6 March 2024. Hope | Brains

Looking for hope // Your brain may need some rights. Someone’s working on it. [#549]

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1: Looking for hope

Jon Alexander, who wrote the book Citizens back in 2022, has been on a bit of a quest this year. As a result of the book, he has been around the world talking to citizens—usually activist citizens—“from Grimsby to Auckland and back again”, as he puts it.

What he learnt from talking to citizens, as he explains in the introductory article, is:

that people everywhere across the world — literally everywhere — are finding one another, organising together, and stepping into whatever power they have to shape the future for the better. I’ve seen incontrovertible evidence that there is something very powerful and positive wanting to take shape in this time.

Yet at the start of the year, he realised that this wasn’t what the discourse was like at the moment. Instead, it was gloomy all the way down:

the headlines of our time tell the story of a gathering darkness. Our crises are intensifying. Autocrats, authoritarians, and outright fascists are on the rise.

As you can imagine, this has produced a powerful sense of dissonance. His explanation is that the citizens are still organising under the radar, in the shadows, whereas authoritarians are very visible everywhere. The citizens are still what futurists would call a weak signal of change:

in a time when pessimism is growing, I feel genuinely, authentically hopeful, rooted in what I know is happening. It’s the kind of hope Rebecca Solnit describes in her beautiful book Hope In The Dark as distinct from and “an alternative to the certainty” of both optimism and pessimism.

And so he has been writing a succession of posts on his Medium site that are intended to draw some lessons from what he’s seen, positive and negative. Writing is thinking, as they say. Fortunately he’s kept them outside of Medium’s paywall.

In the rest of this post, I’m going to try to capture some of the highlights from this series, while recommending that it is worth having a look at the articles themselves.

It is a bit of a world tour: Argentina, Poland, Wales, Taiwan. He starts in last year’s election in Argentina of the far-right Javier Millei because it is the nightmare version of authoritarianism. He points out that the final run-off—in a climate of economic calamity and financial desperation—was between the chainsaw wielding Javier Millei and Sergio Massa, the finance minister in the previous government:

Stick or twist, when you’re desperate and feel you have pretty much nothing left to lose.

The Polish election, at about the same time, looked like it might be heading the same way. The right-wing Law and Justice Party was leading in the polls. But to general surprise, a coalition of centre and left parties, under the very establishment Donald Tusk, won a majority. One of the things this tells us is that context always matters in politics.

But what happened in Poland was that civil society organisations made the difference,

mobilising in recognition of the danger — on climate action, labour rights, and especially women’s rights — in a way that did not happen in Argentina... Civil society organisations used their communications efforts to raise the stakes in the campaign, and in doing so drove a huge increase both in overall turnout, and especially in turnout among women and young people.

This video, shared by Alexander in his piece, is a compelling example of how this worked:

(One of the most powerful examples of the communications work of Polish civil society organisations, courtesy of WSCHOD )

He draws two lessons from all of this. One, from Argentina, that we need to acknowledge that our political systems are failing: if we pretend they are not we play into the hands of the ‘anti-political’ solutions of the authoritarians. Two, from Poland, that “time can still be bought”.

But there are limits to this. Poland isn’t, yet, “authentic hope”. It is only a space for hope.

In the third of these essays, he draws on the work of the Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran—new to me—and her 2022 book Together to go further into the idea of hope. Her earlier book on Turkey documented Erdogan’s path to authoritarianism:

It is an intensely powerful diagnosis of the path to authoritarian chaos we were and are all on, not just Turkey; Temelkuran’s essential insight is that we are simply at different stages in the process.

Together was a response to that, but also a response to a question she kept being asked about where to find hope:

I fantasised about handing the next person who dared ask me the question a menu for Restaurant Hope. I pictured a quaint brasserie serving a main course of Back To Our Senses Stew. Diners would be offered a bowl of Democracy served in a rich sauce of Sensible, Grown Up Politicians, with all the Global Turmoil evaporated off.

And heaven knows we have a lot of Sensible Grown-Up Politicians around the place. Albanese in Australia, Starmer in the UK. But: because they have not yet realised, or acknowledged, that our political systems are failing, they don’t have the tools to deal with authoritarianism.

But it’s not just down to them. We can’t sit down in Restaurant Hope and wait for the menu. We need to be in the kitchen.

This takes him back to an argument he made in Citizens that this is about competing stories. Part of the failure of our political systems is also down to a failure of the consumer story.

The Consumer Story holds that our role as individuals is to pursue self interest, choosing the best option for us from those that are offered... The most dangerous implication of the Consumer Story is that we can expect no better of each other than this.

Authoritarians offer to replace this with a story about being a subject: if we put them in power, they will fix things for us (although they don’t, of course).

Alexander proposes instead a story about citizens, and has a diagram from his book (I’ve shared this here before when I wrote about his thinking in Citizens three years ago.)

(Source: Jon Alexander)

The Citizen Story holds that all of us are smarter than any of us. It holds that we the people should neither do as we are told nor pursue our individual self interest, but instead contribute our ideas, energy and resources to the pursuit of the best outcomes for society as a whole. Our role is not just to choose between options, but to shape what they are.

In here, somewhere, is also a story about trust, and how to rebuild it:

This has to mean, as Taiwanese Digital Minster Audrey Tang insisted in the interview for my book, with government trusting people — not just imploring people to trust government.¹

We need to believe in people if we, the people, are to have any hope for ourselves and for humanity. This piece is already too long, so I’m going to end with part of another quote in the same vein from Ece Temelkuran’s book Together:

To love other humans is not a broken hearts club; it is a philosophical and political responsibility that should be worked on with all the faculties of the mind, sometimes pushing our mental and emotional skills to the limit. fainthearted. It is the most serious invitation to challenge the bloody history of humankind.

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2: Your brain may need some rights. Someone’s working on it

A piece in Vox last month took a slightly critical view of some of the current developments in that area where neuroscience and data overlapped and concluded that our brains need a bit more legal protection than they are getting at the moment.

We’re not really talking about invasive technologies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink here: I’m pretty sure that will come with a long shrink-wrapped contract that removes all rights from the user.

The author, Sigal Samuel, is more concerned about non-invasive applications:

Already, there are AI-powered brain decoders that can translate into text the unspoken thoughts swirling through our minds, without the need for surgery — although this tech is not yet on the market. In the meantime, you can buy lots of devices off Amazon right now that would record your brain data (like the Muse headband , which uses EEG sensors to read patterns of activity in your brain, then cues you on how to improve your meditation).

Meta and Apple are also on the case with their own devices. So we could end up sliding quite quickly into a world where brain data is being collected in an unregulated way. Worse, because none of these are sold as medical devices, there’s no requirement (in the US, certainly) for regulation.

(Image: DARPA. CC0 Public Domain)

One of the tropes I hear endlessly about tech is that technology always outpaces regulation, but these days that’s a lazy cliche, which has more to do with the memory of the decade of rapid digital tech growth in the 2000s (broadly 2003-2013) than what is happening now. In the US, state-level legislators are already on the case:

The Colorado House passed legislation this month that would amend the state’s privacy law to include the privacy of neural data. It’s the first state to take that step. The bill had impressive bipartisan support, though it could still change before it’s enacted. Minnesota may be next. The state doesn’t have a comprehensive privacy law to amend, but its legislature is considering a standalone bill that would protect mental privacy.

Obviously that’s a start, but it needs to go a bit broader. Fortunately there’s a group working on that, convened by the Columbia University neuroscientist Rafael Yuste:

In 2017, Yuste gathered around 30 experts to meet at Columbia’s Morningside campus, where they spent days discussing the ethics of neurotech... While some brain-computer interfaces only aim to “read” what’s happening in your brain, others also aim to “write” to the brain — that is, to directly change what your neurons are up to.

And Yuste seems to have got interested in this area because he was spooked by an experiment he did on mice where he manipulated their visual cortex:

When he made certain images artificially appear in their brains, the mice behaved as though the images were real. Yuste discovered he could run them like puppets.

The group he convened, now known as the Morningside Group, has developed a set of five principles of what amount to rights for the brain, which seem worth sharing here:

1. Mental privacy: You should have the right to seclude your brain data so that it’s not stored or sold without your consent.

2. Personal identity: You should have the right to be protected from alterations to your sense of self that you did not authorize.

3. Free will: You should retain ultimate control over your decision-making, without unknown manipulation from neurotechnologies.

4. Fair access to mental augmentation: When it comes to mental enhancement, everyone should enjoy equality of access, so that neurotechnology doesn’t only benefit the rich.

5. Protection from bias: Neurotechnology algorithms should be designed in ways that do not perpetuate bias against particular groups.

Yuste then set about getting these recognised, and the article describes the steps, which are an interesting case study in influencing policy.

He started by talking to an influential human rights lawyer, Jared Genser, and together they created a non-profit foundation, the Neurorights Foundation, as an advocacy group.

He then got lucky: a friend who was a senator in Chile was interested, and they crafted a constitutional amendment for Chile which enshrined the right to mental privacy and the right to free will in the national constitution. As a result, other Latin American countries are showing interest, and the UN Secretary General António Guterres noticed, and mentioned it in his ‘Our Common Agenda’ report in 2021.

Yuste’s ambition here is to establish a new international treaty, and an international compliance agency, but that’s a big step, and a slow one, and it may not be necessary. It may be that existing human rights frameworks have enough stretch in them to include the right to mental privacy, as in Chile.

And so, in the case of the UN, there are provisions on privacy that appear in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which can be extended. Similarly,

states with a comprehensive privacy law could amend that to cover mental privacy.

That’s effectively the route that Colorado is taking. And at a national level, in the US and elsewhere, that generally would mean that there’s already an existing agency in place that can be enrolled to police the right to mental privacy.

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j2t#549

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1. This inevitably brings Brecht’s satirical poem The Solution to mind