Today I had the luxury of enjoying time with my child who is home from college for a brief visit. As wonderful as it was to have a day off of work, it felt wrong to enjoy a “holiday” celebrating two colonizers. This feeling was particularly strong for me this year. You see my child is now pursuing their education on the un-ceded lands Canada calls British Columbia. It is a place where a significant struggle for Indigenous rights is unfolding. I feel a responsibility to encourage them to educate themselves, to be a good guest, and to support the self-determination efforts of Indigenous peoples who put their lives on the line to protect their territories and culture. I signed a pledge in support of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation and made a contribution towards their legal fees. Information about various ways you can support can be found on the supporter toolkit page here.
I write this statement of solidarity today, hoping my voice can in some small way honor ongoing Wet’suwet’en resistance to the colonial violence being carried on behalf of Coastal GasLink and other pipeline companies and their investors, many of which have ties to the United States. If you haven’t been following the Royal Mounted Canadian Police’s armed invasion of Wet’suwet’en lands, I encourage you to check out the hash tags #ReconciliationIsDead and #ShutDownCanada. Also take twenty minutes to watch the short documentary film, Invasion. It describes Unist’ot’en Camp’s decade-long project to build a healing center and protect their lands and water.
I’ve been trying to sit down and write for several weeks but keep putting it off. I’ve been preoccupied mapping the Negroponte brothers, technocracy, and Blockchain education. Each dot on each map reveals some new horrific facet of the larger puzzle, making it hard to focus and tell the story that needs to be told. My praxis has been to digitally swim in this toxic brew of militarized transnational global capital. It helps me learn the terrain, so I can interpret it for others. The toxicity, however, does take a toll.
An antidote over the past few weeks has been watching from afar the powerful stand taken by the Wet’suwet’en people against the pipeline companies. They have steadfastly and at great personal risk opposed the Canadian corporate state, which professes to be a leader in sustainability while continuing to partner with extractive industries that are intent on devastating Indigenous lands and waters. In a video last week, Freda Huson of Unist’ot’en Camp said they intended make their stand and expose the lies. They would bring the darkness to light.
As a mother, it was incredibly moving to see these matriarchs confronting riflemen and dogs and helicopters. The women of Unist’ot’en Camp were taken while in ceremony honoring the lives of missing and murdered women lost to the petroleum industry. They were taken as they stood in ceremony, living links between ancestors and future generations. It brought to mind Regina Brave’s treaty stand at Standing Rock. The sacrifice of these women exposed the brutal violence upon which colonialism rests.
There is no doubt in my mind that the world is at a crossroads. Will the masses follow the scorched path of technocracy or will we uphold Indigenous sovereignty and pursue a different course? I hope that mothers of the world will recognize this is the time to choose the latter path, the green one. This week my feed was filled with images of Michael Bloomberg and Freda Huson. The former is the face of faux “techno-green” capitalism that intends to kill the planet to further enrich oligarchs through initiatives like LNG. The latter embodies a worldview that centers self-determination for Indigenous and oppressed peoples and collective healing for people and planet.
It gives me hope that so many across North America have risen up to join with the Wet’suwet’en people in calling out Canada and Trudeau on their treacherous actions. The amount of direct action and disruption caused shows how powerful people can be when united in struggle. Let us tap into that power to build a world based in right relationships. Let us to bring the darkness to light. As we in the United States drown in coverage of the upcoming presidential election, we should keep in mind that the leaders we actually need may very well be the Freda Husons.
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to travel to Dallas and Tulsa, connect in person with friends and research collaborators, see local sites of “social entrepreneurship,” and meet others who are developing strategies to fight the coming tide of predatory “human capital investment.” For important background on the disruption that is overtaking Tulsa, I recommend you read Julianne Romanello’s feature article in the Tulsa Star, George Kaiser’s Social Impact Philanthropy: How A Billionaire Turned North Tulsa’s Misery Into A Cash Cow.
During this visit I gave several presentations. Below are three of them, as well as a Facebook Live feed from an informational leafleting action held at an Impact Tulsa event. While the Wednesday and Saturday talks are on the same topic, the first has more audience participation while the second gets through the whole slide deck. It’s a lot to take in, but I wanted to put it all in one place for future reference. I believe the importance of the information shared here will become more evident as the takeover of public benefit systems by “stakeholder capitalists” picks up steam. You can access the slide share for the Tulsa talks here.
Tuesday Discussion in Dallas
Alison McDowell in Dallas from Lynn Davenport on Vimeo.
Wednesday Evening Presentation, Downtown Library, Tulsa, OK, filmed by Green Country DSA
Saturday Morning Presentation, Downtown Library, Tulsa, OK
Leafletting at Impact Tulsa’s Pathways to Opportunity Event at OSU, January 23, 2020
In preparing for my visit I discovered both Dallas and Tulsa are piloting Blockchain high school transcripts. Promoters of Blockchain credentials tout their convenience as well as their capacity to aggregate demonstrations of competencies earned from a variety sources. That, of course, is the infrastructure needed to set up “anytime, anywhere lifelong learning ecosystems.” It will also enable the tracking of people’s economic output against their “education” over time, throwing open the door to widespread adoption of income-sharing agreements. Both are crucial elements needed to scale human capital investment markets globally.
If social impact financiers get their way, future generations will no longer have access to physical school buildings in their communities. It will be in the interests of the elite to suppress social discourse and free idea sharing among the masses as the Fourth Industrial Revolution begins to pick up speed. Instead, we will see efforts to transition to screen-based and wearable technologies that deliver “just-in-time” “personalized” learning content via OER (open education resources). Blockchain will be used to “verify” that individuals, now reduced to raw material for digital processing, have acquired the skills that chamber of commerce executives deem desirable for maintaining their planned regional economies.
As people progress along assigned “cradle to career” pathways, service providers and global investors will collect “impact” payments. Children and older “lifelong learners” will be expected to demonstrate “success,” jumping through the hoops designated by the government officials and investors who set up “pay for success” deals. “Education” will thus be transformed into a grueling, gamified exercise carried out in an augmented reality, surveillance world from which there is no escape, until perhaps one reaches the “gray” stage. Each point along the path is clearly identified, so profit can be continuously harvested as long as some level of “growth” is shown. Increasingly “growth” will entail students and older knowledge workers performing appropriate mindsets. That is why demonstrations of social-emotional competencies have become more and more central to the “educational” process.
For financiers, it is never too soon for children to start building portfolios of badges. Curating a desirable data brand from birth will be key to becoming a successful competitor in the artificial intelligence hiring, global platform, gig-economy Hunger Games. They are attempting to delude people into thinking that if they can log every aspect of their life as a job qualification, they will have a better shot at employment; when in fact, the micro-credential race will enable employers to more effectively pit workers against one another and regulate society using “educational” micro-debt products.
Even though “philanthropists” have put unborn children on Blockchain in Tanzania, and toddlers on Blockchain in South Africa, I expect someone made the calculation that it was not yet palatable to do that in the United States. A better point of entry here is the high school transcript. People would likely question the need to assign a digital identity to a three year old, but by framing it as an “improved” high school transcript, one that could be linked to “free college” no less, adoption of digital identities for workforce development could slip in with few realizing the magnitude of what actually happened.
Thus a generation of children is about to be transformed, on Blockchain, as raw material for the “impact economy,” a system that will run on predictive profiling and real time “smart city” data aggregation. This is what is being discussed now in Davos under the banner of “stakeholder capitalism,” neoliberal poverty management carried out as an extension of the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals. This apparatus is designed to profit the global elite, as refugees and the global poor will be forced to code the geo-fenced digital jails meant to contain them. Offering up their unfree labor will thus become a prerequisite to survive in a world where human labor is rapidly being made obsolete by 5G, robots, and the internet of things.
Union Public Schools in Tulsa, which services 19,000 students, signed on to Blockcerts last April. Blockcerts is an alternative credentialing system refined by MIT spin-off Learning Machine. It premiered in the United States at Southern New Hampshire University, which is led by Paul Leblanc, one of the education advisors to Ridge Lane LP. The district’s ninth graders will be issued full digital transcripts when they graduate.
Dallas County Promise is a “scholarship program” set up ostensibly to combat the “skills gap” and aid students in acquiring post-secondary credentials. In reality it is just as much about creating an apparatus to grow human capital impact investment markets. Last year the program partnered with Manoj Kutty’s Greenlight Credentials and Salesforce.
According to Global Education Futures Initiative advisory board member Tom Vander Ark, this digital transcript will allow Dallas students to “tell their whole story.” Of course we know that means tracking in demand “soft skills” that will inform future investors of a person’s perceived worth as “human capital.” According to a project overview by Salesforce, which provides technical support for the program’s “Education Cloud” digital nudge service, students who sign up for the program are immediately put on a “communications journey.” Thus the digital processing and compliance monitoring begins.
Commit! managed by Todd Williams, a former Goldman Sachs executive, is a partner in the Dallas County Promise effort. It is one of the largest and most influential “collective impact” programs in the country. More background on Commit’s collaboration with DataKind to engineer “gap-closing” “solutions” by deploying social impact finance can be found on Lynn Davenport’s write up here.
There are other big money players in on the game. JP Morgan Chase provided the seed funding for Dallas’s “free college” program. JP Morgan has made numerous significant donations to organizations involved in the privatization of public education, “evidence-based” policies, and the development of “stackable credential” systems. See map below. Interactive version here.
In the spring of 2019 a $1.1 billion bond was passed to expand the operations of the Dallas County Community College District. The bond’s passage was, however, contested by Kurt Launius who filed a lawsuit charging voting irregularities. Launius submitted over 4,500 pages of evidence to back up his claims.
Commit’s offices are located directly across the street from Old Parkland, which I will describe in more detail below. That office complex houses the Dallas Foundation and Tom Luce’s Texas 2036. Human capital speculation is big, big business – a bipartisan business – and it seems a lot of the groundwork is being laid within the leafy confines of that exclusive campus. The futures of coming generations are wrapped up in the calculated conversations going on behind closed doors. The map below shows relationships between Commit!, Old Parkland tenants, and special guests of Harlan Crow. These guests were identified on a framed document seen hanging outside Crow’s fancy Debate Room. Interactive version of map here.
Under the banner of “convenience,” coming generations will be turned into data commodities, their behavioral compliance to authoritarian systems recorded on Blockchain. Thus they can be risk-profiled, their futures exchanged as data in service of global markets. While some still cling to the idea that we’re headed towards a Star Trek techno-utopia, it feels far more likely our destination will more closely resemble the panopticon of Zamyatin’s 1921 novel “We.”
The screen shots below are taken from the education timeline created by the Global Education Futures Initiative.
From Global Education Futures Initiative, see maps and posters tab, here.
During my visit to Dallas I dropped in to check out the Debate Room at Old Parkland, described by the Dallas News as the most expensive, invitation-only office space in the city. Originally a hospital that closed in the 1980s and sat vacant for many years, Harlan Crow bought it from the city in 2006 and developed it as an enclave where the public-private partnership deals of the impact economy and “smart city” development could be hammered out.
It is telling that the architecture and artwork bolsters the mythology of America’s founding fathers as an ideal to be embraced. According to the Dallas news feature:
“This is an American fantasyland created by Crow as an homage to the American Experiment. Towering bronze statues of founding fathers George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin stand as sentinels at three buildings. ‘The idea was to celebrate the ideas of the American founding using specific founders, but also their intellectual antecedents from the Enlightenment,’ says Crow, who’s more than just a history buff. ‘So there’s a lot of John Locke and Adam Smith and guys from the Enlightenment who never came to America but who greatly influenced the founders.’”
But as Tim Scott lays out in his meticulous analysis of The Duplicitous U.S. Constitution published in Dissident Voice in 2017, such myths have always been and continue to be used to mask the ongoing violence that defines our national psyche.
“A nation where private property rights are akin to natural rights, therefore framing capitalism, no matter how brutal, with benevolent intent and thus inviolable. These structural foundations, which are rooted within the barbarism of chattel slavery and the brutality of gender oppression, constructed an enduring national culture defined by genocide, dispossession, white supremacy, anti-blackness, heteropatriarchy, misogyny, social inequity and wealth inequality. Over three centuries later, despite significant efforts by resistance movements to transform it, this underlying national culture persists; entwined within an era where mass surveillance, mass incarceration, unprecedented wealth inequality and unending militarism are perversely justified as imperatives to preserve freedom, democracy and the mythical ‘American Dream.’”
We have arrived at the threshold of techno-fascism precisely because so many cling to myths of “enlightened” white men. Many of these men advanced revolution so they could profit from illegal land speculation. They included men who owned and raped enslaved Black women while issuing statements such as the one featured on an Old Parkland bronze lamppost: “I prefer a rebellious liberty to a peaceful slavery.” That was Jefferson’s letter to Madison in 1787. These contradictions can no longer hold. We are the supply chain, all of us. Once human labor is no longer needed for manufacturing, service and knowledge work, the sole value most of us will possess is our willingness to serve the system as obedient impact commodities. The protections offered by whiteness, professional credentials, and meritocracy will no longer apply.
Now is the time to start acknowledging our long-standing American nightmare. Blockchain identity will usher in neo-slavery at an unimaginable scale. As a society we have never reckoned with the fact that our wealth and power as a nation was built on genocide, land theft, enslavement and forced labor. Soon many more people will be staring into the great maw of late stage capitalism, our futures foreclosed as robots and algorithms are trained to replace us.
So, how will we proceed? Will we begin to address our brutal history? Will we strive for right relations with one another and the planet? Will we build a world where ALL people enjoy self-determination and equal opportunity for fulfilling, life-sustaining work? Where resources are shared in a spirit of abundance, turning our backs on imposed scarcity and brutal competition?
Will we push back against oligarchs who meet in sumptuous basement rooms festooned with Greek inscriptions and inscrutable coins inset into the paneling? Where bad art and bronze plaques extoll the idea of people as private property, targets for debt collectors who seek to profit from mass dispossession?
Now is the time. Given the disturbing Ides of March painting that presides over the Old Parkland Debate Room, we should be very concerned about the extent to which their plans are already in motion.
Images of Old Parkland
A painting depicting The Ides Of March dominates the debate room. The Ides of March was a time for debt collection. Following the assassination of Julius Caesar, Rome was plunged into a period of civil war.
Consider this plaque at the entrance to the building that houses the debate chamber within the context of Blockchain identity and global human capital impact investing.
Debate Chamber, 75 Seats
Atrium at Debate Chamber Entrance: DNA, Steve Jobs, Nixon, Churchill and FDR with Eisenhower. Note lamp posts.
Statements On Lamp Bases Speaking to Protection of Private Property
On January 7, 2020 Black Alliance for Peace – Baltimore issued a demand that public officials reject a planned surge of militarized policing authorized by the Trump administration. Operation Relentless Pursuit is targeting Baltimore and six other mid-size cities, all of which have significant Black and Brown populations. The others include: Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Kansas City, Memphis, and Albuquerque. Representatives of the FBI, DEA, AFT, and US Marshall Service were present at the Department of Justice’s December 18, 2019 press conference.
I write this post as a statement of solidarity in support of their demands and to examine this operation in light of my recent work around policing, diversion courts, and prison “reform” as a global investment market. I have concerns that some of the funds associated with this vile operation may be channeled into problematic technological systems. Residents of these cities could end up as test-subjects for new forms of militarized digital surveillance intended to further harm Black and Brown communities while allowing military interests to refine the signals intelligence required for future urban military actions. Data collected under the pretense of crime reduction could also create baselines to expand futures markets in human capital (pay for success). Baltimore, in particular, is home to major players in the global impact investing space. Among them: the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Catholic Relief Services, Johns Hopkins, and Yet Analytics.
Interactive map of Baltimore Impact Investing and Government Innovation here.
According to the Black Alliance for Peace – Baltimore’s statement, these cities all participate in the Defense Logistics Agency’s 1033 Program, which permits police departments to secure surplus military equipment. The statement goes on to say, “Related is the ‘Deadly Exchange’ program, which is a massive exchange between the U.S. and the Israeli police and Israeli military where hyper-militarized techniques and technologies are shared.”
Five of Operation Relentless Pursuit’s cities are partners with Bloomberg Philanthropies “What Works Cities.” The program promotes municipal “innovation” with data-driven policies and public-private partnerships that provide cover for hostile corporate takeovers of ostensibly public assets. These programs are advanced through donations of in-kind consulting services to governments, provided by fellows from Bloomberg’s iTeams. Last year Israel’s Ministry of the Interior set up a “civic innovation” program in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies to install change agents in twelve Israeli communities.
The program, called Hazira, is located in Tel Aviv. Sir Ronald Cohen’s Israeli office of Social Finance, originator of the first social impact bond, is located there as well. We are living within an increasingly militarized web woven by global financial interests. Activists must always be making connections between policing actions and economic violence carried out at home and abroad. For transnational global capital, borders are fluid; it is for the masses that borders and biometrics are deployed to impose control. Technologies devised to manage one population; whether British prisoners, the children of Gaza, or the homeless of Austin, spread like viruses. For this reason solidarity among cities and through international channels will be vital as we all face the violence of late-stage capitalism.
Militarization of urban environments by public and private security forces (including robots) is a growing concern. In September of 2019 a story in Newsweek revealed that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement sought to procure “hyper-realistic training devices” that would include up to fifty new prop buildings constructed at Fort Benning, Georgia. Just shy of a million dollars was budgeted for two replicas: a Chicago model and an Arizona model. It appears the government is leveraging brutal immigration enforcement policies to launch a training program for domestic counter-insurgent warfare. This is not surprising given the economic and social unrest anticipated to ramp up as the Fourth Industrial Revolution progresses.
In a 2017 interview with Ann Marie Slaughter of New America at a symposium on the future of war, Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed the need for the US army to optimize for urban warfare stating that provisions were being made to design tanks and helicopters to fit these new terrain requirements (clip here). Later in the conference Eric Schmidt of Alphabet / Google, a funder of New America, stated that the future of war would be shaped by advances in artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and pattern recognition (clip here) leading to an increase in lethality from precision weaponry. These sentiments are affirmed by a 2016 report prepared by Mitre for US Army TRADOC D-2 Mad Scientist Megacities and Dense Urban Areas Initiative. The document describes the need for robust systems of data collection and analysis in cities via sensor networks.
In October of 2017 I attended a public meeting on the future of policing hosted by Azavea in conjunction with the International Police Chiefs Conference. At the end of the Q&A then CIO of Philadelphia, Charles Brennan, stated the future of policing was facial recognition software, predictive analytics, and drone surveillance. Robert Cheetham, a colleague of Brennan’s who founded Azavea after being trained in landscape architecture at UPenn and initiating GIS mapping for the Philadelphia police department, had lobbied for city’s “open-data” policy.
Cheetham capitalized on that free data, creating Hunchlab, a predictive policing software program, which was sold back to Philadelphia and other cities where Black people have been killed or assaulted by police including East St. Louis and Chicago. According to this history of the project, the NSF actually funded the research used to develop the for-profit Hunchlab platform. For more on Hunchlab and the rise of predictive policing software I recommend Bilel Benbouzid’s 2019 article from Big Data Society, “To Predict and to manage. Predictive policing in the United States.”
Drones or UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are important. Anyone who’s been following state intervention into resistance movements, including pipeline protests, knows that drones are go-to tools of law enforcement. In 2015, the state of North Dakota even passed a law permitting police to equip drones with non-lethal weapons. A 2019 article put out by Curt Fleming on behalf of the International Association of Chiefs of Police suggests that with strategic education and legislative changes, nests of drones could be mounted on public buildings in service of urban policing within the decade.
Aerial surveillance is not limited to drones/UAVs, but can include satellite imagery and even planes equipped with industrial cameras. In Baltimore, a plane-based monitoring program is being reinstated after having been quashed due to its secretive nature back in 2016. At the time John Arnold, a key figure in impact market development and reentry services, was found to have been underwriting the program. Persistent Surveillance Systems provided the monitoring using military technology developed for use in Iraq. Undisclosed philanthropists are funding this next round of the program, which involves three planes flying over the city for four to six months.
Again think about the military goal of training algorithms for pattern recognition. Imagine all this data being captured about our social relations in urban environments. Any small sliver may not be actionable, but in aggregate and funneled into enormous data lakes, these feeds will undoubtedly begin to exert tremendous control over civic life. As if Internet of Things-based predictive policing were not bad enough, consider what it would mean to layer in risk-profiling of individuals and communities for social impact investments.
We know truancy is an impact metric. Could UAV or plane surveillance data be used to target “impactful” interventions for families of children deemed to be at risk? How about addiction? Will aerial surveillance or Internet of Things Data be used to track substance users in a given census tract? Could policing extend to monitoring the retinal scans of users of supportive housing if they are under state supervision?
Even something as seemingly innocuous as infrastructure for a public transit app opens the door wider to surveillance as is seen in this US Department of Transportation “smart city” application prepared by the City of Albuquerque (which was not ultimately funded). In this excerpt you can see the impetus for the mesh network was ostensibly to track buses and allow building inspectors to upload data, but it also would have made police access to surveillance cameras and criminal records easier, too.
Source “Beyond Traffic The Smart City Challenge” Albuquerque here.
So, it appears the US military anticipates a future of urban warfare, likely within our borders. They are adapting their capabilities to this environment, which had previously been according to Milley “sub-optimized.” The weapons will be informed by AI, and their effectiveness will require lots of training data. The more data that is fed into these systems, the better its “pattern recognition” will be. Now, consider the ways in which digital surveillance has been normalized, particularly in cities, under the pretense of creating “safer” environments. Consider widespread adoption of body cameras, which Axon Enterprise (formerly Taser), distributed for “free” to police departments. The company has been data-mining that footage to refine its own AI.
Seventy-one million federal dollars have been budgeted for Operation Relentless Pursuit. While I anticipate much of that will be used to pay for traditional mechanisms of policing, the press release does state funds can be used for “mission critical equipment and technology.” The seven cities being targeted are all part of the big data, government agenda. They’re involved in “smart city” planning efforts, have “open data” portals, and are collaborating with social impact investment / municipal “innovation” interests through Living Cities and the Bloomberg-backed “What Works” Cities program. Four of the seven municipalities are participants in the Strive Together “Cradle to Career” network, and four are part of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Safety + Justice” Challenge. Several are working with the Behavioral Insights Team, “nudge” consulting.
Interactive map of Operation Relentless Pursuit here.
So-called “smart” city sensor networks and “open data” policies that digitally track public engagement with municipal services need to be viewed as tools of signals intelligence. While touted as enabling cost-effective and accountable budgeting, data-driven e-government is actually about ceding community control to predictive analytics and risk assessment algorithms.
This transition is advancing:
1) lean efficiencies / labor automation that will result in widespread poverty
2) the engineering of labor markets in service of transnational global capital
3) the creation of human capital investment markets where people = data
The hub that permits all of this to move forward is the carceral state: policing, courts, custody, and state supervision. Policing should be understood to include not just municipal law enforcement, but the “soft” policing of welfare officials, state and federal law enforcement, the US military, as well as private security forces. All enact violence against poor communities, though the methods vary. The carceral state works hand-in-hand with “smart cities” and IoT deployment.
The signals intelligence of data-driven policing and justice will be used to:
1) identify and confront threats to systems of control / contain the impoverished
2) absorb surplus labor as living wage jobs disappear
3) justify and document cost-off sets needed to run “pay for success” impact deals
Efforts are underway to portray the “digitally harmonized citizen” of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, as an innovative entrepreneur who will be able to pursue a prosperous “personalized” future through 5G / Internet of Things edge computing. In fact, the vast majority of folks will instead be predictively profiled into permanent poverty and mined for their data as human capital investments. That is the intent behind the big-money interests of the Living Cities and What Works Cities initiatives.
The map below shows the linkages in Cincinnati between Procter and Gable, the Internet of Things, and Strive Together / Knowledgeworks’ human capital tracking programs. On the right are the seven cities of Relentless Pursuit in orange. All but one are linked to either a Strive “cradle to career” or MacArthur / Collective Shift LRNG program of badge/place-based “lifelong” learning in cities (see my post on navigating whiteness). The bottom section features select partnerships the MacArthur Foundation has supported to structure data around the carceral cost off-sets needed to underpin profit taking from the“human capital” management / processing / surveillance of populations deemed “at risk.” To the left of that are links to IEEE and some of the mechanics of digital citizenship. Finally the left side shows the tentacles of the Rockefeller Foundation in the impact investing space. The Rockefeller Foundation is but one of eighteen influential funders working through Living Cities.
Interactive version of Relentless Pursuit / Living Cities map here.
Policy pushers with Ivy League degrees know there will be resistance to what is coming. Government officials attending all of these “Future of Work” panels know it, too. What they need is to have systems in place to predict unrest and contain it, preferably so that the people who already have most of the money make even money; because that is how the machine runs. I suspect that the technologies that will be deployed as part of this operation will begin to address those needs. Perhaps these seven cities are test beds to try out options for military signals intelligence AND human capital data monitoring.
Operation Relentless Pursuit will not improve quality of life in these seven cities. It will be yet another layer added onto a toxic accretion of racist policing. This phase may, however, impose more sophisticated tools of surveillance and data analysis than have been previously seen. It will also serve to push up the number of people under state supervision, so that when human capital impact markets begin to scale, the cost-offsets of mass incarceration have been maximized. Gang-related profiling will likely be used to create baselines for expanding juvenile justice related impact investing; the same for substance users and “evidence-based” addiction treatments. In the end it’s ultimately about building global markets and shutting down dissent.
Brandon Walker of Ujima People’s Progress Party gave an extensive interview about Operation Relentless Pursuit and his view of situation in Baltimore. He expressed a deep desire to reassert community control in response to the systematic and chronic abdication of responsibility carried out by public agencies and elected officials for decades. I suspect similar sentiments are shared in the six other cities. The What Works / Living Cities model is the antithesis of that. Liberation won’t come from an open data portal. Look what we got in Philadelphia – predictive policing software. I write to express my solidarity with Mr. Walker and community members in the other six cities who find themselves in the cross-hairs of Operation Relentless Pursuit, a terrible misdirection of federal funds with tremendous potential for violence to be used against innocent people.
Our collective futures depend on stopping wars at home, including Operation Relentless Pursuit, and the wars abroad. People are hurting. We need the 67 cents of every taxpayer dollar spent on defense to be redirected to poor communities so they can have a voice, self-determination, and start build the world we need; a world of peace where the machines of mass incarceration and militarization are completely dismantled.
If this sounds compelling, check out the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign’s #LivesOverLuxury March on the Democratic National Convention planned for July 13, 2020 in Milwaukee. Find more information here.
Today the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign officially launches preparations for the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee where we plan to march to demand an end to the wars at home and abroad. The 67 cents of every taxpayer dollar that is devoted to waging war must instead be used to meet our responsibilities to those in need here at home. The theme of the march, #LivesOverLuxury, speaks to the brutality of wealth inequality, gentrification, and dispossession. The Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign is an organization advocating for the rights of poor and is led by poor people. This afternoon there will be a press conference in Milwaukee. Press release below.
THE POOR PEOPLE’S ECONOMIC HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 9, 2020 PRESS CONTACTS Cheri Honkala: 215-869-4753 Galen Tyler: 215-883-9771
The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) and the Poor People’s Army announce the #LivesOverLuxury March on the DNC, that will be held opening day of the Democratic National Convention on July 13, 2020 at 4:00 p.m.
MEMBERS OF THE POOR PEOPLE’S ARMY WILL BE ON HAND JANUARY 10 AT 2:00 P.M., AT FISERV FORUM ON THE SE CORNER OF 6TH ST AND WEST JUNEAU IN MILWAUKEE, WI, the site of this summer’s DNC, to speak to the press and public about plans for the march and the teach-in they are holding.
Cheri Honkala, a formerly homeless mother, antipoverty advocate, and founder of PPEHRC, will provide details of the march. Also present will be other PPEHRC leaders who organize and educate around issues impacting youth, student debt, community and police violence, climate crises, lack of living wage jobs, and homelessness.
“I want to encourage everyone to come out and address this epidemic, the endless gun violence, that exists in our communities, especially the African American community,” said Jamal Johnson, of Stop Killing Us organization. “Also want to make all aware that we are the solution to the problem, so we must galvanize to combat it. That’s in a country that spends $50 million on security for a week at the DNC but abandons addressing the violence at home.”
“People don’t have a place to live, they’re dying. There’s homeless people right here in Milwaukee, and violence at home and abroad,” said Honkala. “As Dr. King said, humankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to humankind.”
Since 2000, PPEHRC has had the largest marches outside both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions each election year. This year, at a time so crucial for the future of humanity and the planet, PPEHRC will amass the largest Poor People’s Army this country has ever seen outside the DNC to take back the $.67 of every government dollar spent on war and occupation, to end poverty and all forms of violence at home and abroad.
PPEHRC is dedicated to building a movement that unites the poor across color lines. Poverty afflicts people of all colors. Every day more and more people are downsized and impoverished. Millions of Americans are in poverty, and millions more working and middle class people are just paychecks away, or medical bankruptcies away. from homelessness and poverty.
With the world’s press and attention on the theatrics at the Democratic and Republican conventions, the Poor People’s Army will put poor people front and center in a historic march that will demand a different kind of world where the world’s resources are protected and used to meet the basic needs of all people. The march and teach-in will feature speakers and performers from across the country.
Andy Willis, our comrade from Chicago, created an amazing poster to promote the event. Because of my research I was asked to write up a brief description to go with it, even though the visual alone is incredibly powerful. The take-away is that while we are up against incredible odds, and our government (both sides) has completely sold us out, we should not despair, but instead organize. Poor people, working class people DO have power; what is needed is to come together. Organizing for this march and week-long teach-in provides just such an opportunity.
#LivesOverLuxury
We face a disruptive future brought about by climate catastrophe, militarization, wealth inequality and the automation of labor. The global elite have deprived the masses of a living wage, access to stable housing, healthy food, and quality healthcare. We are at a tipping point. Millions are cast out of their communities, disconnected from one another and social institutions. With so many adrift in media noise, drugs, and violence it is vital that we focus, organize, and begin to restore authentic connections and systems of mutual aid to prepare for what is to come.
Those in power intend to manage global disruption profitably and brutally. That infrastructure is being put in place now, branded as “smart” city technologies. Cloud computing, Internet of Things sensors, artificial intelligence, and Blockchain feed signals intelligence to US Defense interests. Sophisticated systems of surveillance and militarized policing are sneaking in behind innocuous programs like transit apps and digital payment systems. We are unthinkingly adopting life-killing technologies that will force the poor into open-air jails as we poison the planet. There is nothing “smart” about systems that demand the mining of rare minerals by child labor and vast quantities of clean water to cool server farms, not to mention e-waste.
Hedge funds plan to use technology not only to police us, but also to nudge our actions and digitize us as data. Then they can gamble on our identities, our futures as human capital assets, securitized and traded on derivatives markets. The poor will be biometrically linked to benefit vouchers and tracked through the Internet of Things panopticon. The price of living in this world of austerity is behavioral compliance. Stay on the pathways, or else. This is a bipartisan scheme where elected officials front for IBM, Oracle, Cisco, HP, Intel, and Qualcomm. Leaders swap out at election cycles, but the “what works” data-driven government machine stays on its destructive course, lining the pockets of Goldman Sachs and Blackstone as we get ever closer to the edge of the cliff.
But this future is not preordained; it can and will be contested. We will fight inhumanity with relationships. Our clarity is an antidote for corporate propaganda. Together we will channel our creativity and expose these sickening schemes while making provisions to care for one another with shared resources. Endorse the march, make a donation, and connect with the Poor Peoples’ Army. More information, including a #LivesOverLuxury toolkit, availablehere. I am planning to attend. If you are in the Philadelphia area and want more information, get in touch with me through the blog.
Imposition of social control through brutal policing, incarceration, state supervision, exorbitant fines, and forced labor has a long, well-documented history in the United States. The ongoing harm, and devastating legacy of trauma linked to it, disproportionately affects Indigenous and Black communities, the very ones upon whose stolen land and labor this nation’s wealth has been extracted. Dismantling the prison industrial complex MUST be a priority, and yet care should be taken that we do not allow short-term “wins” to inadvertently pave the way for long-term disasters.
For the past month and a half I’ve been attempting to sort out the deep-pocketed interests behind what is being represented as prison “reform.” Many names I encountered were familiar to me from my previous education and impact investing research including the MacArthur, Ford, and Casey Foundations, Arnold Ventures, and Chan Zuckerberg. The same folks aiming to engineer the futures of preschoolers as human capital have their sights on incarcerated populations, too.
There’s actually quite a lot of overlap between communities accepting MacArthur Foundation “Safety + Justice” grants and those involved in “cradle to career” efforts implemented through Strive Together and other “collective impact” organizations. I will discuss this more in future posts, but below is a map to give you a sense of it. Use the link to the interactive version to zoom in and get a closer look.
Interactive map of MacArthur / Strive Together Communities here.
In the impact investing space, the predator class targets the vulnerable, because that’s where the money is. With well-orchestrated PR they often come out looking like the hero. My intent is to disrupt this narrative while alerting activists to the evolving nature of state control as the grip of the Fourth Industrial Revolution tightens. Transnational global capital’s end game? In my assessment it is to digitally incarcerate the world’s poor, in part by co-opting the language of prison “reform” and data-driven “justice.”
Community As Prison
I fear that given rapid advances in the deployment of 5G and “smart” city Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, in the coming decade the criminal justice reform narrative could become inverted, flipping our present understanding of incarceration inside out. In this new paradigm, “community as prison,” one’s movement would be tied to digital identity systems interacting with sensors that can grant or deny access and privileges. This is happening in China now with social credit scoring.
Through augmented reality, those in power can geo-fence the world, coding it not just for the purposes of targeted advertising, but to literally engineer social systems at a massive scale. See the feature image and imagine the cattle replaced with people.
Through continued, systematic criminalization of poverty, large segments of the population could be thrust into state oversight, channeled through community courts, mental health courts, addiction courts, and any number of alternative diversion programs. Once caught in this web they become raw material, set up for data-mining by ed-tech, workforce training, tele-medicine, and tele-therapy interventions to profit self-congratulatory “social impact” investors.
Incarceration is an effective, though immoral, means by which the ruling class manages labor. See how the war on drugs and mandatory minimums fostered the development of profit-making enterprises serving prisons even as massive numbers of jobs were lost to off-shoring / globalization over the past three decades. The possibility that vast pools of surplus labor will soon be created through automation, artificial intelligence and robotics is a serious concern.
It’s hard to imagine what it would look like to build and maintain enough prisons and pay security forces to hold the workers made redundant by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. There must be some cost-benefit analysis out there indicating with proper planning it will be cheaper and create more business opportunities to build open-air digital jails: people forced to find their own food and shelter; drones as guards; Blockchain offering a potent behavior chart, leaderboard, debt account, payment system combo.
Historically, violent policing and expansive carceral efforts have paralleled periods of economic unrest. I hope as I connect the dots between Gaza, Chancheng, Cape Town, and Austin, readers will see that international solidarity is crucial as poor and working class people around the world face off against the machine of militarized transnational global capital. We have a lot to learn from one another, especially those experiencing first hand what it’s like to live under state control.
Impact Investing And Weaponized “Reform”
Austerity has crippled the public sector, allowing it to be commandeered by corporate interests through corrupt partnerships. Esteemed business professors, social policy researchers, foundation program officers, opportunistic government officials, and non-profit CEOs enjoying a “seat at the table” have teamed up to turn poverty into gold under the banner of “social impact.” Investors are scrambling over one another as the last dregs of profit are siphoned from the intense misery created by unbounded capitalist greed.
It is that misery that ensnares millions in judicial nightmares. The precarious nature of the gig economy, wage stagnation, impossible costs of living, and untreated trauma are leading more and more people to engage in survival tactics that run afoul of the law.
That mass incarceration is a profit-making enterprise is well known, but few realize the dangerous and exploitative nature of human capital data markets being established within the prison industrial complex. Provisions for “evidence-based” anti-recidivism interventions written into the 2018 First Step Act support these efforts.
This new mechanism to turn human lives into debt instruments has been made possible by recent developments in the finance and technology sectors. The pay for success schemes (PFS) linked to justice “reform” that are coming online now are branded as “progressive;” however, if one scratches below the surface, even a bit, it is easy to see they in fact double-down on neoliberal policy and open the doors to widespread data-exploitation.
Social impact bonds (SIBs) and PFS are two important items in technocracy’s poverty-mining tool kit. PFS is the term more commonly used now, though both are essentially government contracts for outsourced public services tied to performance metrics; metrics that will eventually be verified by Internet of Things sensors linked to digital identity systems. If you’re curious about the latter, do a keyword search for Vinay Gupta, Mattereum, and Internet of Agreements. Non-profits that sign on to these contracts secure funding from private investors whose profit varies depending on whether or not those serviced meet the agreed-upon “social impact” measures.
Prisons and diversion programs are easy targets for financiers and their nonprofit and higher-ed enablers. Since incarcerated people are systematically and disproportionately impoverished, traumatized, and inflicted with chronic illness and addiction, they represent a vast, relatively untapped reservoir of human capital to be transformed as financialized assets in the speculative scheme of “social impact” finance. In 2019, Bloomberg Philanthropies awarded a million dollar grant to the Philadelphia police department for a “juvenile justice hub” diversion program. Bloomberg also funded the Riker’s Island social impact bond and has advanced a data-driven “what works” approach to public service delivery.
The data-driven framework within which services must be offered poisons the entire enterprise, engendering a culture of scarcity, stress, and perpetual surveillance. Placed on behaviorist pathways, those under state supervision will be expected to conform to the existing broken system, and through their compliance, increase their perceived asset value by delivering the “growth” data technocrats are compelled to present as evidence their interventions “work.” PFS does not offer structural change, but instead allows destructive, privatized systems to continue to wreak havoc on the lives of both service workers and those ostensibly being “served.” The structure of these deals compels individuals to jump through hoop after bureaucratic hoop, their circumstances rarely materially improving, as they generate impact payments for the rich and justify the continued existence of a professional poverty management class.
If you’re new to the blog and want to know more about pay for success finance, I encourage you to read this post that describes a panel presentation I participated in at the Left Forum in July 2019 with the Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign. Justin Leroy, Tim Scott, and Cameron Graham have done groundbreaking work in this area, and links to their work are available on this post along with a video I made about SIBs for those who may want to take a deeper dive.
Global Finance Calls The Shots
As is often the case, reformist language and policies advanced by think-tanks are fundamentally at odds with demands for true reform put forth by incarcerated people, their loved ones, and their communities. Organizations like the Urban Institute and the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments have been promoting broad use of PFS in the criminal justice system.
It is my belief that in the face of rising authoritarianism, growing wealth inequality, intensifying racism, and increasing criminalization of poverty, solidifying a grassroots movement that can begin to dismantle systems of domination OUTSIDE the nonprofit industrial complex is vital. Nonprofits have been remade by Hewlett Packard through a decade of strategic grants to serve the data-driven requirements of the social impact investment sector. We must be clear. The revolution will not be funded; and it most certainly will not be funded through the venture philanthropy of the Rockefeller Foundation, Third Sector Capital Partners, or Sir Ronald Cohen.
As Tim Scott notes in his article, Resistance in the 21st Century and the Futility of Reforming Fundamentally Vicious Systems, “the state-finance nexus reaches deeply into the daily lives of billions of people across the globe…” He goes on to describe complex relationships between finance capital and authoritarian state power, a web of socio-technical control that predicts, course-corrects and integrates resistance into its treacherous operating system.
We are living in a society that attempts to normalize brutality and callousness, even as many individuals see the grave harms being done and attempt to ameliorate suffering where they can. We are dealing with a system of supposed “democracy” that rests as Scott notes in his history of common schooling “on the intersecting structures of capitalism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and hetero-patriarchy.” That profit-taking investments in subjugated populations should be framed as benevolent undertakings comes as no surprise. And yet it is the imperative of all who strive for justice to look beyond these myths, to see the truth, and to circumvent this grotesque system where possible, finding common cause with like-minded folks who are also working to make a different future. Keeping a narrow view and ignoring the bigger picture will not serve us well in the end.
Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley’s call this November for a “People’s Justice Guarantee,” a Green New Deal for criminal justice reform, motivated me to step up my research. While Pressley’s analysis that our criminal legal system is “racist, xenophobic, rogue, and fundamentally flawed,” is totally on point, I have grave concerns that proposals being advanced around diversion and reentry will likely become opportunities for predatory PFS deals.
Massachusetts, Pressley’s home state, launched a ROCA social impact bond in 2014, to provide services to judicially involved youth. Massachusetts is also home to institutions of higher education that are active players in the space. Harvard’s Kennedy School has created and incubated policies to scale many, many PFS projects within its Government Performance Lab, and MIT has refined much of the fin-tech infrastructure needed to run the predictive analytics and begin automating verification of deals. There is a sizable appetite for PFS among Massachusetts’s venture capital crowd, and there will be a terrible temptation to adopt such deals in order to fund services for those caught in the carceral web. Remember, government operates at the behest of global finance.
Alternative sentencing, diversion courts, reentry, and even restorative justice are already being targeted as profit centers for impact investing.
PFS fuels dispossession. I believe that the creation of investment markets to manage people taken into custody as “social impact” commodities will ultimately incentivize policing of Black and Brown communities and the poor and unhoused. This is why I believe the conversation around mass incarceration must ultimately turn to the abolition of incarceration and policing as we know it.
Dehumanized Data-Driven Services
I want to make it clear from the outset that I believe the vast majority of individuals on the ground working in this space are doing it for the right reasons. That said, we must acknowledge the global forces working to restructure the vast US prison system to accommodate new forms of profit taking in a world of 5g, digital surveillance, public private partnerships, and innovative finance. What many well-intentioned people may not yet grasp, because PFS programs are still fairly new, is that data-driven “smart” justice demands service providers turn the people they are trying to help into data. Data collection that serves the interests of private investors in carceral systems is fundamentally exploitative.
Influential foundations have been seeding markets in human capital performance data for quite a few years through targeted grants to established non-profits, progressive think tanks, and professional associations. Meanwhile for-profit prison companies like CoreCivic and Geo Group are expanding “continuum of care” and reentry services, swapping guards for “social workers.”
Tech companies have carved out new markets for their data-mining products, promising to deliver “solutions” that curb recidivism while generating profits for social impact investors. Telecommunications and cloud-based computing interests are eager to manage the petabytes of data generated by “evidence-based” interventions delivered on devices and tracked on dashboards.
Eric Schmidt of Google/Alphabet has said data is the new oil so valuable that nation states will fight over it. We must recognize that the digital carceral systems coming online now will be rich nodes of data (profit) extraction. These emergent landscapes of control will arise from diversion, community courts, alternative sentencing, the end of cash bail, and early-release programs. What is troubling is that these reforms, which are unquestionably better than ongoing confinement, could, in a cruel twist of fate, open the door to an almost unimaginable level of community surveillance.
Inside Out Prisons: Digital Identities in Smart Cities
People on parole in the Chinese cities of Zhongshan and Foshan are being tracked for compliance in “smart” cities on Blockchain; their behaviors linked to social credit scoring. And while we may be inclined to think such a thing could never happen here, Chinese interests, including TenCent of WeChat pay that is involved in digital identity verification in China, maintains sizeable investments in US-based companies, including EPIC Games whose Unreal Engine is being set up for education and healthcare service delivery by synthetic (virtual) people.
In the coming decade we will see the rise of augmented reality (AR) worlds with integral coded layers that serve state interests. The major force behind AR is In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA. Pair Blockchain surveillance with social impact investing tied to digital identity, which is already online with the Amply app in Cape Town; throw in conditional public benefit access run through an e-wallet; maybe some social credit scoring and artificial intelligence decision-making; and suddenly we’ve upgraded to automated techno-fascism where whole swaths of impoverished cities are targeted by sweeps into diversion courts to sustain the rapacious demands of global PFS impact markets.
In a cloud-based, one-click world controlled by transnational global capital, proofs of concept on one side of the planet can show up on the other side in short order. When the power of empire is threatened, when human beings stand in the way of resource extraction, they will be contained and/or eliminated. They’re putting unhoused people on Blockchain in Austin now. If you’re poor in a “smart” city you’re very likely going to end up being predictively profiled into pre-criminality. Far from the imagined utopias we are being sold, “smart” city futures will be built on the brutal legacies of Indian removal, the re-concentration camps of the Spanish American War, and Internment Camps of WWII.
Risk-profiling all who come into custody became a central feature of the prison system in December 2018 when the First Step Act was signed into law. Civil rights groups including The Movement for Black Lives and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights opposed the controversial legislation, which was celebrated in other quarters as a “breakthrough” bipartisan victory. Of particular relevance to my research were concerns about the roll out of a national “Risk Assessment System,” a tool whose development was overseen by the conservative Hudson Institute, and the expansion of electronic monitoring. The baselines created by mandatory risk-screening tool will provide crucial infrastructure to inform PFS predictive analytics.
Prisons will look and feel different in the coming years, and we must factor that into resistance strategies. The web of corporate-state control will become less visible as e-carceration moves from clunky ankle monitors to more expansive digital “community correction” networks. While permitting more mobility for participation in assigned “pathway” programs, devices will begin to capture the data not only of those who are judicially involved, but also that of their families, neighbors, and broader social networks. We must always remember that the Internet is, at its core, a military weapon developed to serve the demands of empire (see Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley for details).
You get a sense of the expanding nature of data collection from those associated with returning citizens in this short video: “Meet Kathy.” Kathy is a “community care coordinator” whose nonprofit is paid whenever a member of Joe’s family meets a performance target on their assigned pathway. Joe’s family has been identified for pathway intervention because he was formerly incarcerated.
Reentry To What?
The brutality of carceral control will not be addressed through minor adjustments to the machine or even a major overhaul. The prison industry is undergoing a transformation framed by the “impact media” as meaningful reform. Vulture philanthropy-funded policy institutes are advancing the premise that we can use performance-based reentry contracts to right the wrongs of racial capitalism. That by carefully measuring gaps in “justice,” those in power will allow us to engineer an efficient route to a non-racist future of reconciliation. But first we need to establish cost offsets so the rich can continue to extract their PFS profit from the machine. The cost to the criminalized poor? Well that is going to be their data and their right to self-determination. That will be the price many will be compelled to pay in order to maintain an engineered life within the panopticon.
I stand with Dr. Angela Davis and Dr. Ruthie Gilmore in support of prison abolition, with the full awareness that the oligarchs’ plans are to make the world a prison. This is a moment that demands international solidarity. We must stand with Gaza, an early test case for biometric border control and with refugees caught in the global aid systems being used to refine biometric-enabled digital payments. We must stand with the people of Chancheng where those on parole are tracked on Blockchain for social credit scoring purposes. We must stand with the children of Cape Town, South Africa where the social capital of preschool children is being monitored on Blockchain with Amply, and with families in Boa Vista, Brazil where cash transfer recipients, the Bolsa Familia, must agree to home visit data being recorded in “digital ledgers” accompanied by digital photographic documentation for impact purposes. We must stand with unhoused folks in Austin, where presidential candidate Bloomberg’s philanthropic dollars are being used to legitimize Blockchain identity systems.
We are witnessing the ramping up of global techno-fascism, a project the ruling class has attempted to wrap in a cloak of “social justice.” Nothing could be further from the truth. None of this is benevolent. These technologies are being advanced quietly now to suppress anticipated dissent later. Digital prisons are being coded around us. Once the masses are no longer of use as consumers, Gates, Omidyar, Zuckerberg and the rest will flip the switch and start to farm us like domesticated livestock, as social impact securities.
Our focus now must be collective liberation. We must stand together with incarcerated people and the global poor who are are on the front lines of human capital exploitation. Ultimately, this machine is coming after everyone. We cannot sit back and watch as it unfolds, because then it will be too late. Now is the time to get organized and take stand for justice. It is time to face off against the global capitalist police state.
My dear friend T nailed it when she said to me, “Reentry to what?”
And indeed that is the question in this era of increased labor automation, militarized policing, and debt finance. Incarceration has always been fundamentally about profitably managing surplus labor through state violence. That hasn’t changed. Which is why we must keep our eyes open and be ready for the next wave. Now is the time for clarity. This system will not be reformed. Once people realize this, new doors open and together we can begin to chart a revolutionary course forward, centering community-led restorative practice and right relations among the peoples of the world.
Next Up
Topics I plan to explore in future installments include:
UN Sustainability Development Goal 16 and the push to measure “justice
How the First Step Act’s risk assessment tool will underpin PFS
MacArthur Foundation, Risk Profiling, Smart Cities, and Public Safety
How Every Student Succeeds Act and Second Chance Pell Grant Act Enable Tablet-Based Profiling and Profit-Taking
The video below is public testimony I gave to the Jobs and Education Subcommittee of Philadelphia City Council’s Special Committee on Poverty Reduction and Prevention on Thursday December 5, 2019 at Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School in North Philadelphia. It is my belief that this committee was created to jump start pay for success initiatives in our city, a city of deep poverty. You can read about the predatory nature of pay for success finance here.
In 2016, the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia prepared a white paper lauding Philadelphia’s potential to become a center for the impact economy. Perhaps we could even aspire to be the Silicon Valley of “impact!” Yes, we have THAT MUCH poverty, and Main Line venture capital interests are falling all over themselves to package the data of misery management for a tidy profit. See my previous post on social impact investing and public education in Philadelphia.
Here is my testimony. It’s about ten minutes long.
*Correction. I misspoke at the beginning of my testimony. Mass school closures in Philadelphia took place in 2015 not 2013.
It was SUCH a long hearing with six official panels and over twenty “approved” speakers. As the final panel wrapped up two-and-a-half hours later, I inquired to see where I was on the list of public speakers. A small group of us, including two wonderful kids who had kept themselves busy drawing on the extra agendas, had been sitting patiently with our banner (Children Are Not Data, Human Capital, Or Impact Investing Opportunities-see featured image) all that time. Only then was I was told there would be only ONE more speaker. The rest of the twenty-plus folks, including me, who had pre-registered with the intention of sharing our thoughts on education, workforce development, and poverty, were out of luck. Too bad.
At that point I loudly protested. I had shared 30+ copies of my testimony with a bunch of folks in the audience letting them know I was on the list to speak. I saw a lot of people reading it. They knew I had things to say, and quite a few nodded in agreement when I spoke up. Ultimately the subcommittee, chaired by Sharmain Matlock-Turner of the Urban Affairs Coalition, acquiesced, allowing those speakers who hadn’t already left (eight of us) to testify. Somehow they STILL left my name off the list even though I had email confirmation from Councilwoman Quinones-Sanchez’s legislative aide who was coordinating that part of the event. Finally, I was told I could sit in the front row. I was the last one to speak.
It should be noted that Pedro Ramos, former School Reform Commission member, president of the Philadelphia Foundation and advisor to ImpactPHL, left before any members of the public came up to testify. During the “official” panel discussion he had inquired about out-of school work-based learning (including what policy changes would need to be made to allow this to happen in public schools), citing the Christo Rey School franchise as a model. Christo Rey seems to have a rising profile in San Jose, too. San Jose is another City of LRNG with many similarities to Philadelphia, which I describe here. This is something we need keep an eye on given the Vatican’s expressed interest in impact investing.
In my testimony I reference the “Parents As Consumer” symposium that Social Innovation Partners had planned for last June. That event ended up being abruptly cancelled when word got out about the agenda, which included both pay for success AND Education Savings Accounts.
Among the panelists planning to participate in the event, which was hosted by Bucks County State Representative Frank Farry and Nicholas Torres’s impact-investment catalyst Social Innovations Journal, was Brian McElwee. McElwee is an investor, but not just any investor. He is apparently known as a “finder,” which according to an investigative article on him from the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2016 is a kind of matchmaker who connects investment professionals to elected officials who control government contracts. McElwee is also board chair of Independence Mission Schools, a non-parish affiliated Catholic school non-profit that was set up in 2012 to run urban schools in Philadelphia, schools where I expect there is a lot of potential for “measurable impact.”
Even though the symposium was ultimately cancelled, that event is significant. We must recognize that faith-based initiatives will be a growing aspect of privatization efforts moving forward, and families who have children in ESA-funded alternative work-based Catholic schools are likely to be subjected not only to the expectation of compulsory child labor, but that their data will be harvested for impact investing deals tied to pay for success.
After a very long wait, on my birthday no less, I felt vindicated. Even though there were only about twenty people left in the audience by the time I presented, I was able to add my extensive findings to the public record. I also asked for the California NAACP resolution opposing linking Blockchain digital identity to public benefit systems, which I referenced at the previous hearing on housing, be added to the record.
Below is that resolution, adopted in the spring of 2019. A similar resolution passed, with overwhelming support, at the national meeting of the NAACP in Detroit in July. I believe the model legislation presented here will be useful in helping educate the public about the dangers of digital tracking systems and to protect targeted populations from predatory finance and Internet of Things surveillance. I encourage folks to bring this information to the organizations of which you are a part, and encourage them to adopt or adapt it to your needs. We need to be proactive as the push to link digital vouchers to pay for success human capital contracts begins to ramp up.
I streamed my testimony, and people around the country are watching it. It seems I have been able to put the pieces together in ways others have not. Once we start to see the bigger picture, identifying resistance strategies becomespossible. Active non-cooperation is key as my hero John Trudell said. And you know what? People genuinely seemed to appreciate it. Sure it is upsetting information, but better to know so we can plan.
Together we can carve solidarity out of the dystopia capitalism has created. Time to look squarely at the truth and prepare for an age of automation and human capital debt-finance.
All we have is each other. Love and peace folks.
My testimony:
We are living in a time of extreme wealth and devastating poverty. The future of work is highly uncertain. Based on pronouncements from the Markle Foundation, the Aspen Institute, Pearson, and Tom Vander Ark’s Global Education Futures Initiative, we need to be paying attention to the rise of artificial intelligence, globalized, platformed labor, and human-robot collaboration.
The MacArthur Foundation and its spin-off, Collective Shift, have spent millions of dollars promoting gamified digital media and learning. Philadelphia is one of their pilot Cities of LRNG. Many LRNG cities are also “smart” cities: Dallas, Chicago, San Diego, and San Jose among them. Digital learning is central to the premise of the “learning ecosystem” advanced by Knowledgeworks, based in Cincinnati, and its “Cradle to Career” social impact offshoot StriveTogether. The latter works closely with the United Way through a “collective impact” network focused on predatory pay for success human capital management.
Those in power have reimagined education, and in this future:
Decentralized learning ecosystems replace bricks and mortar schools.
Learning is privatized, outsourced to online providers, non-profits, and corporations.
There are a few community drop-in centers, mostly staffed by AmeriCorps youth.
Academic and behavioral competencies are kept in online learning record stores.
AI “mentors” and “synthetic people” supplant human teachers and peers.
Learning is “engineered” by neuroscientists.
Internet of Things sensors and xAPI impose educational surveillance.
Badges, developed in partnership with Mozilla, substitute for degrees.
“Lifelong learning” is funded using digital vouchers that link payment to the delivery of specified performance metrics.
Accept vouchers? Hand over the data. In this way even homeschool families are sucked in.
Algorithms screen job candidates’ stackable credentials along with psychographic information pulled from custom-designed HR video games.
Black and Brown children are risk-profiled from birth and plugged into planned regional economies (or incarceration or the military) managed for the benefit of the corporate state (increasingly Google and cyber-defense interests).
In this future, “opportunity youth” are trained as “middle-skill” fodder for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Dehumanized education employs “virtual apprenticeships” upon which Lumina, Salesforce, and the Robin Hood Foundation place wagers-betting for and against a person’s life outcomes data. That seems to be what motivated bipartisan support for the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, the pay for success provision of the ESSA, seed funding from the Social Impact Partnerships Pay for Results Act to get the ball rolling. Evidently there is a lot of money to be made gambling on poor people.
People are being sold on coding as a pathway out of poverty, not realizing it’s this generation’s piecework. STEM sweatshops to build augmented reality “smart” worlds for those who run the cloud and the hedge funds that finance them will start to emerge in federal Opportunity Zones. Digital-on ramps, put in place by Michael and Lisa Nutter years ago with “smart city” money from IBM, wait in the wings as the Philadelphia Education Fund’s STEM ecosystem ramps up. Authentic knowledge will be replaced with isolating online learning, out-of-school time education, Pokémon-Go-style micro-knowledge aligned to the interests of funders like Dow, Chevron, Amgen, and Motorola.
Those in power see children as raw material to be run through the federal labor database O*NET, in Raleigh; “eds and meds,” skills delivered in quantities sufficient to suppress wages while optimizing profit. Meanwhile educational pathways are tracked for value-added “growth” data to run “pay for success” futures markets. Learning Machine has set up Blockchain transcripts with Paul Leblanc at SNHU. Dr. Hite served with him as an educational advisor at Ridge Lane Limited Partners. But whom should we ask about Amply, the pre-k Blockchain identity app launched by Innovation Edge in Cape Town? I hear folks in Philadelphia have been briefed, but I don’t know who’s the project lead.
Worker productivity is high, wages low, and precarious employment the norm. Closed-door deals are struck as Chamber of Commerce insiders line up the policy, finance, and technological infrastructure needed to control the masses. Pay for success, MoneyBall “What Works” Government, behavioral economics, the nudge…every policy wonk, philanthropist, global consultant and sold-out academic pitches techno-solutions for poverty as the Federal Reserve looks on pretending compliance by the oppressed will somehow magically bring them prosperity.
No, justice will not come from more data. What we need is the will to redistribute resources from a billionaire class steeped in white supremacy. Resources must go directly to poor folks; self-determination is key. It is wrong to channel money through intermediaries whose continued existence depends on intractable poverty.
Solidarity not charity!
Instead of coffels, digital peonage will chain people through biometric digital identity linked to public benefits. Eventually, if they get their way, this will include Education Savings Accounts to purchase competency-based education on the open market, the data being fed back into pay for success education deals. Look up State Representative Frank Farry and Social Innovations Journal’s “Parents As Consumers Symposium” planned for June 15, 2018, but abruptly cancelled. The agenda clearly describes the goal of linking ESAs to pay for success.
And so we are here at Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School to discuss education and poverty. Some still trust elected officials to deliver their children opportunities for stable lives presuming they work hard; and yet the reality of pending labor automation is harsh and unforgiving. Who’s going to tell the public there will be no more shop teachers, that the plan is outsourced work-based learning? No one is going to say they are replacing neighborhood schools with IBM and Ford training centers. No one wants to admit the National Center on Education and the Economy’s proposal laid out by Marc Tucker in the “Dear Hillary Letter” is ready to launch; that most future jobs will be gigs, and even those gigs will only go to those with the right sort of human capital. Behavioral data is becoming social credit currency. Build up your brand starting in pre-k, maybe at a Hatch Education surveillance play table. Those in power are watching, always watching; and the rise of robot class means people are becoming more and more disposable.
The United States compulsory education system has been used, since its inception, to reinforce divisions of race and class. It delivers human capital to meet industrial interests: youth trained just enough to do the work required, but not to imagine a future beyond the one defined by the pathways on which they are put. What is needed to eliminate poverty is revolutionary transformation. Poverty “reduction” is not about narrowing gaps. That rift was ALREADY far too great even as the founding fathers hammered out our duplicitous constitution. The system isn’t broken. Trump didn’t break it. Neither did DeVos. Our education system is working exactly as intended.
Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
“With false generosity he attempts not only to preserve an unjust and neocrophilic order, but to “buy” peace for himself. It happens that peace cannot be bought; peace is experienced in solidarity and loving acts, which cannot be incarnated in oppression.”
We need to become conscious, we need the oppressed to wake up to the sinister intent of the planned Fourth Industrial Revolution, and we need education for liberation.
Liberation will not be attained through an appointed committee.
It is created in the streets, doing the work with love and solidarity.
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to return to the Seattle area, visit with fellow education activists, and present at the Kent Regional Library. I was last in Seattle in the spring of 2017 when I gave a talk on Future-Ready Schools at the Lake City Library. If you missed that one, you can watch it on KODX’s youtube channel here.
The video below is a voice recording of the talk I gave on November 2, 2019 along with the slides I presented that day. Be forewarned, it’s a long talk, two solid hours and over 120 slides. I apologize for the delay in getting it put together, but better late than never. You can access the slides directly via my google drive here or PDF here. Those images are clearer, so if you want to zoom in and read the text use the links.
This talk builds on the ed-tech research I presented two and a half years ago with much more information on pay for success finance and the ways in which ed-tech and predictive profiling are laying the groundwork for speculative global markets in human capital data. There are a lot of really good infographics, so spend some time with those.
The Kent School District, a member of the League of Innovative Schools affiliated with Digital Promise, has seen widespread adoption of technology in classrooms and a shift towards work-based career pathways. There is a growing sense of unease about these changes, which is why I was invited.
Many corporations advancing ed-tech (Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) have a significant presence in the greater Seattle area. This talk gave me the opportunity to examine some of the key players working to align public education to the precarious, “just-in-time” labor demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution being promoted by Governor Jay Inslee. It also touches on Inslee’s push for maternal home visits I’ve written about here, and adoption of the Swiss apprenticeship model I’ve written about here.
I’m grateful to have had this invitation extended and for the connections made. I hope it helps those who came to the talk as well as those who watch it online to make sense of the policies that are rolling out and better understand what is motivating these changes. We have to understand the landscape in which we are operating in order to effectively resist. I welcome your thoughts and questions in the comments.
