This Week in the New Normal #114

Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world.

1. Spying, spying and more spying

The UK government has been spying on drivers of electric vehicles using mobile phone data for over two years, multiple outlets are reporting.

The Telegraph headlines:

Electric car drivers ‘spied on by government’ through phones

…but they are actually underselling it, as their own opening paragraphs demonstrate:

Customers of O2, as well as other operators including Tesco Mobile, were monitored on the government’s behalf if their mobile internet history and app records showed they visited a site related to electric vehicles (EVs) once a month on at least two occasions.

Department for Transport officials commissioned O2 to spy on 25 million devices as part of a £600,000 study intended to produce a “comprehensive evaluation and understanding of the uptake and usage of electric vehicles”.

At the DfT’s request, O2 trawled people’s web browsing habits, including those of children, to identify “EV users”. This included passengers as well as drivers.

It then tracked those people’s physical movements around the country and sent “anonymised and aggregated” data to the government.

As you can see, it wasn’t “electric vehicle drivers”, it was actually “people whose internet activity made it look like they might be electric vehicle drivers”, which is worse but also stupid.

Symptomatic, I think, of both the state’s bottomless hunger for data but also their almost reassuring inability to use it correctly or differentiate good data from bad.

2. We might not be going to the moon after all

Just a few weeks ago, we reported in This Week that NASA was sending men back to the moon…it turns out they might not be.

The original plan was for Artemis II to orbit the moon this spring, and then Artemis III was going to land astronauts on the moon in 2028. Now they’re pushing that alleged landing back for…as yet undisclosed reasons.

Nasa announced on Friday radical changes to its delayed Artemis III mission to land humans back on the moon, as the US space agency grapples with technical glitches and criticism that it is trying to do too much too soon.

The abrupt shift in strategy was laid out by the space agency’s recently confirmed administrator, Jared Isaacman. Announcing the changes on Friday, he said that Nasa would introduce at least one new moon flight before attempting to put humans back on the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century, in 2028.

The new, more incremental approach would give the Nasa team a chance to test flight and refine its technology. As part of the changes, the Artemis II mission to fly humans around the moon this year, without landing, would also be pushed back from its latest scheduled launch on 6 March to 1 April at the earliest.

My personal guess is casting difficulties, or maybe a set fell down, or the director was fired for failing to bring the same vibe and feel to the sequel that Kubrick managed in the original.

And yes, you read that right, Artemis II might be happening on April 1st.

3. …speaking of space

The Pentagon’s head of UFO stuff has been talking to the media, and the media are happily printing it all.

Revealed: Unexplained objects that stop and accelerate quickly in space detected by ‘highly qualified observers, says former UFO chief. ‘Spacecraft we know don’t behave that way’

…the Mail gleefully reports.

It is not unrestrained alien bait, as has been the usual form in this story. Lieutenant Colonel Phillips, formerly of the Pentagon, is at some pains to explain most of the sightings, but still volunteers that some craft moved too fast, stopped too quickly and could be explained by experts.

Phillips described reports from ‘highly qualified observers’ who witnessed these objects displaying capabilities beyond anything the US government is known to have.

He said the object had the ‘ability to stop very, very quickly, accelerate quickly, right angle turns – the things that aircraft and spacecraft we know don’t behave that way.’

Out of thousands of reports reviewed by AARO, fewer than 50 remained completely unresolved, even after examination by some of the world’s leading experts, he said.

This timeline is messed up.

BONUS: Moral panic of the week

In Canada, a father and his teenaged daughter went out to a coffee house together and found themselves the target of a police manhunt. Apparently someone had seen them together, assumed the father was a sexual predator grooming a young girl, and reported them to the police.

The father resolved the situation by contacting the police when he saw his face on the news, but the damage was done by then, wasn’t it?

Most tellingly, the police statement highlights the tipster was still right to call it in.

The Epstein-related “pedo panic” is having its entirely predictable (and likely entirely intentional) impact – people are getting hysterical and pathologizing or criminalizing totally normal human interactions.

BONUS II: Reason to buy physical media of the week

The extent of UK’s age verification laws are hitting home with X Box users this week, as many are finding themselves locked out of their X Box Live accounts and unable to play games they paid a lot of money for years before these laws existed.

IGN reports:

Xbox has acknowledged widespread issues with the rollout of its enforced age verification process in the UK, leaving many users unable to fully access games and online features.

Treasure your old discs.

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All told a pretty hectic week for the new normal crowd, and we didn’t even mention even more facial recognition tech rolling out or the first person to die of a “tick-related meat allergy” in Australia.

There’s a lot of change in the air, a lot of agendas in the works, if you see a headline, article, post or interview you think is a sign of the times, post it in the comments, email us or share it on social media and we will add it to the next edition.