Alchemical Musings

If you haven’t yet heard about the  details of the NSA’s spying program, catch yourself up with the timeline so this post doesn’t sound entirely bonkers.

For years I’ve been pondering the scope and implications of what Aram Sinnreich and I call The End of Forgetting, and even prior to Edward Snowden’s revelations, I have recently noticed a few dramatic activations of massive distributed memory banks.

In recent months, there have been a few instances where we have literally peered back in time, reconstructing the past based on comprehensive (relevant) records. In the sciences, the collection of records prior to having a specific question is sometimes called “triple-blind“. And, as we know, the dragnet-style collection of records has extended far beyond the lab. If software does one thing well its the collection/storage/retrieval of records; And, software is everywhere.

This story about the reconstruction of February’s meteor path based on dashboard-cam footage reassembled inside Google Earth was pretty stunning:

Also, was it me, or did the reconstruction of the crowd scenes leading up to the Boston bombings feel a bit like the the distorted phone messages from the past that the Scientists reconstructed in 12 Monkeys???

Mainstream physicists have postulated a viable form of 2-way time travel based on wormholes. In this scenario, one end of a wormhole is accelerated into the future, allowing those in the future to travel back to the point where the wormhole was opened, but crucially, no farther back in the past. The point when this wormhole is created is known as Year Zero.

In the past, I have discussed physically travelling through time (Pyramid Schemes), including how critical detailed records of your destination is to plotting flippin’ pinpoint coordinates. But in this post I’m content to explore the metaphor of the Wormcam, a science-fiction device I first saw used in Arthur C. Clarke’s Light of Other Days.  The wormcam is a wormhole that only allows light to travel through it. In this book, wormholes are first able to bridge any two points in space, and soon thereafter, any two points in time. Most people learn to correctly assume that they have at least one wormcam fixed on them all the time.

I’m not really big on sharp discontinuities in history, and I’m not particularly fixated on determining when precisely Year Zero fell/will fall. But, its increasingly clear to me that The End of Forgetting signifies the singularity, more-so than AI, Mo-Bio, and Nano-Tech combined. There won’t be a single moment when prior and after people won’t understand each other, but the period we are living through right now has those characteristics. And PRISM is just the start.

If you haven’t heard of the British series Black Mirror, stop reading this post right now and go watch  S01E03 The Entire History of You.  Really, that episode alone should lay to rest the question of why someone who doesn’t break the law should care about the End of Forgetting.

Of course, the precipice we are standing on does not only provide us with a view of the past. While the past doesn’t determine the future, power is determined to wield the past as a means of stacking the odds.

The media is currently preoccupied with data mining, and forensic analysis.  But, the real money is about about turning the wormcams to the future, using predictive behavioral modeling. The NSA  only needs to be 100% correct to stop terrorists, but corporations only need to be a few percentage points better to sell more burgers or prevent your friends from changing mobile carriers, and politicians often only need a few more points to win an election or gerrymander a district. A friend of mine at TC published a paper about predicting who will drop out of high school dropouts by third-grade, based primarily on their grades and absentee records. And, that’s before we turn to  pre-crime or pathologizing risk.

In Snowden’s own words, “they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with.” (7:33)

Just remember, if all that exists is the present, then the past must be as malleable as the future. That is, unless we digitally ossify them 🙂

Filed by Jonah at 10:45 pm under air,endofforgetting,metaphysics
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Last month the DSM-5 finally launched at the American Psychiatric Association conference. After 13 years and multiple delays, you can now pre-order your copy at Amazon (list price: $150), or just leave a helpful comment.

The DSM-5 had been surrounded by controversy, and not just by the usual suspects. Allen Frances, the chairman of the DSM-IV task force, just published a scathing critique of the processes and outcomes of the DSM-5 efforts: Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life. Frances has been sounding the alarm about DSM-5 for over a year, raising concerns over the current committee’s secretive methods, conflicts of interest, expansive diagnostic inflation, and the reduction in reliability (the odds of two doctors agreeing on a diagnosis) that DSM-5.  Over 50 Mental Health organizations and almost 15k people signed a petition demanding reform of the DMS-5 drafts.

Although this scale of controversy would be scandalous in many fields, the APA barely flinched. The DSM-5 task force moved some of the most troubling diagnoses into the appendix, renamed a few others, skipped a round of efficacy trials to meet their deadline, and otherwise proceeded with business as usual.

I have to say my jaw dropped when I learned that the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and it’s $1.5B/year of funding,  was “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories[!]”. The official NIMH announcement, Transforming Diagnosis, posted by their director Thomas Insel on April 29th, was picked up by a wide range of science media (NYTimes, Koplewicz @ The Huffington Post, Chris Lane @ Psychology Today, Psych Central) with headlines such as “NIMH Withdraws Support for DSM-5” and analysis that this was a “kill-shot” for DSM-5.

What struck me as most shocking was that the NIMH basically came out and said that the the Mental Illnesses defined in the DSM are social constructs – “the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.”  Ironically, the anti-psychiatrist’s arguments have prevailed, although for the wrong reasons. As I interpret this statement, NIMH isn’t denying the existence of mental illness, just our current ability to agree on its nature and manifestations. But, yes, the current definitions are social constructs and continue to defy attempts at validity. Ha!

But, before anyone gets too excited, what the NIMH proposes may turn out to be scarier than the system in place. This research is representative of the direction that the NIMH is heading: Suicidal behavior is a disease. Here, disorders will be sliced and diced into their constituent elements, which conform more readily to the instruments and models that scientists (neurobiologists and geneticists) already have at their disposal.

I’ve been convinced for a while that within the next 5-10 years the Pharma-Industrial complex was going to invest enough research money to find a definitive neuro-imaging/molecular/genetic/biochemical marker for mental illness (that is, once the marker cast a wide enough net).  However, I wasn’t expecting them to turn the tables and redefine mental illness according to what they could already test. Pretty sneaky.

The saddest part of this whole debacle is that instead of seizing this moment of crisis as an occasion to bring together disparate stakeholders – from patients, to consumers, to survivors, to advocates, to caregivers across a range of backgrounds – and work together to develop a new language and paradigm for understanding human suffering and emotional crisis, the NIMH has doubled down on scientific authority. Soon they will be short-circuiting all debate by pointing at pretty false-color pictures and lab results. There will always be a value judgement when evaluating the boundaries of normal experience/behavior, and no scientific instrument will ever be able to tell us when someone’s experience/behavior is deviant, without human interpretation. As the disability right’s movement says: Nothing about us, without us.

Somehow, for all of the NIMH’s noble intentions, I have a bad feeling that the treatment side of mental health care is poised to become more oppressive. We’ll likely continue to see the growth of anti-psychotics for everyone, and the pre-cog, pathologizing of risk through predictive and preventative care that will explosively expand the diagnostic reach.

This conversation just took a sharp turn past the rhetoric of the last few decades. I hope the psychiatric resistance is following along closely, and updating their arguments accordingly.

Filed by Jonah at 12:25 am under dangerousgifts,epistemology,fire
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