Escaping the Wilderness of Black Mirrors

My Senate testimony on seeing through the worldwide web of geopolitical operations.

Since publishing Part I of my Senate testimony on the cusp of last year concerning upcoming technological “harms”, some have noticed the discordance in Sen. Thune inviting my recommendation for A Second Amendment for Compute in 2021 and, in 2023, cosponsoring the RESTRICT Act, which would do almost the precise opposite—digitally disarming Americans and adding such sweeping and invasive federal power over digital life that our constitutionally guaranteed form of government could wink out once and for all at the whim of officials beyond the reach of citizen power to vote in or out of office. Over at RETURN, Peter Gietl has the rundown on just what restrictions are truly in store if the backlash to the bill is overcome. For those as yet unawares:

This Act can potentially be the most invasive and authoritarian law passed in the last hundred years. It empowers a government agency with draconian powers to go after anyone using a VPN to access banned websites with up to 20 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine…

The bill would grant the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Commerce the ability to designate companies and individuals, including American citizens, as an immediate national security threat for doing business with or promoting a “Foreign Adversary.” They could be arrested without due process, fined $1 million, imprisoned for 20 years, and have all of their assets seized. It also shields the agency from any FOIA requests. With a stroke of a pen, this agency will have dominion over all digital communications with the explicit power to “enforce any mitigation measure to address any risk”…

It’s already plain that the feds see Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general as an intolerable obstacle to rolling out the CBDCs needed to digitize the American financial system under central control. RESTRICT — and the inevitable follow-on legislation to expand and complete the delegation of legislative power on tech to executive-branch agencies whose officials you can’t vote in or out, or even know by name — would make Operation Chokepoint 2.0 look amateurish.

Some digging into the provenance of RESTRICT’s abominable language uncovers circumstantial but nonetheless grim evidence that the real writers of the bill that delegates such monstrous powers from Congress to yet another knot of Executive Branch tentacles are in the Executive themselves — including, rumor has it, National Security Advisor (and former advisor to Obama, Clinton, and Microsoft) Jake Sullivan.

Of course, dealing with TikTok is tricky. Our ruling elites indulged their imaginations’ counsel that our machines would consummate their form of rule worldwide, and their failure to understand what in fact they’d unleashed led to an unprecedented “whole of government” effort to claw back unlimited sovereignty over all digital activity within American territory and reach. TikTok unfolded in a realm those efforts could not penetrate and still as yet have proven unable to do so. It would appear at least some Members of Congress support RESTRICT because they believe an alternate bill, the far more narrowly tailored DATA Act, would outstrip Biden’s lawful authority. Yet in an era of cover stories laundered at the very top of the media hierarchy as unimpeachable fact from the guardians of truth itself, it seems absurd to credit Members’ unwillingness to grant the President one unconstitutional power restricted (if you will) to TikTok for their willingness to grant the Executive Branch deliriously tyrannical powers over the whole of our digital lives.

And so I refer you to a better policy by way of The Heritage Foundation’s Kara Frederick. Meanwhile, picking up where Part I of my testimony left off, the second written question concerns the risks of the metaverse. The answer, I suggest, hinges on a journey into the dark forest of details surrounding the transformation of Facebook into Meta under the most extraordinary and hostile circumstances. Behind all the latest technologies and biggest companies are people, particular individuals bearing institutional loyalties and interests, deeply hidden from the public eye, busily weaving us into new modes and orders to which we hardly know we belong. Behind the risks of this app or that language model looms the active threat of such people using ever more powerful communications technologies to cement their unfettered control over our actions, our words, our beliefs, our identities.

Intelligence, in the sense of spycraft, has long been referred to as “a wilderness of mirrors.” That makes the opaque metaverse our intelligence has encased around us, overlaying, penetrating, and orchestrating our government, culture, and consciousness, a wilderness of black mirrors — one we can find our way through, and out of, only with a kind of spiritual discernment that surpasses calculation and imagination alone.

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Written Questions Submitted by Honorable John Thune to Mr. James Poulos, following testimony to the December 9, 2021 hearing of the Communications, Media, and Broadband Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, entitled “Disrupting Dangerous Algorithms: Addressing the Harms of Persuasive Technology.”

Question 2.  The “metaverse” appears to be what we can expect the internet to be in the near term future.  As you know, Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company to Meta in October, and said that the “metaverse” can be described as the “embodied internet.”  What in your view, should we expect with the “embodied internet” in terms of our concerns about AI and algorithms?

Response. While the digital medium, like all communications media, independently reshapes our senses and sensibilities, much of what appears to be the mere march of innovation in tech is driven by deep-seated strategic conflicts among powerful institutions and personnel reaching back decades. These conflicts shed important light on how our concerns toward AI and algorithms should be dramatically sharpened as conflicting players wrestle for metaverse dominance.

A fresh example concerns recent news that Meta suddenly scrapped the development of its new operating system for virtual and augmented reality devices, after four years of work by hundreds of programmers on the project, in the wake of the abrupt departure of team lead Mark Lucovsky. Lucovsky told the press he quit—to join Google in a similar role—due to Facebook’s hard pivot to the metaverse and the so-called “Facebook whistleblower” Frances Haugen’s disclosures about the company.

Lucovsky is not just some random nerd striking out for greener pastures. He came aboard at Facebook as their Oculus system’s General Manager of Operating Systems after building Chinese and American engineering teams for VMware—a Silicon Valley cloud computing and machine virtualization company that acquired in the mid-2000s companies based in London, Switzerland, Bulgaria, and Israel, the latter of which led to VMware’s opening an R&D facility in Israel based on the team in place in that country at the time of acquisition. Previously to VMware, Lucovsky served for five years as Engineering Director at Google, which contentiously hired him away from Microsoft. In a lawsuit over Google’s poaching from Microsoft of another high-powered tech executive, Kai-Fu Lee—now best known as the former head of Google China—it was revealed that Lucovsky testified in a statement that then-CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer reacted to news of his move to Google with a profane and violent tirade directed against Google chief Eric Schmidt. Lucovsky’s decision to return to Google to do for it what he was doing for Facebook leaves Meta in a position of striking weakness, reliant on Android, the mobile operating system of none other than Google itself.

Lucovsky’s dramatic peregrinations illustrate how Silicon Valley is an extremely small world made up of a very intimately and internationally connected group of programmers and executives working in a highly strategically sensitive and secretive pressure cooker environment evolving at breakneck speed. This reality must color lawmaker’s understanding of what exactly was at work with Haugen’s slickly launched and operated “whistleblower” campaign. Rather than a spontaneous act of conscience, Haugen’s doings—which extend far beyond her media-ready Hill testimony to an in-depth consultative tour with top European regulators aiming to crack down on Meta through a sweeping new Digital Services Act—are organized and facilitated by a cast of global lobbyists with elite backing and support. This shop, called Reset, is run by Ben Scott, a top tech advisor to Hillary Clinton, both in her days as Secretary of State and during her run for president, instrumental to the promulgation of the 21st Century Statecraft doctrine instructing the State Department to thoroughly technologize global diplomacy.

Today Reset draws up to $10 million a year from eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar through the London-based activist philanthropy group Luminate, whose CEO, Stephen King, is a longtime Omidyar lieutenant previously the head of BBC Media Action, a body funded separately from the BBC that reputedly gives MI6 and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office a quiet means to conduct information operations such as the FCO’s Counter Disinformation & Media Development campaign, run until 2019 by career civil servant Andy Pryce. While, to be sure, there is no demonstrable connection between Pryce, King, or Scott to “dodgy dossier” author Christopher Steele, the former head of the Russia desk at MI6 during the financial crisis, a pattern in strategic conduct and conflict is strongly suggested by the manner in which Steele’s ostensibly unofficial investigation of then-president Donald Trump was effortlessly laundered into the national political battle through the slick offices of Fusion GPS on the Clinton campaign’s dime.

If these details seem to suggest some kind of kill shot has been orchestrated against Meta to the benefit of its top strategic rival Google, that is no coincidence. The question is why. The point is not to ensnare lawmakers’ attentions in a wilderness of mirrors, but rather to underscore that the current conflict in Silicon Valley over metaverse dominance is inseparable from the broader geopolitical conflict inside and outside the US over digital dominance and control. It is not unreasonable to infer that, in the case of Meta, powerful individuals and organizations in and out of the federal government have acted on a strong interest in punishing Facebook for Mark Zuckerberg’s and certain board members’ perceived responsibility for Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory and near-win in 2020. This interest, more than a mere partisan disagreement, is clearly animated by a more comprehensive ideological conviction that their factional control over the entire digital infrastructure of the United States, and its projection around the world, is essential and non-negotiable.

The upshot of this high-stakes gambit is that, while the metaverse is presented to would-be users as an escape from the harsh challenges and overwhelming confusions of the real world—an infinite televisual paradise within which to play safely and freely—the figurative TV in which users are to be absorbed is itself enclosed within a vast computer system which unelected officials and their powerful allies outside government use to manipulate and control masses in a vast power struggle for digital sway over the country, the globe, and the minds and bodies of those within them.

In short, it is not an exaggeration to say that AI and algorithms designed for a mainstream and ubiquitous metaverse are geostrategic tools of the utmost power and influence, and that domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, governments, NGOs, corporations, and activist groups should be expected to wrestle for influence and control over their design, reach, and consequences—even as users are in all likelihood constantly conditioned to perceive and experience the metaverse not as a system of unprecedented social control but as an unprecedented funhouse within which, no matter how dark the world outside, they can, in Neil Postman’s portentous phrase, amuse themselves to death.

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