The Age of Transitions 2-28-2025

the podcast. This week again Uncle is away on vacation, so actually we're doing one hour just the Age of Transitions this week, but typically two hours two shows ochelly dot com. Do consider going to I have a request.

dollar bets. So let uncle know that. And they want them to know that they are unhappy that they had to wait because he's on vacation.

I'd like to add some broadcasters. And I'm openly discussing this with people who maybe you're just getting started or want to extend, or just need a new home for what it is they're doing, and would love to add you to the radio and podcast feeds Prochelly dot com and the network because right now it's just me, Aaron and Uncle, and we are the We are the network, okay, with a couple of replays on the weekends, yes, but

not too many. So we have lots of open slots, just saying and oh, by the way, Aaron, we're also going to have to change our Skype thing pretty soon.

because almost everybody still uses it to some degree. But now they're going to get their wish Well, Skype, they need to do better. Well, now Bill Gates is going to give you teams and force you onto that. He's even going to transfer the credits over if you have any credits for your subscriptions or whatever after twenty something years.

was twenty three in nineteen ninety five. So the guy sounded old in nineteen ninety five. Okay, I don't think he's still around, But wouldn't that be funny if it was the same guy and then twenty three years later from now, still the same guy answers the phone. I'm

just saying he was. And by the way, it wasn't just like the guy was definitely I don't know if he was playing along with it, but he was not like it seemed like you might have been talking to somebody who was not necessarily one hundred percent in this realm.

I'm gonna I believe I'll be able to post a new Patreon post with the next tape in the series from the Singularity Summit two thousand and nine tapes, and we'll get some more interesting interviews that Carlos and I got at that event all these many years ago now, so I'll be posting that upson look for that. Also have the affiliate links bookshop dot org. Click on the link of the side of my website to bookshop dot org.

Done anything you buy, well, I'll get a small kickback for sending you there, and we'll cost anything exkewer to use, so please do remember to do that. Also, if you're thinking about starting a podcast, Libsyn use that as your podcast hosting service. You can use my promo code fronds. You'll get two months of libs in for free. It's a great service, all right. So with that aside, thank you for listening. This is a special show because it

is an interview. I did an interview pre recorded last weekend. I recorded an interview with Anita se Chan, who is the author of Predatory Data, Eugenics in Big Tech, and Our Fight for an Independent Future. It was nice enough for her publisher to send me a copy of the book, which I'm holding right now. I will say that I'm

a little embarrassed when I did the interview. I haven't read at all yet, but I am part of the way through now, and I will say it is an excellent book that I honestly recommend, and the subject matter is one of those things that is integral to this site. I've talked about the links to eugenics and technology, transhumanism, the big tech scene generally. I've been talking about this for quite a while, but honestly, it's been a while since I've covered anything about it on this show, for sure.

So it's a good thing to return to that very important and real topic and connection of eugenics and big tech. So Anita say Chan, my guest here, does a great

job of that. This book is really good and yeah, worthwhile reading to remember that all these things that we take for granted in this high tech world we're living in, they have very real, disturbing philosophical origins that the proprietors of all the big tech proprietors of all these things that we use, all these digital toise and whatnot that we have, they don't want us to see that connection. That's for sure. It's real, it needs to be remembered, and I'm sure today's show is going to do a

good job in helping along with that. If Now, what's also interesting is Anita mentioned on the interview she recommended that you go to bookshop dot org to buy the book, which you can, and I will have a link on the post for this show at my website to post for this interview. I have a link that actually goes to my bookshop and you can buy this book, which I recommend. And once you know that, I thought that

was a kind of interesting synchronicity there. So with all of that in mind, I think we're just going to play this interview now, So please enjoy my interview with Anita say Chan Today on the show, I welcome a special guest, the author of Predatory Data, Eugenics and Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future. Anita say Chant, Welcome to the show.

aggression that we continue to teach our students as really the kind of again foundation to predictive methods. It's everything that we in data ecologies. It's essentially why you see but determines what you see on most forms of social media and online media that we encounter today. All those forms of predictive methods and methodologies all have their roots

in eugenics. But it was a history that I discovered that most of my students and many of my colleagues even were not so familiar with, and which is pretty astounding to me, given how powerful the American eugenics movement was and how policy is shaped our information cology, not just in the nineteenth century, but as I say, with the methods that they developed that continue to shape our information economy today.

Their original sort of conception of the human user that's central to the discipline was the library user, like the user of library systems, whether it was the librarian and training or whether it was the human who was using those indices and those archives and essential databases of the library system. So that's different than the computer science where your software systems. Right. So, but they're quite proxy, and many of our students, much like in computer science, go

on to work in Silicon the valley. It's a very very normal trajectory for professions information scientists to get trained to work in information professions that include data sciences, in h in big tech and corporate sectors.

look there is a philosophy behind this. What appears to just be banal information, you know, like data entry and things like that, This isn't just data entry where we're just in putting data and numbers into this digital library. There's actually like there's reasons and perhaps even philosophy for how this the genesis of this?

from sort of historical and cultural historical perspectives. So the name Francis Galton for most, uh most, I hope most of your listeners who made who are interested in history would be familiar.

really found eugenics as his cause. You know, he was doing work in uh colonial data collection and meteorology and

was known for being obsessed with counting. As he sort of came about and by the late eighteen sixties to start to write his first treatises on eugenics, we had to remember that the world in the late nineteenth century was one that was being shaped, of course by new patterns of globalization, independence movements internationally, industrializations in cities and across the West that really changed the demographics of what urban London looked like, of what various cities across the

United States look like. And for Galton this was this kind of obsession with not just counting, but also his preoccupation and his real concern suddenly of what would this mean to see this kind of new proximity and mingling of classes and diverse populations in ways that he had never seen before. What would that mean for the future

of the nation, for the future of the West. And he was quite convinced that in the long run, this kind of continued mixing without any version of moderation or without control, and certainly without sort of any kind of public education around the eventual degeneration that he was convinced would happen would lead to a kind of national demise and a kind of larger demise of the West, and his program and eugenics really started to sort of trace and attempt to impuricize the kind of work and the

value and the pretible fitness of the well born classes to continue to generate the well born, but that uh would increase mingling, that would end up essentially being a program for degeneration, for genetic degeneration, economic degeneration, social degeneration,

but eventually also national degeneration. Uh So his uh, his obsession really not just with counting, but his deep anxiety and paranoia around racial demise was really what drove him to develop all the all the kinds of methodologies for eugenics, for data tracking, for ratification of human populations, and eventually

to found the method of stisco aggression. Again all driven by his kind of deep anxiety around around uh eugenic cro of the that the failure to implement a eugenic program would essentially need to the demise and the fall of the West.

crypto eugenics comes to the fore. Isr is your book here predatory data about like the new version of crypto eugenics. Is crypto eugens even real? Is that? Like?

for the attack and the deconstruction of democratic institutions. And in part of the book is written also to remind ourselves that this kind of program, this version of scientists to use their kind of stature as scientists and their proximity to data, specifically their techniques around the surveillance and monitoring of populations, and their conceit that, and their conviction and their argument over and over again that the numbers

always showed some version of natural hierarchy questionable, I should say, right, I mean the book I think details quite well how this was always this was Eugenics was the first age

of disinformation. But data never actually showed what and could prove what Galton and his fellow eugenicists sought to ultimately try and convince the larger public, But they continuously doctored their information and the data that they collected to try and again, everything from literally editing photos to trying to doctor surveys or effectively doctoring surveys that were to be used as IQ exams for immigrant populations coming into Ellis Island so that they could argue that eighty percent of

the immigrants coming into Ellis Island in the US, who were at the time largely Southern Eastern and Jewish immigrants coming in that eighty percent of these non Nordic classes and non Nordic raceces were essentially feeble minded and shouldn't

be allowed to come into the US. Because of this kind of form of disinformation and the manipulation of data, they were able to effectively lobby for changes to immigration law, So the nineteen seventeen and nineteen twenty four immigration laws which put in the first quotas racialized quotas that into US immigration policy and essentially designed them to privilege Nordic places, so Northern Europeans, and to essentially cut off and limit

immigration coming in from Southern Europe, Eastern Europe. Jewish immigrants,

et cetera. Latin American and African immigrants of course, had were reduced, and Asian immigration from Asia was almost completely cut off into the nineteen fifties they had managed previously, and eugenesis, as the LOOC also details and covers and reviews, had managed to effectively put into place Chinese exclusion laws starting in the eighteen seventies, with the first band on Chinese women, initially essentially arguing that they were contaminants to

the race, that they were bringing in bad blood uh and would essentially infect good, middle class, heteronormative white families with their bad blood and would contaminate populations with sexual disease, but also forms of supposedly uh uh uh contaminating moral depravities like criminality, opia, addiction, laziness, all of these things were thought to be essentially a contaminating force that the Chinese were bringing in and that Chinese women especially were

kind of key source of and so our very first the first globally exclusion acts for immigrants anywhere in the world was quite in place, uh in the US first

against Chinese women. Against that notion essentially argued by eugenicists, medical professionals at the time, other science scientific classes, and public health officials who testified to the validity of this, to the authority of this, and again we're, as I mentioned, quite inclined to manipulate data in order to make the kinds of arguments and essentially promulgate disinformation in order to make the kinds of arguments that they did, but were

quite effective at doing so, and they're in uh. Immigration law for the next five five decades. Really in the US would be redesigned through eugenic effective eugenic policy lobbying and organizing, and so this is a reminder for us of how effective this kind of uses of disinformation by scientific classes, again using and collecting data on human populations, manipulating that data, targeting political classes with their messaging, and

larger publics in order to affect new policy. We have precedent for all of this from over one hundred years ago, and it got quite far, not just with eugenic policy, not just with eugenic policies that articulated themselves through changes and radical changes and immigration law, but even the passage of things like sterilization laws of the unfit in over

thirty states. By the late nineteen twenties, most of the US thirty states, more than thirty states that is, had passed for sterilization, enabled the for sterilization of the unfit, the quote unquote so called unfit who were in state institutions, and states in the West were quite we're quite leading

promulgators of this. In California was one of the California in Indiana or two of the first states with David Starr Jordan, who was initially a professor at the University of Indiana, who then moved, of course, famously to become the first president of Stanford University UH and dedicated much of his career to becoming to being an active pro eugenic advocate and leader helped to found one of the uh uh David star Jordan not only but published and

wrote pro eugenic treatises that became best sellers in their day, but also founded various eugenic societies grounded in the West Coast that brought in fellow leaders in political sectors, scientific and commercial that is, business sectors, sort of the elite of the elite UH and fellow patrician classes of the in the US to organize really a kind of eugenic network and to really help to create make California into and parts of the West Lieling into sort of models

for what eugen policy can supposedly bring about.

of legitimate science. It's like, hey, we've got legitimate science, We've got this biological so they're using like this biological data that they say corresponds to the social sciences, and then they wrap that over into politics, like, hey, we gotta you know, we got to make these new laws because hey, we have we have the proof here eugenics is real. Okay, and so and so. That's just so there's so many things going on. There's so many obfuscations.

parties across the West and across Europe. This is not just a sort of program much like eugenics from one hundred years ago. This is not a program that only saw its sort of work being done, you know, in one nation, and it was very happy to sort of let that lie. It was a program that was quite global.

Eugenics in it to day, much like eugenics now really saw its promise as being one of reordering a kind of global order, remaking the global order, and remaking societies, and especially sort of trying to demonstrate the wrongness of democracy and democratic institutions really, you know, trying to attack democracy at its very foundations, and to demonstrate the rightness of organizing society around the kinds of racial hierarchies and

stratified societies and segregated societies that eugenicists fundamentally believe was was the correct way, the best way of designing strength and maintaining national superiority and national fitness, and so the continuities you see. I mean to argue that Ugenix was the first global movement for dratification. It was also the

first global movement that I just mentioned for disinformation. It was quite successful for growing across the West, seeded in UH in the UK, in in England with Francis Falton, but it was really in the US the kind of choralist to us, with the waves of immigrants that were coming into the East and West coast, that it really saw its earliest forms of of national model and successes take place well before not to Germany. Not to Germany by the nineteen thirties was looking to the US for

all its successes, as its model for an inspiration. But the continuities between contemporary and past eugenics are just uh. Lets I argue in the book eugenics never really went away,

but techno eugenics draws enormous inspiration. And the continuities are that we can see are make themselves obvious, not just that they were both movements and both forms of political forms and social political forms that were driven by a radical eliticism, but that also aim to convince publics that this was empirical, uh, that it was important, and the notion of both of these movements or both of these forms of eugenics as having been they needed to have

a kind of foot in science or make those claims that they would be able to come to prove their their science of inequality. That they were obsessed with collecting and siphoning data from human populations, and we're convinced that with enough data they would be able to demonstrate that

some populations were inevitably always going to be unfit. Uh and that with the fit more more fitness, that the well born bore more well bornness and more fitness, and uh that especially one could could continue to demonstrate with enough data, you would be able to prove that the exceptional would always breed more exceptionality, and that again we so called the counterpart part to that, that the unfit

would would lead to further and more unfitness. That's all that, And there was no point because precisely because the well born were always going to uh breed more of the well born, and the unfit were inevitable going to breed more in fitness. Pauperism, criminality, alcoholism, prostitution, all of these things were wont to get reproduced over and over again amongst the unfit. The poor bore more of the poor, and it was inevitable, inevitable, it was biologically predetermined from

their point of view. And because of that predetermination, there was no point to investing in public institutions. There was no point to investing in public schools and the sorts of things that democracy and welfare states would lean into, because supporting the unfit was only wasting resources. It's only going to be throwing away funds that should actually go

to the well born. And to shore up your strength and to enable the well born to be as fit and as enabled as they possibly could be, rather than wasting them irresponsibly on classes and populations that were never going to amount to anything. So the revial of democratic institutions, we can see that from the first generation of hugenesis.

And we can see obviously that the kind of rapidity by which Musk and fellow magaite and not just must, but you could certainly see it in the kind of rhetoric that even people like Peter Heel and Martin Dresen and right wing advocates from within Silicon Valley. I mean, their writings on the kind of incompatibility supposedly of democracy and technology go back more than a decade. So these are not this is not a sudden right wing turn

from within Silicon Valley. This kind of radical eliticism has existed within Silicon Valley, and if anything, was very very happy to finally find a messaging take foot from a kind of radicalized right political party with mougism, and uh yeah. So you can see any number of different parallels between the kind of elitement of science from over a century though who use their status display politics and markets and the continuities that we see with technogugenesis today.

There's these different elements from online media that have been used by this cadre and they It's just been fascinating to me to see the messaging shift over the couple of decades here. Because, Uh, I'll just throw a name out there. Alex Jones is one of these characters that's used to promote all this. Now, if you go back a couple of decades, he made this film that he put out on his website that was supposedly pointing out eugenics and high technology and how the two go together.

Fast forward to now you have him. Uh, I mean, if if you can't see that he's he's working for these people as a propaganda outlet. I don't know what to tell you. Well, I'll just say it's it's fast, it's it's been fascinating to see that. It's it's been sad. But uh yeah, this far right political movements and the stuff that they spread online is just the most virulent racism.

And it's just what I will say, it has been wild to see it, uh start, you can see it starting, and then you see it picking up, and then the people that are enamored by this and never admit that that's what it is until it's too lady.

eugenics never has gone away in the US. There have always been there maintained, you know, eugenics research organizations and foundations that continued to you know, fund eugenics studies, and especially looking around at the kinds of the wanton spending in in public education and the need to sort of promote more of the gifted and the ways that public education was siphoning off resources from the gifted. You know, there are arguments around that we should bring back also

sterilization laws of the unfit, cetera. You know that even continued into the nineteen seventies. So eugenics have never never fully gone away. What we see continuously as an attempt for eugenics to sort of make its way back into the public mainstream and to test the public appetite for eugenics messaging. You can see it exactly nowadays when you see Trump make and must make overtures to the need for more intelligence in Silicon Valley that you know, or

the need for more intelligence even in public sectors. When Trump was critiquing the you know, Washington plane crash and said that we needed more people with high IQs, you know, in working in in aviation and that with more merit. Right, that if we just had more people with real talent and genius. We need more geniuses, literally is what he said in those and aviation, and that would have prevented

the kind of accident that we had seen. Forget that, of course, he's attacking all the forms of regulation that would maintain safety over all of these sectors. But uh, that language of natural talent of geniuses i Q. All of that goes back to exactly eugenic treatisease. Eugenesis were the first in the US to promote i Q tests.

I mean, Balton's publications, earliest publications were exactly titled on heredity and talent, you know, and genius that way, all of these things were correlated together.

life is irrelevant. Right, So all of this and his messaging back to Silicon Valley, I mean again, it's all

fimly veiled. The fact that he's got you know, literally nineteen year olds and twenty year olds while working for him, who are who openly on their social media promote eugenic policy and have argued I think for what the twenty five year old that was fired from his team and uh then Musk after after the Wall Street Journal reported that just looking at the social media feed of this employee, uh, they were able to see that essentially he had had

posted things such as we just need a eugenic immigration policy. Uh uh, and then was fired over that scandal, although Musk of course came to his offense and that that should never have happened again sort of trying to align some version of argument that this is someone who earned their stature in my team because of some version of merit.

Forget about whether or not they are they have the character and disposition or fortitude to actually steward with care public information and public data of literally, you know, hundreds of millions of Americans right, no zero record of of course, of actually being able to demonstrate any care and responsibility for publics, let alone b publics, but publics at large.

But again, over and over, nonetheless, over and over again, what you see is them leaning into arguments of merit, that they are deserving, that they are the fittest, and that somehow that should put them into a class of exceptionality where anything goes.

of course, to to presumably it's death version. Arguably what they what they argued will be it's death version by just letting them, uh, run of luck with and run of luck with either no oversight on them or just being able to redesign policy.

and that should be out out ageing to all of us. So, uh for the last you know, many of your users or your listeners, I'm sure we're from oial with Facebook as a platform. And no, of course that Facebook is not just sort of the you know, a popular platform in countries like India and portions of the global South. But in India, uh, Zuckerberg and had had made deals

with the Indian government and they're under Modi shamed. Also, right wing authoritar arguably national has Has is known for his Hindu nationalist policies and runs a kind of right wing,

the authoritarian right wing, arguably authoritarian UH. Certain people would say UH, certainly, certainly not not argued at all that it is nationalist, the Hindu nationalist government and party that UH made a deal has made deals with MODI such that the Facebook is essentially the backbone of the Internet and most peoples in India's means of being able to

access the internet. In in India, nonetheless, despite that kind of large stature and privilege, there had been very little content moderation around disinformation and around conspiracy theories in the same way that we had seen in the US. So although there have been many complaints for the spread of disinformation leading up to let's say, the twenty twenty elections and in twenty sixteen, et cetera, it was far far

worse in the global South. When by twenty nineteen, when the Francis Hougen papers the Facebook papers had been released, it was found that eighty six percent of Facebook's funds on for safety and security, So the funds that it was using to support safety insecurity for users through content

moderation was essentially only being invested in the US. And because of that right that the rest of the world gets the split the remaining sixteen or fourteen percent right that the rest of the world then essentially is living

with almost no content moderation. And what you saw was an explosion of hate speech of disinformation against various minoritized populations in India, especially dull It and Muslim minority populations, which meant that there were epidemics literally that were even reported about in the New York Times, of mob violence, of literal lynchings of people who were called or suspected of being a Muslim who was coming into A report

would spread on social media, literally on Facebook's platforms. A report would spread on social media that someone had been spotted. They were unknown, they were coming into the village to kidnap Hindu children, to convert them, or to steal wives and covert them, et cetera. And before you know it, a mob had formed around the unknown persons and mob

violence would be unleashed. Any number, literally hundreds of these incidences were being reported over and over again, where victims were everyone from twelve year old boys to even Google workers so you know, well to do uh information UH professionals and knowledge workers and privileged information sectors were victims

of this kind of mob violence. It's pretty horrifying. There are also reports from various scholars from the Global South that would report also film lynchings, so things would spread via social media as well, and quite violent UH forms of attack and mutilation of bodies that were being celebrated

as defenses of the cond nation. UH and that all of this, again was being spread, this form of this informationtion, but also celebration and realization of this kind of mob violence and defense again supposedly of the true heart of the nation against this un uninvited threat was spreading across social media UH and any number of human rights workers and UH and scholars in the Global South were making reports over and over again to UH to Facebook that they needed to do more to tap down on this

spread and glorification of of mod mob violence and spread of disinformation. That it was entirely predictable what kinds of tax against minoritized populations would be coming up, That it shouldn't have been difficult to be able to flag and limit some of that spreading, and yet none of that

ended up happening. And so again we have real world I'll give one other example as well, because there are UN reports that are literally written about it, the kinds of nationalists violence that literally tens of thousands of Muslim minorities in Burma and me and Mar were experiencing the bur Huina Muslim population that was had been well documented

in the twenty ten, twenty ten, twenty sixteens, et cetera. Uh, that a kind of attack by the nationalist government, by a militarized a military and government on this population as well, that was spreading across, that was spread and amplified through social media. And uh and that targeted again the minoritized population. That all of this was being broadcast and stream through online channels.

done to to camp down on it. H. And you saw, of course you and reports being written that really called out the companies for not taking any responsibility despite literally years and years of and and bodies that that should really, from their point of view, have been accounted for.

in their user in their user basis? And who deserves safety and who doesn't. But now the arguments are even

more cynical. People like Elon Musk are quite happy and entirely okay with seeing violence and harm and injury at scale so long as it's not touching the well born, and from his point of view, any kind of limitation even safety regulations on AI end up meaning that you have to slow down development, and at the end of the day, in his cost benefit analysis, the greater safety of the public or of general workers is not worth the cost that would be to what he sees UH

and what felt technougenesis and techno elitey as a sort of larger benefit to especially and really only two parties like himself, the kind of uh, you know, the cost innovation is not worth UH, it's not worth putting safety regulations, the lives of of uh of those who will be sacrificed, the safety and the lives of those who will be sacrificed in the name of tech, of tech development and tech dancement, for him, is entirely worth the calculation.

I already have this book on that list, So if you buy it from that, Anita will get a book sale, I'll get a small little referral fee, and you'll get a great book. So I would highly recommend that. As I said, I've begun reading the book myself and it's wonderful.

It's a good reminder as I'm saying, that big Tech does have eugenic fillsophoical roots, but also eugenic ambitions with what they're doing, and they're meddling into politics and all of this dominant political scene that we've seen come the prominence and the regime that's in control now that has been bought and paid for by the big tech oligarchs.

They're the ones in control and control. And isn't it funny that all of the alternative media, formerly fringe right wing slash libertarian ideas that were floating around online for so long, that those guys are right in line with all that stuff that they're coming out openly saying so much now and that it's the same thing. Honestly, I hardly even know where to start with all of this. There's just so much to get into, and the show

is nearly over now, which is line. But I just hope that listeners show understand what's going on and that we stop taking for granted all of this propaganda that we are inundated with and understand what it actually is. And eugenics is a big part of it, Racism big part of it. It's dangerous the situation that we're in now, and it's horrible that we just can't so many of us just can't snap out of it and see what we've gotten into. So it's a wild, wild situation we've

gotten into. However, there is hope. I do believe that we can still educate ourselves. We can still understand what's going on. We don't have to fall victim anymore. We can take the power back where we can start thinking along these lines. So much wild stuff in the news this week, but we're not going to even cover that. Don't worry about. Plenty of plenty of time on future episodes of the Age of Transitions to deal with what we can And I'm once again thank you to Anita

stay Chan for coming on the show. I also look for other good guests in the future on the Age of Transition. So I'm having some success getting good guests, so look for that. If you haven't listened to the Age of Transitions before. Please do subscribe to the podcast Go Back We're on. We're getting close to five hundred episodes now, so plenty of old material to go back into.

Plus there's lots of stuff coming up. We're going to I'm gonna do what I can to stay up on things, but also stay grounded in realizing that this isn't just something that appeared out of no where. So we're going to do all of that and so much more Friday Nights Onto Chili dot Com once again, The Age of Transitions dot Com is my website. My name is Aaron Franz. As always, I will leave you by saying secret secon.

Pick up your copy of In Denial at Amazon dot com in digital or physical force.

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