The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  *1 If you live in the U.S and Canada, even your front door has been tagged with its own GPS coordinate. The census uses GPS to record the coordinates of all of the nations’ home addresses.

  *2 On May 1, 2000, President Clinton turned off “selective availability” for GPS, effectively giving civilian GPS the same capability that existed for the military. By flipping the switch, he instantly made the signals ten times more accurate than they had been previously. GPS accuracy outdoors is approximately five meters. With the development of WiFi round-trip time technology that can be used indoors however, accuracy can be sharpened to the one to two meter range.

  *3 Geosynchronous satellites orbit the planet in synch with our sidereal day, or once every twenty-three hours, fifty-six minutes and four seconds, and thus appear to an Earth observer to be in the same place at the same time once a day. A geostationary satellite also orbits the planet once a day but is stationed high above the equator and thus will appear to an Earth observer to be stationary in the same place throughout the day.

  *4 Imaging resolution is said to be at least twelve centimetres, meaning from space you could see a pair of tweezers on the ground. But given the lens size, and the fact that commercial providers are already pushing for ten-centimetre resolution, Keyhole-class satellites can likely see a resolution much higher than that.

  *5 The Outer Space Treaty banned weapons of mass destruction in orbit and outer space but does not ban conventional weaponry in orbit.

  *6 The optic nerve, it’s worth remembering, transmits visual information to the brain, and is also the location of the human blind spot in each eye. It allows us to see, but its location is also hidden from our sight.

  *7 Data from public records has found a 92% false positive rate for facial recognition: “public records request shows that of the 2,470 alerts from the facial recognition system, 2,297 were false positives. in other words, nine out of 10 times, the system erroneously flagged someone as being suspicious or worthy of arrest.”

  *8 He posted, “Joe Lipari might walk into an Apple store on Fifth Avenue with an Armalite AR-10 gas powered semi-automatic weapon and pump round after round into one of those smug, fruity little concierges.” The original quote from Fight Club is: “And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers.”

  *9 Every other year, students are given the “Healthy Kids Colorado Survey,” which pries into personal details, asking, for example, “how old you were when you first had sexual intercourse, have you ever been molested, how many times you’ve driven a car when you’d used marijuana.”

  *10 Police can hire a company like Cellebrite to unlock the phone and bypass biometric readers as well. The cost is $1,500-$3,000 per phone.

  *11 According to an article in the The Sydney Morning Herald, “The first phase of the national credit sharing information platform was being used by forty-four departments, across all provinces and sixty private enterprises, to disclose information and mete out ‘joint punishment.’ ”

  *12 In India, healthcare workers are using fingerprints as a primary form of ID for children without official documents.

  *13 The system can even be scaled up, “expanded, at no additional cost, to handle time and attendance, event admission, parking lot security and the tracking of students riding on school buses.”

  *14 Where ag-gag laws have been struck down, activists are being charged through other means. Rescues of sick or injured animals, for example, fall under federal theft with a charge of five years.

  10

  THE EMPIRE WEARS NO CLOTHES

  Cursed is the first person who said, “This is mine.”

  —CROATIAN PROVERB

  THE BIGGEST BANK HOLDUP in history was invisible. There were no guns, no robbers in ski masks, and no trembling tellers forced to open the vault. That’s because the money was not stacked in one physical place. Instead, it was stolen when it was on the move, flickering across continents in streams of ones and zeroes.

  Employees at Bangladesh’s central bank noticed something unusual on February 5, 2016. The printer that automatically printed out receipts of daily transactions had been completely idle. After some troubleshooting, the problem was finally resolved later in the day, and the printer began spitting out reams of messages from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They were questioning the transfer orders coming from Bangladesh, as they added up to a massive sum: a total of $1 billion.

  Money in the modern economy moves at the speed of light, and unlike human beings it can easily cross most borders. The SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) network is the method by which bank funds make their way around our planet. On an average day, about $5 trillion circulates through partner banks in the SWIFT network, which includes eleven thousand financial institutions in over two hundred countries and territories.

  The thieves hadn’t just hacked the bank with malware, however. They had also pulled off a sophisticated hack of time and space. It took from Thursday afternoon, New York time, until Tuesday morning, Bangladesh time, for bank officials to even figure out they had been robbed. That’s because the hackers cleverly played the countries’ time zones and geography against the bankers. As The New York Times reported,

  When the Fed had received a total of 70 fraudulent payment orders to four bank accounts in the Philippines and one in Sri Lanka, totaling $1 billion, Bangladesh Bank was closed for the weekend. On Sunday, when the bank reopened and discovered the error, it was unable to reach the Fed. [The director] sent a stop-payment order to the Philippines central bank, which was closed for the Chinese New Year….Late on Monday afternoon, Dhaka time, as the Fed was opening for business, Bangladesh Bank asked officials in New York to block the money transfer to the Philippines but were told it was too late and that the money was with recipient banks.

  In the end, the bank robbers did not get all the loot they’d hoped for. Instead, they managed to launder $81 million through casinos in the Philippines to offshore accounts. To date, the culprit has not been identified, but based on data trails the key suspect is North Korea. If it’s true, one of the poorest countries in the world has taken to robbing banks.

  But this brings up a key question: why is there such a massive division between rich countries and poor countries? According to Jason Hickel, author of The Divide, it has a lot to do with how money flows. In the eighteenth century, he observes, people in Asia actually had a higher standard of living than people did in Western Europe. And from Latin America to India to Africa, it was colonization that caused steep declines in standards of living and income. Raw materials were extracted from the land with cheap labour so that manufactured goods could be sold back to the colonies and to Western countries, while high import tariffs ensured there would be no significant competition to the colonial masters. In devaluing colonies’ resources and the labour that produced it, colonialism created a system of “unequal exchange,” an outflow of tremendous riches from poor countries that has played out over centuries and keeps billions poverty-ridden today. As Hickel writes, “In the past, colonial powers were able to dictate terms directly to their colonies. Today, while trade is technically ‘free,’ rich countries are able to get their way because they have much greater bargaining power. On top of this, trade agreements often prevent poor countries from protecting their workers in ways that rich countries do. And because multinational corporations now have the ability to scour the planet in search of the cheapest labour and goods, poor countries are forced to compete to drive costs down.”

  The reason it’s more expensive to buy a shirt made locally than it is to have one shipped to you that was made on the far side of the planet is because of this unequal exchange. If the true costs were accounted for, the wealth drained from poor countries and transferred to rich countries has been estimated to total $4.9 trillion annually.

 
But there are other ways to rig the financial system. And concealing money is a well-known one. According to Global Financial Integrity, a non-profit that tracks the manner in which money is secretly moved, illicit financial flows (IFFs) were estimated to be as high as $3.5 trillion in 2014 alone. And what are IFFs? They are illegal transfers—like money laundering, trade misinvoicing, or the use of shell companies—to shift funds from country to country in ways that are “typically intended to be hidden and unobservable.”

  Money can do this now because it isn’t real. Currency used to be based on something solid, like cattle, or clam shells, or tobacco, but today money is abstract, a network of symbols attached to our identities—numbers attached to our ID numbers—that fly through deep-sea cables and zip through the wireless air as a vapour. The vast majority of the world’s money is ghostlike, invisible.

  Perhaps the best-known trick for hiding money, though, is one that uses the veils of borders and geography to shelter funds. The rich benefit most as they can afford lawyers who are familiar with the ins and outs. I’m talking, of course, about tax havens. In 2016, according to Gabriel Zucman, author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations, approximately $8.6 trillion sat untaxed in offshore accounts. For perspective, that’s almost three times the size of the entire global technology market, currently valued at approximately $3 trillion. Leaks of the Panama and Paradise Papers have revealed just how common this practice is. In Canada, the sixty biggest corporations were found to have over one thousand subsidiaries in offshore zones. As a result, while regular Canadians have to pay their taxes or face charges, Canadian corporations and financial elites have found legitimate ways of keeping $15 billion off the books every year.

  That’s the general rule. Because money is free to move, the rich don’t need to keep it at home. As Fortune magazine notes, in 2017 Apple Inc. held $252 billion of company profits offshore so it could avoid paying US taxes. Amazon made over $3 billion in profits, but thanks to tax exemptions and credits it paid almost nothing in federal taxes. In the same year, according to a report by Oxfam, a staggering “82 percent of wealth created across the globe went to the top 1 percent,” and that 1 percent has enough combined wealth to end extreme poverty in the world seven times over. The gap between rich and poor has become so vast that the richest forty-two people on the planet have as much money as the poorest half of the world’s population. That’s forty-two individuals with the wealth of 3.7 billion people.

  Being poor is not just about losing the game. The poor are increasingly penalized and criminalized for their lack of wealth. At the simplest level, many banks charge a fine, or a “fee,” if an account balance is too low. The Bank of America, for example, has proposed a $12 fee for monthly balances below $1,500, in essence charging people for not having enough money. Banks also mine our data and use algorithms to determine credit scores. Even shopping repeatedly in “stores associated with poor repayments” can have an impact on one’s credit, leading to reduced spending limits and a higher cost for borrowing money. And while the poor can’t just pack up and move to a better neighbourhood, for the homeless it’s even more difficult. As the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, in Washington, DC, reports, “Despite a lack of affordable housing and shelter space, many cities have chosen to criminally or civilly punish people living on the street for doing what any human being must do to survive. Cities continue to threaten, arrest, and ticket homeless persons for performing life-sustaining activities—such as sleeping or sitting down—in outdoor public places, despite a lack of any lawful indoor alternatives.”

  In recent years, bans on sitting or lying down in public spaces have increased by 52 percent, and “anti-homeless spikes”—similar to the spikes you might see to prevent birds roosting—have been erected on park benches and flat spaces with the goal of making resting or sleeping there impossible. Even faith-based organizations and good Samaritans face arrest and criminal liability for feeding hungry homeless people. In the United States, over fifty cities, including Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, and San Diego, have anti-camping or anti-food-sharing laws.

  The yawning gap between rich and poor is a function of how much access each group has to the system of exchange human beings use to trade: money. On a macro level, the global economy depends on the constant flow and exchange of money, but most people, including 84 percent of British lawmakers, do not know where money comes from. What many people consider “real” money, the physical currency of banknotes and coins, accounts for approximately $5 trillion, only 16 percent of all the money circulating in the world. According to the CIA World Factbook, the global total of money, or what’s known as “broad money,” is somewhere in the range of $80 trillion. So where does all this other money come from? It does not, as our parents liked to remind us, grow on trees. But it does grow on computers.

  In a white paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy,” the Bank of England explains that money is created through debt. Specifically, “Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.” The way the textbooks explain it, the bank continues, is a fallacy: “The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks: Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits [emphasis mine].” Debt is a requirement for our modern economic system to keep functioning, because debt creates wealth.

  On another level, we all know the origin story of money. We know that money is not “real”; whether it’s a piece of paper or a coin or a digital transfer, money at its most fundamental level is an IOU. It’s a promise. Global debt, however, has hit record levels, and these debts are surpassed every year. Globally, the world is sitting on $247-trillion worth of these largely empty promises, with a debt rate that has grown a jaw-dropping 40 percent in the last ten years.

  To stay afloat, the world’s poorest countries have had to put a mortgage on their futures. Since 1980, countries in the Global South have been paying off the interest on their debts to a tune of $200 billion a year. In total, according to Jason Hickel, that amounts to $4.2 trillion in interest payments alone that has flowed from the pockets of poor countries to rich countries. Rich nations, it should be noted, are also saddled with enormous debts, but these are owed to banks and individual investors, not, broadly speaking, to foreign governments. And where loans are made to rich countries, they come in the form of government-issued bonds with very low rates of interest. As Annie Logue explains in How We Get to Next magazine, “Rates charged to these [rich] countries to borrow money cover the use of the money and expected inflation, but they don’t consider any repayment risk.”

  The old saying is that money makes the world go round, but it is the invisible, vaporous nature of money and the rigged rules of the game that spirit wealth away into the bank accounts of the wealthy while the debt load increases on the poor. And so perhaps we should consider a different saying when it comes to how we sustain ourselves in the modern economy. As a corporate villain in the TV series Mr. Robot once said, “Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.”

  * * *

  —

  AT THE INTERSECTION of South Finley Street and Dearing Street in Athens, Georgia, a grand white oak stands proudly, its branches raised up in a flutter of verdant leaves. Beneath them, protected in the shade, is a stone plaque that reads,

  For and in consideration of the love

  I bear this tree and the great

  desire I have for its protection for all time,

  I convey entire possession

  of itself and all land within eight feet

  of the tree on all sides.

  —William H. Jackson

  The oak is famously known to town residents as the Tree That Owns Itself, or, more accurately, the Son of the Tree That Owns Itself, as the original tree was damaged in an ice storm in 1907 and finally fell
in 1942. Several hundred years old, it had been beloved by Colonel William Jackson, whose childhood was spent playing under the towering oak. To protect it, Jackson decided in the early 1800s to deed the tree, and the property surrounding it, to itself.

  When the original tree fell, local residents sprouted saplings from one of its acorns and planted one in the same spot. Today, the next generation of this tree stands firm and “free” in its inherited soil and is now over fifteen metres tall. Legally, in the state of Georgia, non-human beings do not have rights, but there has never been a challenge to the oak’s independence, as in the minds of the locals, this one tree, above and beyond all the others, has won the right to own itself.

  The idea that a thing like a tree could have rights may seem absurd. We tend to believe that rights or legal privileges should exist only in the human domain, especially since a “right” is a human construct to begin with. But trees are living beings. As Peter Wohlleben argues in his book The Hidden Life of Trees, these are social creatures that parent their young, communicate with one another, experience pain, have a capacity for memory, and have sex. They are not inanimate; they are alive, and they exist within a silent but dynamic community.

  Just as humans use an underground network of tubes and wires called the internet to communicate with one another, the forest likewise uses a “wood wide web.” Individual trees communicate via fungal networks that connect them to other trees at their roots. Suzanne Simard, professor of ecology at the University of British Colombia, has found that using these mycorrhizal networks, trees can communicate signals of distress, feed and nurture each other with carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and water, and pass on defence signals and chemicals to protect their community from potential threats. We cannot see or hear it happening—just as, looking at a system of wires, you cannot see messages being passed back and forth on the internet—but trees are in a very real sense communicating with one another.