In the very early hours of April 28, 2014, Markus Kaarma stepped through the front door of his sprawling suburban home to investigate the sounds of someone rummaging through his garage. He wore a baggy cotton t-shirt and flannel pajama pants, and after listening for a moment to the sounds inside, fired a 12-guage shotgun through the door four times. When the ringing in his ears finally stopped, 17 year-old Diren Dede lay dead on the concrete floor.

In the court proceedings that followed, jurors were presented with two images of the man with gun: was he a new father, concerned about an increasingly bold series of burglaries, and well within his rights to defend his home and family? Or had he laid a trap, with an open door, motion sensors, and surveillance cameras, and waited to “shoot some fucking kids,” as he described to a hair stylist earlier that day?

The jury was left to measure his actions against those of a reasonable person.

Of course there is no such “reasonable person” to ask how he or she might have behaved (although that would make things much easier). Instead the reasonable person is meant to represent a decent, boring, law-abiding person of average intelligence and no latent misanthropy. It is meant to be the average feeling of the culture today.

As the trial churned through its due process in pursuit of a verdict the court of public opinion was somewhat more swift, and a reasonable person was hard to come by. The case polarized Kaarma’s and Dede’s community. It was quite clear to every observer that a crime occurred that night, but the people were divided on whether the criminal was a murderer or a burglar. No single reasonable narrative emerged, but rather parallel reasonable extremes that each laid claim to common sense.

This comes at a time when our leadership has more or less embraced the premise that we, humanity, are not reasonable at all. And by leadership of course I do not mean this administration, or congress, or anyone like that. I mean the technology industry, who, for better or worse, are the most influential actors actually looking forward and who are making every effort to engineer discretion out of our daily lives.

Our shopping preferences are cataloged and optimized so that we barely need to look for the things we cannot live without. Self-driving cars promise to take human error out of driving and finally make our roads and highways safe (except for when pedestrians wander into traffic). Diplomacy and disaster response is now reduced to a series of game theory simulations and logic models.

Amazon, Google, Tesla, Apple, have (not incorrectly, necessarily) concluded that the “reasonable person” is a fable. That what humanity needs is to outsource the decision making to a tool that is even capable of making an informed decision.

Now, as we grapple with the reality that the notion of truth is a point of contention, and they, those guys over there, are simply pawns of a corrupt elite, it can be hard to argue that Bezos and Musk are necessarily wrong.

Consider looking across a courtroom to a jury of your peers and seeing nine people who thought that The Big Bang Theory was a good show. Or that you could be exonerated by DNA evidence if only those peers of yours respected scientific consensus. Or that some of the people on that jury do not see you as their peer, but as something somewhat less, an outsider, an interloper, who is, perhaps, undeserving of the laws that keep them, the citizens of the jury, safe.

To look across that courtroom you would not be wrong to wonder if the reasonable person against which that jury will measure your actions is very reasonable at all. And if a reasonable man simply evaluates facts in an impartial way, isn’t that really only a problem of logic? And isn’t that what computers are for? It seems almost that machines really are better suited to arbitrate our high crimes and misdemeanors than a peer who can’t even spot fake news.

But a computer cannot think, for now. Its underpinnings are in the goals and assumptions of the engineer, and I hope that we can agree that Jeff Bezos is not a picture of a reasonable man. And so we’re left to sit and watch them all go red faced screaming through their daily lives, and mourn the loss of reason.

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Armed men, they say, are citizens, and unarmed men are subjects. The fever dream goes something like a Federal Government run amok, and a motley, merry band of misfits takes to the hills with rifles.

They see themselves in Catalonia, perhaps, with Hemingway and Orwell, when good defeated evil for a while, or arm-in-arm with Camus as they burned the swastikas from France like as many warts from an old and gnarled foot.

Or there they see themselves, the Patriots, defending our homeland against enemies foreign and domestic, in the Colorado hills with the Eckert boys, and Danny, Daryl, Aardvark, and oh wait shoot actually that’s the plot from Red Dawn. I get so confused sometimes.

In any conversation about gun policy, 2nd Amendment activists will be quick to remind you that the Bill of Rights is not about hunting. That rifles are not just to put meat in the freezer, and that an AR-15 is simply a modern musket. That a “gun behind every blade of grass” is the reason Japan never invaded in the second world war, and, more importantly, that an armed and organized electorate is the final failsafe against an autocratic regime. That the Bill of Rights is about individual freedom, sure, but is a pillar of our functioning democracy. That it’s not only a right to own a gun, but a responsibility.

To be fair, they’re not exactly wrong. The Bill of Rights was conceived in a time when the wounds of tyranny were raw and soothed by armed and skilled militias. And they are right that Bill of Rights is every bit as relevant now as it was in the 18th century, but defending the United States from tyranny today has nothing to do with the 2nd Amendment, and everything to do with the 4th.

Because ultimately armed insurrection in the modern age has been tried and tried again. At Ruby Ridge and Waco, TX we have seen in no uncertain terms both the asymmetry between our armed forces and even the most equipped militia, and the government’s willingness to use that force.

And this is, of course, to say nothing of the drone strikes and attack helicopters in any cartoon dictator’s arsenal – just ask the children of Yemen. The thought of an honest guerrilla war, with civilian firearms, against the might of the US military is laughable. To suggest otherwise is fantasy, to provision is a hobby.

I do not mean to say that the threat of tyranny is not real, only that fighting tyrants in the thickets of New Hampshire is at once foolish and quaint. I mean that bullets are for proxy wars; a modern autocracy is won with thought.

Large scale data breaches have become commonplace in the last decade. The companies we trust, or are indifferent enough not to distrust, have made a habit out of carelessness. Equifax compromised the birth dates and Social Security numbers of 143 million people, after collecting and storing that information without consent. EBay lost control of personal information and passwords to of 145 million customers in 2014. And in late-2017 Yahoo, one of the largest tech companies on earth, conceded finally that yes, all three billion of its customers’ accounts had been accessed by “state sponsored actors.”

It has become clear in recent years that data and information collected under the premise of confidentiality is anything but. Even the largest, most well-funded companies have proven that they are incapable of managing these databases, and that most our personal information is probably being bought and sold on clandestine marketplaces right now, as you read.

This is a bummer, sure, but also not necessarily the end of the world. The nice thing is that you’re not alone! Billions of people have had their information stolen, and there’s a degree of safety in anonymity. Take the time to have strong, unique passwords on your accounts, sign up for two-stage authentication when possible, and keep an eye on credit and accounts. Sure, it’s not convenient, but that’s what will set you apart. Because the economics of convenience are much more dangerous than Russian hackers or Cuban paratroopers.

Far more troubling than the information we give away to the false promise of security is the information we give away with ambiguous assumptions of privacy. Recent revelations about the use of Facebook information by the data company Cambridge Analytica represent a threat to democracy that cannot be fought with rifles.

Consider that information was collected on millions of users in the shadows of legitimacy, and under the auspices of data research. The firm leveraged Facebook’s entire business model, one designed to sell advertising, to construct psychological profiles of voters and influence their behavior. It did so in dissonance with Facebook’s privacy policy but without, apparently, breaking the law. This is happening against the backdrop, and to the benefit, of an administration that is actively attacking the nature of truth.

MKUltra and Manchurian Candidates are the stuff of conspiracy theories and ghost stories, but government mind control is very real. It comes when the stalwarts of propaganda are refined and amplified by big data, and presents the realest threat to democracy we face today.

As the information analytics crisis unfolds in the west, we need only look east to see how it unfolds. Since 2007 China’s Social Credit System has scored its citizens on trustworthiness, collecting credit and banking information and analyzing it against petty crimes like jaywalking. This year those scores are used to bar bad actors from booking flights and rewarding model citizens with gym memberships and medical care.

China has transcended the simple data-driven propaganda that the US is currently coping with, and created a candid system of social engineering. The greatest threat to our modern republic is not that the state will disarm its citizens, it is that it will not have to – the information coup is bloodless.

Rifles will not protect us, of course. But if we’re not careful our disregard for privacy and our eagerness for validation can do far more damage with the intangible Armalite design than a firearm ever could.

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In 2018, in the United States, large scale acts of violence in places like schools, shopping malls, and nightclubs are more or less commonplace. In the wake of attacks like these the outpourings of thoughts, prayers, and ultimately useless calls for meaningful change are predictable, choreographed affairs that tend to run their course in a week or two (except, of course, for people personally affected by the violence, who will live with it for the rest of their lives).

But in the aftermath of the most recent school shooting things feel somehow different. It’s unclear whether this attack resonates because of the response of the surviving victims, who have organized to hold elected representatives accountable, or whether it is that the concept of a person walking into a school and shooting 32 people is no longer a vague, hypothetical bogeyman for a majority of parents, families, etc.

Even so, the fact remains that the Parkland shooting was a whole two weeks ago and we’re still talking about gun violence and reform. Holy cow. Even with the Olympics on we’ve managed to stay focused. This may truly be a new day.

Of course the arguments and solutions for attacks like this are forming generally (but not entirely) along party lines: the left tends to get worked up about pistol grips and magazine capacity, and the right reverts to empty platitudes about “mental health” (which as far as I can tell means incarceration), and meticulously rehearsed daydreams in which they shoot a bad guy with the .380 hidden in their ass. No mainstream narrative really seems to capture the essence of the issue: that gun violence only correlates with gun ownership per capita, and does so strongly.

In classic American fashion, we neglect the evidence in favor of the narrative, and so our conversations gravitate toward dramatic, horrifying events like Parkland, Orlando, Las Vegas, et cetera, ad nauseum.

But in spite of a tidy, mostly partisan divide on how best to address these attacks, the actual policy responses have been much more consensus based. As a society confronted with adversity we lean toward militarizing our civil establishments.

Fallout of the Ferguson, MO protests shone a spotlight on the military’s 1033 Program, which allowed/compelled the pentagon to funnel surplus equipment to local law enforcement agencies. When you saw photos of unarmed demonstrators facing local police officers clad in body armor and brandishing assault weapons from armored vehicles, you saw the effects of the 1033 Program.

The 1033 Program was limited by President Obama and expanded under the current administration. However, it was established in its current form by President Clinton in 1997, and enjoyed relative obscurity until recent displays of authoritarianism.

Now, some parties seem to be seriously suggesting that filling schools with guns is a solution for violence in those schools. Unfortunately, this premise has been in play for decades, as colleges and school districts have taken advantage of Pentagon incentives to equip tactical response units. As early as 2001, school districts in California have used the 1033 Program to purchase mine-resistant armored vehicles, assault rifles, and grenade launchers. A school district in Texas funds its own SWAT team. The unapologetically abusive Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is currently pursuing access to unaccountable, warrantless surveillance programs.

Repeatedly, when confronted with a narrative of danger, we respond with an appeal to militarize our civil institutions.

From our borders, to our local police, to our colleges, to our elementary schools, we have seen a bipartisan effort to place military weapons and tactics in our communities. We have seen a willingness deploy those weapons and tactics in the face of dissent. In order to maintain the civil society that we apparently take for granted, it is essential that we resist this instinctive draw toward military control.

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By now the whole “memo” thing has probably got you whipped into a froth of distrust, confusion, and, if we’re honest, exasperated apathy. That’s ok, I’m in the same boat. The partisan rhetoric around the Nunes Memo is so slanted, so furious, that it’s pretty hard to know how much of what’s being said is true, if any of it. It can be even harder to reconcile how you probably feel about the memo with how you probably feel about Ed Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, etc. while trying to maintain an iota of ideological consistency.

And heck call me a conspiracy theorist, but I can’t help but think that this melange of confusion and outrage is exactly where They want us to be: at each others’ throats for reasons we can’t quite articulate while they laugh their way to the bank to put our civil rights in a safe. It almost feels like nothing is really real anymore, and from this fish tank of absolute relativism it’s easy to forget that some things really are true.

At atmospheric pressure, freshwater will freeze at 0 degrees Celsius. An object, free falling in a vacuum, will accelerate toward the earth at a rate of 9.8 meters per second squared. The relationship between a circle’s circumference and its radius is defied by pi.

Doesn’t that feel better? Great.

But it doesn’t take away from the fact that while the media circus surrounding the current administration is like a car wreck you can’t look away from, in real life things are still happening. With all of this hubbub about memos and the stock market and Tom Brady there are some big stories that we’re not seeing enough about.

Like, Cape Town is about to run out of water. This is one of those things that’s hard to wrap our heads around. It feels a bit like a street corner doomsday proclamation that in a few weeks a city the size of Los Angeles will shut down its municipal water supply. When more than a million residents there turn the faucet, nothing will come out. This is because the city is out of water. I don’t think that I can put this in more stark, terrifying terms. So on the bright side, here’s a picture of the fountains at the Bellagio:

In Myanmar the army is murdering and raping a Muslim minority into obsolescence. The majority Buddhist government is killing tens of thousands of people, and disguising the mass graves with fire and acid so that no memorial of the Rohingya people exists. It’s almost like a community’s religion is independent from its propensity for violence, but hey that’s crazy talk. The travel ban must stand! Keep Muslim refugees out!

And speaking of genocide, today Poland’s president said that he would sign legislation that makes it illegal to question Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Even studying the government’s role in establishing Nazi death camps may be illegal now. This is another move by a right wing, white nationalist government to whitewash and forget the atrocities of the past century.

We are confronted with real, true problems and need to get above the noise.

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