The Financial Tyranny of the Inscrutable Algorithm

Escaping the devil ex machina of automated (or manually targeted) monetary censorship

Fair warning: there are spoilers for the first 3 seasons of HBO’s Westworld and the movie Ex Machina below (if you’re planning to see them, go watch, then come back. I’ll wait).

One of the most pressing problem we face that no one talks about: banks, Paypal, brokerage firms and all other financial services providers can shut you down and freeze your funds without any explanation or due process.

This happened to me with Paypal (many $1000s of dollars frozen for 6 months, by default) and one of my recently opened online business checking accounts.

There was never any explanation and no one I could talk to that knew anything (or was willing to say anything). It was apparently just that ubiquitous modern every day reality of the tyranny of the algorithm. Targeting by rudimentary AI systems, for obscure reasons that the creators of the (more advanced) software may not even understand themselves.

Modern AI for those that don’t realize it are trained on gigantic data sets and discover patterns unseeable to human minds. They “think” in alien ways. They do things for inscrutable reasons. They do not play Chess or Go or make any “decisions” in any context the way we humans do. They often seem to make stupid or outlandish decisions that later turn out to be the most masterful of “4-D Chess” maneuvers.

Our movies and television shows have long toyed with this (predictive?) programming, e.g. in Tom Cruise’s Minority Report, people are captured by the pre-crime unit for crimes they were about to commit.

This doesn’t seem fair. What if there is a mistake, even if only rarely? Isn’t even one person unjustly imprisoned intolerable in a society that values fairness and has a legal maxim of innocent until proven guilty?

Nevertheless our justice system is moving ahead with AI systems to help clear court dockets, predictive policing, and opaque algorithms are now making decisions about our bankability.

I was luckier than many poor souls (the average American has no savings), because I had multiple other accounts that stayed up and didn’t need the money before it was unfrozen, but what if all my accounts were to get frozen at once?

If it can happen to two of them it can happen to all of them. If you stand out in the wrong way or get noticed by the wrong people your personal life and business can be destroyed, seemingly without any accountability.

Monetary seizure happened to the truckers in Canada, and it’s happening right now to an inconvenient politician in England. Soon enough any dissent of any kind (including those refusing shots) will result in total monetary censorship. The inability to make, keep or use (government) money. Forced bankruptcy. Subjugation.

And it’s not just our money (hint: it’s not really ours). By whose authority do you really own anything?

Is that really your car or house or stock portfolio?

In 1967, Hawaii passed a law to address the fact that only seventy-two private landowners owned almost half of the property in the State. The law transferred legal titles from these landowners to lessees. In Midkiff (1984), the Court unanimously held that this law did not violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment because the “‘public use’ requirement is… coterminous with the scope of a sovereign’s police powers.” In other words, as long as the government is seizing property to advance the public good, the taking satisfies the Public Use Clause. Justice O’Connor, writing for the Court, put this point bluntly: “The mere fact that property taken outright by eminent domain is transferred… to private beneficiaries does not condemn that taking as having only a private purpose.” Since the law in question could plausibly be said to benefit the public, the Court deemed it constitutionally permissible.

(source: https://legaljournal.princeton.edu/the-supreme-courts-perversion-of-property-rights/) 

The state ultimately enforces property rights, what belongs to whom, and can appropriate or expropriate whatever it wants and redistribute as it sees fit.

Even though the Founding Fathers left us with more sovereignty than any similarly sized country had enjoyed before, the long arc of human history always seems to bend back towards tyranny and we’ve slowly gone from no income tax in this country to being accustomed to paying higher and higher taxes on our productivity over the last century, while our savings are destroyed by monetary inflation which is really just a hidden tax on our wealth whereby the banking elite get to create money from nothing by “lending out” something they don’t actually have, essentially stealing purchasing power from everyone else: i.e. economically enslaving everyone else.

The reality of fractional reserve banking is this: blood sucking parasites feeding off everyone else in society.

The most productive members of society enjoy this the way a vampires familiar enjoys a fraction of the vampires power.

We the people need our own sovereign monetary system: meaning un-seizable money and a private, un-censorable network to transact in that money.

There are only two feasible options that might work: Monetary metals (gold/silver) or Bitcoin, and neither has the widespread adoption necessary to truly serve the modern industrial societies purpose of censorship resistant peer to peer internet (or even offline) money at scale.

Both of these savings technology can be and are already being used in some small localities to power circular economies and maybe that off-grid setting will prove to be the last refuge of the censored.

If that’s what happens it will probably be a delightful life compared to the hyper-connected information-overloaded world most of us inhabit, but a truly free people must be able to make that decision for themselves.

The only way to give everyone that choice is if enough people opt out into a censorship resistant system or at least take part in it. Money is just a network. If enough people accept an electronic claim on independently stored Gold or naturally decentralized Bitcoin then the government can’t effectively censor dissidents by trying to cut them off from economic activity.

But right now the vast majority of people still don’t see the writing on the wall. For now the only option I see that offers any insulation from this threat is to keep some things of value as far outside the system as possible.

Your morality, knowledge and experience are your primary forms of sovereign wealth - they can’t easily be seized by anyone (and your morality is the only thing that not even old age, infirmity or dementia can steal).

Next, requiring more effort to store: physical gold hidden somewhere on this vast planet where no one else can find it and the treasure map (or the key to deciphering it) resides in your head alone, or Bitcoin held in cold storage with the same caveats. Everything else can be seized by someone with more guns, which brings us to guns and ammo.

If things really go south the ability to defend your homestead may come down to the amount of firepower under your control.

Many people are now heading for the hills to become self sufficient before they are forced into penury. Gold, Goats and Guns is a great podcast by astute political commentator/”conspiracy realist” Tom Luongo, which hints at the usefulness of your own livestock, and by extension other food like poultry, eggs, and vegetables.

It’s actually possible for almost anyone to grow some vegetables, even in an apartment.

If you get deep down the rabbit hole of survivalism you’ll find people stocking up for the end of the world, arranging a source of water, off-grid power, antibiotic stores, etc. When supply chain disruption became a real concern and I realized that our antibiotic supplies heavily depend on India and China, I started prescribing antibiotic kits in case of emergency. I was surprised to learn that contrary to popular belief antibiotics last almost indefinitely: in US government tests they retained over 90% efficacy after 20 years - close enough to full potency that the dosage directions wouldn’t even change. Quite a few patients have put these in their medicine cabinets.

As compelling as it is for many people to be self sufficient and ready for any eventuality, this is not a recipe for advancing a technological civilization, it’s a regression that destroys the specialization necessary to sustain an advanced economy and puts us back in a pre-industrial, agrarian world.

Modern societies are fraught with problems, and we certainly need to design more healthful cultures and surroundings, but I hope we don’t go so far backwards that we all have to become self sufficient again.

I think it would be great fun to farm and shepherd goats, but I’d also like to keep writing, treating patients at mygotodoc, and spreading the word on the harms of the shots and treatments via longcovidreset.com and pro.longcovidreset.com. Goats would be a nice pastime, but I would also love to learn how to hunt, fish and sail in my free time, rather than be forced to manual labor for food.

Specialization is a beautiful thing that draws out the quintessence of people. I’d like scientists to be able to continue advancing our knowledge of advanced mathematics, physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, etc. The wonder of the natural world is one of the primary ways we know God and the innate desire to pursue this knowledge is part of our nature.

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I believe in the Judeo Christian ethic of working hard and giving back without big government. My online clinic, mygotodoc.com, exemplifies that by charging a fee that is well worth the service, but also offering free medical answers and free (asynchronous) care/prescriptions for anyone on request.

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