[Music]
...because now we've got the Good Stuff
the good stuff
Cheers well so welcome to the Good Stuff
with me Andy Farnell, and me, Kate Brown
Kate is an attachment based
psychoanalytical psychotherapist from
the UKCP, yeah and you are a computer
scientist specializing in ... oh you can
say you can say Andy is a computer
scientist with a very big beard, yes an
enormous beard people! You should see it!
It's enormous!
It's huge. It's great that you are
channeling your inner father Christmas
right now. I've got my lock-down beard.
So, Dan has asked us to talk about
immunity passports and I want to set the
parameters of what I'm able to talk
about with some knowledge, and what I'm
not able to talk about with much
knowledge. I'm not an immunologist so I
don't know about the research that would
govern the idea of immunity
Passports.
I'm also not a computer scientist who
understands how such a plan would
be implemented and I'm rather reliant on
on your expertise in that area, I think.
The reason why Dan has asked me to
be here this evening and to talk and
think about a wider issue of immunity is
because what is likely to be the case
is that very strong unconscious
feelings will be behind the current
social discourse
about immunity, and you know, whether
immunity passports are a good thing or a
bad thing. I guess we could both go
through an almost endless list of things
that we are _not_ experts on, yeah
but I think it's particularly important
right now, given the fact that what has
really characterized a discussion about
the current COV-19 pandemic is just
the sheer amount of disinformation. Huge
amounts of disinformation! Everyone's an
armchair pundit. Yes, and we can be
armchair pundits because that's what we
do in our spare time. But there are
people, there's such a crisis in
leadership and there are so many people
today who are _professional_ armchair
pundits. Yes, every politician has
something to say about economics. As if
they were born with an innate
understanding of economics, and almost
none of them have ever looked at the
theory or read a book on economics, but
suddenly being in power seems to imbue
you with a factual knowledge of it, you
know, and every politician and so-called
leader seems to think that they have an
understanding about technology because,
you know, they own a phone, or they type
their accounts in on the spreadsheet. The
real experts, as far as I can see have
very little voice, are picked, are
selected from a very specific pool of
ideas, of thinkers, and so we would be in
very good company if most of what we
were talking was shite. However, I really
hope that we can raise the bar above
that level of discourse. I mean that is
what the Liberality channel is supposed
to be all about right? I don't think
anyone is going to imply that actually
it would be a good thing to inject
disinfectant or anything, or that light...
Is that what people...?
Trump has been saying so, yes, yes.
Tell me you are shitting me! Absolutely. Guys.
You heard it here first,
actually Dr. Andy Farnell computer
scientist extraordinaire had not heard
about what Trump had been saying about...
I'm not interested, I make a
great effort to, I'm proud to admit
this, I do make a great effort to
insulate myself from a lot of the
mainstream media. The mainstream news.
Because it is just so disruptive to
coherent thought, yeah it is so
disruptive to rational skeptical
reflection on things. So tell me more
about what your thoughts are on immunity,
so-called immunity passports - that sounds
a very fluffy way of describing a tech
fascist instrument to me. I want to start
with the fact that there can be no
safety without privacy. And I think that
this is something that probably Freud
intuitively knew about the practice of
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, that if
a safe place was to be created for
people to actually talk freely without
being inhibited, someone could actually be
honest, could actually maybe talk about
some really deep-seated fears, anxieties,
fantasies....  Precisely for things that they
can't do on modern social media because
everybody knows in their heart that
they're under constant surveillance and
scrutiny right? I wonder whether people
actually have pushed that from their
mind. And are actually in denial about
that. But I would say that privacy is a
real tenant of emotional security and as
an attachment theorist actually there
can be no
secure base without privacy. It is the
fundamental reason why I do not, for
example, install a Nest dorrbell
near my consulting room that might trace
patients, you know do video facial
recognition, and that when a patient
arrives I will turn my smartphone off.
But Kate, people will say that,
well you're a psychotherapist, who deals
with patients, and that's a very specific
and niche area of human life, you know,
(I'm sorry), and in order to minimize
you, but what you said to me earlier
just really struck a chord - which was
that for everybody, there can be no
mental health without privacy. Yeah,
and I think that Snowden in his
Christmas address a few years ago really
highlighted this, highlighted the idea of
"Have you never had just a private
thought that you want to remain private"?
For me, the phrase that sticks in my
mind is this: "Psychoanalysis in Reverse",
which is the way I think Horkheimer or Adorno,
one of those kind of Frankfurt guys
describes the process of modern
culture,  as to take everything that's
part of your innermost soul and expose
it to the public, and at the same time to
take everything which is part of the
public, well which is shared, and force
that into your inner psyche. It's the
very... well I think of it as a force of
anti-humanism. It's essentially human to
have private thoughts, to have secrets, to
have plans for your life,
maybe plans for other people, maybe, you
know, hopes and dreams or whatever, and
you cannot exist, there can be no real
human life in a world in which that
taken away. Your right and that has
real ethical dilemmas for example, there
is an ethical dilemma in psychotherapy
of what happens if when restrictions are
lifted in terms of social distancing and
psychotherapists return to seeing face to
face patients, what would then happen in
terms of tracing in terms of consent to
share information, for example if the
therapist had tested positive for
COV-19, would that therapist be
obliged to share the info, of the
contact details of their patients? Yeah
well I don't... I do know that the
legalities and the best practices,
and the things that the
professional bodies like the UKCP, and
so on, have to say about those kinds of
things are very intricate, and I don't
quite want to get too far into that
discussion, you know, obviously there are
times when you _do_ disclose, that you know,
if you think someone is at a risk
to themselves or to others
With patient's consent. With the patient's
consent. With that having been discussed.
Ok. bu let's look at what's happening with
this so-called "immunity passport", and I'm
repeating myself from earlier comments
here, but you know, I don't think that the
virus really has very much to do with
this! This has been waiting in the wings
for a long time. And the current crisis
is an excuse that authoritarians and the
tech-fascists have been absolutely...
They're rubbing their hands together with
glee at the opportunity to roll out
much more oppressive and ubiquitous
social control, in the form of tracking,
of behaviour, of buying habits, associations
and you know, this goes right back to
apartheid to me it goes right back to
1930s. It's equivalent of people being
asked to carry it, to wear a yellow star,
you know, to me, and if you're not
prepared to pick a side now, and see
what's coming, that's what's up,
you'll be like those people were by
1942, you know you'll be dead or
in a camp, so I think it's very important
to recognize this for what it really is.
Yes, because security involves freedom and,
for example, the freedom to opt out, and
the freedom not to share information, you
and I have spoken in the past privately
about the behavior of the tech giants
being almost like an intrusive partner,
and whereas I as a therapist in hearing,
for example, someone saying "my partner
demands that they know everything about
where I go, who I speak to, whatever
little bits of information, what
I'm thinking, even..." You know, I would say
to a patient, that feels somewhat
like coercive control, that is control.
Um, that quote, which I still haven't
managed to source yet, but it's stuck in
my mind like a splinter, is "One never
maps a territory that one doesn't intend
to conquer". Yeah, so think about how that
applies to Google Maps, think about how
that applies to all forms of
surveillance. There's no sense in which
those things _can_ be benign, hmm they
can't be anything but loaded with a
future intent to control. It raises a
question of - what is the appeal of the
products of these big tech giants? And
my thinking is, the phrase, that again
I don't know who to attribute this to
appropriately, but feels quite relevant
to the discussion now, is the saying that
people who think that technology will
save them understand neither their
problems nor technology. Very well. Very
few people understand technology.
So, we've a huge dearth of education in
our schools, and universities as well,
since the humanities were decimated, of
well, to be honest as a computer
scientist I would say that this belongs
on the computer science syllabus,
certainly for freshmen, is modern Tech
Critique. You know, and not just the stuff
kind of like Neil Postman and
Marshall McLuhan and Ivan Illich, and all
of these... there's a huge, huge
body of literature, of ideas who, for
certainly decades, maybe centuries, have
had a deeply critical relationship with
understanding and trying to direct
technology. Today there's only black and
white. There is a camp of people who
fetishise technology, are gushingly
enthusiastic about it, and a group of
people - and they only see others as being
Luddites, idiots of some kind
it's very rare and disturbing for them, I
think, when they encounter someone like
me, well educated and knowledgeable in
technology, who has spent their life
dedicated to it, and yet it is harshly
critical of it. And one of the problems
that we have with Silicon Valley, and
with lots of technology today, is that
its "solutions looking for a problem". It's
stuff that has great private economic
value if you can foist it on people, if
you can get them to use it somehow, but
it doesn't really give them much utility.
I mean that, when you examine it in depth,
there's a lot of technology where
not having it it's not much worse than
having it. So, there's always this
constant temptation to push it, and push
it, and push it into places it just
doesn't belong in human life. So, maybe
this brings us back to the issue of
immunity passports, because an area that
you seem to be implying that big tech
actually, absolutely does not belong, is
in our health records, and in
surveillance of our contacts. I don't
think it does. No. I think it's
extraordinarily dangerous to mix those
things. And like voting can be done with
paper records, yes here in this
country
yes we use paper records in this country,
a system which is entirely voluntary,
entirely elective, and really is based on
experts, I would say G.P's, I mean
they're already heavily overloaded in
what they do, but they belong right at
the center of this. Because I think what
we're going to get onto in the moment, is
how technology breaks and distorts
relationships. Yes, but a patient's
relationship is with a GP, not with
some big data company, not with some
private data miners. So, is secure base
is secure?  No. No, now they not at all.
Absolutely not. You have a smartphone,
ypur base is not secure. It's an always-on
tracking and potential surveillance
device. I am thinking in terms of not
just a relationship that we have with
technology, and whether we choose or not
to have a smartphone, whether we choose
or not to use Facebook or Google, but I
would say that actually our secure base is,
and I'm very deliberately using the
language of attachment theory here, are
actually our emotional relationships,
usually those we have with the people that
we talk about, usually with our family, but
are also present with the people that we
work with, and I's sure that's definitely
present with the medical people that
might be treating us, when we are at our
most vulnerable, because that experience
of vulnerability puts us right back in a
position of abject dependence, mm-hmm and
so our attachment systems are absolutely
activated when we set foot in a place
like hospital because we are dependent
on the actions of someone else
and it is absolutely terrifying, the
prospect that people face these days of
worrying is this person, that I am
dependent on, whether I choose to be or
not, am I a risk to them, or are they
a risk to me. Yeah, this is what came up
in the interview with Sarah with
Dame Professor Sarah Cowley, you
just want to say a word about who Sarah
Cowly is for our listeners?
She is a pioneer of health visiting. Yeah,
and so what she was saying to me in another
interview, that there was a huge problem
in being a health visitor, that you have
to do this balancing act, on the one
hand being an instrument of the state,
potentially being intrusive, like a
social workers can do,
into private lives, and heeping the
interests of mothers and families...
and what enabled that was selective
information-gathering,
was the ability to ommit things from
records, to interpret them, and to record
them in a way that best serves the
interests of the patient, well not
patients, wrong word, 'service user' I
guess you'd say these days? And the
more the technology encroaches into
medicine, and into social work, and into
or all of this stuff, the less it serves
the interests of the patient. Absolutely!
I absolutely had my own experience of
that in working with families in mental
health services, where I would make
judgment calls as to what information I
would record, what information I would
share, and with whom, and with what
information
I didn't feel that it was appropriate to,
Now why? Tell me about those patients. And
what risks they faced? Where there were
families with domestic violence, and the
risk was ongoing, my view was that I
would think that it was incredibly
important that professionals reading my
notes would be aware of what was
happening in my work with families.. There
was code? Wasn't  there professional "code"
in your profession? Yes, in the fact
that I would mark the records, that I
wrote "third party information
confidential not to be disclosed" I hoped
you were going to tell me about the Sri
Lankans, and you know, absolutely those
patients who you knew, their families
were at a very real risk of murder and
torture. There were two
starkly contrasting circumstances, one
when I was working with Tamil families
who were in contact with the Red Cross
during the Civil War, and I would want to
make sure that the spelling of their
Tamil names was absolutely correct,
because if I got that information wrong
it may mean that actually someone years
down the line looking through records or
in contact with the Red Cross would not
make contact with a long-lost relative
that they might otherwise. The direct
opposite extreme to that, was when I
thought that there might be a
circumstance where there might be either
an oppressive individual or be an
oppressive state, bearing in mind that I
was working with people who had been
tortured in their country of origin
by the state, I had no way of knowing
whether that state's surveillance system,
you know, might be able... Well we know that
state actors are within other
nations, so that the Chinese, for example,
have many spies and many back doors and...
So that trauma might be personal, so for
example, a survivor of domestic violence
might say to me "I do not want this
recorded", in which case I would write, you
know um, "patient did not wish any record
of what was to be disclosed" Not to be
recorded. But equally, that person might
be be reporting state terror, as well so
there is that need for judgment, human
you know, human judgment, for healthcare
professionals to choose and to select
the information, yeah and interpret the
information. Do you think, or would you agree,
that the people who conceived
applications like this, and the people
who are the drivers, the
facilitators of state surveillance, are
really very naive about information. You
always imagine that they kind of pick
the brightest and best, in communications
theory, and semantics, and semiotic, so
that they understand implications, and so
on, but I think actually, I've got to say,
a lot of people in the tech industry and
in that area, are intellectual Dwarfs
of the lowest order. They really seem to
_not_ _get_ some _profoundly_ _important_
problems,  and the side effects, and
consequences, of designing these
applications, and when I speak to other
security researchers when I speak to
people like Ross Anderson, to people like
that, who _do_ get these things, who
write volumously on security engineering,
on cyber security, on infosec stuff,
they are equally gobsmacked, I think by
the lack of clear vision and
careful thought that goes into these
kinds of ideas. What do _you_ think,
and you already mentioned that there's,
this, an unconscious, a collective
unconscious, and I kind of wanted us
to maybe, get into this this thing that
terrifies me, is that we all go to the
window and cheer for the NHS, and at the
same time that feels incredibly connecting,
if it feels wow, it really presses all
of those buttons that you will hear
people like Jordan Peterson and Stefan
Molyneux, and what some seem to, some
people consider them right-wing thinkers,
they're not at all, they're just smart
thinkers right, but they understand about the
human psychology of crowd mentality,
and group think, and how the NHS could be
used semiotically, those lovely blue and
white symbol of the NHS, could so easily
be hijacked by tech fascism, you know, and
because there is a deep appeal there to
our to our unconscious fears of
infection, disgust, fear of difference, from
other groups of people, and we've all
felt it and walking in the street in the
last few weeks, there's a very, very
dangerous sociological forces... what do
you think of that? Absolutely, I think
that on the one hand I do cheer for the
NHS. I cheer for the NHS too. But I am
worried that that sort of atmosphere, a
kind of Blitz spirit is going to be a massive
distraction from how underfunded and
underappreciated and the NHS has been...
It's in ruins isn't it? Absolutely, I
would say it is in ruins, it certainly
was my experience of working in
psychiatry.
It was absolutely heartbreaking, things
such as, you know, referral criteria where
the atmosphere, it
almost seemed to be communicated, that
unless you're suicidal or risk to
others, we will not treat you, or offer
you any sort of care, by which cases it's
way too late, often, I mean I, we know,
that this current crisis is going to
have a massive mental health impact and
there have been massive surges you know,
a two-fold increase in cases of domestic
violence,
to support lines, there have been a massive
rise in actual murders since lockdown,
and ironically, I wondered whether
there is something about the lack of
privacy, and the lack of volition behind
that, that leads to mental health
problems, and violence, and that actually
the tech companies with very blanket
applications, are you know the worst, a
very very blunt tool, to you know, for a
very very kind of big problem. It's
actually workers such as midwives that
know the details of people's lives. This
is what Sarah was saying. Absolutely.
Things like whether a child is wanted,
whether a child is at risk what, a G.P.
would say as well. The "family dovtor", now
obviously, that role has kind of obviously
been corroded now by expedient
medicine, and over systematization, but
yeah, you know the relationship you have
with the family doctor, of course is a
confidential one, because your GP really
knows all of the nitty-gritty for sure,
and that's the one person, always, like a
priest, you know, who you would trust with
that level of intimacy, and wow, what
a responsibility to carry it... well what
happens now, when you can't discharge your
confidentiality functions anymore,
because some tech fascist
has taken over your systems and
basically hacked the computer that
you're forced to use!? I think that it's
worse and more traumatic than that. And...
The  BMA should be all over this
You know, if there's any
professionalism left in medicine, they
should be all over this I don't
understand why not... recently I've had phone
calls with medics, and the last thing
that very experienced GP said at the end
of a phone call was "take care", and my
inclination was to say to him "no
you take care You take care because you
are more at risk than actually we are",
and there being something difficult
about that because we want to believe
that the people caring for us somehow
immune from human frailties, hmm yeah, I
think that's a really good point. I've
got two questions Andy, the two
questions that I wanted to ask you. I'll
start with what you believe a
post COV-19 world will look like. Wow.
What would a post Korona world look like?
Well I think it looks very much like it
does right now. My worst fear is that
nothing changes at all. Yeah, I kind of
had this thing I said to you before,
about doing the moral arithmetic of
utilitarianism, and what our grandparents
had fought for in the war to stave off
fascism, and now we're in another crisis
at the same time, we're in a crisis of
environmentalism, and I'm very torn
because part of me thinks this is a
golden opportunity for us to change the
way that we live, and that would be very
painful and very harsh for everybody,
that we would all suffer economic loss,
but you know the idea of,
well forign holidays would disappear,
and I would be quite prepared to accept
that the government came and said,
sorry guys we've had, you know, 50 years
of subsidized air travel... Those days are
over now. We're rationing holidays. Every
three years, you know, your family can can
travel to Tenerife or wherever, you know
maybe you'd have tokens or something
like that, maybe you accrue some kind
of air allowance miles that would let
you do stuff like that. I'd like to see
private cars off the roads, the way they
are now, just people making essential
journeys, wouldn't that be amazing if we
could just keep breathing the lovely air,
if we can keep hearing the birds
singing and the bees return, and things like
that, there's so many potentially
good things to come out of this as a
warning to humanity, to change
our ways. So, what what do I see? My
optimistic self sees as a post COV-19
world as one in which, um we've learned
lots of the lessons from Dana Meadows, on
the limits of growth, and the limits of
expansive economies, that we've learned
to have zero growth economies, that we
think more about maintenance and
sustenance than development all of the
time. The cynical side of me just
imagines everything going back to "normal".
But worse. You know, in many kinds of
mathematical models, as you have in
stick-slip friction and so on, when you
interrupt something, it returns, it
comes back ten times as bad, so you know,
and this is one of the fears that the
government legitimately have, I think,
with the easing of restrictions, is that
the moment you take the brakes off
people will go crazy
they'll be out partying and you'll have
a second wave, a resurgence in
infection. The worst case scenario I
think is that it turns out, when we
really dig down into this virus, that
it's not an it's not a pandemic, it's a
new endemic, and that there's a a 10 or
20 year period in which
diseases are going around which
remain transmissible, that you can't
really build immunity to, and are always
going to be a risk to the health service,
and to lots of people's lives obviously,
but something that we're not prepared to
build a health service to cope with. You
know, so if true, in that case, if the
biology turns up in that way, what we
would need to do is to start the
equivalent of an arms race, but a "health
race". That's my post-COV-19 world. It's
a health race, like the cold war, in which
nations compete to build the best damn
health services that they can, well that
would be amazing, that would be the best
outcome. The worst outcome is that
intellectually naive forces within
government and intelligence services and
law enforcement see this, and the
corporate state, you know, the big-tech,
tech fascists, see this as a
way to kind of follow a Chinese model, of
enacting draconian social control on
people for the purposes of continual
political and economic manipulation, and
for them the COV-19 virus is a great
gift, that just accelerates the descent
into a dystopia. There's an amazing
possible future, and a really fucking
awful one. And I think to me that's why
I'm um feeling the need to answer Dan's
question. For me I think that what a post
COV-19 world might look like, is my
hopes, are that a post COB-19 world
would be a society that
valued authentic human relationships, and
relatedness a lot more, that understood
that technology is not necessarily the
answer to our problems, that actually you
know, valued human interaction,
the sort of things that Bowlby was
talking about, separation distress
proximity seeking, and the idea that our
partners and our parents can be a secure
base, that we leave from and
that we return to, and that actually my
hope would be that we keep big tech
companies big tech giants - that kind of
Silicon Valley Sewer, in check, so we
actually don't mediate our emotional
relationships quite as much as we do
through these big data gathering
organizations. Before we say our
goodnight, I wonder whether actually you
can say something about comments that
you've made in discussions that we've
had about whistleblowers, and about the
courage that it takes to tell the truth
in the face of enormous pressure to do
otherwise. I've said a lot about courage
and that having just finished Snowden's
book and found it full of meaty goodness..
No really!  Really enjoyed Edward
Snowden's book! I think I think here's
the problem - everybody knows that now is
a time that demands great courage yes,
nd by that I mean "simple honesty".
It's already a tragedy that to
speak of honesty is to cloak it in the
language of "courage" right? I mean just to
say what are self-evident truths, and the
things that are your deeply held
values, to feel that you need _courage_ to
do that, is already a tragedy right? With
regards to technology I think we haven't
reached any kind of critical mass or
even the beginnings, of people being
honest with themselves about their
relationships with technology. I think
they're utterly dependent,
addicted and in denial. I think we have a
huge, huge social problem with computer
technology right now, it's an enormous
disappointment to me as a computer
scientist.
It gives me huge pangs of self-doubt
that I've wasted my life. That I've
contributed to huge problems and not
solutions. But I do see glimmers of... you
know when courage happens... when when
I see changes brewing, it's like a
flock of birds taking off, you see a few
kind of fluttering, here and there, but
then there's one moment, and nobody knows
why, and none of the birds know why, they
all take off, it's an epiphenomenal event,
it's an emergent phenomenon, and there
are always those warning signs, just
before, these little things that
tell you that there's going to be a big
change. And when the Economist started to
write about the "tech-lash", I kind of
thought...  "MnnHm, here it comes".
It didn't take the tech fascists
long to kind of paint that all with the
Luddite brush, you know, to kind of
marginalize people who asre having
second thoughts about their
relationships with technology. But I'm
continually seeing signs that people
want to retake tech. They're small, even
hard to describe things, but they keep me
filled with hope, you know,
that there's the possibility for that
change. Whistleblowing is a
poisonous word. Because a situation in
which an institutional society is so
broken, all the mechanisms of legitimate
change and challenging and bottom-up
democratic control are so broken, so
dysfunctional, that anybody who sees a
problem is eventually silenced, for so
long, and suppressed for so long, they're
eventually forced into a situation where
they have to act radically. Like that's a
really, really broken system and that's
what happened to Snowden you know it's
tragic, it's really tragic to
read the story because to me there's so
many affinities I
so the parallels I see with his like
childhood and his father's service
record and things like that, and to me it
was like wow I'm kind of reading the
story of somebody who's like 20 years
younger than me and grew up and was you
know - being in those shoes I'd do the
same thing I would not compromise those
values for defending freedom and
democracy, and you know, the right to be a
free-thinking rational individual I
would not hesitate to do what
Snowden did. So he's an absolute
bloody hero. But the fact that people
have to go to those lengths, and
therefore there's so few of them, that's
really caused us a real problem. I think
we need a revolution in that perception
of courage and necessity, of clear
honest open speech, in a way that just
opens the floodgates, we need that flock
of birds just taking off, so that there
isn't anybody that could be singled out
as the whistleblower, you know
everybody's a Spartacus. Yeah. A final
thought before we say goodnight, is that
something that was often said to me, and
I think was in a line of a poem written
by an accident and emergency nurse during
this pandemic, was about times where
people within the NHS would say to
fellow workers who were expressing
discontent about certain issues:
"Don't make this political". My view and
understanding is that our health our
healthcare system, the NHS, has, will
always be, political, interpersonal will
always be political, and I think the
people who say those kinds of things,
like "Don't make this political", yeah ah
what is a charitable word for them, one
that our listeners
can hear, I don't know..... There's no realm
of politics that doesn't impinge on the
personal, on the individual and your
health. And the
technology behind that. Now it's
down to everybody to call. Yeah I hope, I
would really hope, that everyone in the
NHS gets to hear gets to hear our "Good
Stuff", on the Liberality channel.
Well this is the Good Stuff saying goodnight.
Goodnight all.
