The Day Before the 2020 Election, a New Party Emerges

Even though I’m a Canadian living in Japan, the American election cycle has managed to edge its way into my life more and more thanks to smartphone technology and social media.

What makes 2020 remarkably different is not Trump this or Biden that, which is more like a Pepsi ad that compares itself to Coke, but the fact that the supporters for either camp are moving in two very different directions.

After watching record-breaking crowds flock to Trump rallies (over 50k people attended a recent rally in Pa.), the crowds have been walking away from the Democrats. Say what you will about social distancing and COVID-19, but the fact that Barack Obama could barely fill a restaurant's worth of people at a recent stump stop for Biden says a lot. A car lot full of honking cars? Please.

The crowds that would normally have supported the Democrats are still there, but they are assembling under a new flag. Perhaps they are tired of a party pushing forward a 77-year old Biden who can barely speak except to promise change after being in office for nearly 47 years. A lot of party loyalists will stick around and beef up their presence in the media like a puffer fish (full of air), but the reality says to me that we are looking at a new political party.

The Social Media Party.

The would-be democrat supporters are assembling at night with Antifa, marching through the streets with Black Lives Matter, or grouping together with feminists and going on slut walk marches. This is fine if you think it’s fine. It’s also crazy if you think it’s crazy. Or sometimes one or the other. But all of this is done in sync with getting likes and shares to their Instagram or TikTok accounts that then use their data to feed back to them what they want to see and hear.

If Social Media Party members get a notification about a right-wing rally on their phones, 10s of thousands will automatically show up, phones in hand, and confront the right-wingers with their streaming accounts. What are the right-wingers doing, you might ask? It doesn't matter -- the notification told them to go and confront them and stream it, so they did. In other words it’s opted-in automated political assembly. Weaponized flash mobs.

While the energy for the Republicans builds around Trump as a populist, the energy for Biden is largely represented by a sympathetic media while the would-be supporters let go of the old and assemble under a new flag powered by algorithmic generative networks. It is via smartphones tethered to social media apps that their voices will be cast. That's where the energy is, and while it sometimes overlaps with official Dem activities, the Social Media Party is increasingly a growing satellite pulling away from the gravity of its origin planet.

I have seen the Social Media Party balloon over the past four years, and expect it only to continue as the number of those who walk around with their phones stapled to their hands only increase while traditional left-wing democrats run away from the metastasizing cloud programs that activate political hoards in the 3D world. Social Media Party members are largely driven by unknown accounts liking, commenting, and pushing more and more individuals into the Party overseen by Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Chinese Communist Party.

I don't see Japan following in this way, as most Japanese do not put their politics in other people's faces so much. But as this American cycle comes to an end, to avoid being caught up in future election cycles, I expect more and more expats to localize their online activities as part of a long-term strategy to hide from the hungry and bloating Social Media Party.

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Fighting the Smartphone Zombies, 5 Peaceful Ways at a Time

I thought they would go away. So did you. But they didn't. Their numbers only increased, and now they are everywhere. We are few. Yet ready.

The Smartphone Zombies are the greatest threat to peaceful modern existence worldwide.

This is Okay:

1. Checking wireless content and data snacking in a seat or standing in line somewhere. It beats looking at the other jerks in the room.

2. Bluetooth headphones on while someone asks you a question out of the blue. Take one side off, offer assistance and be on your merry way.

This is not Okay:

3. Darting out of a building eyes glued to an OLED and charging into an intersection while furiously scrolling through pillows.com.

Sorry pal. You are asking too much of the world to accompany your pillow fetish in public spaces. Door No. 3 has been opened too many times!

This is the Rubicon. The Die Has Been Cast! 

The social contract has been torn up by people who transport their consciousnesses into alternative digital realities while they dangerously sleepwalk through the land of the living. 

If it were 1 person? 

Who cares. 

Now that it's worldwide and in the billions.

It's time to fight back. Peacefully.

Here are 5 Steps to Take Back the Social Contract We've so Diligently Fought for and Protected.

1. Don't move for them. Even if it's a woman. Don't bash into them, because this is about peace. But never give a wayward ship the right of way. If they are dealt a faint glance and both parties sarcastically apologize, it's the best we can hope for. But never cause harm. Never give the right of way.

2. Increase your shoe volume by scrapping your heels across a sidewalk while preemptively staring them in the face. When they look up due to the aural signaling, they will see your eyes and move aside.

3. The Digitally Obese are already taking up too much space. Don't move out of the way of their smartphones if they are dangling them in a public space. If their smartphone gets a bump and their wrist goes limp in a public space -- it's on them.

4. If they are weaving on the sidewalk ahead of you like a drunk but it's only 9 a.m., just walk behind them with about 2 feet of distance and clear your throat. They will look up, shocked, turn around and thereby transport their consciousness back into the 3d world and let you pass with a perplexed expression.

5. Don't hesitate to tap on your friends' screens when they are zombie messaging during a dinner. Just walk up to their phone from behind, and randomly jab your finger on their screen. This will hopefully wake them up and prevent them from becoming the other 4 categories. 

That is -- if they aren't already.

The war is on, and has been for years. We have fallen behind. But maybe it's time we all caught up and piece back together a social contract that makes sense and throw social media to the curb.

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Japan WUT Podcast focuses on Lifestyle, Indie Music, and Tech in Japan and Asia. 

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Your Media is Hunting You

Your Media is Hunting You

Our smartphones make it easier than ever for our betters to stick their ears up our asses.

TikTok is a Chinese app and Bytedance is the parent company with a near 100 billion USD valuation. For TikTok, AI is key -- depending on what you watch and how long you watch it, the app will show you more of that. I had the app installed on my phone for a short time and within minutes I had an automated list of video feeds of Asian Bikini Girls jumping up and down on trampolines. Pretty neat. 

Foregrounds, backgrounds, music, ethnicity, location, facial expressions, fashion -- these are all encoded and then iterated to the user. A digital injection of realized psyho-graphics available anytime, anywhere.

Imagine the insights gained from the seemingly random  products stacked and piled around the rooms of millions of 17-year-old girls. For advertisers this is a gold-mine. And for the censorious, those with books by The Approved lining their bookshelves of their livestreams can be allocated celebrity streaming status, and those with books by The Condemned piled up on their bedside tables during a dance-off can be either shadowbanned in a liberal-democracy, or be tracked down and shot in the street by an authoritarian dictatorship.

If you are a parent with kids who do TikTok -- know that just by shaking their hips for free in return for dopamine hits of likes and shares, the Chinese Communist Party is building profiles. The personal space of children and teenagers is being segmented into psycho-graphics, commercial interests, and political influence campaigns in return for followers and emojis. But emojis are kind of outdated. These days reams of hearts bursting forth from the bottom of a smartphone's livestream are preferred. But it's free. Of course it is.

WeChat is an amazing app powered by Tencent, one of the most powerful companies in the world. Tencent streams the NBA in China, operates in Hollywood, and so on and on. They actually seem like a pretty cool company.

WeChat is on the chopping block in the USA because frankly WeChat technology is better and can operate a payment system outside of American creditors while giving Chinese residents the chance use their currency outside of China but also keep it inside of China via their app payments. The Belt and Road Initiative loves it.

In Japan, a lot of Chinese tourists (way down since covid) and Chinese nationals like to use their homegrown tech when they can, and in recent years a lot of Japanese shops have been implementing it to accommodate payments because money talks and bullshit walks. Since Japan has now banned Huawei from operating inside its telecom networks, and with Chinese tourism down 99%YoY it remains yet to be seen whether or not Chinese tech will continue to make inroads or if localized payment software can connect to China to create a buffer space. Like PayPal.

Before smartphones in 2007, English-speaking ex-pats in Japan relied largely on locally published media and the occasional bro that would have international cable in their 3LDK. Now though in Tokyo, foreign media has made its way into all of our smartphones. You can subscribe to the New York Times, Netflix, in addition to the SNS Apps more easily than you can check locally produced news sources if you don't have a TV. The technology is great, but it's possible to disassociate yourself with local culture when your smartphone with a reasonably priced app filled with nostalgia and must-see content is hunting you down with notification after notification.

My prediction is the foreign community in Japan will increasingly glare into their smartphones showing them the media they know and love while ignoring the Japanese media that plays unnoticed around them in return for an increased acceptance of surveillance capitalism.

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Coronavirus, Supply Chains, and Value Systems

Japan recorded over 1000 cases of the novel coronavirus on July 28, 2020. The most ever. Out of a population of 125 million, you will have to excuse me if my alarm bells aren't bouncing off the walls. To those affected, I wish a speedy recovery. 

To alleviate my fear gauge levels, I have been using this website: https://toyokeizai.net/sp/visual/tko/covid19/en
It is filled with stats from the government pipeline, not spokespeople

Screenshot from toyokeizai.net

So while the numbers of cases have been increasing, the serious numbers and deaths have been decreasing. Whew!
A lot of people are flipping out, and I wonder how we will meet again. It is very different from the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster of 2011, and even the Lehman Shock/Great Recession of 2008 where the culprit was identifiable. This time, it was a mysterious virus that was released from China and spread all over the world, sending everyone into worldwide panic with the immediate implementation of strange wordings: social distancing, bend the curve, zoom meetings.

This is weird, and nothing makes sense. 

But what the hell is going on with our supply chains? My noggin’s ticking.

After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) locked down Wuhan City but let its citizens fly around the world, I discovered that Wuhan was a global distribution center for everything from car parts, cybersecurity equipment, telecom gear, EV/connected cars, aerospace and pharmaceuticals. Half of the Fortune 500 have facilities, operations or manufacturing sites within Wuhan. India imports 70% of its Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients from China. These imports are used to manufacture key medicines. 

The world's key supply chains have been bottlenecked into an area with wetmarkets and weaponized biolabs that can be shut down by a totalitarian government. 

Remember to thank your local manager.

The short-term profits were fantastic. 

McShipping! Just In Time Shipping for EVERYTHING!

In July 2020, Asia flooded. An atmospheric river dumped and dumped and dumped. And then dumped some more. India flooded. China flooded. The Three Gorges Dam, at risk of toppling under the weight of the surging waters battering its heights, released so much water that cities and towns downstream on the Yangtze flooded.

One example of a maintaining a supply chain during a flood

Pretty hard to keep those supply chains in check when flooded factories left without contracts after the global economy crashed during the Covid Lockdowns that caused millions of job losses in the developing world. 

American and European clothing corps usually place a lot of orders in Myanmar, Bangladesh, and countries of that order. That’s all but dried up because of the coronavirus, and now those supply chains are laying in wait, gathering dust while the workers wonder what the hell is next. Try feeding a family on 5 dollars a day and then have that resource evaporate with no promise of return except for maybe a text message to your smartphone, which mysteriously always works.

The Japanese government has announced a $500 million plan to repatriate or establish new supply chain routes outside of China and to move either into South East Asia or South Asia. I recommend South East Asia as they are more trustworthy countries with very capable supply chains. If the Philippines and Indonesia can up their infrastructure, we could see a stable supply chain network emerge.

Japanese supermarket-chain Aeon also announced a partnership with British robotics company Ocado, which is an autonomous supermarket operated almost entirely by robots. By robots, I don't mean humanoids. These robots are canisters with arms and move along a grid and prepare orders for customers placed online. 

While British robots and South East Asian networks alone may not recombobulate the supply chains bottlenecked in China, having the world's key production lines pinched on a river owned by a totalitarian regime with a growing number of human rights violations on its hands including organ harvesting and forced abortions may not be the most rewarding of structures for the consumers who are on the purchasing-end of this bizarre network of supposed efficiency. 

And generally managers don’t like a flood of blood on their hands.

To rework the supply chains, expect more automation, 5G, and humans moving into the management of robots for home delivery. You can also expect the novel coronavirus to be used as the main reason for these changes.

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Matt Bigelow Blog: Your Face is a War Bond for the Facial Recognition Panopticon

I worked at a major Japanese telecom for about 5 years, and my students were engineers and they wanted to know about IoT, AI, and tech markets. So for that duration, that's what I did everyday. Finding tech, how telecoms are changing through the use of smartphones, and how emerging countries were taking advantage of smartphone tech and networks to make new and incredible things happen. 

Here are some common themes:

• Facial recognition ATMs in China -- just look at an ATM and money comes out of it.

• Smart Contactless Cash Registers -- just scan your baked goods and pay with a QR code.

• AI cameras that scan train tracks for preemptive maintenance -- smoother tracks mean more carriages which translates into more dollars

• IoT Go-Round Sushi -- keeps sushi fresh and shops can automatically order stocks when low

Incredible tech using incredible wireless telecom networks.

And incredible doesn't always mean positive.

Nuclear bombs are incredible

And so is facial recognition, an incredible tool doing incredible things.

It is time for everyone to consider their role in the upcoming network and tech world. Data is expected to be the fuel that powers the next century. Whoever gets that data gets the fuel to power their AI systems that rely on telecommunications networks. As Adam Curry likes to say, “Data is the new bacon.”
While facial recognition is only a tool, how it is used by the telecom or operator will determine if the tool will benefit or harm not only the user, but their society at large. So who do you trust with your biometric data?

Biometric war bonds.

A Facial Recognition Ticket Gate is tested in Osaka

A drone with a facial recognition and a thermal camera can help find a lost child in the woods. It can also be used to ethnically cleanse a rival group of people with enough weaponized drones equipped with ethnic readers.

Where you point your face will determine how that tech is applied in future after iterations backed with values.

China is probably the world's leader in the physical implementation of AI products and services being used by daily people on a daily basis in the 3D world. And the complete lack of privacy laws in China combined with its rapid acceleration to the world's number 2 GDP is really giving a fuck ton of governments, corporations, and telecoms pause. And by pause I mean shitting their pants. Why? Because the Chinese wireless AI technology tends to work really well, while at the same time totally disregarding the individual's concern for privacy, because in China privacy is not even an afterthought.
For the past few years, some schools in China have been using AI cameras to evaluate a student's in-class performance. The student's results are sent to the parent's smartphone in the form of a report. But the parent does not only receive their child's scores -- the parent receives the scores for the entire class with names included. Your phone goes beep and you now know how your student compares to all of the other students with cute photos of your child smiling in the class at 3:33 p.m. or whenever the timestamp is. Other Chinese applications monitor women and determine how "birth ready" they are and whether or not they are single or married. This data is collected in the open and is constantly being stored on open servers with no passwords.

Pushing further into China, we can look at the genetic monitoring of ethnic minorities, where their medical data is taken then stored as a QR Code. Combined with AI surveillance systems, these minorities can be tracked in real time and if their genetics are required by the state, then it’s essentially on-demand. Get the picture?
Group think is also established by algorithmically notifying the gen pop what to think and when to think it with state-sponsored news sent to everyone’s phones.
Furthermore Chinese nationals use their phones’ Chinese commerce apps outside of China which gives the CCP insight into how their citizens behave when out of earshot, and which also weirdly acts as a way to keep Chinese spending inside China through the use of Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Finally the name and shame approaches by the CCP also involves tracking J-walkers, and fining them in real time, and the infamous facial recognition toilet paper dispenser that allows you 70cm of toilet paper every 10 minutes through a face scan, so you don’t selfishly use too many shit-tickets.
But the list of these applications goes on and on and on, with little to no concern for individual privacy.

So what happens in the future if your country does not develop this technology? Will your leaders "Just import it from China. It's cheap, and it works!" That’s what Europe is doing. German trains using Huawei IoT networks and Swiss elevator companies equipping all of their elevators with hundreds of sensors connected to Huawei.

Or will your country develop facial recognition technology and limit its AI parameters, limit the data it collects, and store the info within encrypted in-country data centers? Considering the current batch of sketchy incompetent leaders across the Western world, they will just “import it and make it cheap!” and then go back to talking about global warming.

A facial recognition vending machine on display in Japan

But I’m in Japan! As facial recognition becomes more of a common sight in Japan, it's important to use it. Japan has very strict privacy laws and while violations occur, violators are subject to punishment by law as well as public scrutiny. In my time in the Japanese telecom, maintaining privacy of user data was a constant top topic, because if personal data is leaked in Japan, trust is immediately eroded and customers will choose another option. In America, you are rewarded for your successes, in Japan, they punish you for failure. Japan is a high trust society and the Japanese don’t like it when public trust is compromised as a general rule of thumb.

In order to provision Japanese companies with the data they need to offset Chinese Communist Party technological influences, consider using Japanese homegrown facial recognition technology. NEC and Panasonic are good places to start. I HOPE!
It's possible to exist anonymously in a facial recognition camera world. For example: Your face is not recorded. Your face's biometric data is recorded and anonymized into a code. When you are walking about the town, your face passes through the cameras without the cameras registering your data (in the present tense — your face could be searched super easily after the fact). If the police are looking for a dangerous criminal, they can release that criminal's biometric code into the telecom-network-supported AI camera systems, which will scan public spaces for the individual’s biometric code. Once that code is spotted, a redbox appears around his or her face in the camera, and now that suspect can be tracked in real time by the coppers while the innocent go about their day. Send in the drones!

What would you have this drone do?

The risk of abuse of this technology is obvious. I researched this “Over the Horizon Future” tech for 5 years and I disliked more than liked the overall use of its applications due to the possible rampant abuses by the main players. For example, I wonder about Israel and China teaming up to create an international AI spy-grid under our noses under the guise of "Mutual Cooperative Strategy in the Middle East" (my wording). I also worry about Facebook and Twitter establishing a defacto social credit score and punishing people for thought crimes. Facebook banned me from its advertising platform and I don’t know why but I suspect some of the crazy Marxists in the Tokyo music scene reported me for Wrongthink.
The more the CCP iterates this technology to monitor it's 1.4 billion civilians, the stronger their AI technology will become and it may become less and less feasible for your country to develop its own practical facial recognition technology.

So you might want to use your face as a war bond to bolster the AI technology in your own country before another country with closed and shady morals implements it for you. Remember: Data is a power source. The cleaner it is, the more valuable it is. It’s going to be scanned in public. One of the few options you have is who do you provision your biometric data to.

We live in incredible times. It's time to do incredible things with your face, oddly enough.

I run the Japan WUT? Podcast. If you like what you read here, you might want to consider listening to “the Japan WUT? Podcast”.

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This is How Billions Are Made (Japan WUT? Blog #5)

WeWork was supposed to be the new office. Scalability! Networking! Free Beer! There was even talk of an artificial intelligence system that could act as a networker and link engineers with design teams based on individual workloads. WeWork was supposed to be a graph: A graph that you wanna get.

In addition there was a promise of an Internet of Things system that would predict office needs by using sensors with big data to self-design office space based on usability. The company boomed worldwide and became quite popular in Tokyo, climbing to 28 locations in 2020. 

The idea appealed to me as the business model meant a significant reduction of middle management. WeWork was going to offer an Initial Public Offering valued in the $40 billion USD range. People were set to make bank and transform the Office Space culture of the Office. 

Milton was just about ready to throw his stapler out the window. Steve Carrol perhaps had ideas for a spinoff. WeWere all about to jizz in our pants.

Turned out WeWork was kind of a sham. They had the office space, the payment plans, but the mysterious AI and IoT, while did exist on paper, failed to bring the rubber to the road and have the investors race down the highway to the liberal billionaires club where they could spend their days virtue signaling on Twitter.

At the beginning of 2019, WeWork had a $40 billion valuation thereabouts, and in June 2020, it was hovering around $3.5 billion. Still doing pretty good, but the would be billionaires that had attached their efforts into the rich-person's sunset are most likely ejecting in crazy numbers. At the end of2019, WeWork cut around 20% of its workforce.

I was disappointed because I thought the problems that WeWork were trying to solve made a lot of sense on paper. While on one hand we need a certain amount of middle-management, on the other hand developed nations have a massive middle management glut problem. I think that 90% of middle managers never wanted to become middle managers, and of those 90%, 99% of them don't make great middle managers. Many of them want to open their 10th floor window and jump to their deaths, knowing they will never climb to the top.  Most don’t because they have families and want to milk the company for all they can.

The proud, capable, motivated middle-manager is someone to cherish and behold.

So the WeWork bubble popped. When a whale dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean it attracts a lot of bottom feeders for a long-period of time, and everyone feeding on the rotting whale carcass agrees that it's awesome. 

While the scuttlebutt around the whisperers and hopefuls decry that WeWork may help offices and businesses post-COVID-19, WeWork may have to deal with a completely free and very usable tool: ZOOM.

ZOOM provides high-quality video and audio, digital whiteboards, and with existing business mobile infrastructure such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets, it provides more access for remote groups to share information across a wider field of candidates during a meeting. 

Need an interpreter? A smartphone with a pair of earbuds can provide live interpretation without the need for travel. In a presentation involving several people, the attendees not presenting can message and confirm details with each other without interrupting, thus bolstering their performance in front of a high-level sales meeting. It's potentially millions of dollars for free.

ZOOM meetings also open up the idea of digital avatars, so that a more professional you can be displayed via AI camera installed on your laptop. You are in your PJs drinking a beer in your home, but your digital avatar is wearing a 10-piece suit in a spacecraft drinking a $1000 cup of coffee from Zaltron 4. There is even talk of putting your digital avatar on a Blockchain to prevent others from abusing your digital you.

There are some backsides: ZOOM did close a video conference amongst some Chinese dissidents, and others have raised the issue about the locations of the servers and is most of COVID-19 ZOOM Meetings data being vacuumed into some mysterious Chinese AI-Fueled dragnet? 

Worthy questions, but there are short-term gains to be made!

As more and more companies move to a digital meeting paradigm, I expect office sharing to take more of a backseat.

So in future you may be in a ZOOM meeting while your blockchain-encrypted espresso-drinking digital avatar covers your ass as you pound back a few afternoon margaritas in your PJs at home during an online conference call hosted by ZOOM which uses WeWork as a scalable, highly flexible server zone to feed all of the office meeting data to secretive Chinese companies hiding behind the Great Firewall.

This is how billions are made.

Automated Thought Erasure for Cash

AI Engineers come from all walks of life, and the good ones are very skilled at coding, training, and iterating their AI. It's very impressive work to see computer vision and self-driving cars develop so quickly at companies such as Face Plus Plus and NVIDIA.

The people designing the algorithms are just like you and me -- they don't know much outside of their area of expertise, except for maybe a hobby or two and some activism. They spend their time with people that are very much like themselves — they might be from diverse walks of life but they are numbers and code people. And if you haven't debated using Python vs PyTorch, then you ain't in their club.

I have listened to over 100 AI engineers give talks in webinars, do presentations at events online and in the 3D world, as well as respond to aspects of AI research outside of their preferred areas. It was a part of my job between 2015-2020. I got paid to do that. My takeaway is that while the AI community is very good at making cars stop, they aren't very good at understanding how people from other backgrounds think, especially in understanding what people mean when they say something mean. 

Most of the AI censors are probably just in it for the job and a chance to get paid to pursue their interest -- AI. However the odds of how interested their coding skills will affect the lives of others who live in different communities with different values is rather low. General platitudes such as "make the world a better place" and "international community is good for the international community" might make it seem the interest is high, but the vast majority probably don't spend a lot of their free time engaging facetime-to-facetime with communities from places they’ve never been to nor heard of. When it's time to punch-out of their AI Censor jobs, it's just like you and me -- off the pub, or go home and take care of the fam. Netflix and Chill. Trump this or Trump that. TACO TUESDAYS!

What could possibly go wrong?

That's where 3rd parties come in. Major SNS companies will sign major deals with groups that claim to have a lot of information on people from different communities. They're Verified Groups! Yay! A recent example is the rise of alternative theories on the COVID-19. Despite being headed by a communist revolutionary who is not a physician and who may have covered up cholera outbreaks in his homeland of Ethiopia/Eritrea, YouTube decided that the World Health Organization would be the end-all-and-be-all for its AI censorship. As a result, if highly trained doctors wanted to tell people about possible alternative treatments on YouTube, they would be shut down. Preventing false information is crucial, but in an outbreak where not much is known about COVID-19, surely having some dissent and discussion in the medical community would be a jolly good scientific way to figure out a variety of possible treatments. 

YouTube are not doctors, but they are using WHO’s expert guidelines to help train their AI censorship algorithms which are then turned on to real doctors and eventually silences a bunch of them.

Algorithmically On-Demand Censorship.

Good ol' memory hole. Works every time.

There are other examples I have seen.

Israel is a world leader in AI, and one AI researcher was looking to create an AI Camera program that could spot terrorists by analyzing facial expressions in airports. The idea is that perhaps a person makes certain facial expressions before carrying out a suicide bombing. If these facial expressions could be recognized by an AI camera and processed with a percentage of probability, then it would give airport security advanced time to prevent a suicide bomb from going off. The trade off would be targeted screening by security, but in exchange fewer bombs going off. I can see discussing the issue on both sides.

When this idea was presented to a liberal feminist AI researcher in America, her eyes widened as if triggered by something more than a micro-aggression. "That's racist!" She said. 

Why would it be racist? No mention of race was made. But to her, "Israeli AI Suicide Bomber Detector" probably translated to Muslim. And targeting Muslims to her is racist, despite Islam not being race-specific. After hearing about this program, I doubt that the USA AI researcher went and researched suicide bombings and facial expressions and the types of different ethnicities carrying out suicides strikes in and around Israel (I didn't). She most likely walked away thinking of racism from the POV of herself in her own community (like me), not what's going on in Israel. Why? Because she is a busy human who went back to work and then went home to Netflix and Chill. 

I hate Netflix. Love Chill.

I am a Canadian living in Tokyo, so I don't know who is right in this situation but what I do know is that these two people — the Israeli Anti-terror AI coder and the US Liberal Feminist AI Coder — are both coding algorithms that may impact our lives. They don't know about each other, and they don't know about you or me but their algos will be flying around the earth's atmosphere, in some sort of cloud wirelessly beaming 1s&0s into connected devices placed somewhere you would never think to look.

I don't trust the experts much because they are so frequently wrong and get promoted afterwards. I do trust my own intuition and can admit to being wrong and consider the internet a place to get information on pretty much anything and accept the risks involved. While the SNS companies continue to employ people who know little outside their tiny bubbles of expertise, expect the random ideas you want to talk about disappear into the memory hole. Why? Because millions of dollars are on the table and if your thought can be eliminated, someone can get paid. 

Automated Thought Erasure for Cash!

In a way, it's a way to reinforce everyone into acting the boring normie so that we all just publish photos of pets and food, making the SNS companies corporate friendly for their advertisers to invest in without having to worry about a critical public thinking for themselves. 

Why Does the World React to Major Events in Unison Now?

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Why Does the World React to Major Events in Unison Now?

All over Japan and the world we were/are being told to Social Distance due to the Corona Virus. There are signs everywhere in Tokyo written in English telling people to Practice Social Distancing. This is perhaps the fastest roll-out of an English campaign done in the history of Japan.

The Social Distancing English signage has been so accurate Engrish.com is probably taking a stock market hit.

This English is accurate and not readily exploitable by visiting Gaijins looking for an engrish.com scoop

At the drop of a bureaucrat's hat "Social Distance" became a global slogan. 

Imagine sloganizing the world.  "Netizens" are told to be careful! DO NOT spread fake news or fuel conspiracy theories! However, the ideas spread on social networks by us lowlifes are usually only responded to by a couple of drunk haters interacting with our awesome content somewhere on a device made in China. All of the access to the world and nobody really cares.

Yay.

Yet Social Distance took over the world in the blink of a politician's eye. 

Everyone Everywhere Suddenly Even Me:

 "Yes, we will do Social Distancing to Flatten the Curve. No COVID-19 over here! We're all in this together!"

But then…

At the end of May 2020 in Minneapolis an African-American citizen was killed in the street by an officer.

Public Execution.

Most called it racism. A few said misconduct. I don't recall anyone being happy about it. Everyone seemed shocked by the horror.

In the viral aftermath, crowds gathered, protested, and burned down what seemed to be at least 24% of America.

And now the citizen journalists documenting the chaos are asking me to subscribe to their Instagram live streams. 

Haha No.

When the protests started, the following Social Distance Enforcement stopped: 

1. Media reports scolding citizens for going to the parks

2. Officers arresting families for relaxing in their backyards

3. AI-Camera equipped drones flying around checking groups for potential COVID temperatures

—> Worldwide <— & —> Immediate <—

Did the media, police, and surveillance drones instead turn their tax-hungry eyes and scold the protestors, rioters and vloggers that appeared out of the ether in the aftermath of the public execution in Minneapolis?

For some reason no.

The virus that knew no borders decided to take a break when faced with the gooey specter of racism. 

Trust the science!

Am I supposed to get with the program? Count me out. Stop trying to hijack my mind with tragedy.

IS IT SAFE?

IS IT SAFE? IS IT SAFE? IS IT SAFE? IS IT SAFE?

I try to keep an even keel and mind my own beeswax. The last thing I want to do is spit on someone's face to protest the apparent Social Distancing nonsense. And while I understand the appeal of getting more Insta Subs by filming burning cars while race-fuelled mobs in the night scream at baton-wielding Peace Officers, I won't.

COVID-19 was/is (???) an international event which caused quite the global Social Distance pickle indeed, but the American Race War 2020 will probably not reach the shores of Japan seeing how Japan is well over 95% Japanese. There are around 12,000 Canadians in Japan. Not quite the numbers needed for a good old-fashioned Canadian Revolution.

So with a global release of something like Social Distancing, what is the after effect? In my case, Social Distancing is now Officially Implementable and the after-effects of its release remain in the real world. There are still benches and shop signs all over Tokyo with the perfectly written "Social Distancing" posters plastered everywhere. And there are probably people in bureaucracies who are now responsible for managing Social Distancing paraphernalia. Their Microsoft Excel skills are not to be wasted. And they need to be kept around to deal with the physical after-sludge of the next digitally inflamed crisis. The tech companies, seeing as how their product is wireless and without fingerprints, gets to move on without having to clean up the mess.

Some of the hottest real estate in Tokyo is still blocked off as of June 1 2020. Tokyo Midtown seen in the background.

Through these crises Big Tech companies get to add billions of dollars of value to their stock price somehow, and while Amazon and the lot vacuum up more segments of market share, local businesses suffer potential bankruptcy by being mandated to scare hopeful customers with a bunch of tacked-up crappy COVID posters. And if you want to sit on a bench with a loved one, you may have to do so with a MAINTAIN SOCIAL DISTANCING poster staring at you in the face for decades to come. 

Enjoy your free time, taxpayer, you've earned it.

I am ignoring the hysteria. Look at the facts, man. Most governments keep clean enough stats on their websites so I check those. I don't get involved in anything dumb, except bourbon. Most of the Antifas burning buildings and the Karens screaming about Social Distancing are steering teetering belief-ships built out of idiosyncratic contradictions fueled by smartphone tech. I bid them farewell. Buy the ticket. Take the ride.

I believe we can expect Big Tech and their political sponsors to continue to use the smartphone-addled populace as a training pool to iterate social algorithms while the panopticon of surveillance capitalism spreads.

As a Free Person, you can still choose where your dollar and time goes.

You can quarantine a group, but you cannot quarantine the mind.

Thanks for reading this blog. You can also listen to my Japan WUT? Podcast. 

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Local Resident or potential Agent Provacoteur? Using bags as Social Distance Enforcer. Also a potential Karen (カレン).

COVID-19 Is Over -- Are You More Hyped Than Ever?

In Japan, the COVID-19 is finally moving behind us with little damage done. There is a heavy heart cast to those that passed.

It should be noted that it didn’t take draconian measures in Japan to “beat this thing”. People acted like responsible adults for the most part without the need of big brother stomping its heavy technocratic boots on our necks.

On May 25 7pm Japan Time PM Shinzo Abe declared the remaining prefectures of Japan “No Longer Under Emergency”.
So it’s over. Are you hyped? We are free. Maybe you enjoyed your free time. I sure did. Twas nothing permanent. More like Limbo.

Or are you wondering why? Why was all that so much so fast so willy nilly with everything pulling a 180 all the time.

Wear a mask? —> You’re stealing from the health workers. Now go to the supermarket and buy all the toilet paper and post it on Twitter!

Don’t wear a mask? —> You are going to kill my grandmother! Now quick, stay inside, don’t leave and beg for the cure from government doctors, unless they protest on Youtube, in which case — ban them!

Now let’s do social distancing for non-essential workers! —> Free money now!

Notice how the COVID-19 started in China but now… no one really talks about it? Why are people so quick to make a crises about themselves?

It blows my mind.

Kaboom.

While the crises might be over, supply chainers and business owners are left scratching their heads, and the more clever of the lot will probably start to consider the following:

1. Why was everything being manufactured in Wuhan, a remote city in China few had heard of before? From IT, to cyber security, to pharmaceuticals, to car manufacturing — for the world.

2. How was it possible for the CCP government to at first deny anything was happening then lockdown Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, and essentially comandeer a global supply chain?

3. How did China start its own businesses back up while the rest of the world essentially scrambled? (essential-scramblers?)

When most people think about Chinese goods, we are still in the mindset of cheap trinkets that line the walls of tacky electronic shops as well as the random goods we order online that arrives in the mail and soon makes it way to a closet somewhere.

In 2020, not only was a considerable chunk of the global supply chain bottlenecked in a distant city in a totalitarian regime, the products were far from cheap trinkets. Yet when I was in Beijing in May 2019 most of the tourists had never heard of the technological advancements that China had been making since the 2010s, with their QR Code payment systems making to up as much as 75% of all Fast Food Purchases in 2017, to Government Incentives of building new cities with underground tunnel networks of self-driving cars to separate pedestrian traffic from automated vehicles. There were police robots on the streets of Beijing. The tourists wanted to see the Wall. With paper maps.

While the world is now focused on their own needs and are beginning to reflect how they somehow won the COVID Crises, the Chinese Communist Party was able to study in real time on all of the open global networks how individuals, communities, countries, and global orgs like the WHO were reacting and the measures that not only the people were requesting, but the government were promising to implement with 100s of billions of currency at the drop of the hat.

Think about that kind of actionable insight. Hello Big Data. My name is the CCP, and I like what I see.

All we saw from China was either on state-run media of people putting medical supplies into relief jets, or people being welded into their homes. Information so polar and useless no one knows what to make of it.

So yes, we are free people once again, but just like how the yin and yan turns on the face of the rotating earth, in time we as free people should consider that responsibility for the COVID-19 spread is from China’s CCP, and that the COVID-19 was allowed to spread while the global supply chains were shackled by foreign powers.

Hey Free People! Are you more hyped now than a week ago? In Japan, I expect most people are over and done with it.