Published: 2 March 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
DIVING INTO THE TWITTER feed of Jamie Susskind takes you right into the heart of the British debate about anti-Semitism, in all its hurt and incredulity. Susskind, who is in Australia (to speak on the unrelated topic of democracy in the digital age) at the Adelaide Writers’ Week and at UNSW, is a 30-year-old barrister from London who has had, by his own admission, a privileged upbringing.
But he has lately found himself, as a former “loyal Labour activist”, sundered from the people he’d long regarded as fellow fighters in the struggle for social justice. “I am British… the feeling of abandonment is crushing,” he writes online, while telling Plus 61JMedia: “The Jews didn’t leave the Labour party in the UK, the Labour party left them.
“All I know is that I lived most of my life never experiencing anything like it, and that the last few years have been horrible in that regard. There’s been allowed a culture of casual anti-Semitism to build up in the party for which [Jeremy Corbyn] is unquestionably responsible. I’ve left the party. I hope to be able to return sooner rather than later but only if it’s clear to me that whoever is leading the party has a grip on the problem.”
The Jews didn’t leave the Labour party in the UK, the Labour party left them.
As author of the bestseller Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech, Susskind’s main focus is on the way digital technology is transforming society, and the political implications of everything from driverless cars to voting influenced by a Facebook feed, to hiring and firing or medical decisions made by machines.
Just by existing, the digital becomes political, he says, and regulation is needed to wrest its control from private corporations so that it becomes beneficial for all of us, not just those selling it.
But, as one Susskind to another (my father was from Stuttgart, while his grandfather’s family was from Hamburg), we focussed first on another preoccupation, one that has intruded massively on his life in recent years – the anti-Semitism that has seen him feel obliged to battle “nutters” online when he would rather have been doing other things.
He’s clear that the anti-Semitism within the Labour party is “not just a right-wing smear job”. It has become institutionalised: “The truth is there are a lot of left-wing and liberal Jews in the UK and basically none of them were able to support the Labour party in the last election… It’s not a very safe place for Jews.
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“This is a very multicultural country and the Labour Party is a very multicultural party, but it is, I think, wrong to think or hope that this is just a matter of people not using words carefully. There are a set of beliefs that exist on the quite far left which are not anti-Semitic in themselves, but which are capable, without much care, of becoming anti-Semitic.
So if you, for instance, believe, as Jeremy Corbyn does, that the foreign policy of Britain, America and, to be fair, Israel, is essentially evil, and that the opponents of those countries, no matter how dangerous or violent they are, are essentially right and if you combine that with the belief that all international finance is at the root of our political and social troubles, and with the belief that the world is essentially controlled by a small cabal of people at the top of the media or the banks or government … a lot of people who hold anti-Semitic views will feel all of those [sentiments], and are talking about malignant Zionist Rothschilds, ready to upend western democracy and stop the progress of society.”
Susskind says Corbyn is blind to the implications of what he says and does, which is how he ended up giving succour to terrorists and dissident groups who “want to hurt Jewish people” and has allowed Corbyn to make throwaway comments about Jews, like “these guys don’t understand irony”.
Many of us are able to criticise the Israeli government without tripping over into conspiratorial anti-Semitism. I don’t believe Jeremy Corbyn stays on the right side of that line.
His supporters then justified that by saying he was only talking about two individuals, as if being racist against two people is better than being racist against all Jews. It’s the same blindness that enabled him to lay a wreath at the grave of the person who slaughtered the Israeli Olympic team in Munich.
“I recognise that a lot of this is closely tied up with difficult and intractable questions, relating in part to the treatment of the Palestinians, but many of us are able to criticise the Israeli government without tripping over into conspiratorial anti-Semitism. I don’t believe Jeremy Corbyn stays on the right side of that line.”
Does he, like me, feel more Jewish in the face of rising anti-Semitism? “I agree with that. In a sense, it’s a source of regret to me. It’s not that I regret that part of my identity, it’s just that I want to be to be the master of whichever way I want to present myself to the world.
“And I didn’t like the fact that in the years surrounding the publication of my first book, and my semi-entry into public life as a writer, that I had to spend most of my time on Twitter battling nutters and trying to explain why the concerns of the Jewish community were real. I’d rather be talking about something else but we don’t always have that luxury of choice.”
THE “SOMETHING ELSE” Susskind alludes to is the ubiquitous nature of digital technology (his father, Richard and brother Daniel have authored a book on a related topic and his sister Alexandra studies in the area too) that most of us have for too long regarded only from a consumer perspective, as an economic or social force, instead of a political one.
The digital is political, and software engineers who encode programs are becoming social engineers, affecting the health of democracy, social justice and the nature of our freedoms. Yet in many countries, we seem to be content to leave its control to market forces, “the logic of the market, rather than the logic of the forum.”
The example of driverless cars illustrates his argument. The people writing code for them write the rules the rest of us must follow. “When you and I drive a car, we are able, if we want, to drive over the speed limit maybe just for a few miles. We can park illegally for a couple of seconds if we’re dropping someone.
The digital is political, and software engineers who encode programs are becoming social engineers, affecting the health of democracy, social justice and the nature of our freedoms.
“Under the current legal system, there is this freedom around the edges, where we can get away with minor infractions sometimes. But in a world where rules are coded into technologies, the indications so far are that a self-driving car would not park illegally, or decline to pull over automatically for a police car, or drive into territory which a GPS search said would be trespassing.
“It is not going to drive over the speed limit, even in an emergency. Heaven forbid a parent is on their death bed.”
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Among other instances he mentions are blocking messages on phones for planned protests, and facial recognition which may block people, who are not deemed attractive enough, from entering into certain venues.
The world is changing so fast, in ways that are almost inconceivable, he says, quoting car manufacturer Henry Ford (an anti-Semite, as he points out) who used to say that when he asked people what they wanted as consumers, they’d reply faster horses, the point being that it’s hard to imagine a future so different from our own because we don’t have the words or concepts to describe it. But it’s possible that the world we’re entering is as different from the one we are leaving as the car from the horse.
But in a world where rules are coded into technologies, the indications so far are that a self-driving car would decline to pull over for a police car. It is not going to drive over the speed limit, even in an emergency.
We could, Susskind says, harness technology and the information it provides to enhance democracy. While at present our data and preferences are used so effectively by private corporations, there’s a complete disjunction with the simplistic way we choose our political leaders, through a tick in a box every five or so years.
If all our data could be harnessed, or if we could perhaps tick the boxes every five days, or even five times a day, it could feed into decisions in a much more responsive, holistic and democratic way.
“Let’s assume that technology continues to develop faster than we can imagine, in the same vein, with systems getting more and more capable. There’s more data and integration of technology into the world around us, and let’s assume I’m also right that, as that happens, those who own and control those technologies will have a higher and higher degree of power.
If that’s the case, and we have effectively a new class of people able to affect our public and private lives in a profound way, then the obvious answer is that we have to bring some of those powers under community control, not through common ownership, but through regulation so that those products and technology are designed and engineered for the common good, not just for the benefit of those in charge.
“That to me is a big political project, not a pie in the sky thing.”
DETAILS OF PUBLIC TALKS
Jamie Susskind will speak at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas this evening at 5pm, in a session titled Future Politics: Living together in a world transformed by tech details
He will also give a talk in Sydney on Thursday at 6.30pm at the University of NSW, titled Democracy in the digital age
