My last note was about the fight between Anthropic and the Pentagon, I described how the United States government has been legally purchasing bulk personal data about Americans from commercial data brokers for years, without warrants, and why attaching a frontier AI system to that pipeline would transform it into something qualitatively more dangerous.
Thoughtful.. I am just back from a trip down under. It occurred to me that Americans know a lot less about what it means to be American than people from other countries. It is easier to get information concerning highly sensitive and personal information about a person when it comes to financial interests than it is to find out if a person had a broken arm in life. At the end of the day, we do not live in a free society with any protections. We live in a box that has controls and variability on freedom with the dependency of wealth and control. I wouldn't say there are any specific masters (not known of course) but the system itself supports people in political power and wealth controlling everything down to the data. We can see fragments of what is available to them but the real truth is something much more gross and horrifying. Move? Go off grid? Is that even possible today? Where is off? The world is monitored from space... Put me back into the matrix please.
I moved to Portugal. The people are warm, the healthcare is remarkable (note coming on this), the highways would embarrass most American interstates, and the food is simply better. There are no guns to speak of. But the thing that genuinely surprised me is harder to quantify. The Portuguese understand, in their bones, what good governance is worth, because 1974 is not ancient history here. The memory of what came before democracy is still alive in the people who lived it, and that memory does real civic work.
What concerns me now is what money does to a place like this. Expats are arriving from everywhere, many of them wealthy, and wealth has a way of bending culture toward its own preferences without anyone quite deciding that it should. The distortion is gradual and then it isn’t. The deeper problem is one that history keeps demonstrating and that we keep refusing to learn: when people with significantly more money than everyone else are allowed to shape the rules, the rules stop serving everyone else. Portugal escaped one form of that trap in 1974. It would be a shame to walk into another one through the front door, smiling, pulling rolling luggage.
Thoughtful.. I am just back from a trip down under. It occurred to me that Americans know a lot less about what it means to be American than people from other countries. It is easier to get information concerning highly sensitive and personal information about a person when it comes to financial interests than it is to find out if a person had a broken arm in life. At the end of the day, we do not live in a free society with any protections. We live in a box that has controls and variability on freedom with the dependency of wealth and control. I wouldn't say there are any specific masters (not known of course) but the system itself supports people in political power and wealth controlling everything down to the data. We can see fragments of what is available to them but the real truth is something much more gross and horrifying. Move? Go off grid? Is that even possible today? Where is off? The world is monitored from space... Put me back into the matrix please.
I moved to Portugal. The people are warm, the healthcare is remarkable (note coming on this), the highways would embarrass most American interstates, and the food is simply better. There are no guns to speak of. But the thing that genuinely surprised me is harder to quantify. The Portuguese understand, in their bones, what good governance is worth, because 1974 is not ancient history here. The memory of what came before democracy is still alive in the people who lived it, and that memory does real civic work.
What concerns me now is what money does to a place like this. Expats are arriving from everywhere, many of them wealthy, and wealth has a way of bending culture toward its own preferences without anyone quite deciding that it should. The distortion is gradual and then it isn’t. The deeper problem is one that history keeps demonstrating and that we keep refusing to learn: when people with significantly more money than everyone else are allowed to shape the rules, the rules stop serving everyone else. Portugal escaped one form of that trap in 1974. It would be a shame to walk into another one through the front door, smiling, pulling rolling luggage.