 about the politics of the supposedly neutral and how you can weed them. Adam calls himself a survivor of the American capitalism, so please give it up to Adam and enjoy. Mike Gain. Yes, thank you. Hi. So, originally, this talk was supposed to be about algorithms, and then I realized that I was falling prey to exactly the thing I was trying to critique, so I expanded the title a bit, but you'll see there's a bit of attention in the talk between the entire system and an algorithm that is kind of the piece that is hard to discuss. So I wanted to just start with mathematical formalisms. This is a variable. It doesn't seem to have any political implications on its own other than it can be used for a lot of things. It can stand for anything. Here's a variable squared. This might have implications. This could be used to calculate the area of property that you own. This may be fewer, maybe something electrical. Triangles could be used in some kind of projection of Cartesian coordinates over indigenous landscapes. This goes boom. Now we start getting into actual applications. So, yeah, most of this might seem obvious or it might seem completely foreign, so just help fidget or something to give me cues. Yeah, mathematical formalisms are sometimes considered objective, but obviously they only exist in a context, so Howard Zinn has a book about his life called You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. The idea is that any mathematics exist in social contexts that were constructed for a reason, and then omission is almost equally important if, depending on what's happening, it could be more important. Omission would just be the things that are not included in your formula and your algorithm silences the voice of complicity. I'm sort of misusing that. But no, algorithms are the same as anything else. You should follow the money. If you want to understand what's happening, it's just a materialist and a pretty effective way of understanding things. Think about who created the algorithm. What is it used for? What types of effects might it have and what would the alternatives be if this wasn't the way that the subject matter was being treated? Unfortunately, algorithms are almost never part of public debate. They're hidden. The private property of corporations, of governments who don't think that we need to know what the details are, they're hidden intentionally or not behind the language of mathematics. In order to critique at this level of mathematical formula, you need to be literate in both mathematics and politics or sociology. They don't necessarily go together. That immediately narrows down the number of people who might be talking about the content of a formula. All I'm doing here is I'm just giving a few examples and showing how something that might be neutral is absolutely not. I'm starting with human population. Population obviously has been a hot subject for centuries, and the projections are wildly different and hypothetical. Obviously it matters a lot. We're at a turning point in our planet's ecology, at least. When you see a graph like this, you need to think, what is this? Why does it have such a wide range? There's this blue line that goes straight up, and then there's this other line that looks like some type of collapse or rebound back down to a sustainable level. If you look at who's putting this out, they're not interested in the political aspects at this top level. They actually want to take those out of their predictions, although you see something like the red dashed lines, and those are 80% prediction certainty, and the dotted lines are 95% prediction certainty. I would say that's all pretty unlikely because they haven't factored in some important parts about the world, such as the Earth's carrying capacity. Most estimates say that this red line, or sorry, the estimates are very different, but one plausible estimate is that we passed the Earth's carrying capacity in 1992, in which case most of these curves are bogus and something entirely different is going to happen. To not include that in your population projections is, I would say, irresponsible. Here's another publication by the same well-meaning organization, but you can see there's these little buttons at the bottom that you look at the more developed and least developed regions, which is another obstacle to participation. It's a pretty World Bank sort of perspective, the global development view, and then you see that the population of African countries is growing more quickly, which throws a racial element into it too. Unfortunately, that's how this type of map is used. I can't read this because it's too awful, but this is sort of the state of rhetoric around population in public discussion. And this same author, 1968, pretty mainstream, is saying, this is one way to take care of population growth, so you can see it gets bad quickly and we need to be involved in actually reconceptualizing these models. We can't let there just be a graph like this that doesn't include this. We can't let there be a map like this that doesn't talk about the power dynamics between countries and the history of racialized politics. Yeah, here are just a few consequences of how population models actually affect the world. And then, of course, there are follow on effects of population anxieties causing other political effects. Here's an alternative model, and this one is a bit more interesting. I just wanted to paint the status quo so that I could show you what the alternative might be. This is a model that was actually the first, it was only put out a few years ago, and it was the first to combine the idea of ecological cycles with, excuse me, yeah, the Earth's carrying capacity, ecological resource consumption with class conflict. In this case, the humans are eating the planet, the planet slowly regenerates, and the rich are eating the poor. This is actually, surprisingly, a controversial thing to say. It predicts a completely different sort of population trajectory than the United Nations graphs did. The green line here is the Earth's resources, the red line is the commoner's population, and the blue line are the elites. In this case, they're like an unchecked predator, and as soon as they're introduced, they eat all the poor people. If you play with this model, I have an interactive version online. You can, sorry, this is not my model, but I made an interactive visualization for it that lets you change the parameters and see what happens. If you drag the inequality control back and forth, then you see that you can get a completely different behavior. Here you get the population skyrocketing and then stabilizing, and that's sort of just the natural thing that you do if there's a single predator prey cycle and you're just rabbits eating grass, for example. I don't think there's time for a tour right now, unfortunately, but it might be fun for you. The point I wanted to make, though, is that with this second predator prey cycle between rich and poor people, you're actually introducing Marxism into the formula. This has been used to explain capitalism's periodic crises, which capitalism still won't admit exists, interestingly enough. Capitalism says there's always some external driver behind the crises. If you take this assumption in the formula and you say capitalism does cause periodic crises and rich people are acting like predators, what do you do? You need class struggle. You need to create more equality. So this is just another example of how we should try to be involved in the construction of these models and their use in our world. Labor supply is also very important, but maybe not as interesting. Don't worry about this. I tried to not include math because part of the point here is to make these ideas accessible with or without math, but I did want this picture up here just to show that in the dominant neoclassical economic perspective, if you pay people too much, they stop working. So you want to pay them just little enough that they work as much as they possibly can. There are all types of crazy assumptions built into these formulas like humans are able to make rational choices rather than just taking the next job in desperation. I've never lived in this world. I've only lived in maybe this world where I want to fight back against this formula as much as I can. Sorry, I'll let you read this if you want. But yeah, this formula is missing all of the things that relate to my working world, like my motivation for working is not just consumption of things. There's essential survival and then there's wanting to be motivated by contributing to the world somehow. There's organized labor, which I think about pretty often at most jobs. That would be another way out of this formula. And you can see the effects of this type of policy are that the richest 5%, keep getting richer and everyone else stays the same. More effects of the neoclassical labor supply. And then this is sort of more active. I don't think there are a ton of people working on this, but I'd like to just go through the question anyway. Wikipedia has never had paid advertisements and it's valuable because people visit it extremely often and trust it based on its reputation. So if you put advertisements on here, this would be the holy grail for most advertisers. It would be that you would have your product advertised on top of something that people already believed, so their skepticism would be much lower. There was actually a discussion about putting paid advertisements on Wikipedia in 2001. Well-known fact, Wikipedia was started as part of a porn company, BOMIS, and the chief of this porn company, Jimmy Wales, said that there would be paid advertising on Wikipedia caused a huge fight. Spanish Wikipedia split off and formed the encyclopedia Libre Universal, I think it's called. And pretty much because of this fork, Wikipedia was then forced into not having paid advertisements and split off from BOMIS. When we do have advertising on Wikipedia which brings in money, it's basically just a relentless stream of money and we have to turn it off to not raise too much. And so here's the extremely materialistic view of what could be done with Wikipedia. We have 244 billion paid views per year. We could put in four advertising slots. This is an industry standard number. In fact, I think it's four per page, so as you scroll, there would be more and more ads. And then at this price, we could bring in almost $3 billion a year, which is a huge profit margin at the low operating cost of $100 million. If you create this type of formula, then you have Wikipedia suddenly becomes something that you can buy and sell, it becomes something that corporations would want to take over and control the content of. That's obviously soulless. Here's another view of advertising on Wikipedia, who creates the value in Wikipedia that editors do, who's allowed to run the fundraising campaigns. Only three organizations, actually. My employer, Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia Switzerland and the Wikimedia Foundation, which interestingly enough, is the one organization in the group of Wikipedia chapters. It's the one organization which is not democratically controlled. It's a self-perpetuating board, and this charismatic porn leader, Jimmy Wales, I hope this is recorded, he's still some kind of honorary chair of the board. He has renewable membership for life, and the board members appoint themselves. Yeah, so why are they allowed to be the only ones raising money through Wikipedia? Because they own the trademarks, so it's a pretty typical arrangement when it comes down to it, and there's some kind of power-sharing deal that, although I know about it, and I was close to people who do understand it, I never learned what's in there, so I can't tell you much about it. So if you follow this train of logic, then you can come up with another set of formulas, which is actually the flow of value around Wikipedia and its content, and if we did that, we might be able to say, hey, there's an excellent argument for having democratic control of the resources, and then more along those lines, if you take the same problem domain and you come up with different formulas inside of it, you can do things like say, what would editors like from this system that exists to post advertisements, which does exist, by the way, they're just not paid advertisements, editors might want a better way of sharing the resources among themselves, they obviously would fight tooth and nail to prevent paid advertising from ever being on there, but they do want each other's campaigns to be more effective so that we're not constantly showing banners with no return. I also wanted to point to this paper, which is the one that caused me the anxiety at the beginning of the talk, protective optimization technologies, I'd love for you all to click it because it's like a formal perspective of looking beyond the algorithm at the entire system that the algorithm is embedded in, the slides are attached to the talk link if you want, that's all I have, does anybody feel like asking questions? Extremely brave people want to ask questions? Hi, so it was five minutes late, but perhaps do you have more examples on how you see some kind of a political, not twist, but like background when you see graphs or statistics, do you have any more examples when you see that happen, and how do you detect this? When you're a beginner and you look at a statistical graph, how can you analyze it and find out what the political background or like missing preconceptions are? Thanks, I wish I'd prepared a few more. And I'm just doing this from an armchair also, my day job is just in programming. And so the only reason I think about this stuff is because I've spent a long time working for evil companies, unfortunately. And so I'm always trying to second guess what the company's actually doing. But to do that, there's no real trick that I can think of. It's really just the Chomsky approach would be follow the money. Where does the money come from? Where does it go? Why do people want this to exist? And so you have some formula, some system, if you have one in mind, please suggest it. And then, yeah, there's a thing that you could do like literature review, where you just look at similar attempts to look at that same problem domain and find what people have left out of the one that you're looking at. But I don't think there's a concrete system to do it because that would like allow you to invent everything in the world. So it's kind of case by case, as far as I can tell. Sorry. If you were Jimmy Wells back in the day, and you would be set up like a benevolent dictator for life, how would you have faced yourself out? How would be your take on what should be the the the correct way or correct way of of Wikipedia raising, for example, funds if in the end, the people who create value are editors? Mm hmm. When Wikipedia was first started, it was officially a membership organization. And so everybody who is editing or uploading files or changing the source code was considered a member in Germany. It's a fine, I think. And so everybody was supposed to have one vote for the Board of Trustees. And that pretty much takes care of the problem right there. If you don't in Wikimedia Foundation was illegally changed to be a non membership organization a few years in actually, it was illegal because they didn't announce it to the people who were technically members. So I suppose editors would should feel free to sue the Wikimedia Foundation for control, for example. There's no statute of limitations on on this particular thing that happened. But but in general, I would say from my tiny bit of experience doing grassroots organizing, an organization is something like a child. It's you don't want to have it live in your house. It's all life. And you don't want to be telling it to get up and brush its teeth in the morning. The measure of success should be something more like it takes a life of its own. It might be a direction you didn't consider. And so to do that, you have to devolve the power from yourself. Does that answer the question? Okay. All right, well, thank you so much for coming. I hope it was useful.