Witches brew

Sometimes, and lately a lot, what was imagined becomes real.

Last week, Spain stopped crypto company World Coin from gathering eyeball scans in exchange for a few coins. The company which does the scans through a contraption called an “orb” is capitalized at $3 billion. It says the project is “for humanity.”

This is such an old trick. Like the snake oil salesman on the back of the wagon at an old country fair telling you it will cure all your aches and pains. The salesman is of course in it for the money.

The founder of World Coin is also a founder of OpenAI which was registered as a nonprofit dedicated to the “safe and beneficial” use of artificial intelligence. It quickly set up a for-profit arm into which Microsoft invested $10 billion.

Connected to that is news from a couple weeks ago that Amazon and others are investing in companies that combine robots with artificial intelligence. In science fiction, the robot that looks like a human is called an android.

And the World Coin eyeball scan is meant to establish “personhood,” in other words differentiate between humans and androids.

So the race is on to control, through the private rather than the public sector, money used in human transactions and create androids so close to humans that only the eye scan can tell the difference.

In the 1982 movie "Blade Runner," that is how the police search for rogue androids, by putting a scanner up to their eyeballs and judging the reaction when questions are asked. Not identical but pretty darn close.

Jumping to another, older movie, I never saw the 1969 movie "Easy Rider" which is one of the American Film Institute’s top 100. Watching it now for the first time, I was struck by the movie’s basic conflict which can be summarized as longhairs versus crackers.

That was more than fifty years ago. But is there a similar convulsion going on now — a building cultural divide so deep and wide that American society has no common ground left and is consumed by the battle within.

Winding through that wilderness of observations, I would then advance the theory that the divide is a possible explanation for the current paradox between an economy that is humming along just fine and the president’s abysmal poll numbers on that same issue.

The percentage of people who say they are financially “comfortable” has jumped five points in the last four months to 48%, according to a Financial Times poll published this week. During the same period, the president’s numbers on his handling of the economy stayed flat at 36%.

Rationality has nothing to do with it.

What matters in these times is what you believe. And a majority believe the president is mishandling the economy despite 275,000 new jobs last month, unemployment at 3.9%, and inflation hovering around 3%.

That belief goes hand in hand with the overarching notion that the state of things in America is messed up right now, put another way, that we are going in the wrong direction. For those who so believe, and there are many, then they might ask, what do I have the power to change. And knocking those in power out of power is a way to change things. Unfortunately, for the worse.

Lastly, there is a phenomenon discussed among economists called “the wealth pump” where money is funneled upwards from the poor to the rich, said to be pumping away since the 1970s. That is, during the same period the countervailing trickle-down theory was popularized by Ronald Reagan.

The difficult-to-fathom enormity of wealth accumulation in the tech industry (see Google’s stranglehold on internet searches) is an in-your-face demonstration of the wealth pump in action.

So to put it all together. Our very identity as humans is under siege, the culture of our times has split the common ground, the economy is amassing wealth at one end of the economic spectrum and taking it away from the other.

And into that pot of trouble, you add the chance that small nuclear weapons will be used by Russia if it feels under attack, and that, as is already happening, drones will continue their rise as the deliverers of indiscriminate death on multiplying battlefields around our beautiful orb.

The sum is the alchemy for some very strange times ahead.

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