Making sense of the world through data
The focus of this blog is #data #bigdata #dataanalytics #privacy #digitalmarketing #AI #artificialintelligence #ML #GIS #datavisualization and many other aspects, fields and applications of data
I personally have a rather positive approach to AI. But here's below the other side of the coin. Anthony Aguirre explains why the race toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) may be fundamentally misaligned with human interests. And he may have a point. At the very least, we should progress carefully instead of investing blindly into a technology which negative aspects may far outweigh the positive ones.
The article below is essential to understand what is at stake with the Epstein papers. This is not about a network of pedophiles and perverts but about how "the system" truly operates behind the curtain beyond the laws and rules of society.
No wonder the Trump administration was not keen to dig deeper. The deeper you look, the worse it becomes, endangering the foundations of what we still call "Western democracies" but in reality seems to be nothing of the kind.
The public fixation on the Epstein files has settled, predictably, on the most lurid elements of the story.
This is understandable.
Sexual
exploitation, particularly of the young, is among the most corrosive of
crimes, and the scale of Epstein’s abuse, as well as the apparent
indifference of powerful institutions to it, demands moral outrage.
But to focus exclusively on the sexual scandal is to miss the deeper and more unsettling lesson the affair reveals.
What the Epstein files expose, above all, is the social and moral estrangement of American elites from the people they claim to govern.
Epstein
was not merely a predator who gained access to power. He was a node
within a closed world of wealth, influence, and immunity. The scandal is
not that powerful people behaved badly in private—history shows many
such examples—but that they did so with a confidence rooted in the
belief they were insulated from the consequences of their behavior.
They
moved through a transnational elite culture that had largely severed
itself from ordinary moral constraints, legal accountability, and civic
obligation. That culture did not merely tolerate Epstein but normalized
him.
This echoes the point Christopher Lasch made decades ago,
long before private islands and hedge-fund philanthropy became familiar
symbols of elite excess. In his 1994 book “The Revolt of the Elites,” Lasch argued that the modern American ruling classes had stopped seeing themselves as stewards of a shared national project.
Instead, they increasingly saw themselves as a mobile, globalized
caste, educated in the same institutions, moving through the same
cities, governed by the same tastes, and primarily accountable only to
each other. Citizenship was seen as a minor inconvenience. Nationhood
and patriotism were just sentimental relics from less enlightened times.
The Epstein affair reads like a case study in Lasch’s thesis.
Here
was an individual whose wealth was opaque, whose sources of income were
rarely scrutinized, and whose social standing seemed immune to ordinary
reputational risk. He functioned as a social broker among financiers, politicians, academics, royalty, and celebrities,
many of whom publicly advocated policies of moral uplift, social
justice, and global responsibility. Yet in private, they inhabited a
world defined by indulgence, entitlement, and a contempt for limits.
Elite detachment today is not only economic but also existential, and it is hardly confined to Americans.
The governing classes of advanced democracies increasingly inhabit a
world defined by mobility, abstraction, and insulation from consequence.
Their loyalties are professional rather than civic, global rather than
national, and managerial rather than moral. They experience society less
as a shared inheritance than as a set of problems to be administered at
a distance. In such a world, attachment to place, memory, and common
fate appears parochial, even suspect, while belonging itself is quietly
redefined as an obstacle to progress.
Those who create policies
affecting immigration, policing, education, public health, and national
security rarely face the consequences themselves. They do not send their
children to failing schools, live in high-crime neighborhoods, compete
for scarce housing, or navigate broken public institutions. Their lives are shielded by wealth, location, private services, and increasingly by law itself.
The
Epstein files sharpen this reality because they reveal not just
hypocrisy, but impunity. Despite extensive documentation, repeated
warnings, and credible testimony, accountability arrived slowly and
incompletely. This is not because the crimes were ambiguous, but because
the accused moved within a protected sphere where consequences were
negotiable and enforcement discretionary. Justice, like morality, was
something applied elsewhere for other people.
What enrages the public is not prurience, but recognition.
The scandal resonates because it confirms a growing suspicion among
ordinary people that there is one moral universe for the governing class
and another for everyone else. Elites preach restraint, sustainability,
and responsibility while living lives of extraordinary consumption and
indulgence. They urge social sacrifice while exempting themselves from
its costs. They speak the language of progress while practicing a
refined form of decadence.
Lasch warned that such a ruling class
would eventually forfeit legitimacy, not because of ideology, but
because of character. A society cannot be governed indefinitely by
people who do not believe they belong to it. When elites become tourists
in their own countries, financially global, culturally unrooted, and
morally untethered, their authority rests on little more than coercion
and spectacle.
The Epstein files should therefore be read less as an aberration than as a symptom.
They reveal a governing class that has lost the habits of
self-restraint that once justified its power, and the sense of common
fate that once bound leaders to citizens.
For many, the salient point of the Epstein files is the scandal. I think it is more accurately seen as a disclosure.
The
danger is not merely that such elites are corrupt, but that they are
bored. Bored with limits, bored with norms, bored with accountability,
and ultimately bored with democracy itself. That boredom, Lasch
understood, is the precondition of revolt, not by the masses, but by
those who no longer feel answerable to them.
If the Epstein affair
provokes lasting anger, it is because it crystallizes a truth many
citizens already sense, that the people shaping the future live in a
world apart, governed by different rules, and increasingly incapable of
moral seriousness. No society can long endure that division without
consequence.
The question is not whether further revelations will
emerge. It is whether the public will finally insist that elites once
again live under the same moral and civic conditions as those they
presume to lead.
If there is one subject on which governments across the East/West divide can agree on, it must be the subject of control of the Internet.
In North Korea, you simply cannot exit the country. What you have is a kind of national intranet.
In China, there is the Great Wall which filters and limits interactions. As far as I could experience, access from international hotels and companies is free but some applications are not available and many words are filtered. As in the case of AI, the "touch" can be light (DeepSeek) or insufferable (Kimi).
Following the example of Europe, Russia is also turning the screw and filtering access to YouTube, WhatsApp and Telegram as explained in the article below.
What can be said? Yes, these applications can be used for propaganda and more ominously against the state. That much is true.
As a libertarian, I believe that the best way to defend a state is to develop an efficient "immune system" based on truth and open information.
The opposite always ends up as a kind of joke, Pravda-like, the old communist newspaper that everybody read in the Soviet Union and absolutely nobody believed.
On this subject, your attitude will entirely depend on where you stand in respect of State vs Individual power. Chinese people, thanks to their education tend to err on the side of the state while Americans tend likewise to err on the side of the individual. The Russians and Europeans are mostly "socialist" in their thinking and consequently in-between.
From my experience of living in all these countries, your attitude and ideology is almost completely shaped by your education. This is why it is so difficult to build multi-national entities like the European Union. Greeks are simply not Germans and probably never will. Nor do they want to be!
So although it is easy to have an absolute opinion on the subject, for or against, in reality it depends on context and culture, time of growth and stress, economic expansion and contraction which is why attitude varies not only across cultures but also epochs.
The
West has been calling Russia's ever-tightening internet regulations on
its citizenry a "digital Iron Curtain". Already over a period of months
and years of the Ukraine war, various popular US-based social media apps
have been throttled and even banned, but this week things have escalated with YouTube and WhatsApp being blocked in Russia:
Russia's internet regulator Roskomnadzor has removed"youtube.com" from
its DNS (Domain Name System) servers. If a user tries to access the
site directly without a VPN (Virtual Private Network), their router can
no longer assign the address to its IP address.
This means that You Tube is no longer accessible in Russia. The WhatsApp domain has also disappeared from Roskomnadzor's servers. The Russian government has also launched a campaign against the messenger app Telegram, leading analysts to say Roskomnadzor is cracking down on platforms beyond its control.
But
perhaps even more impactful - in terms of Russians quickly getting
news, information, and public statements (even from their own government
channels) - is the new move to throttle and block Telegram.
An interesting theory, especially in the wake of the shocking Wagner mutiny of 2023...
Russia’s state media watchdog Roskomnadzor has tightened the screws on Telegram, accusing the messaging giant of failing to curb fraud and safeguard user data,
which ironically is similar to what the French government accused the
company of when it famously detained billionaire Telegram founder and
CEO Pavel Durov.
The platform has an estimated over 93 million Russian users, which is more than 60% of the total population, but the Kremlin hopes to replicate with its state-backed messenger, Max. The all-in-one 'super-app' has been described in the following:
Max,
a state-backed messenger developed by VK, is being positioned as a
patriotic alternative to WhatsApp and Telegram — platforms that in
recent weeks have suffered complete or partial disruptions to voice and video calls across the country.
Beyond
the glitzy marketing, Max is built to serve a political purpose.
Officials want it integrated with the state services portal Gosuslugi
via the Unified Identification and Authentication System (ESIA). That
would allow citizens to log into government platforms, pay utility
bills or sign documents directly through the app, in effect making Max a
digital gateway to basic civil services.
But at
a government commission meeting in early August, the Federal Security
Service (FSB) initially blocked Max's immediate connection to ESIA, citing the risk of personal data leaks. According to IT industry sources cited by Russian media,
the FSB submitted a multi-page list of requirements ranging from
certified encryption systems to source code audits. Deputy Prime
Minister Dmitry Grigorenko, who oversees the project, voiced similar
concerns.
BBC has pointed out: "Moscow has made extensive efforts to push Russians to its state-developed Max app, which critics say lacks end-to-end encryption."
As
for Telegram, it's loss will be huge for Russians, given that for
starters every major Russian media outlet operates a Telegram channel,
some even publishing there exclusively.
Major
state and legacy outlets including RIA Novosti, TASS, RBC, Interfax,
and Kommersant maintain large, highly active channels. In border regions
like Belgorod, battered by power outages and municipal disruptions from
Ukrainian strikes, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov uses Telegram to deliver updates directly to residents.
The
same goes for many oblasts across Russia's south which have remained a
frontline of sorts when it comes to cross-border attacks out of Ukraine.
The other problem in getting rid of Telegram is that Russia's Defense Ministry pushes near-daily battlefield briefings,
combat footage, and soldier interviews to its several hundreds of
thousands of followers. So clearly any kind of major 'transition' - as
is now apparently being forced on the population, won't come easy.
The
Kremlin has long warned against Western intelligence infiltration and
data exploitation especially via US-based platforms. It has also long
battled what it deems 'propaganda' via content on these apps. But to
some degree they are also mediums where Russian and Ukrainian officials
can directly address the other side, serving the cause of public
diplomacy, or at least clarifying each's position.
We are at war although most people do not realize this.
In a way, this was unavoidable. Since the 1970s we knew that by the early 2020s there would not be enough resources for the 8.5+ billion people on Earth. Increased productivity should have solved the problem but the Jevons Paradox which states that when we reduce the price of goods thanks to increased productivity, people paradoxically start consuming more negating the benefits. So in the end, we ended up with a zero sum game where increased consumption by one party necessarily decreases consumption by other parties. Today, the apple pie is still growing but not as fast as our appetite and soon it may start shrinking.
Nowhere will this be more obvious than for raw material, although water and agricultural land are close seconds. And it is consequently what we are witnessing currently with rare earth and the silver market where East and West are competing for dwindling resources. (See video below)
This is why the Trump Administration so desperately wants to "acquire" new land and resources, be they in Venezuela, Greenland or Canada. Only such a move can guaranty a new round of investment and economic growth.
The alternative is Europe: Rhetoric with no action. Europe will rearm to confront Russia, increase investment to compete with the US and China while doubling down on outrageously expensive Green technology and of course paying for the legions of retirees and the migrants flooding in to replace them. Too bad that each Euro can only be used once and that the debt is already so high. It would have been useful to have the current budget X5. But they don't. So to convince people that sacrifices are necessary and belts will have to be tightened, the war in Ukraine must go on. For this reason alone, the war will not end anytime soon.
As long as Europe is at war, they are in a war economy and budgets are irrelevant. The day the war ends, Europe stares bankruptcy in the face. How could this be allowed to happen?
