Accountability Sinks
(1979) A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE | THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION (img)
We were in Mexico when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) came second to Enrique Peña Nieto in the 2012 presidential election. The election was rife with fraud and corruption and led to protests and resistance. The details are not important here, though the broad lesson is that AMLO never conceded, not in the immediacy of the election results and not in the longer-term struggle during Nieto’s presidency. Whereas other left of centre movements of the time, like those in the UK under Corbyn and in the USA under Sanders, collapsed due an acquiescence to centrists spurred by bad faith attacks from the right wing, AMLO persevered, turned MORENA into a political party, and kept fighting.
The rest was history.
The right wing pundit class hates AMLO. A lot of opinion pieces have been written by rich, connected Mexicans (in a lot of cases, Mexican-Americans) in op-eds and USAID funded think-tanks that argue that democracy is being destroyed, that there’s no transparency, and no accountability with this “populist.” A quick google search can find dozens of such articles, which I won’t link, some of which are blatant with their US State Department approved interests:
putting Mexico’s democracy in peril. Mexico’s political backsliding shows how hard it is to defend democracy from abroad. But that doesn’t mean that its neighbors and other nations, particularly the U.S., shouldn’t try.
During those Biden years the US did try to peddle its influence, culminating in a large astroturfed “march for democracy.” A counter-march was held, a far more populous one, which resulted in this iconic photo. He called out USAID as interventionist (Reuters). He sold off his predecessor’s boondoggle of a quarter-billion dollar presidential plane (he prefers to fly commercial) and used that to fund hospital construction. He ended presidential immunity (Reuters), including for himself, and held a symbolic referendum to investigate previous presidents for corruption (france24).
listening to the people was valid even if it was not binding.
That pull quote is the crux of the argument. When American diplomats say there’s no accountability, ask yourself: to whom? To the elitists? To USA state interests? To Canadian mining companies, British oil corporations, and American media? Ultimately a government should be accountable to its people.
This is why for all the criticism of AMLO’s rhetoric or political maneuvering nothing the opposition threw at him would ever stick. While they made fun of his slow speaking style, the material conditions for people living within Mexico improved. Millions were lifted out of poverty during his term. Real salaries have gone up drastically. Infrastructure, including many hospitals, are being built. “Bienestar” social programs are improving communities. As a whole, the people oft ignored by those neoliberal think-tanks and previous governments saw a politician standing up for them after decades of corruption and impunity.
The result was even more historic.
During the second Trump term, American words about AMLO destroying Mexican democracy ring hollow. Right-wing accusations of a lack of "accountability" are always disingenuous: at best mere hypocrisy, at worst a projection, or admission of their own desire to act that way. We are witnessing it now.
During the second Trump term, American checks and balances are being decimated, judicial orders are being ignored, billionaire losers have the keys to the kingdom, technofascists are compiling databases of confidential personal information, and Marvel superhero tshirt wearing secret police rendition people with no due process. While this is happening in the public sector, the private sector is consolidating into a corporatist panopticon while capital is being funnelled out of people’s hands into imaginary grift currencies that are laundered into auto-complete plagiarism machines being forced into every aspect of your life.
I mean, Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI execs are literally joining the USA Army as Lt. Cols in a part-time advisory role.
Is actual day to day life improving? By most metrics it’s getting worse. Biden’s neoliberal regime failed to improve American lives and had the gall to gaslight them about it: the economy is good! GDP is up! Never mind that you can’t afford healthcare or housing or even basic groceries. They handed the presidency to the fascists because they had done nothing to distinguish themselves from them. The Democratic Party establishment doesn’t care, won’t care, and no one will take the blame.
That lack of accountability in these systems is by design. They hate responsibility because they know that their actions don’t hold up to any moral or social scrutiny. They don’t want to be called out on their policies because when they get stripped of the macro-bullshit cruft their core beliefs amount to “yes, I do think some children should starve and die.” There is a moral rot in Western society’s upper echelons and the only way to fix it is for the people to organize and force them to account.
Unfortunately the deeper we get into the mud the more the pessimism sets in. It’s hard not to with everything that is happening, yet that is why I’m impressed by what Mexico has accomplished going against the grain. I look at what Zohran Mamdani has been doing—another person the liberal establishment absolutely hates and is freaking out about–fighting against the tide. I see small acts of resistance at the local level, on the ground, and online, and I think that, yes, change is possible.
As long as you never concede.
Related Links
The Accountability Sink (aworkinglibrary.com)
If you combine those two frameworks, you could conclude that to be accountable for something you must have the power to change it and understand what you are trying to accomplish when you do.
AI Indulgences and the False Promise (techbubble substack)
Harder still when those preserving such a broken political order have figured out there is money to be made, even when there are no profits to be made. So long as you can convince people that it’s worth externalizing the moral costs (onto everyone else) and eschewing accountability (for harms visited on everyone else), then you can maximize returns, wealth, and power. What else matters?
Against the People (n+1)
The new wave of founder-controlled tech firms are quite frighteningly cultish and hierarchical. Peter Thiel even spells this out in Zero to One: he describes these firms as little cults and “feudal monarchies.” They’re very secretive, with very little public accountability, and that allows for a lot of executive power. As with Elon Musk, these owners and founders can preside over the social-media infrastructure of millions of people around the world. They can elect themselves chief censor and arbiter of content and insert themselves into the everyday communications of hapless users.
The Era Of The Business Idiot (wheresyoured.at)
The Business Idiot is also an authoritarian, and will do whatever they need to — including harming the institution they work for, or those closest to them, like their co-workers or their community — as a means of avoiding true accountability or responsibility.
I like Ed Zitron and he’s got the right idea a lot of times but he needs to be more concise and efficient with his newsletter writing.
The Weaponization of Waymo (bloodinthemachine.com)
Waymos are ultimately an automation technology product. And a key function of any kind of automation is that it serves as an accountability sink for the companies and managers that deploy it.
Mexico's presidential jet sold to Tajikistan, in latest twist to political saga (reuters: 2023)
"It's important that everyone knows how people thought before, how the authorities acted, like little pharaohs,"
Listen to this
Last year, WRWTFWW reissued a 40 year old “proto-techno” album by Japanese musician Yoshio Ojima, supposedly released on a limited edition of 50 cassettes in 1983. It was reissued on vinyl only so it’s not readily available online, except on YouTube. I’m particularly fond of the track “Days-Man.” I listened to it a lot on YouTube at the time and it got hard fucked into the algorithm and now it’s being recommended to me after every fourth video I watch. That's not a complaint. Now it can be in your reccos:
Signing off, sometimes.