I’d like to begin this post by taking a moment to think about the roots of the word crisis, where it comes from, and its etymology. The word originates from the Greek krisis, meaning “decisive moment”.
Graph showing the etymological progression of the word “crisis”.
In the early 15th century, crisis was taken to mean a “decisive point in the progress of a disease,” as well as “vitally important or decisive state of things, point at which change must come, for better or worse,”. This came from the Latinised form of the Greek krisis.
In the context of our learning thus far, it is interesting that it was in the 15th century that the word was directly linked to disease. In the century following the Black Death, it appeared that crisis and memories of disease become linked in the collective linguistic psyche of the English world.
Koselleck delves deeply into distinctions between definitions of crisis in political, medical and social language. An aspect of his text which stood out most prominently was the bringing together of all these very different areas. “At all times the concept is applied to life-deciding alternatives meant to answer questions about what is just or unjust, what contributes to salvation or damnation, what furthers health or brings death.” (361).
The cohesiveness of defining crisis as a concept applied to life-deciding alternatives is interesting in light of topics covered. In relation to climate change, it is a question of justice or lack thereof when considering the economic inequality inherent in climate change. In relation to plague, ideas of salvation or damnation relate to religious beliefs about the cause of plague.
References Koselleck, Reinhart, and Michaela W. Richter. “Crisis.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 67, no. 2, 2006, pp. 357–400. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30141882. Accessed 26 Mar. 2021.
Parker’s “Did Someone Say ‘Climate Change’?” lays out the ways in which climate change has significantly affected humanity throughout history. To be confronted with the very real crisis extreme weather brings about in quantitive terms was shocking, however this was made all the more shocking when upon doing some of my own research I found that “data released in 2020 shows that the average global surface temperature has risen over 1 degree Celsius—about 2 degrees Fahrenheit—since the pre-industrial 19th century. That’s faster than at any other time in the Earth’s history—roughly eight times faster than the global warming that occurred after the ice ages.” (Amadeo) Comparatively, Parker states: “Finally, in the mid-seventeenth century, the earth experienced some of the coldest weather recorded in over a millennium. Perhaps one-third of the human population died.” (15)
When reading the two in tandem, the rate at which the climate change is currently occurring and escalating led me to consider the ways in which we may see climate change affect parts of life that we don’t traditionally associate with extreme weather. When thinking of climate change, images of natural disasters and extreme conditions come to mind. It is less common to consider factors like disease or GDP when thinking about modern climate change.
An example of the modern impacts of climate change
This interested me greatly, and I was surprised at the amount daily, economic factors which climate change affects.
Insurance An increase in extreme weather occurrences will naturally lead to an increase in insurance premiums. This may become unattainable for some, leaving them uninsured in case of this extreme weather. The 2018 California wildfires say $18b dollars of insured damage (of $24b total), meaning insurance companies may begin raising their premiums as this extreme weather becomes more frequent.
GDP A 2015 Stanford study has found that there is a 71% change climate change will have a negative impact on global GDP. The study found there was a 51% chance that global GDP could fall by 20%. To contextualise this, GDP fell 26.7% during the Great Depression.
Economic Inequality
It is impossible to discuss GDP without considering the economic inequality this brings. A Stanford News piece found that “the gap between the group of nations with the highest and lowest economic output per person is now approximately 25 percent larger than it would have been without climate change” and “the biggest emitters enjoy on average about 10 percent higher per capita GDP today than they would have in a world without warming”. (Garthwaite) This climate driven fall in GDP is therefore clearly likelier to affect those countries already most economically vulnerable.
Immigration As natural disasters increase in frequency, the devastation they bring will lead to an increase of climate refugees. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has estimated that between 2008-2017, 22.5m people were displaced due to climate-related events. This will likely have ensuing political effects, particularly in areas with already fraught tensions such as the southern US border.
Food Prices
Immigration and food prices are intrinsically linked. The factors leading to climate-driven immigration, such as drought and shifting rain patterns lead to crop issues, causing migrants go leave their homes due to food insecurity whilst also driving up food prices. This may lead to fresh produce becoming less attainable for some, a big indicator of the economic inequality caused by climate change.
References
Amadeo, Kimberly. “What Has Climate Change Cost Us? What’s Being Done?”. The Balance, 2021, https://www.thebalance.com/economic-impact-of-climate-change-3305682.
Garthwaite, Josie. “Climate Change Has Worsened Global Economic Inequality | Stanford News”. Stanford News, 2019, https://news.stanford.edu/2019/04/22/climate-change-worsened-global-economic-inequality/#:~:text=Climate%20change%20has%20worsened%20global%20economic%20inequality%2C%20Stanford%20study%20shows,new%20research%20from%20Stanford%20University.
Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year takes us forward in time, from the Black Death of 1348 to London’s plague in 1665.
The nature of this text is of note, written as if it is a first person account though published over 50 years after the events it describes. The symbiosis between fact and fiction in the text has been fiercely debated, with general consensus appearing to fall with this being a fictionalised account rooted in much research, and based at least in part on primary accounts. Critics have struggled to categorise the text as one or the other, or decide which side it errs on. Mayer’s “The Reception of a Journal of the Plague Year and the Nexus of Fiction and History in the Novel” provides a fantastic overview of varying positions. He concludes a discussion of various critics’ positions with the rather irresolute:
“Alternatively concretized as history, fiction, or history-fiction, the Journal’s ontological status has remained undecidable throughout the history of its reception” (Mayer 544)
The audit style recounting of death counts contributes to a sense of reliability, rooting the more emotive aspects of the novel in a sense of reality. This brought to mind points raised during week 1 about the humanity inherent in the act of recording administrative documents amidst crisis.
The switch to a different, more emotive tone when talking about the human consequence of the plague was also of note. There is something incredible about reading a text and aspects of it resounding centuries lately. In particular, one passage stands out:
“The Face of London was now indeed strangely alter’d, I mean the whole Mass of Buildings, City, Liberties, Suburbs, W’estminster, Southwark and altogether; for as to the particular part called the City, or within the Walls, that was not yet much infected; but in the whole, the Face of Things, I say, was much alter’d; Sorrow and Sadness sat upon every Face; and tho’ some Part were not yet overwhelm’d yet all look’d deeply concern’d”
An empty Trafalgar Square | Copyright Reuters
This sentiment feels very familiar, with the same sense of a city altered and its inhabitants concerned felt acutely around the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
References Mayer, Robert. “The Reception of a Journal of the Plague Year and the Nexus of Fiction and History in the Novel.” ELH, vol. 57, no. 3, 1990, pp. 529–555. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2873233. Accessed 21 Mar. 2021.
Approaching this week, many of the preconceptions I had about the plague were addressed. As anticipated, images bought to mind when thinking of the plague involved plague doctors with long masks, rats, and sores.
Of the information presented, I was particularly interested in the reasons Medieval people thought the plague had come about, and the religious overtones of this. The primary sources made for interesting reading, in particular the document entitled “The Flagellants” in Horrox’s The Black Plague. It was interesting to note the dissonance between the calls for pious acts of penance in previous letters, and the the disdain for these flagellants. The reasoning for this, of usurping the order of teachers in the Church, implies that acts of penance were only acceptable when performed under the supervision of the Church, in ways deemed acceptable.
Another point of interest was the seeming parallels between today’s Covid-19 pandemic, and the plague. References made to “the disease from the East” struck a chord, as did discussion of the ways in which the disease would have spread through ports. Today’s equivalent is the manner in which international travel exacerbated the spread of Covid, contributing to the vastly differing rates of infection in those countries which closed their borders, and those which did not. Further to this, the belief that plague was spread by miasmas, or bad smells, brings to mind modern fears about the spread of germs through air. It is easy to imagine the inhabitants of Medieval Europe avoiding these miasmas much as we today avoid crowds or unventilated spaces. A further similarity which stood out was the act of singing as an act of devotion. I could not help but remember scenes of neighbourhoods singing from their balconies during the very first lockdowns.
The Covid-19 pandemic has upended lives, shifted views, and changed the way we live. However, throughout, we have grasped at a sense of normalcy. This theme was striking throughout Professor Laura Ashe’s programme, Plague Fiction. I’d like to explore this through the lens of documentation which Professor Ashe calls upon.
The example explored of administrative documentation through times of great difficulty as an act of humanity struck me. I, and I am sure many of us, have developed an almost subconscious habit of checking Covid-19 statistics daily. Every morning, in much the same way as I consume morning news along with my breakfast, I click through a graph charting the fall in cases. I seek out articles outlining the vaccination rollout. It seems that documentation does not solely exist as a way of memorialising fact, but as a way of building hope. This of course is a double edged sword. Over the early months of 2021, we watched cases rise exponentially. An insurmountable mountain of a graph appeared upon my screen every morning. Yet, in a strange way, this still brought with it hope. It is a basic law of physics that anything which goes up, must also come down. Watching this rise, I was instead heartened by the solidarity brought about through crisis. I watched my peers train to become vaccinators and volunteers, strangers gave way on park pathways, and masks were to be seen everywhere.
It feels somewhat as if this act of searching for information was embedded in the desire for normalcy. By building this into a routine which would exist regardless of a pandemic, a sense of control over the situation grows.
These thoughts which arose as I watched were complicated by my reading of Caduff’s “What Went Wrong”. In it, Caduff states “I have tried to carve a path through the morass of fear, panic, and desire for control to see how one can sustain a critical analysis of the pandemic response.” This implies that a desire for control is at odds with a critical analysis of pandemic response. This led me to reflect on the place of critical analysis versus the sense of humanity discussed in Professor Ashe’s programme. In the documentation of death counts, there seems to be rife opportunity for both critical analysis and a more human recognition of this desire for control, and thus normalcy.
“Canon” is a weird concept. It’s primary issue is obvious: it excludes the historical women who accomplished things as great as any man living at the time, thereby giving the impression that there just weren’t women doing anything important at the time due to strict gender gender roles. However, it goes deeper than just their erasure from official records. Their accomplishments may have rivaled that of their male counterparts, but the effort that they would have had to put in to get to that point, and the glass (or perhaps concrete) ceilings they would have faced in centuries gone by make their achievements arguably more impressive than the men doing the same things.
Thankfully we have progressed in leaps and bounds to get to where we are today, but as demonstrated by Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women, there remains a multitude of barriers around the world that prevent women, both directly and indirectly, from enjoying the same benefits that society has to offer men (1).
We have, of course, overtly misogynistic behaviour: FGM, femicide, lack of access to birth control/abortion services, and the prevalent dichotomy of female slut-shaming versus the acceptance and even celebration of male sexual prowess (3). Though these things can quite easily be explained as unfair to anyone who agrees that men and women are and should be equal, they persist.
It’s the hidden barriers, however, that Invisible Women surprised me most with. The things that aren’t intentional, but merely a result of a world where male-centric behaviours are so normalized that the insinuation of inequality sounds radical and disruptive (1). I kind of understand it, because the data around the sexism of Swedish snow-clearing needs an explanation, so much so that Criado-Perez dedicated an entire chapter to it.
There’s a fine line to walk between being branded as a brave feminist and an irritating “feminazi” (a term popularized in 1992 by conservative radio host Riush Limbaugh) (4). Arguing that women should be allowed to work, and vote, and own property? In the West, these aren’t controversial views, even among those with conservative leanings. You’d have to get reasonably deep into the world of the right-wing to find people who really think women holding jobs should be illegal, at least to the point they’d be willing to admit. However, propose allocating money to remove the misogyny from something as unbiased and objective as housing, or public transport, or any sort of physical infrastructure? Not so easy. The bias is undoubtedly there when you look at the numbers, but 1) a lot of people don’t look at the data because they don’t have the training to understand it (I certainly don’t but thankfully Criado-Perez is an excellent explainer), 2) it’s hard to encompass that scale of the issue in an attention-grabbing headline, but much easier to do so with a headline bashing liberals, and 3) in too many cases, the data simply doesn’t exist, which leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy (2). It’s easier to omit gender-segregated data, but without it, there’s no proof that (unintentional discrimination is occuring (1). Understanding is growing and eventually being taken into account by city planners, but the time it will take to convince everyone that sexist infrastructure is real, combined with the eventual re-vamp of said infrastructure is unlikely to be a quick process.
References
Criado-Perez C. Invisible women. London: Chatto and Windus; 2019.
Chen Y, Conroy N, Rubin V. Misleading Online Content. Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on Workshop on Multimodal Deception Detection [Internet]. 2015 [cited 25 March 2021];:15-19. Available from: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2823465.2823467
Endendijk J, van Baar A, Deković M. He is a Stud, She is a Slut! A Meta-Analysis on the Continued Existence of Sexual Double Standards. Personality and Social Psychology Review [Internet]. 2019 [cited 25 March 2021];24(2):163-190. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7153231/
Hesse M. Rush Limbaugh had a lot to say about feminism. Women learned how to not care. [Internet]. Washington Post. 2021 [cited 25 March 2021]. Available from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/rush-limbaugh-feminism-feminazis/2021/02/19/3a00f852-7202-11eb-85fa-e0ccb3660358_story.html
‘The Invisible Women’ written by Caroline Criado Perez expresses an exceptional yet disturbing male default mindset in the current societies, where characteristics of the male body including the immune system are dominated in the existing literature and studies (1). The lack of sex-disaggregated data in the medical field forms an essential issue in defining and modelling treatments for different gender in encountering various diseases and medical conditions.
It is already well-established knowledge in the medical field that women are more prone to mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, eating, and somatoform disorders. While men on the other side are more prone to disorders such as impulse control, substance use, and antisocial personality disorders (2). Evidence up to the early 2000s suggests that women are twice more likely to develop major depressive disorder and dysthymia than men in their lifetime (3). Other differences between the male and female human bodies include the different lung capacities, the different tolerance to alcohol consumption, the different exposition to various hormones, etc. Some researchers argue that sex bias is characteristic of autoimmune disease (4) and ‘sex differences (is evident) in every tissue and organ system in the human body’. (5)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-_7YwpsvI0
According to sex-disaggregated data collected by Global Health 5050, Covid – 19 has a higher overall case fatality ratio in men than women, with a 68% of men and 32% of women in the ICU admission data. (6) This trend of difference in the reaction of the human body towards disease is also evident in the SARS – CoV where research demonstrates more men were infected in comparison to women (7). Furthermore, through an experiment conducted with both male and female mice with estrogen receptors and SARS – CoV infection, it was suggested that estrogen signalling plays an important role in protecting the female mice from lethal infections (8). This experiment along with other hypothesis presented suggests the sex chromosome and genes is an important factor in the different regulations of the immune system between the two sexes. In addition to the different immune system between the male and female body, women in COVID – 19 is also impacted by the medical equipment provided to them which are essentially designed for the male body. These apparent disparities between the body system and physical characteristics of males and females illustrate the importance of sex-disaggregated data and the hazardous male default mindset in the medical field.
Despite the clear evidence of differences between the male and female body, specifically, their immune system is encountering Covid – 19 and other diseases, scientists or medical professional are unable to determine the cause of such differences other than stating it as a possible different immune system between the two sexes. Perez argues that the fundamental reason behind such catastrophe is the over-dominated medical data collected from men in the existing medical literature. The overpowering male medical data gradually formed the gender bias in medical education to an extent where Travis concluded in her book ‘The Mismeasure of Woman’ that ‘The male body … is the anatomy itself.'(9) This is supported by the gender data gaps evident in the images presented in medical textbooks and medical curriculum in higher education. (10) The lack of sex-disaggregated and female data in the current medical field endangers the health of women especially regarding the admission of vaccines as women often ‘develop higher antibody responses and have more frequent and severe adverse reactions to vaccines'(11). In a study produced in 2014, it was proposed that a male and female version of vaccines should be produced in encountering the different body structures between the two sexes. However, in 2021, during the COVID – 19 pandemics, such versions of the vaccines are still non-existent, it does make me wonder why medical professionals are negligent to engage in this topic despite the overall evidence in the topic.
Reference
Criado-Perez, C., 2019. Invisible women : exposing data bias in a world designed for men / Caroline Criado Perez.
NR Eaton, KM Keyes, RF Krueger, et al (2012).An invariant dimensional liability model of gender differences in mental disorder prevalence: evidence from a national sampleJ Abnorm Psychol, 121 , pp. 282-288 Christine Kuehner,Why is depression more common among women than among men?,The Lancet Psychiatry,Volume 4, Issue 2,2017,Pages 146-158, ISSN 2215-0366, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(16)30263-2.
Channappanavar R., Fett C., Mack M., Ten Eyck P.P., Meyerholz D.K., Perlman S.(2017)”Sex-based differences in susceptibility to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus infection”. J Immunol ;198:4046-4053.
Alghamdi I.G., Hussain , Almalki S.S., Alghamdi M.S., Alghamdi M.M., El-Sheemy M.A.(2014) “The pattern of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus in Saudi Arabia: a descriptive epidemiological analysis of data from the Saudi Ministry of Health”. Int J Gen Med ;7:417-423.
Channappanavar R., Fett C., Mack M., Ten Eyck P.P., Meyerholz D.K., Perlman S.(2017)”Sex-based differences in susceptibility to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus infection”. J Immunol ;198:4046-4053.
Tavris, Carol, 1993. The Mismeasure of Woman. Feminism & psychology, 3(2), pp.149–168.
Dijikstra et al (2008)
Klein, S. L., & Pekosz, A. (2014). Sex-based biology and the rational design of influenza vaccination strategies. The Journal of infectious diseases, 209 Suppl 3(Suppl 3), S114–S119. https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiu066
The fostering of human rights and the protection of national security are often viewed as two conflicted intentions in policymaking (1). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights(UDHR) announced in 1948 established 30 equal rights and freedoms to all individuals in the world despite their gender, race, or nationality (2). Article 3 of the UDHR states ‘everyone has the right to life liberty and security of person’ yet this vague article failed to recognise the trade off between civil liberties and national securities.
When a state of emergency arises and regulations are rushed to be constructed under limited time, human rights are often overlooked or present obstacles in the process. President Bush’s speech on US national security strategy in 2002 states a ‘commitment to protecting basic human rights however in the same document he also clarified that ‘defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal Government.’, prioritising national security over individual rights. Wilson suggests that the priority of security over individual liberty can be compared with the mandatory airport security measures, which ‘involve systematic interference with the liberty of those who have done nothing to deserve such interference to their human rights (3). Yet, to ensure safe travels for all passengers in the airport, specific privacy rights are neglected. Although this concept of sacrificing an individual’s human rights for the good of a larger population makes sense logically, this concept raises questions on the degree of human rights that could be sacrificed for the general good and what degree of general good can demand the sacrifice of individual rights?
In the example mention by Wilson where mandatory airport security allows border security to inspect the contents of the passenger’s luggage and carry-on bags, which offends the passenger’s right to privacy to an extent, I would argue is acceptable due to a few reasons. Firstly, all passengers arriving at the airport are aware of the security measures. Secondly, the information obtained from the passengers will not be stored by any department. Lastly, the security procedure will not affect or influence the life of the passengers significantly. The lockdown, mask mandates, location tracking, and other measures adopted by many governments worldwide seem to exceed the population’s acceptable degree of human rights violations. Various protests held against mask mandates and lockdown measures employed by governments as a measure for lowering the infection rate of COVID -19 worldwide suggest a sense of resistance to such policies (4).
However, as Covid 19 is classified as a public health emergency different set of laws will be applied. In 2007 after the SARS pandemic in China, the Emergency Response Law of the People’s Republic of China was issued by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. Article 49 of this law states ‘Controlling promptly the danger sources, marking the danger areas, blockading the dangerous places, demarcating the cordoned areas, implementing traffic controls and taking other control measures can be justified in the case of an emergency. The ‘control measures’ is defined by the 4th cause of article 49 as ‘shutting down or restricting the use of relevant places, terminating the activities with a high density of people or production or business operation activities likely to cause the expansion of damage, and taking other protective measures.’ (5) With the adoption of specific laws in encountering public health emergency, it is clear that sacrificing human rights are necessary when encountering emergencies.
Which one leads to the other? Is political unrest the popular reaction to a critical situation? Is political unrest rooted in the population’s anxiety, anger, miscomprehension of a current, consequential events? I will endeavor to explain how political unrest can be considered as a crisis in itself, themselves leading to even more impactful, destructive crisis. If it is unclear how these two are correlated, it is undeniable that they are intrinsically linked together in a cyclical relationship.
Here are a few pictures of the so-called “political unrest” in a wide variety of countries:
First of all, it is important to define the scope from which I will look at the word “crisis”. The word crisis is overused and misunderstood. Its etymological root coming from the Greek word “krino” meant “separate”, “choose”, “judge” or “decide” (McIoughlin). It leads us to believe that the word crisis depicts a state in which the human being, able to reflect on what is happening around him, has the possibility to deliver a critical analysis of his surroundings. The very word crisis is inherently linked to the existence of a living soul with cognitive capacities.
Political crisis, economic crisis, sanitary crisis, psychological crisis, and especially existential crisis show us how the term is multifaceted. So multifaceted that, pushed to its paroxysm, it has lost all meaning. The term “crisis” only highlights that there is something wrong and undefinable that our lack of vocabulary pushes us to use the term “crisis”, a term to which everyone in the room will nod to, because they might not really know what we are referring to, but they know that there are many things they would like to change.
As far as crisis is an individual conception, the anxiety it creates can be transmitted to others, and especially with the rising influence of medias, as Carlo Caduff suggested in What went wrong: Corona and the World after the Full stop” (2020): “today’s fear is fueled by mathematical disease modeling…nervous media reporting”. There can be a general sense of crisis, a consensus on how people feel about a situation. However, it is possible to live in the denial of a crisis, just like Jim Callaghan was hoping to live in denial of the winter of discontent.
So here we have decided that a crisis arises from a common anxiety, or perhaps anger, that is decupled with the number of people exteriorizing it. If it can be seen solely as a human conception (or misconception) of a situation, it definitely arises from unavoidable events coming from an overpowering force: a government, a natural disaster, a disease…
In the context of HIV/AIDS, the sanitary crisis definitely led to political unrest, even though it has only been acknowledged quite recently. In both movies Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme) and 120BPM (Robin Campillo), the crisis is portrayed very differently.
Here is an actual footage of “Act Up” at Notre-Dame in Paris in the 1980s, an organisation working to the lives of people infected with HIV and demonstrating in order to make the government change their policies and offer more funding for their cause.
The movies are strikingly different in the way they represent HIV and the people affected by it, and these diverging conceptions, even though they might highlight cultural differences, reside in the fact that both movies were released at different periods of time in the history of HIV: Philadelphia was released about ten years after the discovery of the virus when it was still unveiled in spiralling questions, whereas 120BPM is almost thirty years older. The HIV “crisis” seen in hindsight is utterly different, especially considering the swings that occurred in the public opinion, concerning a disease that was initially believed to be a “gay cancer”.
In Philadelphia, Andrew Beckett’s death caused me a lot of uneasiness: if the music (Wake, Neil Young) is undeniably dramatic, the chatter and laugher of all relatives attending the funeral seems out of place: children are running around, representing the renewal of life, adults look at a screen representing Beckett’s innocent childhood, a child not infected with HIV and this is how it ends. There is no crisis represented here, an individual has died but Demme decided to focus on this individual, forgetting all those left alive and in need of help and reaction from the rest of the world.
This is the last scene of the movie “Philadelphia” by Robert Demme
However, 120BPM shows the crisis from the point of view of someone acknowledging the existence of the crisis. And in these eyes, it does seem like a crisis affecting the whole world, creating in the audience a stronger reaction, and a will of revolutionizing the world and its institutions.
Two extracts of the Gay Pride Scene, a completely different portrayal of the population’s reaction to the HIV crisis. The first one is represent a gay pride scene, the second is the invasion of a medical research laboratory by members of Act Up.
Therefore, we come back to the idea that the notion of crisis is highly subjective and that it is possible for one to avoid it completely if it does not impact one’s immediate environment.
To come back on the main question reflecting on how political unrest and crisis are intertwined, it does seem that in such a context, the original, sanitary crisis evolved in political unrest. However, this political unrest triggered a multitude of crisis to arise; the sanitary crisis exacerbated a political crisis which, in turn, would have dire consequences on the system.
Joe Biden’s election shows how political unrest can be the crisis in itself. His election as American president in December 2020 does not seem to be a crisis in itself: most people around the world seemed to be rejoicing about it. However, some of Trump’s supporters did not seem to agree with this election, creating a huge political crisis as the American democracy was jeopardized:
Here are two videos showing briefly what is referred to as the “Capitol Hill riots”
I strongly believe this political crisis is due to a more deep-rooted, insidious phenomenon: social medias and algorithms.
It used to be believed that there is nothing more unbiased and straightforward as statistics. Numbers do not take opinions into account, making them a pure reflection of reality. However, as the overarching use of statistics, and especially varying incentives hidden from the common human being looking at them to prove a point was a precursor for statistics’ loss of credibility. So as much as we used to believe that algorithms were a succession of numbers, the incredible development they have undergone now show us that they do take opinions into account.
We all go on social medias hoping to find the truth. But these social medias were not created to give us the truth. They are not non-profitable organisations working for the common good. They are working for themselves, selling our unconscious biases, our tastes, our personalities to other companies. We are the product, not the consumers. Facebook, twitter, Instagram, snapchat are free apps for us, because we are being sold. And to keep us on their social media as long as possible, they have to feed us with information we will agree with, facts we like, so that they can sell us more. They will never give us the counter-opinion of our beliefs, they can’t create frustration, they can’t afford to let us turn off our phones.
The constant political unrest the world has been undergoing in the recent years is a crisis in itself, which is due to misinformation and media manipulation. The crisis here is embodied by political unrest. The HIV/AIDS crisis was a precursor of political unrest leading to new crisis. Therefore, crisis and political unrest are entangled together in a myriad of different ways that are undefinable. This is probably due to the uncertain definition of the word “crisis” that is being overused, but I believe that recent events and the manipulation we are being the victim of are blurring the differences even more.
Examples of the reproduction of sexist and racist discrimination by artificial intelligence have multiplied in recent years. This is not surprising, as the algorithms that allow AIs to function are fed by real data sets. They reproduce the biases of our societies and even have an unfortunate tendency to run in a loop, and thus reinforce them.
The number of women in the AI professions is particularly low and this has played an important role in the fact that women are thus under-represented in algorithms. According to Syntec numérique, women represent only 27% of employees in the sector
and only 11% in cybersecurity. It’s even worse in AI, with 10% of employees working on the subject at Google and 15% at Facebook’s specialist lab, according to a Wired survey.
A concrete example of the
problems in these algorithms: Last October, Amazon, which had been using artificial intelligence since 2014 to automatically sort CVs, ended this selection system, Reuters reported. Based on data collected between 2004 and 2014, the AI systematically gave low marks to applications from women for technical jobs, such as web developers. The main reason: during this period, the company hired almost exclusively men. The AI was simply reproducing what was being done, including sexism.
While researching the subject, a work by Cathy O’Neil particularly caught my attention.
She is a highly placed mathematician in the United States who has worked in large companies and banks.In 2016, she published a book ‘Algorithms Weapons of Math Destruction’. Here she raises a civic alarm: we cannot remain spectators of a world where we are increasingly dependent on opaquely designed tools, used for commercial or security purposes and resulting in exacerbating inequalities.
In my opinion, it will be very difficult to change the system because algorithms are now established in almost everything we do. However, it is necessary to rethink the way they are made in order to be able to change things because the consequences of these technological tools are not negligible, and we don’t know yet how far it could go. Raises of awareness such as what Cathy O’Neil denounces in her book might be very helpful, can make a significant difference. We need to actively seek out the flaws in these programs in order to improve them.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fouquet, C., 2018. Syntec Numérique se mobilise pour les femmes !. [online] Syntec-numerique.fr. Available at: <https://syntec-numerique.fr/actu-informatique/syntec-numerique-se-mobilise-pour-femmes>
Myers, B., 2019. Women and Minorities in Tech, By the Numbers. [online] Wired. Available at: <https://www.wired.com/story/computer-science-graduates-diversity/>
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