Polygamy, from Catholic Synod on Synodality to Social Control Media & Debian CyberPolygamy
In 2021, the late Pope Francis started the Synod on Synodality, a process which finished with a final report in October 2024.
The list of working groups includes a group dedicated to the challenges of polygamy, especially in regions where the church may recruit new followers who already have multiple partners in their family.
The working group on polygamy produced a short report with an emphasis on the challenge in Africa.
The final report from the Synod in October 2024 only mentioned Polygamy once. It appears the working group didn't identify a way forward that the bishops could agree on and it remains an open topic for the church.
Out of all Christian religions, the Catholic church is one of the most strict in relation to polygamy. Catholic Catechism, para. 2387:
polygamy is not in accord with the moral law. [Conjugal] communion is radically contradicted by polygamy; this, in fact, directly negates the plan of God that was revealed from the beginning, because it is contrary to the equal personal dignity of men and women who in matrimony give themselves with a love that is total and therefore unique and exclusive.
Notice the word exclusive is part of the Catholic definition.
In our modern world with social control media and artificial intelligence people's brains are being re-wired and this has a direct impact on the way people form and perceive relationships.
It could be argued that some people are now so totally intertwined with social control media that they no longer have an exclusive mental bond with their real-world partner.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen gave compelling testimony to the US Congress:
Facebook chooses what information billions of people see, shaping their perception of reality. Even those who don’t use Facebook are impacted by the radicalization of people who do. A company with control over our deepest thoughts, feelings and behaviors needs real oversight.
In other words, Facebook's algorithms have become a third person in many marriages. Facebook's algorithms are complementing the decisions of parents over their children, and not in a good way.
I saw that Facebook repeatedly encountered conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved those conflicts in favor of its own profits. The result has been a system that amplifies division, extremism, and polarization — and undermining societies around the world. In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people. In other cases, their profit optimizing machine is generating self-harm and self-hate — especially for vulnerable groups, like teenage girls. These problems have been confirmed repeatedly by Facebook’s own internal research.
Alan Turing forecast this phenomena in 1949 with his proposal for the imitation game. Today we call it the Turing Test. The implication of Turing's thinking is that as each new iteration of the algorithms emerges, it becomes harder and harder for a human to distinguish the algorithms from a real human being.
If the human is unable to distinguish the algorithms from another real human being then it is only logical to suggest that the human may begin forming emotional bonds with algorithms and the personas created by artificial intelligence.
Much has been written in research studies about the interaction between social control media and dopamine in the brain. Our brains can have natural highs with dopamine, for example, when a baby smiles at us and our brains can have highs when we see something artificial, like an AI-generated video of a baby on Facebook. More research is needed to understand the extent to which these substitute stimuli undermine real-world family functioning.
From another article in NeuroLaunch:
But it’s not just dopamine getting in on the action. Oxytocin, often dubbed the “cuddle hormone,” also plays a role in our online social bonding. When we engage in positive interactions on social media, our brains release oxytocin, creating a sense of connection and trust. It’s as if our brains can’t quite tell the difference between a virtual hug and a real one.
Scary.
We need to look at this phenomena, the way that social control media displaces real relationships as a form of virtual polygamy or cyberpolygamy. When we discuss the challenges of polygamy, the very mention of it has negative connotations for many of us in western countries. It doesn't feel fair to focus on polygamy in third world communities and not simultaneously talk about the virtual phenomena.
At first glance, the term cyberpolygamy may irritate some people but it is important to use a term that attacks the emotional burden of social control media. To prove the phenomena is real, try living twelve weeks without any social media and see the impact on your relationships.
The term cyberpolygamy is a good choice because it encourages people to think about how their time and emotional energy is being siphoned off by enterprises outside their family.
Everybody else's problems become part of our consciousness. This is a huge emotional burden. Walking home from work, you might see a "lost cat" sign in the street, a car with a flat tyre and a neighbor working on their garden. When you go into your home and close the front door, all those things rest outside. Social control media brings all of those neighborhood issues through the doorway and into every space where you take your phone or computer.
Research tells us that each time you view a text message there is a fifteen minute lag before your brain can return to the resting state in your family environment.
Social control media is even worse than text messages because the algorithms seek to show you additional pieces of content to keep you engaged.
One of the most extreme cases was the death of teenager Molly Russell. The coroner looked at the impact of algorithms exposing her to negative content while she was in a space where she should have been safe, her home. If the algorithms can displace a teenager's will to live then it is fair to say that the same algorithms are displacing relationships between spouses.
Looking at the open relationships in the open source software ecosystem, a lot of these things are alluded to but never said out loud. In 2016, people began spreading rumors about a developer, Dr Jacob Appelbaum. Various news reports appeared. The magazine Die Zeit published an article "What has this man done?". Anybody sharing links to the article was immediately punished in certain communities. The article notes:
Sitting across from them is a young American woman. She had gotten to know the others just a couple of days before, but she appears to be uncomfortable at this party. She doesn’t talk much but listens in a friendly manner to what is being said.
...
Mr. Appelbaum’s party guests number about 20 and are programmers, hackers and activists from all around the world.
I subsequently disclosed internal emails suggesting the accusations about Dr Appelbaum appear to be falsified, overblown and never even reported to any police.
One theme related to the Dr Appelbaum crisis is the notion of open relationships in the free and open source software communities. When the crisis began in 2016 there was a lot of discussion about what really goes on at the parties. News reports appeared. People found it embarassing.
These are the people who are creating the technological foundation for many of the online services we depend on. Therefore, if the polygamy phenomena is valid in these communities then it is inevitable that it becomes morally acceptable in those technologies extrapolated from our work.
Woody Allen released the film Vicky Cristina Barcelona in 2008. We saw parallels in the DebConf room lists that people are now sharing. The Debian Pregnancy Cluster followed and immediately after that, in 2014, people decided to organize Women's MiniDebConf in Barcelona, as in the movie. Other people quit. As far as I can tell, the event has never been repeated.
The Debian cases may be an edge case, typical of cult-like groups but the virtual polygamy phenomena of social control media feels like a much broader risk.
Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, handed over an enormous volume of documents revealing the extent to which Facebook's algorithms ingratiate themselves to their subjects. Haugen demonstrated what Facebook does with chilling effect on certain types of subject, for example, teenage girls with eating disorders.
This brings us to another theme: polygamy is usually worse for women than it is for men. In the world of big tech and social control media there are a very small group of men in Silicon Valley who are exercising surveillance and control over women around the world.
Regular polygamy usually becomes obvious when the man brings each additional wife into the home. Cyberpolygamy arrives by stealth, it may not be visible to outsiders but nonetheless, it changes the dynamics of the home.
The exact manner in which it impacts one couple may differ from the manner in which other couples are impacted. Some couples are choosing to exercise some limits, for example, choosing to never bring electronic devices in the bedroom. This only addresses one aspect of the phenomena but it is a good step.
When my father died, people who are part of this culture insulted my family and I. Some of the things they say and write are completely outrageous at a time of grief. Yet this demonstrates the extent to which people have had their brains rewired by this phenomena.
The rewiring of the brain, substitution of virtual love for human love isn't only an issue in the husband-wife, parent-child relationships. Look at the death of Abraham Raji at DebConf23 in India.
Each time somebody dies, the Debianists put out a cookie-cutter statement of regret like this based on an email template, they cut-and-pasted Abraham's photo into the group photo and then after taking a break for the funeral, the conference continued as best as it could on the existing schedule.
Even if some participants were willing to carry on, many other organizations would have canceled the remaining part of the conference both as a mark of respect to the victim's family and to allow people to have a mental break for a few days after the tragedy.
A couple of days after Abraham drowned, they took a group photo in the hotel swimming pool and published it with the caption "Come on in and join us".
Compare that to the way Amnesty International responded when two staff committed suicide. Amnesty commissioned a series of external reports and promptly published the reports for all their donors, volunteers and staff to read them. After the Debian Suicide Cluster, not one report was ever published. Vast sums of money have been spent trying to stop people publishing evidence about the deaths.
One of the most tragic deaths occurred on the very same day of our wedding, which was, coincidentally, Palm Sunday.
To the outside observer, the manner in which these groups cut-and-paste a boilerplate statement about each death and then carry on as if nothing happened may appear extremely callous. We need to look more closely to understand the dynamics of these relationships. Many of these people rarely meet each other in the real world. If ninety-nine percent of the relationship with Abraham was based on electronic communications, does that mean people had not formed a human relationship with him before meeting for the first time at the conference?
This is perplexing. Stepping back, we find that people had a less-than-human relationship with the volunteer who died but on the other hand, when using social control media, some people are bonding with the algorithms and experiences even more strongly than they bond with family life in the real world.
To put it another way, we can't simply worry about the impact of hidden friendships on social control media, we need to worry about the algorithms themselves re-wiring those parts of the human mind that are normally reserved for the exclusive part of a married relationship. Or what was considered to be exclusive in healthy marriages that occurred before the social control media came into existance.
Diagram of Debian cyberpolygamy
The diagram only shows a subset of the relationships. It is worth comparing to the notes about the Debian pregnancy cluster and the notes about the Outreachy program.
It is important to look at a complete diagram like this because some of these people are actively involved in cyberbullying attacks against other open source software developers. To stop cyberbullying, we need to identify the origins.
The Debianists attempt to present themselves as a quasi-professional organization. They puff themselves up with big titles and they steal the jargon of the Code of Conduct from more credible organizations. If they want to use these big titles and the Code of Conduct jargon then they also have the obligation to reveal all of their romantic and financial conflicts of interest. Attempting to hide these conflicts of interest with excuses about privacy and harassment is unethical and dishonest.
When we put all these relationships in the open, when we see that all the people holding big titles in different teams are all linked romantically, we can see that Debian is not like a professional organization at all, it is more like a student union or an amateur theatre group.
References:
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.