Today was slow. The only interesting bit of breaking news I ran across was a development in Canada. Following announcements by the Canadian government that it could start going after bank accounts suspected of involvement in the trucker protest, there were widespread outages of Canadian banking services. The outages weren't publicly attributed to the Canada's invocation of Emergency Powers, but the timing suggests a connection.
Part of my regular work this week is summarizing a New York Times article on the Israeli spyware company NSO Group. This company makes products that allow governments to spy on their citizens. It developed cell phone spyware called Pegasus that made it possible to take control of Apple and Android devices remotely, entirely unbeknownst to the user. Pegasus has been used by governments all over the world to go after both criminal groups and political dissidents. NSO also developed a special version of this software for the US called Phantom.
Publicly, the US claims not to have used either product against Americans. Although it seems plausible that the FBI would refrain from using Phantom due to its unconstitutional implications, the NSA may well have its own version of this sophisticated spyware, operating without any connection to a foreign company, deployed without meaningful oversight. Given the history of clandestine mass surveillance in the US, it would be surprising if this weren't the case.
Another story I ran across recently concerns depression. Depression rates went from 8.5 percent before covid to 32.8 percent last year when a Lancet study was done. Being single and having a low income were found to be predictors of depression, as was having experienced multiple stressors during the pandemic.
That's a startling increase of depression. It boggles the mind to imagine the scope of it. Nearly a third of American adults experiencing depression. This sounds like a statistic from dystopian fiction. But it isn't dystopian fiction. It's dystopian fact.
Today the grocery store was out of one of my staple foods, and they blamed the shortage on supply chain problems. Being told this, with everybody wearing masks, felt distinctly dystopian. The worst part was the knowledge that these sorts of disruptions have become the new normal. Like, if and when the pandemic eventually fades, society will probably keep malfunctioning, just in response to the next crisis. There's an endless string of such crises on the horizon because our total system is unsustainable.
A depression rate of 32% certainly seems unsustainable. It's a clear indication that society is doing something profoundly wrong. How high does this figure have to go before people stop making the world worse, and start making it better?
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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