📅 January 27 - February 02 | Under attack

That’s it, done. The first month of the year is already over.

If it didn’t pass by at breakneck pace for you, I’d like a little bit of what you’re drinking please!

For this instalment, I’m not sur how much I am going to write as I start typing this out. It has been a strange couple of weeks for me on both a personal and professional footing. Various issues took up far too much time than I had anticipated and left me a little on the back foot to prepare a focused article here.

But, as it’s my online space and I get to decide what I do with it, I suppose that’s ok.

Let’s dive straight in.

Turbulence online

I’ve been an advocate for a more open social web, one where the likes of Meta are reduced to being members or players, but are stripped of any overbearing control, creepy surveillance systems and damaging societal-level incentives through advertising. It is a feeling I’ve had for many years, and one that has accentuated more recently. Particularly with the turn to the right that that has manifested for much longer than most realise, but is only just being noticed.

I’d written about this some time ago, and possibly even had some of my thoughts dismissed for it. Heck, I even blinked myself, thinking that I had pretty much gone too far and that this is not what was happening in front off my eyes. But here we are. And the truth is that I, and many others, were right. The signs were there. There were warnings, and still we were unable collectively to do anything about it and that has left us in a very compromised position as general members of the exploited public.

What we have now is a tech oligarchy that is systematically dismantling many pillars of democracy for their own profits and power, at the expense of you and anyone not connected. They have skilfully convinced a number of people who would be the natural targets of such extreme political stances that they, too, are part of this new power —people of colour, people with neurodivergence, and people of sexual orientations that differ from what their religion normally accepts historically. What those who have been co-opted seem to not realise, is that once there are no longer other easier targets to attack, it will be them next in line.

Extreme right-wing politics is fuelled by hate and fear. The two resources in abundance in America right now. Yes, in abundance for the moment, but it is not an infinite resource and at some point it will run out, or become so extreme as to disgust the world into action.

Are we there yet? Of course not, but it is a short route from where we are today and totalitarianism and imperialism and dare I say it, Fascism. America is in a dangerous place.

It used to be said that when China sneezes, the whole world catches a cold. It referred to its power in manufacturing prowess and supply chain management, and any disruption there could have had enormous consequences for the world. This phrase is likely to get adjusted for the current political situation in the US. I’ll leave that to you imagination. I have my ideas.

Looking at the practical fallout of this and how it relates to the Caribbean, leads me to feel very worried for the near future.

Over weekend a sustained and violent attack on an institution that I have worked for took place. The entire website of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) got taken offline. No holding page, no explanation. Nothing. Just a 404.

USAID has (had?) an annual budget of $50 billion and has been a big donor, developer, and assistant in the Caribbean for a long time. The Agency has been called “criminal” by Musk, and its shuttering is in line with Trump’s “America first” agenda, that is just a thinly veiled warning to the world of their imperial ambitions. (See Greenland and Panama and Project 2025). Many businesses, many people, and many families in the Caribbean are going to be directly and negatively affected by this. It is so depressing to see this happen to people who least deserve it.

And, yes, you can argue that USAID wasn’t a perfect organisation and it left a few things to be desired in terms of development and effectiveness, but it tried. The people I worked with there were all passionate about helping, and unlike many development agencies, it wasn’t staffed by “white knights in shining armour”, which is a legitimate criticism of many aid organisations around the world. It was staffed by Caribbeans from communities in the Caribbean, trying to do their best for their communities and the region as a whole.

It is all about to end, if we believe what we see. And I’m sad about that for a number of reasons. But one of which, I suspect, hasn’t been thoroughly thought through.

Geopolitically, the Caribbean is in the Americas, and at its closet point, only approximately 50 miles from mainland USA. It is intrinsically linked to the USA through its history and is a gateway to the continent both physically and through telecoms infrastructure. And it is this that is a danger for the USA, because it is also a gateway for other forces, open to exploit.

During some research I did on the Caribbean a few years back, I crossed by information that showed how some US citizens had been spied upon within the continental United States, through the telecoms and internet infrastructure of the Caribbean. It was a shock to the security forces and lead to a number of decisions being made about the use of various telecoms equipment manufacturers. Telecoms equipment is essentially made in two places currently, Europe and China, with the USA effectively losing its place in that market a long time ago. An out and out ban on the deployment of Chinese equipment was instigated, and pressure subsequently put on Caribbean nations to divest and replace them.

Some of the reasons behind this, and I cannot go into any detail here, were that America had let go of any interest in helping the Latin America and the Caribbean for a number of years, leaving the door open to other influences to provide money, equipment, assistance and training to deploy telecoms and ancillary devices (CCTV and the like). La nature a horreur du vide!

So you see —and without any judgement on my part— withdrawal of interest in Latin America and the Caribbean will only provide an incentive for other parties to invest, setup and implant themselves in the region. You don’t need me to tell you who the most likely candidates are and their track record of freedom of speech are.

The tech oligarchy is actively supporting and enabling this and they deserve our derision and our resistance by us contributing rebuilding an open social web that they stole from us a couple of decades ago, before it is too late.

Reading

“LLMs amplify existing security risks and introduce new ones”

Gary Marcus discusses the previously-linked Microsoft research on Cybersecurity in the age of AI. TLDR: 😱

On the Grid​ | How Surveillance Became a Love Language

It is out of hand and must be comprehensively dealt with, in my view.

Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

What the headline fails to convey is that location tracking, i.e., precise longitude and latitude coordinates are being passed on, even if you have turned them off! I smell criminal proceedings.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great week.