100 years too early

The 2173 in the name of this blog refers to the year, 2173. The year was 200 years in the future from 1973, when the futurist comedy "Sleeper"was made. 

Turns out, it's 100 years too late. There's a movie out (coming out) called 2073 that uses real-life footage from today's news to tell a story of a future apocalyptic hellscape. It caught my attention because of the title and because I'd been outlining a piece of fiction using the same primary sources.

Wikipedia says:

"2073 is a 2024 British science fiction docudrama film directed by Asif Kapadia. Set in a dystopian future, the film is inspired by Chris Marker's 1962 featurette La Jetée. It follows a time traveller who risks his life to change the course of history and save the future of humanity.

The documentary premiered out of competition at the 81st Venice International Film Festival on 3 September 2024.^"

You're welcome. Maybe 2173 will be when things turn again from the bleakness to something good.

In Authoritarian America, first, they came for Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine

It's amazing to me, that a time when the nonprofit and philanthropic sector in the USA should be running around screaming "house on fire" (very bad metaphor for a Californian), most seem to to be just plodding along. I am hopeful that they're being digitally savvy; shifting to encrypted platforms, scrubbing their websites of information that will enable doxxing of volunteers, constituents, staff and boar; red-teaming their governance policies and crossing every T; dotting every i on their financial statements; meeting with lawyers; raising funds for legal defense.  

                                                Photo by Dalton Abraham, Unsplash

They must not only worry about the official US government under Trusk. Worry about #KingMusk himself. And his minions. And his berserk followers. And his allies in the Russian and Chinese hacking communities. Want to know what harassment of your organization might look like? Look at what's happening with Wikipedia/Wikimedia Foundation. 

The Heritage Foundation (home to Project Esther and Project 2025) is preparing to use facial recognition and online sources to dox contributors to Wikipedia. They claim this has something to do with antisemitism. BS. They'll go after Jewish and Palestinian issues first but they're really trying to take down THE site that the global public turns to when disaster, war, corruption strike. They've also gone after The Internet Archive, home to the Wayback Machine, which is the oft-cited "backup" of the internet. Lawsuits are one strategy (see Internet Archive). Doxxing and harassment are another strategy (See Heritage and Wikimedia)

Public Citizen has been on the offensive, opposing OpenAI's efforts to abandon its nonprofit status without returning to the public the value of its tax exempt status to date (an estimated $30 Billion). Thank goodness for that, because letting tech entrepreneurs have free rein over the nonprofit tax exemption is a nightmare I'd rather not consider. 

But what about suing Heritage for violating tax laws or reckless endangerment? What about pulling the old trick that I love watching backfire on Texas - pass a law banning sexual content in books in schools, only to discover you must now remove the Bible. With the low quality of expected appointees to places like the IRS, the FTC, and the FEC, smart lawyers on the center - left ought to be able to find gaps in their legislation big enough to drive a truck (or the Heritage Foundation itself) through. 

What about offense? 48.3 percent of voters didn't vote for this coming nightmare. Basically 1 in 2 of us. Rally us. Mobilize us. Listen to us, we are civil society.

The #Blueprint Series - (#16 launches on January 15 - get your free copy here) - has been tracking, commenting on, jumping up and down about the steady deliberate corruption of democratic norms undertaken by the #GOP for the last decade and a half, preceding even the Citizens United debacle. I can only hope people have read it and responded by taking their digital security (and physical security of volunteers, staff, boards, and constituents) seriously. Partnering with similar organizations to build a legal defense fund. Getting good legal advice. Workshopping messages about the importance of a diverse, pluralistic, fragmented and abundant nonprofit sector (What we have at the start of 2025. Who knows what will be left by 2028). 

Donors and philanthropists - you're not safe in this, so don't sit back and watch. Foundations will be interrogated. Donors will be doxxed. Some philanthropists will cave, if they haven't already while wearing their CEO hat (see Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.). Some will be targeted and made boogeyman in ways worse than the decades of lies the GOP has trafficked about George Soros. Women donors and networks? I'd expect little good and lots of bad from the misogynists-in-chief.

The Democracy Funders Network is out with some more preparatory guidelines - access those here. 

Both Wikimedia and the Internet Archive are well-established, cornerstone organizations of civil society. They were at the forefront of our collective conversion to digital civil society. We need both of them to survive.

And so it begins

Remember this post - from a few days ago - about how I was marking a baseline for free speech in the USA? 

I'm still speaking my mind, but looks like the mainstream press is having a tougher time. Several senior editors and reporters have left the Washington Post, including political cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who resigned when King Bezos's minions killed her cartoon about supplicant tech execs. 

Below is the cartoon the paper chose not to run:

 

(c) Copyright Ann Telnaes

 

First they kill cartoons, then they kill stories on the EPIC corruption we can expect from this White House and it's actual - though by no means elected - chief decision maker, #EmperorMusk. 

 

As I've said repeatedly over the years, the nonproift sector in the USA has much to learn from the past two decades of the hollowed out journalism industry.  It also has much to fear from the press's capitulation to POTUS and his tempermental vindictiveness.

It's not just the WashPost. Did you read in the paper about the manifesto written by the guy (US born, white) who blew up a cybertruck in front of a Trump Hotel? No, you didn't. Because, as is being reported now that the story has moved off the front pages, the guy was a big fan of #KingMusk, the president-elect, and RFK, Jr. Domestic terrorism by "their" guys, apparently, is not the kind of news they want being told.

                                                           Image accessed on Reddit

But that part got left out of a lot of news coverage, pretty much all of it. 

The U.S. press has already caved to the incoming administration. I have long subscribed to The Guardian, and am now also following several Canadian, Australian, and South African papers online. If I could read another language besides English well enough to follow the news, I'd draw from other places as well. 

What on earth does this have to do with philanthropy? Have you donated* to a nonprofit news site that you depend on? If in the USA, are you ready to protect PBS and NPR? Because once they destroy the independence of the media, they can commence the greatest grift ever attempted - the #billionaire suck on the U.S. federal government teat.

*If any of you philanthropy insiders are aware of a legal defense fund for these news sites, I'd love to know about it. If you are donating** to such a site, give a little more if you can - they are going to be sued by you know who.

**Despite what every piece of mail you received prior to December 31st said, that was not your last chance to donate. It was your last chance to itemize your donation on your 2024 taxes. Chances are, you don't itemize anyway. And, if you do, you can just itemize it for 2025.

Bots v bots and public v private

Rob Reich, political scientist at Stanford, and colleagues Mehran Sahami and Jeremy Weinstein teach a class on ethics in computer science. One example they use in class is of an app fights parking tickets. A pretty basic AI system, the app helps drivers submit an appeal to the ticketing city. Lots of jurisdictions make "showing up for the hearing" the key moment of jurisprudence - hearings only occur if the driver goes through the hassle of appealing. For drivers, it's a matter of filing an appeak and attending just one hearing. For the cops who write the tickets, they may be part of dozens or more hearings each year, depending on how many tickets are issued and appealed. The appeals process is annoying enough that most drivers will just pay a ticket. But if they use the app to file their appeal, the work load shifts from the driver (who still must show up to the hearing) to the cop who issued the ticket. 

The app helps a lot of folks get out of parking tickets. 

                                                        Photo by Waldemar on Unsplash 

Parking tickets are a public good problem. They are a way for cities to enforce parking rules, which one can hope are developed with an eye toward spreading the benefits of available space across the greatest number and type of users (drivers, store owners, pedestrians, shoppers, trucks making deliveries, etc). There is a public good involved - following the rules and paying into the shared pot (the fees to the city) when you don't. 

So using the parking ticket app is not only a but of a cheat, it's a cheating of the public good for the benefit of a driver with a smart phone who wants to break the rules and not pay. Not a lot of sympathy for this app from the professors. 

Today, I learned of a new app, that couldn't be a more timely twist on the conundrum of the parking ticket app. It's name gives it away - FightHealthInsurance.com. It's a website where you can file appeals when your insurance company (to whom you pay premiums, and co-pays, and out of pocket expenses, and co-insurance) refuses to pay for a procedure or pharmaceutical that your doctor has prescribed. 

There's lots of private goods in here. Have you ever appealed to your insurance company? Its a pain, everyone apologizes, no one knows or will tell why things are being rejected, it pits people who are not medical doctors against systems filled with them, it can involve days on the phone, and - in the clearest sign they don't want you to do this - it requires faxing forms. The website uses your rejection letter and your insurance plan documentation to argue that the procedure should be covered - it's designed to help the individual. The individual who is already sick or they wouldn't be in this mess, who is paying the insurance company so it will cover medical expenses. The goal is to get coverage from the insurance provider. In the USA that insurance provider is a commercial company. Unlike the parking app, there is no role here for the public treasury, it's people versus insurance companies. 

So, if the private individual wins their appeal and the insurance company loses, do we care? It's one tiny hit to their massive profits. We know the insurance companies use AI to deny their customers the very product they pay for.  I find it hard to feel bad for the customer tossing a little AI right back at the company. 

Is it fair? I'm sorry, have you not been paying attention? Nothing in the US is fair; certainly nothing related to insurance. 

Is it fair that down the road this might raise insurance rates for other people? Really? The companies raise their rates every year for pure profit motives, what makes you think they would stop just because they had to honor a few claims they tried to reject? If its an AI v AI battle, and a person v a company, my preference is for the person's AI to beat the company's AI. For one thing, you can bet the company has the resources to keep finessing its AI to not get beat, whereas the person is sick, tired, and wrestling with paperwork. For a product they already paid for (insurance). 

If more AI were tilted toward helping the little guy, I'd love AI a little more than I do (which is to say, I don't, because it's built by and for, centralized power).

TL;DR - we're about to live in a world where my bot fights company bots. This will be called the age of AI Agents. #Nonprofits - it results in bots v bots, do not engage, do not participate, step away from the computer keyboard and the bright shiny thing.