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- 🌊 Why No One Trusts Institutions Pt. 37
🌊 Why No One Trusts Institutions Pt. 37
To understand why people don’t trust institutions anymore, just look at the SPLC
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By Max Frost
A recurring topic we like to investigate in this newsletter is why people have lost trust in institutions. This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center provided a terrific example, which we examine today.
During my freshman year of college, I spent spring break on a tour of the “civil rights south” led by Julian Bond, a civil rights leader who helped establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s and later led the NAACP. We met the widow of Medgar Evers, who was shot dead in his driveway for registering black people to vote in Mississippi; visited the home of Emmett Till; and went to the site of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, where the KKK killed four young girls on a Sunday morning in 1963.
Arguably the highlight of the trip was a visit to the home of Morris Dees and the headquarters of the group he founded, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC.
Dees, a civil rights lawyer, co-founded the SPLC in the 1970s and began bringing lawsuits against the Ku Klux Klan. In 1981, the group launched “Klanwatch,” which documented KKK activity across the country. The SPLC implemented a novel strategy to break the KKK and it worked: By suing KKK chapters for monetary damages on behalf of their victims, the KKK went broke. In 1987, the group declared bankruptcy and was forced to sell its Alabama headquarters, accelerating its long-term decline.
The SPLC had won. In the process, it had become one of the US’ most powerful and well-funded civil rights groups. What would it do next?
By 1996, the SPLC was being celebrated not just for defeating the Klan, but for creating a way to defeat “hate” groups more generally. As the New York Times reported that year, the SPLC "have been credited with devising innovative legal ways to cripple hate groups, including seizing their assets."
Accordingly, the group pivoted, rebranding its “Klanwatch” project to the much broader, and more subjective, “Hate Watch.”
And this is where things started to get tricky.
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Editor’s Note
All we want is a bit of sanity. Is that too much to ask for?
Our inbox is ready to blow up – send over those takes! We’ll be back tomorrow with a fascinating and exclusive mystery interview, but first – our past stories and your recent replies:
Peter from NY wrote:
The issue with a kill switch is that we assume it will be used by someone with good intent. If Open AI had a kill switch to completely shut down their model, it could also be used by malicious actors. I also question if the deep learning and neural network designs that emulate a human brain have led models to have some inherent will to live. After all, the will to survive unites even the gnat and the human - should we really be shocked that a hyper intelligent computer program develops (or emulates) that will to live?
This is all culminating in us being confronted with a question we may not be ready to answer (or our answer may not end up mattering) - how much control are we willing to give up to artificial intelligence? Perhaps if the models are useful and do no harm to us, it isn’t inherently bad if they don’t want to shut themselves down. But if our models are harmful to us AND out of control, it would be nice to have a kill switch as a last resort.
And Luciano wrote:
It is the theme of the novel upon which is based "Bladerunner." Even what is not human does not want to die. Demons will rather possess pigs than live bodiless in an abyss. Are we ready for a Brave New World?
Thank you for reading, we hope you have wonderful weekends. We’ll be back tomorrow.
–Max and Max