What Does the Future Hold?
Today, most of us are just puppets—pulled here, whispered to there. The results are quick to follow.
In China, artificial intelligence is increasingly used for surveillance, creating social credit scores and trustworthiness ratings for citizens. But analyzing brain activity? That seems almost beyond reality.
Specifically, companies are now analyzing employees’ brain activity. Sensors in headgear read “brain waves” and predict how tired an employee is, whether they’re close to depression, losing concentration, under stress, or even at risk of lashing out. At Hangzhou Zhongheng Electric factories, workers wear such headgear, computers analyze the data, and management can adjust break times to prevent burnout and boost productivity—which means more profit.
If an employee is too emotional, that’s a risk for production or service. Managers can remove such workers from their shifts. Train operators on the Beijing-Shanghai line wear visors with sensors that, according to the company, detect loss of concentration in 90% of cases. This technology will likely be adopted by Chinese airlines as well.
This raises questions: How should this be regulated? What kind of relationship should exist between companies profiting from analyzing your brain activity and you, the individual?
Beyond company profits, there’s also the goal of “increasing social stability.” The state may not know exactly what you’re thinking, but it can understand your emotions. This opens up unprecedented possibilities for control—a “thought police.” Add AI and a social credit system, require everyone to wear a “visor” (which China could do), and the brave new world of Big Brother is just around the corner.
Compared to what’s brewing in China, Facebook’s data collection is child’s play.
Digital Manipulation and Protest Organization
But is that all? Not at all! On the other hand, we have technologies for verbal influence via the Internet.
Not long ago, revolutionaries relied on Twitter and Facebook, but now messengers have taken their place. Why? Because messengers use end-to-end encryption, making it harder to de-anonymize users. In traditional social networks like Facebook, it’s much easier to track protestors and their initiatives. Early on, opposition groups tried to disguise themselves as “picnic lovers” or “street artists,” but this tactic didn’t work well.
The most popular messengers are Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, and FireChat. FireChat allows smartphones to connect via a “wireless mesh network,” which is useful if mobile service or Wi-Fi is down. FireChat was widely used by protestors in 2014, with over 5 million public chats created during protests.
However, using Telegram led to mass de-anonymization of protestors. Police exploited a vulnerability to identify protestors’ phone numbers, and from there, their names, addresses, and other data. In the age of big data, this isn’t hard.
Protests may look spontaneous, but they’re often well-organized. Meeting points, escape routes, pharmacies, and grocery stores are all planned in advance. This level of preparation points to excellent coordination. Today, scouting locations is much easier, and in tech-savvy cities, it can be done remotely.
Someone has to coordinate all this, inventing new gathering spots daily. It’s more like a carefully planned military operation, isn’t it?
How do you get people to join a protest? Manipulating fears and dissatisfaction with government policies plays a key role. Is this relevant for Ukraine? Absolutely.
The next step is manipulating economic fears—urging people to withdraw money from banks, convert it to cash or cryptocurrencies. Smaller banks collapse, and protest numbers swell.
Switching to cash and cryptocurrencies increases payment anonymity, making it impossible to track bank cards. Protestors also stop using discount cards, personalized metro passes, etc., since police can remotely scan these cards during rallies using drones.
Unexpectedly, Apple AirDrop has been used to share coordinates via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. About one in twenty people receives such messages during protests.
Even games are used. Pokemon Go has served as a pretext for unauthorized rallies, with people pretending to gather for catching Pokémon.
Key Takeaways
- By testing different protest tactics, opposition groups have gamified protests, turning them into something like a video game, using real-time protest maps and methods borrowed from the virtual world.
- Protest leaders have innovatively coordinated actions using popular messengers (especially Telegram), file-sharing services (Apple AirDrop), service apps like Uber and Tinder, and anonymous city forums (like LIHKG).
- For protest participants, maintaining anonymity and quickly sharing their views with sympathizers is crucial. The active use of anonymous tools—from encrypted messengers to privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Monero and Zcash—distinguishes today’s protest era.
What’s Next?
Are governments (almost any government) ready for such protests? Probably not. Any tightening of control leads to backlash. Remember the blocking of Russian websites and social networks? It only led to more people using VPNs or browsers like Opera with built-in VPNs. There was no sharp drop in traffic. The lesson: bans on networks and sites, without creating equally popular alternatives, don’t work.
I really liked the comment on this article by respected public safety expert and former police general, PhD in Law, Yu.V. Sednev:
“This reminds me of child development, when a young child shows extraordinary learning results and knowledge beyond their age, but then slows down emotionally and psychologically. Similarly, the more society advances in technologies that outpace our understanding and proper application, the more we miss the most important question of self-preservation, making our minds vulnerable from another angle—emotions, relationships, and the value of the individual, which threatens humanity’s destruction.”
So think, friends, think!
References
- Chiu K. From Facebook and Twitter to Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal: how protest technology has evolved since Occupy Central [SCMP]. Read more
- Boehler L. ‘Off-the-grid’ messaging application FireChat continues to ride Occupy boost [SCMP]. Read more
- SCMP. AirDrop requests are Gen Z’s way of passing notes on Apple devices – as Hong Kong protesters show [SCMP]. Read more
- Spectee. Hong Kong: Ambulance Passes Through Sea of Protesters During Sunday’s Massive Rally [Spectee]. Read more