Spring Blossoms

Untruth on Demand

I was listening to RadioLab in my car on Sunday, and they were talking about the ability to make fake videos by combining a couple of different methods: The first being the ability to synthesize someone's voice if you have enough recorded audio of them, and the second being the ability to create convincing video of someone by effectively manipulating their digital image as if they were a puppet. Perhaps not by coincidence, The Atlantic also has a piece on the same technology.

What both stories have in common is an open concern about people's ability to discern truth from fiction, and the possible negative consequences of this. But something occurred to me when I was listening to the RadioLab story, and it came up in the piece from The Atlantic, as well.

As Ian Goodfellow, a scientist at Google, told MIT Technology Review, “It’s been a little bit of a fluke, historically, that we’re able to rely on videos as evidence that something really happened.”

Given that politics has existed for much longer than ubiquitous video, one suspect that people will survive the loss of the ability to believe anything they see. All it will take is a reliance on the skills that people relied on in the past. Both stories pointed out a basic problem - when people can't readily discern the difference between a forgery and a genuine article, an inconvenient reality can easily be denounced as a forgery. But this has always been true. The idea that technology could offer a form of telepresense, and in doing so, offer something between a reliable and ironclad understanding what transpired is, as Mr. Goodfellow pointed out, a fluke. Self-corroborating evidence of an event is a very recent innovation, if we can even claim to have it today. (And it's reasonable to say that we don't have it today, given that conspiracy theorists routinely challenge everything that pushes back against their understanding of the world as having been forged.)

Perhaps the real problem is our understanding of progress, and the role of technology in it. If we view the society and politics of all of history before "unimpeachable" video evidence of events as being necessarily broken, being forced to return to that would seem like a catastrophe. But maybe, as in a lot of things, our understanding of the present is an overly harsh judge of the past.

Unconstituted

Let's start with this:

[Bill] Maher said he didn’t agree with Ingraham’s stance on that or many other issues — and even called her a “deliberately terrible person” — but said it’s her First Amendment right to say what she wants.
Bill Maher doesn’t like Laura Ingraham. He hates the boycott of her show even more.

And then move to this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

Given these two things, I'm not sure how one relates to the other. Mainly because the teapot tempest that Ms. Ingraham stirred up is not with the government. It's with David Hogg, the public and her advertisers. None of whom are a party to the First Amendment. And none of whom, properly speaking, are interfering with her right to say what she wants. If her show is cancelled because of a boycott, or even a capital strike, there is no violation of the First Amendment there, unless it can be shown that Congress, or the broader government orchestrated it. I'm somewhat surprised that Mr. Maher doesn't seem to understand this, given his role as a media personality.

Even when he took it on the chin (or, was the "victim" of a boycott, if you prefer) for his comments that lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away was more cowardly than riding a hijacked plane into its target, his troubles weren't a violation of the First Amendment, even if White House spokesman Ari Fleischer could be fingered as the trigger point.

The First Amendment of the Constitution does not demand that the Marketplace of Ideas make room for all comers. It simply states that the government may not force any particular concept or speaker out of the marketplace by the force of law.

In other words, it's one thing for a government to detail Bill Maher, or force HBO to remove his show from the air, due to the content of his comments. (Although it must be said that there are limits on that. We understand that if Mr. Maher were to, say, solicit the commission of some or another criminal activity on the air, that forcing HBO to pull the plug would be a legitimate act on the part of the government.) It would be another thing entirely for HBO to decide to dump him (as ABC once did), for the businesses that fund the show through their advertising purchases to withdraw that support or for some segment of the public to decline HBO subscriptions because they don't appreciate his particular brand of commentary.

It's tempting to see a betrayal of American values and/or Constitutional principles in the sudden downfall of people who say things that unexpectedly place them at odds with the public - or the people who control their access to large segments of the public. But that conflates the State with the people who constitute the State; and even in a government of the people, by the people and for the people, they are not the same.

Fearless

There are, I think, only two ways to be free of fear. You can understand that you have the power to change what frightens you, or you can understand that you have the power to deal with the consequences of not changing it.

I am not fearless. While I understand that my control of the world is limited, and thus I have very little by way of the power to change things, part of me is a control freak, who charts a path to acceptance of the world through being able to dictate to it. But the world does not owe me anything. It was here first, and so it need not listen to me. But its disobedience causes me a certain amount of anxiety, because I am not always confident of my ability to survive its adversities.

Which is something of a curious thing. I am after all, nearly 50 years old. I have dealt with, to quote a song, trials and tribulations, heartache and pain. Survived it all. Yet, there is still that nagging feeling that tomorrow, something so catastrophic that I won't be able to do anything with it may happen. I understand how fear can be a survival trait, but I also understand that most of the things that trigger my fear response simply raise my blood pressure to no good end.

I have come to understand how my attachment to things results in needless anxiety. But I have also come to understand just how difficult that selfsame attachment is to break. I don't know if I'll ever master it, but I'd like to. Because then, I will have become fearless. And it will be glorious.

Cluster of Blooms