There is no doubting that, in the face of a significant shift in climate’s place on the political agenda, the Green Blob has regrouped and commissioned a number of new fronts, or perhaps even a rear-guard action. Globally, climate is a much diminished concern as great power politics makes its uncomfortable return. This has obvious implications for a deindustrialised and economically ravaged Europe, including the UK. European countries have found themselves in a new geopolitical context – not the green Utopia they were banking on – unarmed and unable to assert military force to their east, while salvoes of economic sanctions have bounced off their target and caused more self-harm. In Britain, furthermore, the longstanding cross-party consensus on climate change has fractured. And, whereas a decade ago, there was very little critical commentary on what then was not even Net Zero, now there are constant criticisms of climate policy. The Blob has needed to respond.
Tracking media commentary is a time-consuming and expensive process. But the dim sparks of the Green Blob have new technology to help them: Artificial Intelligence. The ‘censorship industrial complex’, as it was dubbed, has summoned up censorship tech entrepreneurs to automate the process of detecting speech crime, both for purposes of regulating unauthorised social media conversations and to beset political opposition. As I have reported here previously, Green Blob front organisations struggle to recruit staff that are capable of reading and parsing abstract prose and formulating a response to political critics, and so have turned to the promises of AI to ease the burden. The Blob might lack brains, but it has money in hyper-abundance. And money buys a lot of processing power.
Now, AI bots can transcribe TV, Radio and YouTube shows and track social media discussions in real time to produce a stream of text. This stream can in turn be analysed by algorithms that detect offending statements. Just a couple of computers can do the job of thousands of Green Blob idiots. And this technology is now being used to compile lists of commentators’ and broadcasters’ transgressions. According to Guardian Environment Editor Damian Carrington, Green Blob front organisation Stop Funding Heat has “used a combination of manual and AI-assisted research to monitor broadcasts for relevant content” for the newspaper. The results of this monitoring were then given to the paper, which Carrington has turned into an article – a breathless tour of all the wrongspeak over the summer months, mostly related to the heatwaves, uttered on channels that Carrington doesn’t watch and doesn’t think other people should be allowed to watch.
Stop Funding Heat is the climate spinoff of Stop Funding Hate. The conceit driving both organisations’ search for Blob cash is that, whereas laws might not effectively allow billionaire funded NGOs to state what may or may not be said in public, conversations might nonetheless be controlled by targeting advertisers. By politicising adverts, these wannabe Stasi can police speech. If an advert for a chocolate bar appears on a platform or broadcaster near some unacceptable commentary, then, the campaigners argue, the manufacturer of that chocolate bar has enabled that unacceptable commentary. So the direct harassment moves from the commentator or broadcaster to the advertiser, seemingly to undermine its public image and to associate it with racism/transphobia/climate change denial or whatever. As Stop Funding Heat puts it: “Billionaire-owned media really are spreading messages that divide and distract us.” So a list of companies that advertise on GB News, TalkTV and the Telegraph has been compiled.
