The silver lining amidst the trauma and tragedy of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic was the 7% decrease in carbon emissions worldwide — 2.4 billion fewer tons than in 2019 — that accompanied quarantines, lockdowns and the resulting decrease in travel. With vaccination rates picking up in developed states, the return to international travel threatens a return to pre-pandemic carbon production levels in international development, a field that prides itself on sustainability.

Big Tech and the devices and apps it produces consume the world’s collective attention in pursuit of profit. Tech giants need to find a better purpose if they are going to retain society’s permission to dominate our lives in the way they currently do. Society is distracted, our attention neurologically hijacked by a tsunami of weapons of mass distraction that focus our attention not on what we want but on what Big Tech wants us to want. For generations Z and Alpha, in particular, this is profoundly life-shaping.

Everyone has a personal relationship with YouTube. That’s just the way YouTube works. It is literally the platform that gives you what you — uniquely you and nobody else — want. It “understands” your tastes and needs. Understanding means gauging your unconscious reflexes in a statistically significant way. Most people would agree that, while the platform appears to “think about” each of our choices and anticipate what we want to see next, its obtusity and insensitivity to our real desires regularly become apparent. Why is it offering me a document that is obviously tendentious propaganda from a right-wing Australian TV station? I’m not right wing and I’m not Australian. Perhaps if I watched that video, I would discover that the discourse it contains might provide an example of language worthy of appearing in The Daily Devil’s Dictionary.

Wired this week features a story by Will Knight with the title, “Why a YouTube Chat About Chess Got Flagged for Hate Speech.” It highlights the curious relationship between the natural behavior of human beings and the sophisticated but fundamentally unnatural logic of artificial intelligence (AI). Until very recently, our civilization thought of data simply as the formally defined information humans gleaned from their collective experience of the world. In recent years, the innocent notion of data morphed into a compelling and powerful phenomenon called Big Data. This new organic personality foisted on what was formerly thought of as a collection of random facts became a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. 

A look back at history shows that desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures. After all, it was not until Saudi officials watched in horror as oil prices plummeted by 70% that, in 2016, Vision 2030 was born. While other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members presented their own initiatives, true to form, Saudi Arabia’s economic reform agenda is the most ambitious yet. 2020 was set to mark the agenda’s first benchmark achievement. Instead, an oil price war, a disastrous bombing campaign against Yemen and a 5.4% contraction in GDP set a different tone than the kingdom may have intended.

Globally, the short-term changes in pollution levels associated with COVID-19 lockdown measures highlighted the importance of investment in renewable energy sources more than ever. India’s National Solar Mission was set as one of the policy initiatives under the National Action Plan on Climate Change in 2010. As a signatory to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, India has committed to generating 175 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2022, which included a major share of 100 GW from solar, 60 GW from wind, 10 GW from biomass and 5 GW from hydropower.

The battle of media titans over their profits — and our data — triggered by Australia’s attempt to make Google and Facebook pay for the news they use has little to do with the public interest. If we are worried about the quality of news and information, there’s not much to choose between the Murdoch press, which backs the news bargaining code proposed by the Australian government, and Facebook’s disinformation mills. The two often work hand in glove, as demonstrated by the way Rupert Murdoch’s flagship paper, The Australian published false narratives about the devastating bushfires last year, many of them poached from the online conspiracy theory fever swamp. In particular, as The New York Times has noted, The Australian echoed debunked claims that arsonists were to blame for the catastrophic fire season — even as online trolls and bot farms circulated the same false information online.

Everyone knows that Amazon is a successful, profitable, world-conquering and, therefore, obscenely rich company. It has made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world. He keeps getting richer by the day. With his fortune, Bezos doesn’t need to be as careful with his cash, in contrast with normal human beings, who know how important is to save up for a rainy day. That may help to explain why Bezos has just stepped away from his post as CEO. Still, the culture Bezos created at Amazon during his reign insists on being extremely careful with its money. We now learn that this is true even when it’s cash that belongs to other people.

As Shoshana Zuboff has warned in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,” the great tech giants have built a system people have become dependent on for their social relationships. But this “social” system has been built to serve a fundamentally antisocial purpose. The customer is the product. And, thanks to advances in technology, the product can increasingly be remodeled to maximize its commercial value.

On January 7, the news media announced that Elon Musk had surpassed Jeff Bezos as “the richest person on Earth.” I have a personal interest in the story. Two of my neighbors just bought a Tesla, and this morning, on the highway between Geneva and Lausanne, an angry Tesla driver flashed me several times, demanding that I let him pass. His license plate was from Geneva. Apparently, these days, driving a Tesla automatically gives you privileges, including speeding, particularly if you sport a Geneva or Zurich license plate. In the old days, at least in Germany, bullying others on the highway was a privilege reserved for Mercedes and BMW drivers, who, as the saying went, had an “inbuilt right-of-way.” Oh my, how times have changed.