can’t have our own personal HAL 9000 at some point in the distant – or maybe not so distant – future.

The future is dead

Any night-time scroll through social media is enough to tell you that the future is dead, or at least dying. It seems that it’s the function of marketing campaigns to tirelessly rehabilitate the retro until there’s no space for the new. The sense of current temporal specificity – i.e. the sense of 2018 feeling like it’s 2018 – has been replaced with a swirling collage of 20th century styles. In Mark Fisher’s words, “to live in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture distributed by high-speed internet”. This over-tolerance of the past is destroying the creative essence of contemporary fashion, music, art, and pop culture in general.

This isn’t a case of mild retrofetishism, but a completely formal restriction. The constant recreation of the past is not in the spirit of homage or criticism, but an unconscious choice. Past forms are the only forms that seem viable to us. It seems that at some point in the last twenty years the past colonised the present and killed the future.

It’s easy to dismiss this trend as a kind of mass nostalgia, something that pop culture will recover from if “shaken up” a bit. This is to misunderstand the cause. The zombified past is kept animated by the dynamism and massive data capacities of contemporary technology. Rather than culture – as was the case in the 20th century – being the driving force in human society, technology is the place where we experience a kind of permanent obsolescence. Creative momentum has been transferred from culture to technology itself, and the result is a severe change in the collective phenomenology of time. Paradoxically, this makes contemporary technology one of the strongest forces of cultural conservatism ever made.

Two thought experiments demonstrate the strangeness of our collective predicament. The first, from Mark Fisher, encourages us to think of how people would react if music from now was sent back twenty years. It’s hard to believe that anyone in 1998 –perched on the end of a decade that gave them Radiohead, Nirvana, and the Wu-Tang Clan – would be any more than mildly interested in the music of the future. For any other twenty year stretch in the 20th century it’s another story. A listener of traditional 40s pop music would not be able to deal with the unashamedly avant-gard proto-punk of the Velvet Underground for example.

The second thought experiment is less of an experiment but more of a reflection on two twenty year periods: 1958-1978 and 1998-2018. In terms of musical culture, the first period of time saw the end of the rock ‘n’ roll era, the beginning and end of Beatlemania, the psychedelic rock of Jimi Hendrix, the blues rock of Led Zeppelin, the start of heavy metal, the creation of funk and later disco, the start of hip-hop, the apex of soul music, the birth and death of punk, and the beginnings of post-punk, goth, new wave, and early electronic music. Although it’s true that new genres have cropped up in the last twenty years – dubstep, grime, and emo are probably the most culturally significant examples – there clearly haven’t been as many developments as ’58-’78. Even the middle decades, ’78-’98, were clearly more culturally fertile.

A side effect of this flattening of cultural time is that the concept of the “futuristic” is just as stylistically significant as the the idea of the “Baroque” or “Victorian”. This democratising of styles leads to the future as a potential point in time being replaced by the “futuristic” as a timeless and static aesthetic, as easily selected or discarded as any other font or theme.

The temporal crisis can be seen as epiphenomenal, happening in line with the logic of our current political and socioeconomic systems. In his essay “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, Fredric Jameson links this cultural stagnation with the fact that “aesthetic production has been integrated into commodity function more generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of even more novel-seeming goods… assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation”. This means that it is relentless commodification that is fuelling our timeless dystopia – our sense of a future is being destroyed by the sheer amount of products. Coupled with technology that gives us instant and frictionless access, we are constantly forced to reconfigure older styles, unable to see past the past. This can be seen clearly in the contemporary music industry; as the structures of dissemination – streaming, downloads, social media – get more and more complex and totalitarian, the novelty and innovation in the music is diminished.

It is not a coincidence that this mass failure of cultural production, this inability to envisage an artistic future, coincides with the apparent death of all political alternatives outside of neoliberalism. The closing of the aesthetic imagination is a symptom of the closing of the political imagination.

O Brave new world… genetic editing in the 21st century

The creation of the CRISPR/cas9 biotechnology is the most significant development in the field of genetic engineering in recent memory. Unlike previous gene editing tools, CRISPR/cas9 allows scientists to directly target pieces of the genome and edit them with “molecular scissors”, removing or replacing strands of undesirable DNA with unprecedented accuracy. It can even change the DNA in human sex cells and early stage embryos, causing permanent and irreversible changes to the germline.

The CRISPR/cas9 process is an already existing mechanism in biology and is part of the bacterial immune system. CRISPR acts as a kind of vaccination hard drive for the bacterium, storing short strands of DNA from viruses that have previously attacked the cell. This DNA is converted to RNA which then binds to a cas9 protein. Using the RNA as a search code, the protein cuts the DNA of attacking viruses at specific points that match with the guide RNA, in this case rendering the selected virus benign enough to be destroyed by the cell. It is this process that forms the basis of the gene editing technology.

The initial medical applications of the technology seem obvious. Blood diseases like haemophilia and sickle cell anaemia will more than likely be the first disorders that are tackled due to the fact that the faulty cells can be taken out of the body, modified, and replaced. Genes linked to big killers like cancer and heart disease will most likely be the next targets.

Beyond important but fairly standard medical use, the existence of a technology that can alter human DNA presents us with profound social and philosophical questions. For example, it is probable that, in time, CRISPR will be used for cosmetic purposes. Tweaking genes that regulate muscle development, eye colour, and hair growth will likely become the norm. What bodies will regulate the technology? What private institutions, if any, will benefit from its usage? What will be the broader psychological effects of this pursuit of biological perfection? Considering how rapidly the science is advancing, these questions need to be answered sooner rather than later.

If we assume that new technology maps onto existing institutional and social structures, then we should expect massive discrepancies in access to CRISPR therapies. 82% of the wealth created in 2017 went to the top 1%. Half the worlds population – roughly 3.8 billion people – own as much wealth as the richest 42. Looking at these statistics it is hard to believe that the benefits of CRISPR will be distributed anywhere near equally.

We can also expect huge difference in the way countries decide to regulate the technology. If made internationally available, we should expect the launch of a of genetic tourism industry, a state of affairs in which the wealthiest members of society travel to countries with the laxest regulation in order to boost genes that may – if the genes that regulate intelligence, productivity, longevity, etc. are isolated and modified – increase their wealth to an even greater degree. We may also see an underground, unregulated market of gene editing grow underneath the legitimate institutions if the channels of access to the benefits of CRISPR are collectively considered to be too restrictive. These potential consequences, although currently science-fiction, may become science-fact within decades.

Due to the simplicity of the mechanism – it contains just two key molecules – and that it is, in theory, a “one and done” style therapy, CRISPR has the potential to advance well ahead of any restrictive legislation. Its simplicity should not be understated. Jennifer Doudna – who is one of the creators of the technology and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UC Berkley – described using previous gene editing tools as “having to rewire your computer each time you want to run new software”. Conversely, she described CRISPR/cas9 as like “software for the genome”. It is worth noting that she has, in the past few years, called for a “worldwide moratorium” on genetic editing.

It is likely that the final consequences of this technology will outstrip even the most fanciful science-fiction inspired predictions. This is because, despite our best efforts, human beings have a fairly poor record when it comes to predicting the various outcomes of new innovations. Who knew, that when the automobile was invented in the latter half of the nineteenth century, that it would become one of the primary contributors to the transformation of our atmosphere and subsequently cause irreversible changes to the ecological makeup of our planet? This case study alone should demonstrate that it is vital that we proceed with caution.

Jordan Peterson and the failures of liberal gender politics

In the past couple of years, Jordan B. Peterson – Canadian social critic, public speaker, and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto – has become somewhat of a mascot for a certain kind of internet-savvy young man. For anyone who hadn’t heard of him until his name hit the mainstream, his popularity – as attested by the millions of views on his YouTube lectures – may seem baffling, possibly even inexplicable. This piece will attempt to contextualise and explain his appeal, as well as give an assessment of the cultural climate he is moving into.

It’s tempting to see the ascendency of a figure like Peterson as purely a result of the power of his ideas, but, despite what his most ardent disciples might believe, this is not the case. His rise as a central member of the “intellectual dark web” – and the rise of alternative intellectuals generally – can best be viewed as a side effect of the failures of liberal gender politics specifically and the collapse of the left-liberal political project in general. Changes in media are also a factor, as the internet offers a non-regulated space for alternative intellectual currents to develop.

Peterson’s name lurched into the mainstream off the back of a handful of controversies. The most recent was his Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman, but the first was his opposition to the Canadian government’s Bill C-16, a law introduced in early 2016 that added gender expression and gender identity to protected grounds under the Canadian Human Rights Act. He made his feelings clear on several videos posted to his YouTube account, stating that it shouldn’t be up to the government to regulate what pronouns people use. Protests and counter protests erupted on the University of Toronto’s campus, garnering international media attention. In late 2017 the controversy was reanimated when a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University was formally reprimanded for showing Peterson’s critique of Bill C-16 to a class of Communications students. She was called into a meeting by senior staff and told that not only had she created an “unsafe learning environment” for trans and non-binary students, but that she had violated Bill C-16 itself. She secretly recorded the meeting, and upon its release gained the support of Peterson and other members of the “free speech” movement. It was later determined that no students had formally complained and the university was forced to issue a statement saying that the case was “mishandled”. The staff who reprimanded her apologised and she was exonerated.

During the initial furore surrounding Bill C-16, Peterson’s professional standing was being threatened. His 300+ hours of YouTube lectures, in his words, “saved” him from professional disgrace. They offered him a leverage point outside the scope of the university’s influence, a demonstration that his ideas resonated with a a broader public. The numerous long-form lectures and podcasts – their topics ranging from Jungian psychoanalysis, Christianity, totalitarianism, mythology, and general life advice – are overwhelmingly viewed by young men. Peterson has said that this may be due to the general YouTube audience being made up of mostly young men, but their is something undoubtedly masculine about his topics and approach. For much of his audience, Peterson is the father they never had.

Peterson’s folksy, common sensical, no-nonsense persona is his biggest draw. His new bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, is him at his most patrician. His supporters see him as the ultimate anti-PC crusader, and some assert that he is the most important living intellectual in the west today. His talk of stoicism and responsibility have been lapped up by young men, many of whom would have dismissed him as a reactionary social conservative perhaps six or seven years ago.

With reference to the current political climate, the Peterson appeal is not difficult to pin down. He is popular because there is a lack of empowering narratives for young men to align themselves with, and as long as the political left lacks narratives that appeal to young men, or at least lacks the ability to articulate their narratives to young men, they will continuously haemorrhage support to substitute father figures like Jordan Peterson and his alt-right/ alt-light allies.

Current feminist discourse gives men two options. They are either 1) a congenitally sexist soldier of the patriarchy who lives for the continued oppression and subjugation of women, or they’re 2) a well trained ally who, although they are tainted with the original sin of maleness, have exonerated themselves by constantly ceding to female authority and by using the correct jargon-laden vocabulary. The implication is of course that men who are 1) have a moral obligation to move to 2). If this is the only narrative that young men are offered then it seems likely that most, given no other options, would reject it altogether and move towards figures like Peterson.

Despite the structural biases that they may face, it is not difficult for young women to find narratives in pop-culture that make them feel empowered, useful, and strong. Even the word “empowered” itself has now become a pop-feminist buzzword.

In her book One Dimensional Woman, Nina Power explores modern iterations of feminism and how they interact with capitalism and consumerism. She finds an ideological landscape were “almost everything turns out to be feminist – shopping, pole-dancing, even eating chocolate.” Wherever they look, it seems, women can find a feminist justification for even their most mundane consumer habits. Gone is the pedagogic and dictatorial second wave feminism that sorted women into friends or enemies of female empowerment; it has been replaced by a blown out definition that means everything (and therefore nothing, as Power concludes).

The obvious downside to this kind of individualistic feminism is that it is so ideologically mailable that it can be used to serve any set of interests, usually the interests of economic elites. It has no need for distinctions of class and race – everyone is apparently equal under capital. It is devoid of any political impetus except vague notions of “fun” and “empowerment”, and by definition only serves rich western women who have the resources to consume their way towards a feminist utopia (presumably a utopia of copious ice-cream consumption where Beyoncé albums and Girls reruns play continuously on repeat).

This kind of feminism is like refined sugar – completely devoid of nutritional value but deeply satisfying. Women can go through life in the knowledge that any choice they make, as well as its negation – which includes everything from smoking to not smoking, to having children to not having children, from wearing dresses to wearing jeans, to exercising to not exercising, etc. – can be justified by the prevailing “empowerment” narrative. Again, this is not to say that women do not face everyday sexism or structural inequalities, but it is to say that women almost always have a narrative to reach for when it comes to justifying their place in society. This is not the case for young men within the confines of the left-liberal narrative.

Although I put myself at risk of sounding like a vulgar psychoanalyst, it is important to again emphasise that the most appealing thing about Jordan Peterson is his fatherly qualities. The fact that “clean your room” is one of his signature nuggets of wisdom and is basically his catchphrase at this point says enough. His burst of popularity is clearly an indication that young western men are clambering for some kind of symbolic father, someone to give them direction and foresight and meaning.

The Peterson appeal is intensified by the fact that he is an articulate and accomplished scholar who is highly referenced in his field and is apparently unable to answer a straightforward question without a flash flood of references and allusions to evolutionary psychology, 19th century Russian literature, the King James Bible, Jungian archetypes, Nietzschean historicism, or Kierkegaardian existentialism. During his many recorded speaking engagements he stalks the stage deliberately and stares out from under the Mephistophelean arches of his rather severe eyebrows at his captive audience like he’s telling them a deeply held secret. He is striking, intense, serious, entertaining, charismatic, and occasionally dryly funny. However, under the dramatic presentation lies at least a handful of deeply reactionary views.

In a recent interview with Vice, Peterson stated that it wasn’t known whether men and women can work together because “no one knows what the rules are”. He also said wearing makeup was a sexual display and that women who wear makeup and heels to work are being hypocritical if they complain about sexual harassment in the workplace. There are several things wrong with these statements. The first is the shallow evolutionary reductionism. It may be true that makeup and heels enhance the way women look, but to say that that is there only function is absurd. Both women – and men – augment their looks for a variety of reasons – to fit in, to stand out, to look presentable, to feel confident – that have nothing to do with sexual displays. If makeup was purely a sexual display then you might ask why a woman would wear makeup to a family dinner.

The second problem is the implicit premise that women are in some way responsible for their own sexual harassment. It should be self-evident why that idea is morally reprehensible. And, for a man who talks enthusiastically about male responsibility, it seems strange that Peterson would put the responsibility on women for encouraging harassment with their “sexual displays” and not on men for their predatory behaviour.

When you dig under the surface, it’s easy to find views of his that are basically indistinguishable from the most conservative members of the Christian wing of the Republican Party. For example, in a recent discussion with Camille Paglia, he suggested that feminists who align themselves with Islam are driven by an unconscious desire to be dominated by savage men. Rather than come to a common sense conclusion like, for example, that feminists support Muslims because they always see them as an oppressed social group – an assumption that I think is sometimes misguided and comes from a simplistic place – he ends up looking like a parody of a pontificating psychoanalyst coming to overwrought conclusions that have the appearance of insight. His views on casual sex are also worthy of note.

Another questionable feature of his thought is his over reliance on Jungian archetypes to demonstrate what is “true”. Although there may be some credence to the idea that parts of our brain are built around evolutionary expectations, the claims about specific archetypes actually existing somewhere remain as unfounded and unscientific as the claims about sexuality made by Jung’s fellow psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. They are unscientific in the sense that you can evoke and refine any archetype you want to support any conclusion, that is to say you can always make an argument work. With a Jungian approach you can endlessly pontificate about intricate rules of behaviour and draw conclusions from them without really proving that the archetypes – which are the sources of the behaviour – exist anywhere in the human mind. Additionally, someone who is arguing from archetypes is almost always projecting their personal or cultural standards into a false “ideal”. Much like Freudian psychoanalysis, it allows you to interpret anything you want in an infinite amount of ways, and come to any conclusion you want. This is not to say that Jung is not an interesting or engaging thinker, but his theory of archetypes can’t be formulated into falsifiable hypotheses, hence it isn’t scientific.

This error is clearest to see when Peterson is engaging in a favourite activity of his – analysing Disney films. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are fantastic films because they adhere to what he sees as archetypal – meaning they are basically socially conservative in their content – but the recent film Frozen is “reprehensible propaganda” because it undermines standard story telling tropes. He seems to be very selective about what is ideological and what is not – if a film rigidly upholds socially conservative standards then it is somehow not ideological, but if it undermines that worldview then it is. This in and of itself is a deeply ideological conclusion.

Peterson tends to resist political classification. He rather vaguely refers to himself as a “British classical liberal” (which is assumably some form of conservatism) but there is no doubt that he is popular on the so called alt-right, a lose collective of neo-fascists, anti-feminists, and trolls who are Donald Trump’s main constituency. Despite Peterson’s regular assertions that he is not one of them, Richard Spencer, a white supremacist and arguably the chief ideologue of the alt-right, seems to like him anyway.

Of course that is not to say that their worldviews are indistinguishable. Peterson is clearly the more moderate of the two (one difference among many is that he doesn’t tend to emphasise race or ethnicity) but there is evidently some congruence between their reactionary and traditionalist views, at least from Spencer’s point of view. The American identitarian clearly sees Peterson’s prominence as a tactical plus for the far-right. Peterson is best described as alt-light rather than alt-right, a potential gateway drug to more extreme views.

The central edifice to Peterson’s thought is that there is a cabal of “postmodern neo-Marxists” conspiring to undermine the values of Western society. While it might be true that the group that Peterson identifies as the foot soldiers of this ideology, the so called social justice warriors – i.e., identity obsessed liberals with humanities degrees – are often simplistic, reductionist, and obnoxious in their form and style of argument, to say that the radical left have a big influence on western capitalist society as a whole is nothing short of a conspiracy theory, a conspiracy theory that is, at least in structure, basically indistinguishable from the white supremacist idea of Cultural Marxism and the Nazi era idea of Cultural Bolshevism.

There are many problems with this theory, but I’ll just highlight a few. Firstly it doesn’t seem to me that SJWs are radical leftists in any meaningful sense. As Slavoj Žižek pointed out in his recent article on Peterson, “the PC left uses its true points (detecting racism and sexism in language and so on) to reassert its moral superiority and thus prevent true social change”. The left-liberal tendency to resort to identity politics and language policing has nothing to do with genuine economic Marxism but is a bourgeois performance that allows them to guiltlessly hold the moral high-ground without having to address genuine structures of power. To call political correctness “cultural” or “neo” Marxism, or to compare it to Marxism in any way, is just a lazy conflation.

Mark Fisher’s essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle”is a thorough analysis of the differences between the PC left and the genuine economic left, as well as a consummate critique of the solipsistic, identitarian, and anti-solidarity tendencies on the PC/ identity-politics left.

Secondly, Peterson’s concerns seem to be based on a complete misreading of what postmodernism actually is. Postmodernism, which Jean-François Lyotard defined as “credulity towards meta-narratives”, does not necessarily sit well with Marxism. In fact, Marxism is often defined by postmodernists as a meta-narrative that is in the process of being rejected like any other large scale theory about the world. Peterson’s contention that postmodernists took the Marxist distinction between capital and labour and generalised it into a dominant-oppressed dynamic that could be applied to any racial, national, or sexual group is not something that can be found in the writings of prominent postmodernist theorists. It simply is not there.

More reasons as to why the idea of “postmodern neo-Marxism” is senseless can be found here.

The most frustrating part of the Peterson phenomena is not the inconsistency of his thought but the zeal of his disciples. He knows he has a great deal of power over them, and seems to periodically egg them on by hinting at bizarre conspiracies. For the most dedicated, to criticise Peterson in any way is to take his ideas out of context. Arguments against his positions are usually seen as evidence of stupidity, ad hominem smears, or further proof of postmodernist rot. For a number of his followers he is a mixture of Jesus, a mad professor, and their dad. Even renowned conservative firebrand Peter Hitchens has noticed the cultish behaviour of his fans. Their belief in his ideas is basically religious in structure: if someone does not agree with him it’s not because they have a genuine criticism but because they haven’t yet seen the light.

It is important that the left gets its house in order before more young men are taken in by the chauvinistic right. Although there are problems with his positions, when compared to the other members of the new men’s movement – whether it’s the rape advocate Roosh V or the proven liars running “A Voice for Men” – Peterson is fairly moderate. It is in one sense fortunate that thousands of young men have decided to stop at Peterson before delving deeper into the alt-right. The left will continue to cede ground to right wing moderates and extremists if the conversations around gender politics are not changed.

It’s clear that young men either side of the Atlantic are lost. In the US, men are nearly 4 times more likely to die from suicide than women, and in the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45. While women reap the benefits of 50 years of feminist discourse, young men are finding it hard to engage with modern life. Some, as we have seen, are reverting back to an older, more chauvinistic version of masculinity in order to have something to define themselves by. This is a route that can only lead to disaster.

McLuhan and the Monkey

 

Most people plugged into the contemporary political climate know that putting a black child in a “coolest monkey in the jungle” hoodie and displaying that image to hundreds of millions of people is a bad idea. It is patently ludicrous that a large corporation with a teeming array of well-paid PR and advertising experts at its disposal would make such a stupid decision, but H&M managed to do just that.

While assertions that this was a display of conscious racism on the part of the clothing company are basically absurd – on the one hand it seems difficult to imagine why a corporation would so blatantly harm its public image, and on the other the conclusion is too extreme to hold up without the hard evidence of corroborating emails or internal memos – it is a clear example of a blind spot that could have been seen if H&M chose to hire more individuals who would have spotted the gaffe, namely non-white people.

It is important to point out that the association between black people and non-human primates is not just an insult – it is not historically trivial. The association was used to create hierarchies that justified the most heinous examples of organised violence in human history. Humanity is still suffering from these ideological edifices to this day, and is likely to suffer from them for a great deal longer. For many black and brown people – myself included – the first time they encountered racism as a child it was in the form of this kind of comparison.

H&M should have seen the error – they should have done better.

Having said that, it is not the worst thing H&M has done. In fact, it doesn’t even come close. In 2016 it was revealed that they use factories in Myanmar where children as young as 14 are exploited for more than 12 hours a day. The minimum wage in Myanmar is just 26p per hour, but in factories supplying H&M, children were earning as little as 13p per hour. Even if the factories adhered to the actual minimum wage, the rate in Myanmar is still amongst the lowest in the world.

The workers at these factories are paid so little that some have to resort to living in makeshift huts near the factories in order to save money on rent and utilities. The only way that these outcomes differ from those of medieval feudalism is in technological sophistication and PR gloss.

This is a systemic problem, it is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. Private institutions do not make money if labourers do not create more value than the wages that they are paid. The tendency of corporations will always be towards lowering wages and increasing “efficiency”, a race to the bottom that results in exploitation, automation, unemployment, economic instability, and mass suffering. Additionally, while private corporations have the freedom to move around the globe at will and labour remains comparatively stagnant, governments will be incentivised to destroy unions and have poor labour laws in general. In a global capitalist world order, blocks of labour are literally competing with each other to lower their own wages.

Even apparently well meaning celebrities cannot escape the vice-grip of the profit motive. Unicef ambassador David Beckham, who is the face of an H&M clothing line, announced in 2015 that he was starting a fund to combat global child exploitation. The irony was not lost on people when H&M’s labour practises where revealed and this contradiction came to light, but of course this issue is no longer of interest to the news media in general.

Released in 2004 by former Chas T. Main executive John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitmanis a comprehensive guide to the system of corporate neo-colonialism that creates and perpetuates this kind of exploitation. The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and it’s Solutions by Jason Hickel also offers a thorough overview of the same system, but from the perspective of institutional analysis. The main thesis of the book is that poor countries are integrated into the global order on unequal terms. According to Hickel, the economic failures of so called third world countries are not, as we have been told, due to their failure to compete adequately in a fair market system, but due to other factors like unfair trade deals, tax evasion, land grabs, and other forms of wealth extraction.

H&M, by necessity, is an actor in this system of exploitation; it is a private institution that needs to survive in a market so will automatically take advantages of situations where it can reduce cost and increase profit. The executives at H&M are not driven to do this out of individual spite or malice, but because this is what our system demands.

In light of this information, it is important to reassess the reaction to the hoodie debacle. While it was a mistake that H&M should make an effort to put right, the loss of celebrity endorsements and riots in South Africa are an extreme reaction. It would be unheard of for people to react that way to the aforementioned exploitation, despite that fact that it does continued harm to real people.

But why does social media, and media in general, take so easily to these kind of controversies while barely touching on deep systemic and institutional problems? In order to find out why, it’s useful to look at the ideas of the father of media studies, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980).

Dismissed by some in his 60s heyday as a preening pedant and the ultimate example of academic incomprehensibility, and hailed by others as a prophet of the new media, McLuhan and his theories seem to become more and more relevant with each passing decade. Originally a James Joyce scholar, McLuhan, much like the advertising industry that he critiqued, had a knack for coining pithy slogans that slipped with lubricated ease into the public lexicon: “global village”, “hot and cool media”, and “the medium is the message” are all McLuhanisms.

His unique contribution to the study of media was to point out how technology feeds back into its users. Technology is on the one hand an extension of our central nervous system, and on the other it is an entity that sets up a structure of awareness. His most famous fridge-magnet-worthy aphorism – “the medium is the message” – draws attention to this fact. It is the medium that is important, not the information that is communicated through it; in his words: “What you print is nothing compared to the effect of the printed word.”

When it comes to looking at how we live now, McLuhan was eerily prophetic. With reference to the internet, he predicted that instant electronic information would undo the private culture created by print media and architecture (the Gutenberg press created media that had to be consumed in private, and modern architecture created the enclosed spaces for that media to be consumed) and would lead, amongst other things, to the “electrical retribalization of the west”. Another effect of new media that he identified was the state of information overload, a phrase that perfectly describes the subjective experience of being on the internet.

But how does this relate to debates about society and race on social media, the kind of debates started by H&M’s stupid mistake?

My contention is that the qualitative nature of social media selects for information in such a way as to push us towards a particular kind of communication. The newly retribalized individuals plugged into the data soup of the World Wide Web constantly have to define and redefine the boundaries between their tribes and other tribes. Much like fictional genres, the tribes themselves are defined by arguments about what distinguishes them from other tribes. Faced with a constant flood of data, people on social media grasp onto information that can easily be slotted into this combative context.

(It is worth noting that people do not belong to just one tribe at one time and that there are concentric circles of tribes – tribes within tribes within tribes. We are still interconnected within a McLuhanesque “global village”, it is just a village that is constantly at war with itself).

The monkey hoodie controversy is a perfect meme for individuals who want to strongly define their tribe. The image is simple and so is the concept: H&M called a black child a monkey, that’s a bad thing, and that bad thing must be condemned. All nuance is sucked out and the image remains: hyperreal and emaciated. It becomes, at least temporarily, the symbol of all racism. Coupled with the essentially performative nature of social media, this leads to the image being reliably reproduced, reanalysed, and retweeted. Reactions become more and more inaccurate and hysterical as members of the tribe perform their zealotry to each other. People forget the details (e.g., that “cheeky monkey” is a specifically English phrase that is not in the South African or American lexicon). A hurricane of indignation spurs the firestorm of controversy, leading to a state of affairs where situations like these register much louder on the collective radar than more complex and more deeply rooted problems, completely skewing our perceptions of what reality is.

Child labour and internal contradictions within the capitalist system are not easy to talk about. The issues can’t be summed up in one tweet with one caption or one status with one cogent take. Tribal lines cannot easily be drawn. There is also the basic problem that most people don’t want to be confronted with the fact that they participate in an inherently exploitative economic system that is almost impossible to escape from.

Examples of child exploitation and suffering that are shown in media – Oxfam adverts are suitable example – tend to produce within us a kind of reflexive disgust. Privileged westerns see the images as off-putting, pitiful, guilt inducing. From an opposite perspective they are often dismissed as “poverty porn” and condemned for taking commercial advantage of human suffering or as being examples of an immoral and repellent white saviour complex.

Both of these attitudes can be analysed based on McLuhan’s categories of hot and cool media. He identified cool media as media that is immersive and involving and often operates on different sensory levels. The internet, as well as television, is an example of that kind of medium. They both demand that the consumer of the media participate and feel a certain degree of responsibility for their participation. Hot media is the opposite: it normally involves fewer sensory modalities and is low in audience participation. It’s effect is passive, cumulative, and intense. Novels and films are examples of hot media.

McLuhan identified the Vietnam war as a “hot” war and television as a “cool” medium, and the disgust and horror that Americans felt when the war was beamed directly to their television sets was due to this exact contradiction. War is a hot topic that must be presented through a hot medium – films or genre fiction or photographs or epic poetry – because cool mediums are too immersive, too confronting. Similarly, cool topics are much better suited to social media than hot ones. Sincere debate about our global institutions cannot survive in the cool, immersive, and tribal air of the internet.