Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better
Since Brexit, an embittered, drawn-out separation procedure which homogenised the UK’s political news for almost half a decade, political commentators have routinely surmised the future of the UK-EU relationship.
Whatever differences may exist in the specifics of their predictions, many operate under the pervasive assumption that the relationship is a work in progress – it doesn’t quite know what it is yet, it needs time to root itself into something tangible, which thereafter can be analysed at a deeper level.
Unfortunately for professional pontificators, the essence of the post-Brexit UK-EU relationship has already materialised: “anything you can do, I can do better.”
One might argue that every international relationship is like this. Even where this concord and sainted ‘co-operation’, the vying interests of states lurks beneath the surface.
Whilst it’s true that competition is an indelible component of politics, it’s worth noting that just because states can act in their own interests doesn’t mean they will. Now more than ever, the course of politics is dictated by PR, rather than policy.
As such, when policy considerations arise, states are prone to pursue goals which aren’t necessarily in their interests but provide a presentational veneer of ‘superiority’ when compared to rivals.
“Shot yourself in the foot, eh? What’s that? With a flintlock pistol? Pfft. Amateur.”
*Proceeds to aim cartoonishly large blunderbuss at own foot*
The UK’s ‘divorce’ from the EU was officialised over 3 years, yet both are desperate to ensure the other is perceived, well-in view of family, friends, and random strangers, as the cause for the nasty, bitter, and very well-publicised breakdown of relations.
In response to the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, the world’s first AI regulatory framework, Paul Graham’s brief, but accurate, outline of the EU’s relationship with technology regained online attention:
Following the EU’s announcement, the UK government announced their intention to one-up them. Prime Minister Sunak pitched Britain as the future home for AI regulation.
On the surface, it looks like the UK is one-upping the EU, beating them at their own game, doing EU tech policy more effectively than the EU themselves.
This wouldn’t be bad thing if the EU didn’t suck at tech, something even its most ardent supporters have admitted. It’s not a coincidence that none of the top 10 tech global companies are from the EU, or that every tech start-up leaves for (or gets bought-up by) the United States or China.
In America, you are told to “get out there and do it!” In China, you are told to “get out there and do it, or else.” In Europe, you are told to “sit tight as we process your application.”
Despite their differences, whether ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘statist’ in their methods, both America and China have a far more action-oriented culture than Europe, which is inclined towards deliberation.
Given this, the UK is well-poised to become technophilic outpost in a seemingly technophobic region of the world – the beginnings of a positive post-Brexit vision.
The Prime Minister seems to, at the very least, loosely understand this fact, as the recent tweet gaffe would suggest, but continues to push the aspiration of turning Britain into Europe’s biggest bureaucratic wart.
However, this “Anything you can do…” attitude transcends the realm of tech policy, extending to other major areas, such as the environment and energy security.
Back in 2021, UK Environment Act came into force. Described by the government as the most ambitious environmental programme of any country on earth, the bill includes, amongst other loosely connected environmental commitments, new rules to stop the import of wood to the UK from areas of illegally deforested land.
Initially implemented as an expression of new powers acquired through Brexit, hoping to upstage the EU by implementing comparatively stricter environmental regulations, the EU have since ‘one-upped’ the Brits in pursuit of going green.
In December 2022, the European Commission approved a “first-of-its-kind” deforestation-free law: European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).
EUDR is one of several measures by the EU to tackle biodiversity loss driven by deforestation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, aiming to achieve net-zero by 2050.
Set to be implemented in December 2024, the EUDR prohibits lumber and pulp companies ensure from importing any material which has contributed to deforestation after December 2020.
Additionally, companies must know the origin of their products, ensure their products are produced legally in their country of origin, and obtain precise geolocation data for all the products they place on the EU market.
If companies fail to comply with the incoming regulations, they will not be allowed to sell their products on the EU market. Expectedly, companies with business practices in violation of the EUDR will face criminal charges, including non-compliance penalties of up to 4% of their EU turnover.
Putting aside snide comments about European pedanticism (isn’t selling lumber definitive proof of deforestation, what more proof do you need?!), this new regulatory framework is significant for two major reasons.
Firstly, the EU accounts for one-sixth of the global lumber trade and over $4 billion in tropical timber-related imports alone, contributing to the highest import value in a decade.
Whilst wood imports to the EU from Russia have declined, largely due to incrementally impose restrictions dating back to the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia was still Europe’s main provider of wood, exporting (alongside Belarus and Ukraine) $6.71 billion’s worth of wood (including furniture) to the EU in 2022.
To provide such a strict and through regulatory framework for a market as large and as unprepared as the timber trade is ambitious, to say the least.
New data from the Zoological Society of London’s Sustainability Policy Transparency Toolkit (SPOTT) assessment shows only 13.3% of lumber and pulp companies are publicly monitoring deforestation within their own operations, and only 4.3% are monitoring their supplier’s operations.
Only 6.4% of the 90 companies surveyed by SPOTT are currently able to trace 100% of their supply to the location of harvest. Additionally, only 21.3% of companies report the processes they use to ensure suppliers comply with their legal requirements.
Secondly, during the winter of last year, firewood prices spiked, warehouses were placed under immense pressure, and crime (especially illegal logging) flourished, both in the EU and the UK.
In August 2022, firewood sales in the UK surged by a fifth, around which time wood pellets nearly doubled in France, Bulgaria, Poland, and several other EU counties, with practically all of Europe scrambling for firewood, drowning out the protestation of environmentalists.
Whilst this was certainly caused by Europe’s ‘green’ policies, such as the closure of Germany’s last operating nuclear power stations, and the embargos on Russian gas, leading people to source alternative sources of fuel, the EU’s less-than-publicised import ban of Russian wood and pellets in the month prior certainly did the trick.
Given that building up a reliable, long-term stock of relatively clean energy is politically untouchable, it’s safe to assume things will get worse, if not much better; that goes for both the Europe-wide energy crisis and the UK-EU relationship.
Indeed, “Anything you can do…” has trickled down into the media class. Several commentators have remarked that as Europe lurches rightward, the UK has remained a bastion of liberalism, on course to elect the centre-left Remainer-led party by a landslide.
This flies in the face of several important facts, such as Britain’s electoral system which does not reward upstart or fringe parties in the same way many EU countries do, or that Britons (when asked) generally display conservative views on immigration (and have done so for over 30-odd years), having arguably led the ongoing ‘right-wing populist revolt, etc, etc.’ with UKIP, Brexit, and the 2019 General Election, or that Christian, social, and liberal democratic still have a lot of electoral influence across Europe.
If Britain is a bastion of liberal/social democracy, and Europe is becoming a post-fascist conservative bloc, where does that leave their droopy-eyed fascination with ‘Bregret‘?
The rather boring reality is that the politics of the UK’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU will be non-existent. Policy agendas and goals remain aligned on a fundamental level, with the only ‘political’ tension constituting a war of nerves – in short, not especially political at all.
If it was political, there would be room to instate the reform our state so desperately requires.
Digital Censorship Is Now the Perfect Crime
The combination of free speech and the internet should provide an unprecedented democratising effect on public discourse. After all, anyone with a decent idea can now reach out to millions of people worldwide, regardless of their wealth, respectability or social status. The potential for innovation is endless.
And yet, looking at the world today you would be hard-pressed to find a clear exemplar of this democratising effect. It appears that new technology has also created new forms of censorship. Control of public speech is now so subtle-fingered that it’s often hard to recognise as censorship or even detect when it’s happening at all.
To understand this new phenomenon, it’s worth taking some time to consider how social-media algorithms work and why they’ve become so important to our society.
Ideas spread through social networks and the fastest social networks are those found online, managed by large corporate platforms like Facebook, WeChat, Twitter and YouTube. These sites all curate what’s seen by the user into a ‘feed’. In order to create the feed, posts are ranked automatically based on numerous statistical parameters: the number of views, likes, comments and shares; the ratio of these quantities to each other; the upload date; the topics and tags assigned to the post; and so on. Network spread is accelerated by the number of followers of the poster and of the commenters and sharers. So far, this is common knowledge – but the algorithm doesn’t stop there.
It’s a trivial piece of programming to scan each post for keywords and assign a score to the post according to its content. Some words are coded as ‘negative’ or ‘positive’, or linked to different emotions like anger, outrage, joy, pride and so on. Based on this score, you can assign a different behaviour to how the social network treats the post. The post might be ‘throttled’ and shown to a disproportionately small number of accounts or it might be ‘boosted’ and shown to a large audience.
Instead of emotions, algorithms can also score posts on their political alignment with a range of contemporary pieties, such as racial or social justice, lockdown advocacy, or climate change. Individual accounts could then be given scores based on the type of posts they make, ensuring that the most egregious or inflammatory posters are quietly and gently smothered into irrelevance. Everything is automatic. No humans are involved. You, the poster, would have no idea whether censorship was happening or not.
The mechanism described above need not be the exact approach used by Twitter, Facebook or any other site. Consider it an illustrative example of how an engineer like myself could easily build multilayered and highly sensitive speech control into the networks of public discourse, to run a controlled speech environment that seems ostensibly like free speech.
Ultimately, all meaningful public discourse is now finely manipulated by the hidden algorithms of these social-media corporations. This is a reality of life in the 2020s. And with private companies manipulating public speech in these arbitrary and unaccountable ways, governments around the world are eager to get a slice of the pie.
Bearing the new algorithms in mind, consider how a government might suppress an idea that’s hostile to its interests. In the 1500s, the king’s men would march off to all the troublesome printing presses and intimidate the publishers with threats of vandalism, imprisonment or execution. It is against these weapons that the great Enlightenment arguments for free speech were constructed. Indeed, smashing up publishers was a risky move, creating martyrs and stirring opposition to absolute rule among the educated classes.
But in the 2020s, no such kerfuffle is necessary. State censorship has become astonishingly easy. The government need merely express its views to the management of a social-media company via their private channels, and every post sharing a particular idea will be throttled, demoted or blacklisted. Even if you can post the idea, the prominence of its spread has been hamstrung. It is thus the perfect crime, costing governments nothing, creating no martyrs and leaving opponents and their followers with paranoid doubts as to whether they were suppressed in the first place.
Different governments achieve this in different ways. The US is a world leader in invisible censorship, helped by the fact that almost all major social networks are Silicon Valley entities (enjoying close ties to the US intelligence apparatus). The most visible incidences of US censorship on social media concerned sensitive information about the Biden family during the 2020 US Elections, and the control of narratives surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown measures.
Across the pond, the EU has passed into law a Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into effect last month (25th August 2023). The law empowers a large taskforce on disinformation, answerable directly to the European Commission, to immerse itself in public discourse control and censorship on all major social networks. Twitter is required to meet regularly with this taskforce and answer to demands of the Commission regarding ‘misinformation control’ or face fines and other sanctions from the EU.
Critics of the EU will note that the EU parliament is again sidelined by this troubling new institution. And like the GDPR regulation of 2016, this is liable to become a global standard in the relationship between state institutions and the internet.
What terrible danger demands such a robust approach to information control, you might ask? The usual suspects appear in a list of disinformation trends compiled by the EU-funded fact-checking hub, EDMO:
Each of these problem issues is subjective and political in nature. It appears that the EU is concerned with changing the views and opinions of its 450 million subjects to match the ‘social justice’ ideology of their leadership – which is precisely the opposite of democratic governance.
The arguments of classical liberal thinkers are outdated when it comes to combating this new form of censorship. It is true that whenever an idea is silenced, the community is made poorer by not having heard its voice – but can that argument be made with the same vehemence when the idea is merely muffled or massaged into a lower engagement ratio by a tangled web of hidden algorithms? Is there an essential ethical difference between government interference with public discourse through social-media algorithms and the interference of an agenda-driven Californian software engineer who happens to work at one of these companies? Most media outlets don’t even describe this process as censorship, after all: it’s just ‘content moderation’.
Proponents of subtle censorship will point to the numerous social goods that might conceivably come from light-fingered thought control on social media. These include the suppression of enemy state propaganda, the neutralisation of dangerous conspiracy theories, and the management of violent sectarian ideology that could cause social harm or terrorism. But aside from the foiling of vague and nebulous threats, whose impact can never be reliably predicted, it is hard to see what conceivable gain comes from surrendering our right of free public discourse to unelected state organs like the European Commission taskforce.
The danger we face is that our present situation could rapidly evolve towards the total engineering of public discourse on social media. Western governments have shown an alarming desire to create populations that are docile, disorganised and progressive-thinking, rather than trusting the democratic process to produce good ideas through argumentation and open debate. Subtle censorship on social media has the potential to nudge us into a dystopia, where people are only permitted to organise around an elite-approved set of curated ideas.
Photo Credit.