Episode 40: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

And so that's how tanned I was at one point.

That's part of my thinking about going to the committee is that this is a rare opportunity to find out how these things happen. Maybe they even will be able to subpoena some records, so we'll see.

Lots of stuff happened in the world this week, that's interesting and we can get to some of that. You texted me something pretty early in the week and I watched it and a chill went up my spine. Did that happen with you when you watched this for the first time?

And Dia, by the way, is sort of the Ukrainian word for, I guess, to be or being. It's kind of conceived as like an everything app, right?

And then they play a video about the Dia app and what it sounds like and what it looks like. And obviously this is in English, there's a Ukrainian analog. I've obviously I went and looked at it later, but this English language video the piece of it just by itself. There's so much to get into here.

Visa Executives Vice Prime Minister for Innovation Mikhail Fyodorov from Ukraine, Tara Swisher. Was there, Samantha Power?

But yeah, so they roll this video. And man, if this doesn't remind you of a certain sci-fi movie, I don't know what to do. But let's see, let's take a listen.

Has the enemy launched cyberattacks on Ukraine? Of course they have, and they failed. Even when the world is falling apart, our main task is to protect the people. Together we can build a stronger one.

This happened in stages. The prior president, Petro Poroshenko, he introduced something called Prozorro between 2014 and 2016. This was designed to be kind of a dot-gov app that centralized contracting and some other things, improving transparency. And then it was Zelensky who came along and created this concept of the Ministry of Digital Transformation in 2019. And that's when they coined the phrase a digital state in the smartphone, where you could fight corruption and manage complex administrative hurdles. Quote with one click.

This became possible thanks to the DIA app, meaning action in Ukrainian. It goes into how, in addition to all the civilian uses of this, they began to develop after the war started. Some other features for this app? Therefore, in the first days of the war. The Ukrainian government launched the chatbot e-Enemy, called e-Enemy, designed for Ukrainian citizens to report the Russian military and its equipment movements and inform the Ukrainian government about the collaborators activities, the chatbot activity gained over 370,000 visits, most revealing hostile groups. Moreover, the DIA application offered the option to donate to the Ukrainian army a financial assistance program for businesses affected by the war and recompensation for damaged properties. A migrant card, assistance consultations for displaced people and an e-document for those crossing the border without documents quickly became available in the application.

In this way, a mobile phone could confirm people's identity, even when the physical copy of the document was lost. So it's your whole life on the phone, and it's a way to report on those who are enemies to the cause. And in Russian, I saw it referred to as Evrog, so that's e-enemy, but, you know, it sounds a lot more sinister in their language. I don't know Walter. This reminded me of Starship Troopers. And the whole like, you know, and a little bit like the DHS thing that we talked about just a couple of weeks ago. Where obviously they have more cause to do it in Ukraine.

But creating an app and they talked about the intersection with cyber security agencies and developing this stuff. You just start to wonder about the possibilities of this kind of technology.

You know, if Tinder, the thing that we have in America, allows us to identify potential mates or friends, intimate friends. This allows us to find adversaries everywhere and report them. Maybe have them, you know, disappear from view. I don't know what happens to your e-Enemy after you've registered them. I don't know if it's like....

In a lot of ways. This app, though sinister, only concentrates things that populations at war seek to do all the time. Which is, you know, spot threats. Identify traitors, loose lips, sink ships, maybe call out people who are talking too much about state secrets. But it also, what was interesting, has all of these sort of domestic, everyday capabilities. So you apply for a mortgage on the same platform that you turn in traitors and spies. And that is, I think, the innovation here, in this banality of evil fashion. Make a kind of financial app, PayPal or Venmo or e-Trade, absolutely adjacent to your militarized side.

Besides your own face.

But you can also imagine all sorts of applications for this that are a little bit less, you know, black and white. Especially in, you know, given the background of what we've trained people in the internet age to do, we've already created systems where, you know. Reporting people online for their behavior is a thing that we've become accustomed to doing, and that it's effective. It puts them on denial lists, it sort of knocks them down as social media citizens. You can end up being kicked off a platform, and then your record of being kicked off the platform follows you around for a while, like a virus. And so we've already sort of trained the population to have like one click reporting of people next door. And I don't know that because of that, this makes me nervous.

For example, a relative died suddenly and unexpectedly in a town across the country. And getting there became very difficult to the funeral. Getting there to the funeral became very difficult. All of a sudden. He had a very arduous life on his hands, and, you know, whether he earned his No fly list membership I can't speak to.

But once he was on it, life got very tough indeed, and what was interesting in talking to him was how. The avenues for appeal were few. And it also became clear that local authorities could place you on this no fly list, your local sheriff, for example, and ever getting off it?

And when you found them, they were hostile, and then the connection broke. But in any case, so, so, all of these, all of these hassles that come with being identified as a dubious person will, I'm sure, be built into this thing. In other words, it will not only have this, it'll not only have this. This positive affirmative capability, allowing people to identify others, turn others in, apply for mortgages, and so on. But it will probably have a capacity that is negative and keeps you from getting a mortgage or makes it harder to get a mortgage. Or alerts you to the fact that you've been turned in and that, and you should probably report somewhere to clear things up with the authorities.

They only told one side of the story about Dia, which was what it's like to be sort of the gunslinger of Dia, rather than be gunned down. You know, they talk, like I say, about how it might help you get a home, but they didn't mention that.

The corollary must be there, too. It can probably stop your mortgage application cold, you know, do. Luckily, as I say, we'll never have this in America, so I can only speculate on what it's. You know what its effects will be. But I wonder how many Ukrainians there in the audience? In the midst of this war, which is incredibly violent, devastating and is taking out the infrastructure of this country?

Had a feeling of inner sunrise. About the digital landscape that will come and that will come and redeem the experience of the soon to be deoccupied cities of the country. That was a little weird language, wasn't it? It assumed it assumed a kind of easy blithe success that's just around the corner that I'm not sure is real or can be easily assumed.

It might have been nice if it was a little more dystopian and a little more dramatic. And said something in in the post-nuclear wasteland that Ukraine may be, there is a bright spot. Those few survivors will include those traitors who caused the destruction, and you will be able to identify them through your phone. There won't be much left, but vengeance will be yours and at your fingertips.

As as conventionally defined, might disappear, but you have this notion that there will be mortgages to be had and and applied for was a little optimistic. I thought, in general, it had the act, like you say, the absolutely chilling tones of a science fiction movie like Starship Troopers. Why do they make their propaganda sound so terribly sinister? I mean, don't they have consultants?

Who? Who could make it a little warm and fuzzy, like those, you know, endearing insurance commercials couldn't flow. Introduce Dia or Jake from State Farm. Yeah, yeah, because, because, frankly, all I could hear when I listened was a voice. That was a combination of airport paging being called to the principal's office over the, you know, over the school speaker system. Something that I imagine might be blasted on loudspeakers from helicopters at some point in our future evolution, you know? So so what, what are they trying to do there? what are they trying to do to us with these things? I mean, I guess this was only for an inside group.

This wasn't meant to get out to the general public. But sometimes I wonder if they just are menacing on purpose with this stuff. It's just a little poke.

And yeah, they always forget that there is another audience out there that might hear this. But this stuff is particularly. I think they've gone several levels in a in a new direction in terms of being out of touch with how horrifying this sounds. Because not only are they creating an app for thinking on your neighbors, they're creating an app that puts your entire life in one unified, shared endeavor paradigm, where all your information is in one place. And I'm assuming that the decisions are interrelated, somehow, that, you know, the authority is all centralized.

Right, that is a that sounds nightmarish to me, but they are excited about it.

And the premise of my book was that in this near future. Everyone wore a bracelet, which was attached to a service called AidSat Aid Satellite. And there were operators on call and it was sort of like the Onstar service that they were starting to put into GM cars at any point. This, this bracelet of yours, which was your best friend, your alter ego and everything. That the iPhone would be, because we didn't have iPhones when I wrote the novel. You could be doing things like negotiating for a car, say, and run into a problem with the salesman. And you could just ask AIDSaT to start coaching you in your ear through the negotiation.

You could use it for everything. And the reason I called the book the unbinding was that. When I thought through the logic of this technology, I realized that what ultimately was going to do was displace people's identities from their actual bodies. The decisions, our decisions were going to be made remotely, and they were going to be reported to remote beings and centers. And all our body was ever going to do after that was just carry this idea or this AidSat bracelet around.

We were at that point drones, functional drones. We were eyes and ears for the state, and we were at the law. At the furthest end of all these decision making processes about our economic life and so on. And there was in me an apprehension about why people would ultimately go on when all of the executive functions of life were now off site. You know, and and you know, much hilarity and many complications and dystopian situations ensued. But the essence of this was to examine the problem of having a alter self in a machine directly linked to authority.

And and also, in some ways, more powerful in our fate than we we were. Quote unquote we. So it's really a new ego and a new superego, certainly, and it's on a, you know, it's on a disk or a chip.

And it's not just the surveillance possibilities, the censorship possibilities, or the life interrupting possibilities. It's the fact that you start to wonder if your brain is even meaningful as something to carry with you, or just baggage.

So this reminds me of the nose you read. That story is so it's about this sort of sort of mid-level bureaucrat who's a jerk and a womanizer.

AI.