If you're of a certain age, you will remember this scene from The Graduate.
Dustin Hoffman plays the character of a young man graduating from college. At his graduation party, a neighbour takes him aside confidentially and says, "I have just one word for you -- one word -- plastics".
What he means is that he is "confidentially" telling him what the "next big thing" is which he should chose as his field of study and employment. It's hard to remember why plastics would be a big thing, but in 1967, when this movie came out, plastics were not ubiquitous. There were paper bags, not plastic bags at the supermarket. Less things were shrink- wrapped in plastic, they just came as they were. Toothpaste tubes were made of aluminum, not plastic. Children's toys were made of rubber, an older product, not plastic. There were bed springs and cotton stuffing, not memory foam. Cottage cheese came in paper tubs, not plastic (yoghurt wasn't as ubiquitous). There simply weren't designer water bottles at all. And so on. Plastics, with their "More Science High" and chemicals-for-better-living took over the scene and nobody thought about how they had once hardly existed. Indeed, it was a booming field for a young person looking to start a career in a big company.
So today, if you're at that graduation party your parents have thrown for you and you're feeling alienated and at loose ends, surely someone will come up and take you aside and say, "I have just one word for you -- actually two -- Big Data!"
Big Data is now the latest or the Next Big Thing and it's just everywhere. Colleges are scrambling to make majors around data mining, businesses of course have been touting it for years already and it's now going to rule our lives. Big Data will show us why we're wrong if we object. Nate Silvers is all about Big Data.
I thought this paragraph was really telling as to what Big Data was all about -- finding, like within a Rorschach blot, what you'd like to see and making the numbers fit your story:
Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at Johnson Research Labs, taught “Introduction to Data Science”
last semester at Columbia (its first course with “data science” in the
title). She described the data scientist this way: “a hybrid computer
scientist software engineer statistician.” And added: “The best tend to
be really curious people, thinkers who ask good questions and are O.K.
dealing with unstructured situations and trying to find structure in
them.”
Somehow, a separate science or critical industry has to spring up alonside these "computer scientists," that will question how they form their narratives to see the structure in those unstructured situations. Who will provide this necessary service?
Of course, other things go along with Big Data -- the Cloud, where it all has to be housed; neuroscience, which is going to purport to duplicate the brain's functions, only make them better, despite what critics say; and then online governance (the wired state) in which Big Data will increasingly be used -- and maybe deployed so as even to obviate the need for voting at all. The geeks who want to eliminate political parties and voting would be happy to see data-scraping and strategic deployment of its results replace organic -- and messy -- democracy so that they can control it as coders.
Most of all, the forced majoritarian democracy of Big Data results will be deployed as "science" to prevent deliberation and voting at all -- or even as a to selectively chose votes (likes) to make a point. I would see this sort of thing in Second Life all the time on the JIRA, the public board where you could vote for a bug to get attention from the developers, or suggest a feature. So, only two people would vote for some obvious bug that affected businesses, and the open source cultists who hated business would flash mob 100 people to comment against it (or start another bug entry and vote for that), and the devs would say, "oh, you're in the minority, sorry". These people who in fact were never ruled by democracy and never really even consulted democracy would suddenly invoke "democracy" in a narrow, manipulated setting to make their point. They avoided a real show-down by having a properly-notified vote with the issues framed properly, and a one-person, one-vote system to avoid alts or sock-puppets -- and of course didn't even have the ability to vote "no" which was an automatic skewer.
So Big Data is above all about who frames the data and who is telling the story, and how they tell it. It's also about the "garbage-in" problem -- if Wikipedia is forming the basis for new data-gathering and Big Data drilling projects, small wonder that we will have political skewing.
It's not really about the data. It's about the story. I would see this with Nate Silvers time and again. There was never anything wrong with "the math" -- how could there be, it was math! But it was about what was selected, which polls, which story to go with them, where the cuts were made. This goes in, that doesn't go in.
I remember one of the big discoveries I made in Second Life was that there was a very different real popularity list than the "top 20 popular sites" list that the company kept featuring. I had this instinctual sense that where I saw my customers going, and where the company said they were going were different.
The "top 20" was manipulated, of course by several factors. First, the company itself would pick out sites it liked for ideological or business reasons, and feature them in various ways -- sometimes with a blog post, or even something as seemingly innocuous as the CEO putting it in his own personal "picks" on his avatar profile. There could even be guided paths to those sites -- like Cubey Terra's Aerodrome -- for the newbie when he landed in the world and was looking for things to do. So those "top 20" sites had some steerage -- and then it was a self-fulfilling prophecy -- once boosted, the site would stay in the high ranks as people came to it because people came to it...Having had such a windfall a few times for my own sites -- when unbenownst to me, my sites were picked when I hadn't even applied -- I can see the deluge of traffic that would come to them, no doubt the way the traffic for the sites featured right now on the Linden blog, like Eshi Otatawa's dress store.
The other factor would be the manipulation of traffic statistics in Second Life through "camping" as it was called -- paying people to physically remain at your store or hangout or dance club to artificially drive up the numbers. Soon people deployed bots, hiding them in boxes up in the sky so their artificial nature wouldn't turn people off, and that way they could make it appear as if hundreds of people were coming and staying at the site.
So I suggested that instead of looking at those fake and manipulated numbers, the company should tabulate another source, which amounted to the "likes" on Facebook -- before that system even existed, and before Facebook was widely used. These were the "picks" that you put on your profile. When you visited a store, you could "like" it by clicking on the button to have it show up in your picks, and then the picture and name and URL would automatically render on your profile. To be sure, there were companies that were willing to buy people's picks, but really not that many of them, because most people found the few spots on their profile to show their favourite places to be so precious they didn't want to sell them to some store. In fact, they used them as a story board, and put up moments of their Second Life, like their first home or their virtual weddings or a party with friends, and then in a sense the place where their story had occurred became a "favourite".
So I challenged the company to track those "picks" and put up the results, and Philip Rosedale was finally persuaded to do this once, and even Hamlet Au, who loathed me because I challenged his house-organ style paid writing for the company at the time, was forced to write about this great idea of mine, which was called a "folksonomy". Naturally, the pristine state of the "folksonomy" couldn't last long, as companies might then game it. But it was less gamed than the other means which was determined by traffic -- itself a category that then got discarded and manipulated with other secret algorithms a la Google (and even the Google Search Appliance was used).
I thought of all this when I read Socialbakers' report on the top brands "liked" in America based on what people clicked on Facebook. Sure, those companies may be hiring bands of "likers". But by and large, I think they have pretty much genuine material. I see hundreds of my friends "liking" those brands. Once, I heard someone complain that a brand he didn't think he "liked," really, was showing up in his feed. Did he accidently click when he was hovering? Is it sometimes put in without your liking? (Right now, I see things in my Facebook feed I can't believe I could have ever accidently clicked, even, like "Lower My Bills," so it's right to ask the question).
Even so, if pressed, I think these analytical firms could show through representative samples that most of the "likes" are organic.
Wal-mart, the store that the left loves to hate, is America's favourite store. They love it. They "like" it on Facebook. For real. Because they are not like you. We are not like you. I shop at Wal-mart's when I can, which isn't so often as we don't have one in New York City, which is too urbane and hipster and lefty for Wal-mart -- it would never get approved. We don't have very many big stores beyond Macy's and a few like Bed, Bath and Beyond anyway -- be thankful we have at least a K-mart.
Note that Apple doesn't even appear on this list; Samsug is the favourite brand for gadgets.
Despite the left's best efforts, Chik-Fil-A's picture of their founder enjoying a birthday was the most interacted picture. The second-most interacted, i.e. reposted, was a critique of Michelle Obama's birthday party at a time when White House tours for kids were cancelled. The third is a demand that McCain apologize to Rand Paul.
Now, you might conclude that these are just organized conservative or liberatarian flashmobs, and maybe they are, but they are interesting, because they are so different than the flashmobs we seem to see on Twitter.
Here's another "crowd-sourced" evidence of the "liking" of Wal-mart from Dorothy Gambrell. This is the place where people are, when they spot someone they'd like to date, but either don't get up enough nerve to meet, or else lose in the crowd before they can say anything. This romantic "missed connection" idea is very popular on Craig's List, and this map of the country pining in their place of "missed connection" is quite telling about culture -- the 24-hour fitness gym in California, the subway in New York City where people have to take long rides underground -- and Wal-mart so many other places!
The fact is, while the left keeps trying to demonize Wal-mart as part of their assault on capitalism as a system, because they think it exemplifies its evils, people keep shopping there because it's convenient, helpful, and the prices are cheap but the goods not too low quality. The left prefers to bash Wal-mart for buying goods manufactured in China, even as they tweet arrogantly on their iphones also made in China by Silicon Valley companies like Apple.
Whenever I see one of these anti-Wal-mart stories, I always have to wonder where they come from. I saw one, two, three of them the other day, and they all seemed to come from the same source at the same time, or are recycled. It seems to me Business Insider, despite its name, consistently runs a leftist or "progressive" line that is anti-business of the sort that Silicon Valley hates culturally or finds competitive.
So I asked using that self-same social media whether other people were finding that the Wal-mart shelves were empty, the sales people were depleted, and the lines were long. Yes, there was a picture of an empty shelf at Wal-mart in these news article, but was that what people were randomly discovering in their particular Wal-mart?
Not surprisingly, some people in different locations across the country reported that they weren't seeing any of this.
Some reported that they saw less sales help and longer lines, but not empty shelves. I will have to come back and post my findings when I hear from some more people, but even with just a half dozen answers where no one found any empty shelves, I had to question what this story was about.
Now, a brisk Silicon Valley Big Data manager might tell me that the numbers were showing empty or emptying shelves over the entire system. Or the journalists trying to make a point maybe selected a geographical sample, or an illustrative sample to make their point. And how will we know, as journalists are increasingly babbling about how they are crowd-sourcing and using Big Data now and there is even an implication that we need "journalist-coders" for the future.
But if they cannot faithfully render what might only be the minority experience, it's misleading. And as we keep encountering these seeming "Big Data" pronouncements, dripping with mathematical certitude and self-righteousness, how can we dare combat them? The media could be selective or it could really use "Big Data" from across a system, but come to tendentious readings of it. Telling the story their way.
And there will really only be one way of combating this, if strong enough social movements rise up to keep insisting on their own narratives. One side will always find the other's to be "false," but what's important is that there be mulitple narratives so that there's a running critique for the ordinary man to try to make up his own mind.
As for that job you're trying to land? I'm not sure there will be that many six-figured data-mining jobs so available just yet. And despite what you read in the papers, Wal-mart is always hiring and is massively popular, so try there.
Here's Matthew Keys again, heckling me on the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper that he is charged with helping to vandalize. What a creep!
There's also no sense of responsibility -- that he is a public figure in a public news agency. This parochial, village-like mentality of big people on the Internet with inflated egos is something I often come across in the "global village". A shock from an individual with numerous followers and fawning attention that he might have critics. A shriek that someone might fact multiple criticism on multiple news articles instead of just letting their crusading lawyers' misleading statements stand in the public eye. Incredible!
"Often,
"bullying" seems to mean something about hating gays -- but then that
means if you question anything about the way that some aggressive gay
activists are pursuing their cause by boycotting or trying to silence
other groups they don't like, why, you're the "bully" then -- even if
what they do would be classified as bullying in anyone else's hands."
Apparently the same can be said for "harassment." When you question as
to why someone is obsessed with an idea or an individual -- going so far
as to look up every article on a subject so they can leave a comment --
that's "harassment," even if said person goes to great lengths (and
takes great time out of their day) to write lengthy, rambling blog
entries on said person, which might qualify as "harassment" to some
people.
I
certainly stand by any quote I make, and this quote about the
aggressiveness of some gay activists trying to take others' freedom of
association and freedom of expression of them is definitely a concern I
have. I support equality, gay marriage, and LGBT rights. I don't support
achieving them via persecuting others and taking away their rights.
This shouldn't be a minority opinion.
Matthew, you seem to
have forgotten that you are a public figure, and a very public figure,
running the Twitter feed for Reuters, a news agency. There's a saying
about translators about how they should be different than the proverb
about children -- "translators should be heard, not seen," i.e. their
personalities should not get in the way of their job. This adage might
apply to your profession as well. Nobody is "harassing" you because they
comment on your case, whether in one
comment or in numerous comments. There is no "Internet police" that
decides that comments are "too much". I marvel at the involved
narcissism and self-regard coupled with thin-skin geekitude that could
produce a notion that leaving comments on public articles about public
figures is "harassment". Rambling or no, blog entries about public
figures are legitimate as well. This idea that you have to undermine
legitimate activity -- take rights away from others -- is why we have to
worry about arrogant people like you who act with a grand sense of
impunity to take other people's rights away in the name of "journalism".
Sergey Brin wearing Google Glass in the subway -- and did you know Prokofy Neva with his monacle was nearly able to sit in his lap?
I don't know whether Mike Arrington is guilty. I think any person's allegations of mental or physical abuse have to be taken seriously, regardless of whether their partner is a famous tech investor and blogger or not.
I don't know how this will end, but I noted on TechCrunch that somehow, the TechCrunch management and AOL have to make a statement about this. As Arrington will take the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt later this month (at least, he took part in it in past years even after leaving TC so I think that's the plan), many people will be whispering and AOL will have to address this. They could say that they are waiting for a court or internal corporate investigation or remain silence, but neither option will be very good. To be responsible, they would have to say at least that they take such allegations seriously. But in the tech world, allegations are made often, sometimes they are true, and even when they seem likely, the corporations don't always suspend or comment critically about their colleagues or employees -- see Reuters and the Matthew Keys case.
Is There Reason to Fear Mike Arrington?
Rebecca Greenfield doesn't think there's any reason any more to fear Mike Arrington, and thereby has ensured his enduring love. There's a lot that's creepy in her piece because she doesn't make a generic condemnation of domestic violence, and doesn't think there's a problem in the Valley. Worse, she thinks the statements of a HR administrator are somehow better sourced than the statements of the victim herself. She also makes a very thin case for claiming that this powerful VC and presider over TechCrunch and still occasional contributor to TC is somehow facing competition from "other" blogs. Which ones? Like his former colleague Sarah Lacey, a brave lady, at PandoDaily, who hasn't said anything about this?
Maybe it's just the little people and not the big people who have to be afraid of Mike Arrington? How little?
Arrington can be very charming and charismatic and brilliant, as we all know, and also very abrupt and nasty. I remember years ago, he blocked me on Twitter. I didn't care. I kept responding critically to him. Then he blocked me directly on TechCrunch. Again, I didn't care. I kept commenting anyway on my blog and linking. Interestingly, eventually I was unblocked by Arrington on Twitter (and remained unblocked) and was let through on TechCrunch where I remain. I have no idea what made them block me for a time on TC. Perhaps it was comments on that whole Leo Laporte affair, where I took Leo's side. Tech biggies blocking me is not news. Robert Scoble and Loren Feldman both blocked me back in the day, and both unblocked me. I'll live.
Some time ago, Arrington had a conversation on Facebook about what he should do with "trolls". I generally reject the concept and use of this term as it is often very broad, and for thin-skinned vain geeks, can expand to almost anything. I said he should just ignore them -- he was getting to the point where he wouldn't post on Facebook because of the problem of keeping an open, public account but having then people answer in ways he didn't like. Yet of course, he had the option to mute people not just for that thread, but to take his entire feed out of their view as if it didn't exist, and it wouldn't even show up in search (Facebook, like G+, is over-thorough that way, something I've always condemned). I pointed that out. He got into a separate, private conversation with me on Facebook explaining how large communities break down into trolling and it destroys the user experience, but he had to shut off comments on FB even if it meant losing the "smart thoughts" of people like me.
I might have been flattered, but not for long. Perhaps a year later, Arrington posted something aggressively attacking the Boy Scouts. I said I supported gay marriage rights but that I didn't think the way to getting them was by denying others their civil rights of free speech and free association. Arrington said he was no longer a libertarian on this point and while there wasn't any acrimonious exchange, he blocked me, not just from that thread, or not just from "friend" status to post, but from seeing his feed completely. So yeah -- charming, flattering even, making you feel special -- and then brutal and mean.
Arrington was the guy who first suggested there be a motorcycle contest at TechCrunch, then called on everyone to make pitches. Many people got up and made start-up pitches or poignant reasons why they needed this motorcycle. I got up and said I needed something that would keep my son from joining the Marines and going to Afghanistan. I won the contest, and Arrington came over and shook my hand and took my card. That motorcycle indeed changed my son's life -- he stayed in college and then got a job which he was able to do much better on the bike. To be sure, it began impossible to find any place to charge it, and he had to swap it for a time with a friend who had a house with a garage where he could do the charging. But it kept him from going to the army out of a sense of lack of choices. He had something to work on, a goal to achieve, first getting the licenses and other paperwork and maintaining and managing the bike and figuring out things like parking and routes and care. Every kid should have a motor vehicle when they turn 16 or 18 so that they begin to think of what is required in life to be an adult -- it gives them goals and projects -- something to polish and shine and talk about with their buddies. It might seem trivial, but a thing like a motorcycle can be the one thing that makes somebody's life gel and turn around, making commuting a joy instead of a chore and even deterrent (taking two buses for an hour to college was a grind).
Certainly Lara Kolodny of Fast Company, who believes she was the one who managed this whole motorcycle contest PR thing, expected me to be "grateful" for this and was angry that I criticized her fatuous claims -- sucking up to the tech set -- that Congress was "stupid" and didn't have technical expertise. She ended up blocking me completely, too, and acting as if somehow a personal relationship in a little village had been violated. That's how touchy strangers can get on the Internet. Arrington may have thought I should have been more grateful, too. And it's indicative of this world that I'm thinking, as I haven't gotten my press pass yet for TechCrunch Disrupt, where I did get a pass the last two years, that maybe because Arrington has me blocked on Facebook, I might not get it... That would be sad, as TechCrunch is among the most important intellectual experiences for me of the year, and without being there, it's hard to really get the good stories. I feel I had some really good original stories including even news on Marissa Meyer the last time I went, but thin skins and hurt feelings of people in power can mean your "smart thoughts" will not be welcome.
Can We Have 'Pre-Crime' Prosecution in the Future?
In any event, this brings me to the question of whether tracking activities that might turn into crimes will bring us a better or a worse world (there was a movie on this subject, "Minority Report"). And of course, I'm leaning toward thinking it will be a worse world, because it will leave no room for human remorse and change, or none of that gray area that enables human interactions to proceed in an imperfect world with imperfect people, parallel to legal systems, which of course can be corrupt or over-brutal, even though I think they mainly deliver justice in this country.
The TechCrunch people had a case of allegations of violence from Mike before, but they handled it through a private HR investigation and then both parties decided to keep it confidential and no charges were pressed or reprimands or anything were made. If those corporate confidential processes are to have any integrity, and serve as a parallel to law that is sometimes useful, and not always exonerating of those guilty, then breaking that confidence by now going to the media is wrong.
Or is it?
Of course, when the Catholic Church used that logic on pedophiles, and put notes in files and moved people around, and tried to deal with the problem "within the community," look where that ended up! And I think more and more, like child abuse, people will not tolerate domestic violence as a private matter that should be handled by private systems and not the public courts. Indeed, if a stranger threw you against a wall, or shoved you down on a bed hard, you could file assault charges; if he's your boss or an important man, obviously you're going to weigh the impact on your career.
Does That Snapshot of Bad Human Behaviour Describe the Person Fairly?
I think cases of violence have to be reported, but they aren't a cure-all. In my huge New York City apartment complex, my neighbours and I have reported domestic violence of partners or crazy parents against their children, and it doesn't always "go anywhere". In one case, the jealous boyfriend still came and shot his girlfriend despite us bringing the police to the door on multiple occasions. In another, our showers of reports to management and child welfare authorities only made the abusive mother suddenly move out with her scared children and disappear.
Then there is a story like this that makes you contemplate the morality of crime reporting forever.
I will never forget the time I was walking along by a rehabilitation hospital and saw an altercation out front between a man and his wife and their severely disabled little daughter in a wheel chair. The mother was shouting and screaming at the man, they were arguing about who was going to take the child, evidently, and he began pushing her, and somehow in the melee, the little girl's wheel chair also got pushed around, and was dangerously close to oncoming traffic. The look of fear on her little face was terrible to see -- she broke into tears. The man and women were shouting and carrying on. Another woman and I on the street witnessing all this immediately wrote down the license plate and called 911 on our cell phones. The couple ended up driving away with the child -- nothing came of it. I also called Child Protective Services -- nothing seemed to go further.
And maybe it's for the best. Several weeks later, I was walking along the same street. There I saw the same man. He was cradling the little disabled girl in his lap, and she was smiling happily. He was feeding her some ice cream, and letting her know she was the best daughter in the whole world. The little scene made me think. What if the police had arrested him? These things can go very far, very fast, and the man could still be in jail because of the city's fears of missing yet another case where a child is beaten or dies. But who else was going to take care of that little girl every Saturday? Who else was going to hold her in his arms and care about her more than anyone else in the world? It wouldn't be me or you. I happened to have volunteered in that same hospital, translating for teenagers whose legs were blown away in the Chechen war as children. But then I went home, and didn't come back every weekend, and didn't give them ice cream. My point is that as bad as that incident was where the little girl's wheelchair was dangerously pushed and her parents were shouting and it made her cry, well, that was not all there was to the relationship.
I think in dealing with human fallibility, we have to have some common sense and good judgement, but that it is hard to make alone, and hard to make without all the circumstances and evidence, and hey, that's why we have independent court systems, and not Google Glass, where the Server Does Not Lie.
Morozov's -- and Schneier's -- Legal Nihilism
Which brings me to Evgeny Morozov's shocking legal nihilism in To Save Everything Click Here. Of course, we could have expected this from him, as he was always ambivalent about WikiLeaks and very much dodged the moral question of the DDoS (which is why geeks and their fellow travellers have to be pushed on this relentlessly). He dodged it when I asked him directly, by taking the clever route of questioning harsh sentences or ruination of young lives -- instead of biting the bullet and making a moral judgement about it -- and there was no reason why he couldn't. In the end, he wanted to keep the DDoS available as an option for special situations of the political kind he'd approve. Despicable. (I explain why the sit-in is nothing like the DDoS because the former appeals to rights peacefully and non-disruptively and the latter takes them away disruptively.)
So legal nihilism (of the sort Medvedev knew all too well and pretended to condemn and wish to change) is exactly what I will call it.
Because the guidance in the little story above is "the best interests of the child" and judging the severity of the crime and whether outsiders really can serve as judge and jury and executioner. It's still human rights. Just a little more -- if the mother had been beaten, if the child really was pushed into traffic, no amount of ice cream would exonerate it, you know?
In his book -- again, not surprising, given his constant and cunning undermining of the institutions of Western civilization -- Morozov quotes celebrate security geek Bruce Schneier in his bid for a world in which we don't have "too much" security induced by intrusive security states or "pre-crime" sorts of monitoring by all kinds of smart gadgets. He thinks a little bit of latitude is needed to ensure that "change for a Better World" that all geeks -- and Morozov is no exception here -- yearn for and use to exonerate a multitude of sins.
Here's what Schneier -- that legal nihilist lawless security consultant who explains says about why we can't have too much law, and need to enable "defection" -- by which he means a suspension of the law for the particularly smart and deserving people like himself.
First, Morozov gives a very strained hypothetical re-telling of the famous Rosa Parks story, in the future, in a perfect electronic "smart world" where all the buses would be able to tell all the people planning to board them, and calculate the white people who would need to sit in the front rows, and the room left for the black people (pp. 204-205). "Equipped with sensors that know how many passengers are waiting at the nearest stop, the bus can calcualte the exact number of African Americans it can transport without triggering conflict; those passengers who won't be able to board or find a seat are sent polite text messages informing them of future pickups."
In this horrid dystopia, Rosa Parks never gets on the bus to make her famous sit-in, because the smart gadgets have locked her out way in advance with facial-recognition technology, so she never even gets a chance to rebel against this racist system (so goes Morozov's thinking).
Of course, the future isn't likely to contain racist or sexist block-outs -- or if it will, it will be in a place like George Zimmerman's community, where a black teenager running from the 7/11 with Skittles will be pre-blocked from even being able to run across a lawn. What's more likely in our future is a bus that doesn't let fat people on, because they take up more seat room or require more expenditure of gasoline to carry.
But surely Morozov underestimates the human spirit. Rosa might have staged her sit-down at the bus stop, refusing to leave until the racist system was removed. Or she could have gone to protest to the bus company. Yet he concludes that in an over-electronically-regulated future, "there's little space for friction and tension--and quite likely for change."
Security expert Bruce Schneier invokes Rosa Parks in his notion of the need for less security and a law-breaking mentality as Morozov explains:
Security expert Bruce Schneier makes a smiliar point when he celebrates "defection" -- security speak for lawberaking -- as "an engine for ninovation, an immunologial challenge to ensure the health of the majority, a defense against the risk of monoculture, a reservoir of diversity, and a catalyst for social change." Advanced security systems tend to become institutionalized and integrated into vast bureaucratic systems; when policing functions are shifted to technolgoy, with its aura of neutrality and seemingly natural origins outside human intersets and institutions, such institutionalization can happen eve quicker -- and in a far less visible manner. As Schneier points out, societies protected by such measures are not necessarily moral or desirable; they can be -- and are -- rather awful. To build a technological environment where lawbreaking is impossible is to close the important social valves through which social change happens: "Sometimes a whistle-blower needs to pubilsh documents proving his government has been waging an illegal bombing campaign in Laos and Cambodia. Sometimes a plutonium processing plant worker needs to contact a reporter to discuss her employer's inadequate safety practices. And sometimes a black woman needs to sit down at the front of a bus and not get up. Without defectors, social change would be impossible; stagnation would set in," ntoes Schneier. John Dewewy would agree.
Nonsense -- and dangerous nonsense, and here's why.
Just Law
In each one of these examples cited by Schneier and Morozov, the whistleblowers are not in fact breaking the law as it really is -- or the law as it should be if it were just law. The notion of actual law and just law are completely missing from their analysis where they just feel that certain smarter, daring people should get to change things by their anarchist and revolutionary notions.
In the case of the Pentagon Papers, the bombing can be characterized as "illegal" in the first place because it is not authorized or because the cost of civilian casualties is too high. The higher call of conscience to a greater just law involved in the Pentagon Papers is clear in ways that are completely absent in the case of Bradley Manning (in fact, as I've explained, these two cases are very good examples of the difference between the human rights or legal approach and the revolutionary or ideological approach; Manning is not a whistleblower as he didn't even see fit to publish -- nor did Assange -- the story that supposedy caused his turn to conscience).
In the case of the plutonium plant, there are regulations that the employee found were violated -- there was law, and it was violated. Her job was the restoration of the rule of law, not breaking a law.
In the case of Rosa Parks, the Constitution's "all men are created equal" had to be made good on, and the racism against slaves and former slaves had to end to be consistent with the notion of "equality before the law" which was a bedrock of American Constitutionalism (and forms the basis for the drive for recognition of LGBT rights including marriage). Here, again, it isn't about legal nihilism, as both Morozov and Schneier claim, but restoration or affirmation of the existing or higher law -- the just law. One sense that neither Morozov or Schneier have any notion of just law in their minds when they gleefully give a blessing to "defection".
So with the DDoS as "civil disobedience," the false argument is made that a higher and just law "requires" this. What would that be? The right of disgruntled former employees or bored script kiddies or anarchists to destroy companies or the capitalist system because they feel like it? They really believe it's a greater evil than communism or fascism?
Morozov's examples just aren't rising to the test to make the claim that the latitude is needed to bring about that geek religionist's "Better World". And that's mainly because it will be decided by revolutionary expediency by him and his smart friends -- the problem with legal nihilism, always.
Do We Need Room for 'Defection'?
That brings us to the problem of how we are to enable both forgiveness for humans -- looking at the sin and not the sinner, or not letting the sin overtake the sinner's capacity for change -- and also securing compliance with good laws or improving bad laws by invocation of the notion of just law above them. For example, the secrecy of drones and the drone wars can be fought on grounds of over-technology, as Morozov might, or hyper lawfaring notion of "lack of due process", but the problem with both those ideas is that the borderlines for when technology is good or bad, a tool or a weapon, can be in the eye of the beholder, and P.S., war is legal under international law. An approach that emphasizes the "just war" notion -- that drone strikes create more enemies than they remove and aren't ending wars -- or that emphasize injustice against a notion of justice -- that those injured or killed by "collateral damage" should
The problem with some of the notions that both the targets and the alllies of Morozov have with all this is that their set of propositions for change now aren't of the law-based"Golden Rule" sort but more of the ideological-based "it's good because we say so". Pot legalizers just want to legalize pot to feel good, and if you are killed in a car accident or have less parental attention as a child from them they don't care; drunk drivers feel the same way. People who want to violate copyright just want to consume media freely or without friction or use it themselves to make money -- they coat this with the notion of "innovation" but it's an old story.
Yes, I get it that in the Derrida world -- the world of a broken man who committed suicide -- yes, even "the rule of law" or the law-based approach is considered "merely yet one more constructed ideology". Sure, human legal systems are imperfect. Yet they are better than a stick in your eye. Obnoxious and dangerous potheads and drunks, like downed servers, are sticks in your eye.
Google Glassholes or People with Google Glasses Won't Throw Stones?
Technology and discussions around it move so fast that when Morozov started, Google Glass was just "Project Glass" and he doesn't have too much discussion of it; today it is what hundreds of people are buying and talking about and ads are even made using it. Morozov first seemed only disturbed that Google Glass might be bad at serving you with its imperfect machine algorithms -- it might tell you were sad at the bad phone call you just got, but it would then give you a Renoir painting to cheer you up that might merely be the one randomly available in your collection of 124 selected, and might only irritate you.
He later moves on to discussing "situational crime preventing," and contemplates the problems of technology stopping even the good guys -- the full-body turnstile meant to keep out scofflaws then prevented police who didn't happen to have metro cards from getting in the subway to help a shooting victim who then died. Not so in Berlin, with SCP. So Google Glass might pick out young males with high testosterone, note when they were drunk, and prevent them from viewing females on a gadget, writes Morozov. Or potentially in real life, in the Internet of Things? Well, this is going to get complicated.
If Meg Asha were wearing Google Glasses (especially their hidden cousins sure to come) she could film Mike Arrington. Or Mike Arrington's knowledge that she had them on would be a deterrent. Even if he broke them, the footage might be "in the cloud". Then she and he and the HR department might decide to erase it or keep it. Or she might call the police. It might be harder then for both of them to continue their careers, even if a criminal or civil case didn't develop them. Then society can decide whether that would be a benefit.
I guess what I'm saying is that even with the capacities of Google Glass for pre-crime or situational-crime monitoring and therefore potential stopping, human judgement is still required, and perhaps more than ever. The attitude of society to domestic violence in general, and its ability to forgive it in the famous, like Rhianna, will still be tested.
We are all familiar with how media can tell a story, but hide a story even while appearing to tell it. I once sat on a jury where a food worker who injured his thumb badly in a fall in an unsafe refrigerated pantry and sued his employer for damages was impugned by a wealthy hotel chain that filmed him secretly trimming his hedges while on medical leave, trying to imply that he was still able to use his hands. Of course, a mittened hand on a set of sheers tidying up some shaggy bushes, while someone is bored on sick leave with nothing to do, isn't the same as the perfect chopping of numerous salads in a restaurant.
What you learn from Wales himself and some former Wikipedian editors is that while there is a claim of 150,000 volunteers producing the millions of entries; while of these, 615 do 50% of the edits (!), in reality, only 15 people -- like a little Politburo -- are the arbitors for controversial pages. That's just horrible.
Then, as I saw more and more repeated vandalism and libelous claims being made on my ever-more elaborate Wikipedia entry, and then a swarm of Anonymous began to harass me and dox me in February when I criticized their vigilantism in Steubenville, I began to put objections on the "Talk" page.
Instead, I just got another kid, one of them, a former Googler and software developer. I publicized all this correspondence, as I think it's part of the large and necessary social task that many, many more people than me need to bring to Wikipedianism, especially as Wikipedia will increasingly be used as the "knowledge base" for all kinds of "smart" gadgets.
So here's the response I got to my latest complaint:
Dear Catherine Fitzpatrick,
Wikimedia Volunteer Response Team is committed to providing assistance with sensitive issues related to the biographical articles on Wikipedia. However, since you have decided that attacking the volunteer who has genuinely tried to help you is an appropriate reaction to the effort he has put into cleaning up the article about you, we no longer find ourselves in position to assist you any further. Since your concerns do not require privacy, as you have voluntarily published the entire correspondence, you may bring up them publicly on Wikipedia, as described in <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons>.
Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit charitable organization which employs people with extremely diverse backgrounds. We have about 35 chapters around the world, all ran by local volunteers. Our projects exist in 350 languages and we have a language engineering department with resident linguist. We also have a dedicated program of the development of Wikimedia projects in Global South and a lot of events aimed at involving more women and improving Wikipedia coverage on topics related to feminism and women's history. I do not know how have you verified your assumptions about "white nerdy males" and "narrow-minded little coders", but they certainly do not add you credibility when compared to reality.
Yours sincerely, Victor Vasiliev.
Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/ --- Disclaimer: all mail to this address is answered by volunteers, and responses are not to be considered an official statement of the Wikimedia Foundation. For official correspondence, please contact the Wikimedia Foundation by certified mail at the address listed on https://www.wikimediafoundation.org/
Well, Victor, Global South program or no, we can't check your claims because you don't have transparency about yourselves at all!
And while you claim that these answers from volunteers "are not to be considered an official statement" from the Wikimedia Foundation, in fact, it seems as it is, as your answer has essentially conceded that tacitly.
You imagine that people to whom we are forced to appeal about grossly vandalized entries are somehow "helping" when they don't help, but take the side of their tribe, the geek vandals.
And you imagine that publicizing the lame answers of this volunteer -- in a much-needed transparency and accountability for your secret society -- is an "attack". It's not an attack, it's a mere publication of his geeky response -- obviously this material is tendentious and he can't grasp it. Without any "science," he linked to the completely biased piece on Woodbury banned from Second Life, as if this was the case for "many" educational projects, which he pluralized, and as if they weren't banned for cause.
And isn't it hilarious that on my say-so, he can decide that I don't have the largest artificially-intelligent chicken experiment in Second Life (I surely don't, but he has no way of knowing that), but on my say-so, he can't remove the entire ridiculous insanity of even tying my biography to Woodbury University, merely because I abuse-reported these griefers and documented their abusiveness against me in a virtual world.
What a creepy bunch, these Wikitarians! If you refuse to make an account and join their system -- I refuse -- then they expose your IP address -- even though the zillions of people who make edits are largely anonymous. On my entry, you can see there are those who make accounts, then vandalize my entry, then evidently delete their accounts -- which accounts for notices that there is "no such name" when you click on it. The person who started this digital form of harassment of me named "Jason OBrian" doesn't exist. Hah!
Then, if you publicize their tendentious correspondence, they decide then that they can "no longer help you". Of course, one doesn't need such "help" but indeed, I will continue filing complaints.
I'm looking around now to see if there is any group that has a concerted effort to try to gain accountability from the murky and cultic Wikipedia gang.
Look at this appalling concept of "fiberhoods"
brought to us in Kansas City creating broadband haves and have-nots in a
system that was supposed to increase broadband -- as the Harper's piece explains,
critiquing the much-ballyhooded Google "socialism in one city" project:
Utility-owned networks guarantee access to every citizen in a
municipality. Google, by contrast, divided up Kansas City into 202
"fiberhoods" -- and decreed that between 5 and 25 percent of the
residents in each fiberhood had to preregister for its service by paying
a ten-dollar fee and opening a Google account. Fiberhoods that didn't
qualify would be left out of the network. Worse, Google's fiberhood map
bisected the city at Troost Avenue, a historical racial divide. It soon
became clear that most lower-income black areas would fail to meet the
preregistration quotas. Local teachers and librarians began canvassing
door-to-door with Google employees, urging residents to sign up, and
charitable groups raised money for registration fees. A majority of
these fiberhoods ultimately qualified for service. But the frenzied
volunteer push revealed an uncomfortable truth behind the city's "real
partnership" with Google: Kanasas City had left itself powerless to
guarantee service for its most vulnerable constituents. And it could not
compel Google to redraw its maps in a less discriminatory way. (Of
course, the vegan bakery, Pilates studio, and Italian deli next door to
Google's subsidized offices received their fiber service for free.)
The authors also talk about the real reason this experiment was done in Kansas, and not California -- a town willing to drop all its regulatory functions over this corporation.
But another explanation might be the treasure trove of user-behaviour information that such a network represents. Data of this kind is so prized that a company like Google can afford to give away other services for free, as long as this beneficence opens up new markets. In Kansas City, low-income subscribers to the company's slower, "free" Internet option will be giving Google details about each URl they visit, even if their accounts remain anonymous. And customers who plunk down $120 a month for the "Full Google Experience" will have their television-viewing habits individually tracked by Google's data-mining elves. Is this a reasonable bargain? For Kasnas City, it's too late to ask. But history -- and the success of municipally owned fiber-optic projects throughout the country--strongly suggest that we should look this gift horse in the mouth.
Pick up the hard-copy of this issue of Harpers from your news stand -- this article is a must-read. Plus, it has a good story from John LeCarre (although some of his whiney lefty pontificating to go with it) and another useful article about Ron Paul.
Happy, shiny people bringing Googlefiber to Kansas City. Photo by UFCFool.
Creepy cult TED talk by Beth Noveck. Especially laughable is the notion of the Russian state-owned bank's "crowdsourcing" -- and her preaching against civil society's "antagonism" with government when it gets "transparency".
If you ever want to see the seeds of totalitarianism, just look at this!
What Could Bring Totalitarianism Via the Internet?
Basically, I mean these six premises, creating the circumstances where an "advance guard" of revolutionary intellectuals take power of the state through their networks and rule it with "science":
o The gov 2.0 or "open government" movement has never really been democratically decided or sustained any liberal democratic critique; it is a movement of technolosts benefiting themselves first and foremost
o the reputational systems that this movement wants to use for various "Better World" purposes, generally those maintained by Wikipedia, Facebook or LinkedIn, are highly flawed and have technological and political limitations and little ability to opt-out or appeal their tendentious results;
o the "social pressure" that these goverati want to harness through social media can range from the vigilantism of their political networks to Anonymous hacking, and is itself a coercive means of bringing change, usually according to a revolutionary agenda;
o the "automated processes" invoked are decided by coders, without much democratic input, according to the ideology of the network in power;
o the allusions to "participation" or "more voices" are highly stylized and often consist of models like Code for America, which are just ingroups getting together with their networks to force changes without scrutiny or political process;
o there is no grown-up oversight, public or private, of these ideas, as they are mainly concocted in certain think -tanks and railroaded into government offices untouched by any critical process.
All of those things contain the seeds of totalitarianism in them.
Big Brother in Your House -- And Whom Morozov Doesn't Mention or Criticize
@dgolumbia Sounds more like Big Brother in your house as opposed to you firing bureaucrats.
Well, exactly. I've been jumping up and down and yelling about Beth Noveck and her ideas for eight years now. For this reason. It's the seeds of totalitarianism. Everybody needs to fight it or we really do lose our freedoms, as this isn't just some professor -- it's somebody on Obama's transition team who occupies the White House Office of Science and Technology for some years before returning to academe and still remaining a beloved guru of the State Department tech set and many other influential networks.
So...I went to look up Beth Noveck -- I can't keep up all the time! -- after noticing a troubling thing: in his Evgeny Morozov's enormous critique of Silicon Valley, it's as important to see who he doesn't talk about, or mentions in a half-line as it is to see he obsesses about (like Jeff Jarvis or Tim O'Reilly). I guess part of it is "Silicon Alley" doesn't capture his attention as much -- he spent a lot of time in California. Beth Noveck, based in New York City, is eclipsed for him (or in fact he likes some of her ideas). Fred Wilson, who is the entrepreneur who should be mentioned in any great study of technocommunism as the praxis master bringing actual money, thought, and action to a lot of the wacky ideas that would remain in the can without him, gets no mention by Morozov; AnneMarie Slaughter, better known for her "can't have it all" cry against certain kinds of feminism, but actually among the key Twitterati intelligentsia, and now to head the New America Foundation is not mentioned at all; Rebecca MacKinnon, also at NAF and on the board of CPJ, gets just a brief mention of her Internet-centric notions of politics; and Beth Noveck gets only a paragraph or two, although she is an example of someone actually getting to a position of power with these ideas -- she was assistant director to the White House Office on Science and Technology, and is now back at New York Law School (not to be confused with NYU Law School) and very influential.
I first became horrified with Beth Noveck's writings here in 2005 and here, where I talked about the coming collectivization on Web 2.0, and here, where she was speaking in Second Life from her perch at the White House. Last year, I saw her in person at Tech@State and even managed to get a question from the audience through a horrible Twitter backchat filter (the conference hired a live team of geeks to sort through tweets with the hashtags of the conference, and then only use the ones they liked, and then replay the ones they liked and that they felt suited their notion of what should be promoted on a large screen in the conference room, and little screens all over the conference space -- truly awful stuff defeating the free speech of Twitter, of course).
Since she is on the record as saying she wanted to "blow up Congress," I asked Noveck whether he various conceptions were really about circumventing Congress -- some geeks have actually articulated this as a goal, and she has indicated it as a wish. Her answer indicated merely that she had learned the PR speak of saying that she had in mind enhancing democratic governance.
But that's just why all her neo-collectivist ideas are so awful -- they are cloaked in the language of participation, transparency, democracy, good governance, etc. -- but in practice they are an electronic mapping of Leninist democratic centralism and collectivism. Once she, like Shirky, found that the masses that showed up in free unmoderated social media were too unwashed -- on the White House discussion pages they would advocate for marijuana legalization or raise questions about Obama's birthplace -- she then had to figure out how to hang on to the democracy lingo yet still use coded systems to her advantage.
So she devised various bureaucratic methods as any such authoritarian would do long before the Internet was created -- internal groups of friends where the real action was; notices that went out only to those on the list or to those who could muster the patience and determination to follow boring and arcane discussions; simple mutes and bans (especially on Twitter) for those who needed to be filtered out, and so on. When all else fails, there was the 15-day or 30-day or 0-day discussion closing limit on the web-page that would be invoked by her staff at any time.
I view Beth Noveck as one of the most dangerous thinkers in terms of actually installing the Wired State, a state run by elite groups with the Internet and smart gadgets with considerable power to suppress dissent and the free media. Indeed, they already have an embryonic form of it on Twitter and in various group and web networks.
Perhaps the rule is "you can't criticize your fellow NAF fellows" and that's why Morozov, himself a NAF fellow, doesn't have anything to say about some of the characters there. Or maybe he doesn't take women in tech seriously, or women on the East Coast in tech seriously. I do!
Fornicating Dragons of Democracy Experiments
Beth Noveck was in Second Life for a time back in 2005 -- Lawlita was her avatar's name (!) and she formed something called Democracy Island, to do experiments with her class and which was ostensibly "open" and about "open government" but which became rapidly actually "closed" to those who weren't in the invited group (you couldn't visit the island unless she invited you into the group). Now, sure, any university might want to do this to keep out griefers and day-trippers. But then they have the option to put their whole island on invisible in the system, not have it in search, and not pretend they are doing experiments for a Better World that are ostensibly in the public interest and "open".
As one of the more perceptive participants in her class pointed out, in time -- a few months? -- even when she did finally open it up to public access, the island lay fallow. The "Creative Commons License Machine" that was supposed to revolutionize Second Life had cobwebs on it from unuse -- only 30 people had touched its dispense I discovered when I looked at the time because the DRM of Second Life itself engineered into the object menu just worked much, much better for them than Lessig's cult. As my friend who used to be in the groups said, one day he logged on to the empty and deserted island and found, as he put it, "two dragons fornicating" there -- it had become a trysting place for furries without land (furries are people who chose animal avatars, either real or mythical).
So that about summed up "Democracy Island" for me. Fornicating Dragons! Lots of smoke but not too much light!
Beth Noveck continues to make her reputation in so many places for having "revolutionized" the patent system -- although there, she was never able to fully incorporate her system, which basically involved a bureaucratically-centralized system for casting about and filtering in "experts" to work on patents -- basically an online version of "the cadres decide everything" where you have a more efficient way to cast about and filter for cadres and then put them to work. Noveck used her own considerable real-life network or "social graph" to test and include those who "fit". I don't think the system got approved in the end, and in any event, Noveck left the Administration to go back to academe. She then set her sights on the federal rule-making system -- fertile ground to invade as it is arcane and nerdy and perfect to use as a stealth-overthrow operation because most people won't be able to pay attention. Take a system that is supposed to work under democracy, where the candidates to various agencies are appointed by the president, then they hire experts and consultants or keep various civil servants employed in the system -- and they make the rules that enable the implementation of laws. If you don't like a law, break into the rules-making system and see if you can place "civic pressure," i.e. your networked lobbying group of likeminded persons on it, under the guise of "public participation". If anyone cries foul, say "but the people are participating, what, you're against open government"?"
When I see the cult-like political movement in New York City called Working Families getting into budget meetings and calling in new Internet-based "participatory democracy" on budget meetings, I cry foul in the same way -- in fact it was an extended argument about the true meaning of this system with Alex Howard that got him eventually to block me on G+. But if anyone had world enough and time, all they'd have to do is show up alongside the cadres at any of those meetings, and try to insert any other political perspective, and see how "democratic" the "participation" would be...
The Constructed and Collectivized Online Self
Beth Noveck's writings here are what began to trouble me so greatly because she was willing to dispense with the individual so quickly and reconstruct her online:
Avatars are “public” characters,
personalities designed to function in a public and social capacity.
Avatars think and act as members of a community, rather than as private
individuals. Having to construct an avatar in a virtual world not only
allows me to see myself but it demands that I design a personage for
interaction with others
Everything that I had learned from extensive involvement first in the Sims Online, then in Second Life, let me know that this was not true. People bring themselves online and stay intact as individuals with rights. They may manifest as a dragon or as a beautiful 20-year-old female club dancer when in fact they are a 40-year-old postal worker, but it doesn't matter. They manifest a part of their soul and being and it is an extension of who they are. One could argue that the self is constructed offline for interactions -- "prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet" as T.S. Eliot said -- but Noveck takes it further -- coded virtual-world systems (of the sort that we will all be living in some day because that's how the Internet of Things and other features of web 3.0 will be managed) *force* you to construct that self. That force-constructed self, of course, is controlled ultimately not by you, but the platform provider, in this case a private company (like Linden Lab is for Second Life, or Facebook, which is a virtual world as well (and now that it is coming as a phone interface, it creates even more virtuality -- or augmented reality, which is also a form of virtuality).
For Noveck, "avatars think and act as members of a community" -- the groupism and collectivism seems to happen as soon as you log on. Of course, in real life, too, you are "think and act as members of a community" in various settings -- the PTA, or the book club or the political party. But these feel less rigid and more easily than the constructed self of the online world. There are various technical exigencies that come to play. Let's say there are the hard limits of the servers dictated at Facebook -- you can only have 5000 friends. You also can't talk too rapidly to those friends, or the managers will automatically stop you as a spammer, and possibly even ban you. In Second Life, as in a lot of communities, there is a hard limit to the number of groups you can join -- for a long time, it was set at 20; today, it is set at 42 -- that number geeks love as it is the answer to life. So you can only put so many groups that identify your interests on your profile (some groups and stores get around these limits by designing other "group joiners" that amount to mailing lists). I don't know what the Facebook limit for numbers of groups you can join is -- there is likely on.
More to the point, group owners can decide to invite you or not, let you speak or not, mute you or not, etc. -- these are functions long present in Second Life groups, and today we see them on Facebook, G+, Plurk and other forms of social media. I think Twitter has a hard limit on "lists," which is a kind of group.
Coded Reputational Systems and the Technological Confines of the Online Self
There are all kinds of other hard limits put on the collectivized self online -- the extensive system of mute, make invisible, delete, and ban, all heavily made use of by "thought leaders" on social media. I think I haven't even begun to explain the half of it, especially when Google Glass enables some people to take lots of pictures of life and people and do what they want with them, and lots of other people not to be able to "play" as they either won't have $1500 for the goggles, or they won't like the disruption of having a game-world-like HUD up in their face in real life.
(Ironically, generations of especially young buys who played World of Warcraft and other games are perfectly suited to Glass adaption, as they spent hours and hours of their formative years glancing at dashboards and heads-up-display (HUDs) in front of their eyes while concentrating on game action; it is precisely this factor that will encourage more young males to see the world as a place where you can engage in MMORPG -like shooting as well -- who doesn't doubt that among the first apps or games we will see with Glass will be a game to target and shoot people you don't like -- that complaining customers ahead of you in the store line, that slow driver, that annoying clear -- and make them splatter, and get points for it?)
Reputational systems are another thing we have had long and bad experience with in Second Life, and then later on Twitter and Facebook and such -- and I could summarize these as follows:
o any of them can be gamed, and people can find extra-network ways to get lots of "pluses" -- think of Jason Calicanis, the entrepreneur, who offered a free ipad to anyone who could follow him on Twitter in the early days; think of bosses and teachers getting all their employees or students to follow them
o those with old-media star capacity can easily take over new media reputational systems -- Justin Beiber can get 30 million followers on Twitter because he's broadcast all over the world on TV and radio and of course Youtube.
o people may not become your friend for various reasons, and then they aren't in your friend deck, and you can be judged for that
o you yourself may not have spent adequate time nurturing your friend list, which is often achieved by mining others' lists and then putting those friends-of-friends in the awkward position of saying "no," which often makes them cave to "yes"; you can be limited in your numbers of friends.
o pluses for good behaviour as well as neg-rating (if they are even ever put in) can be gamed or flash-mobbed or be happenstance -- even paid for, as we discovered famous game-maker Will Wright himself did to corrupt his own game in the Sims Online by paying people to take "friendship balloons," probably the earliest form of what we all take for granted today as the "friends list". (Of course if there were friendship lists in the Well predate this, but they didn't have the same features, especially the feature of showing "where you had been" and becoming greener or redder depending on interactions).
o inability to get rid of trolling negrates or inflationery plusses meant to discredit -- not appeals system
o proximity issues -- as geolocation gets matched with friends, you are characterized as a "friend" of someone you merely were next to for X minutes, and this gets inflated, misunderstood, can't be changed, etc.
So that informs you of my background for making the claim that the following notions -- merely lightly put up as questions on a professor's web page as "totalitarianism".
But that's just why I worry, as I spent many years working in that sort of field myself and dealing with these institutions and I know how culty and undemocratic they can get.
Leftist Cultural Attitude Toward Corporations
The first problem for the average lefty professor is accepting that corporations have a right to exist. Under current law, like it or not, they also have the right to make political donations and are persons in ways that a certain hard-left cadre does not want them to be (although they don't feel that way about the corporate persons that are unions or nonprofits or law firms -- the traditional bastions of Democratic candidates and their revenue source).
The problem in trying to rein in corporations with all sorts of do-gooding corporate responsibility schemes, like the Ruggie principles (which do not have the force of international law, but are just "soft law" or recommendations) is that the corporation itself -- the profit-making association -- is not first blessed, legalized, and accepted in the UN and other such bodies. With the crippling of the structures for years by the Soviet Union and its allies, that could never happen. The corporation was just a given force outside of these multi-national bodies with no real definition of, and therefore acknowledgement of its right to exist.
To be sure, the right to associate with others is one of the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that gets you a certain distance; private property also has some acknowledgement but not sufficient. The right to make a business and run it at a profit is basic to human existence all over the world, even in countries of "really-existing socialism" where at least cronies or shoe-shines are allowed such businesses, but it doesn't really exist as a universal principle in international law.
So in settings like the former Soviet republicans or some Africa countries, where kleptocratic and oligarchic governments suppress small and medium business for the sake of keeping themselves in power, there isn't any body of international law to turn to -- there is only the socialist-informed precepts of various UN bodies long hobbled by the Soviet Union's descendents. One of the cures to the depradations of transnationals might be small, medium and even large businesses of the national sort, but most UN-type schemes fetishize in fact bureaucratically-controlled very small micro-credit schemes, of say, women basket-weavers, over the more challenging businesses that would help countries join the modern world. They fear and loathe them. They don't fit into their ideology.
Lefties, "progressives," socialists of every kind, tend to view capitalism as a system and the corporation as an entity as suspect and needing to be reined in, as always predatory, as alwayd destructive. Understandably, tThey want to devise every kind of aggressive control over it in the belief that they are harmful, and not worry about how free enterprise is nurtured in the first place.
So it's this basic underlying perception of the Eurocrat and the leftist American professor leaning toward Marxist that informs this discussion -- corporations bad, "the people" good.
Responsible Corporations and Free Enterprise
I don't share their worldviews. As a Catholic and human rights advocate, of course I want businesses to be responsible public citizens, to have fair labour practices, not to despoil the environment, not to exploit workers abroad, and so on. Who would not be for these values in our time? But I start from a different place: the belief that capitalism is not immoral and that regulation can ensure its morality in a liberal democratic society. The socialist does not start form that premise: he starts with fear and loathing of the corporation.
I'm not seeing it. In my whole life, my neighbours, relatives, friends and I have worked for big corporations. If not Xerox, than Kodak. If not Home Depot, then Rite-Aid or Wal-mart. Wal-mart is particularly the target of sneering leftists as symptomatic of the "worst" practices. I shrug because I know they are selective, tendentious, and deliberate in this targeting as a project of undermining the capitalist system per se, not genuine as improving this or that company. I see that Wal-mart in fact as responsive to many of the concerns brought to it by this tendentious bunch not really representing its workers. Millions of people work for corporations, large and medium. Corporations give them their livelihoods, their communities' revenue. Those in particularly Soros-funded nonprofits of the left, and leftist university faculties, naturally see the world differently. The world of finance that created the Soros billions that enable them to feed their families (including me for many years I worked at OSI) is opaque to them -- they don't see how it connects to those very corporations they want to bring down (Soros himself is of course something of a perestroika liberal socialist especially in prescriptions for other people).
The Goverati Bring it All Home to You and Run Your Life
Well, as you can already see, I don't share the felt need for "automatically" and "efficiently" regulating industry in quite the same way as this professor. I've stood at the Xerox machine and fed it for hours in testing; I've stood at the Rite-Aid counter for hours or laboured in the back room files of Citibank; my friends and relatives have stood for hours in the Home Depot, selling lumber or plants for homes; or at Wal-Mart or Aeropostale selling dresses; they've toiled in the mines at JP Morgan and Kodak and IBM and Dow Chemical as accountants or programmers or engineers or scientists. And by and large they are happy with their lives; they may even be in the 47% if they are part-timers with a school loan or food stamps, but they have nothing like the visceral hatred of corporations that people in universities or the UN can acquire.
So I have BIG questions about HOW and WHAT the regulation is about (and this is often quite deliberately left vague).
Even so, Evgeny Morozov, if he were to apply his critique even-handedly (he doesn't) would have questions about the Internet-centrism and solutionism implicit in all these "automatic" and "efficient" systems. Who gets to decide them, and how?
Who Decided That We Needed to Re-Imagine Democracy?
These proposals come from one of the numerous gov 2.0 meetings -- too numerous to track meaningfully -- this one called the London Summit on Re-Thinking Government and Re-Imagining Democracy with these goals, all of which are means of either a) intalling technocommunism by making the "peers" be "progressives" or (in this case) cloaking with "open government" speak things that in fact are the same old big government:
Promulgate a new theory and vocabulary for open, participatory and “peer progressive” governance;
Define a new curriculum for teaching participatory governance and
problem solving to the next generation of public servants and civic
innovators;
Create methods with which to gauge the effectiveness of open and collaborative governance practices;
Design a research and action agenda to discover and apply new designs for our institutions of governance.
But what was the Alternative Regulation Working Group (getting inside those federal rules!) up to?
How the Advance Guard Can Decide Things for You -- and Shame You on Social Media
As we learn, it's this:
How can we design regulatory processes that are automated and optimized?
How can we involve more voices in the regulatory process and promote distributed decision-making?
How can we create reputation mechanisms best promote self-policing within markets?
How can we apply research on behavioral economics and social pressure to promote better behavior among regulated entities?
How can we create real-time feedback loops that provide information
with which the success of individual regulatory processes can be revised
and improved?
Well, even if you don't share my views about corporations and corporate responsibility that comes parallel first with an acceptance of free enterprise, you might have worries.
Who says we need to automate regulatory proceesses and how is optimized designed?
"Involving more voices" in the regulatory processes sound grand, until you see it in action Beth-Noveck style, which means picking relatively obscure processes with arcane procedures -- like the Patent Office and harnessing networks of likeminded friends to flash-mob them -- from existing opposition lobbides -- in merely a more robust and aggressive form of lobbying electronically.
Distributed Decision-Making Means You Don't Decide, an Algorith Does
"Distributed decision-making" is one of those fashonable academic buzz phrases that can mean different things and also cover up a multitude of sins as those decisions are distributed right away from you.
For $219, you could learn about what it means here:
Distributed decision making (DDM) has become of increasing importance in
quantitative decision analysis. In applications like supply chain
management, service operations, or managerial accounting, DDM has led to
a paradigm shift. The book providesa unified approach to such
seemingly diverse fields as multi-level stochastic programming,
hierarchical production planning, principal agent theory, negotiations
or contract theory. Different settings like multi-level one-person
decision problems, multi-person antagonistic planning, and
leadership situations are covered.
How can we create reputation mechanisms best promote self-policing within markets?
As I've explained above, the best reputation system is no reputation system. Automatic, Internet-based reputation systems are always inherently unfair. To be sure, we are stuck with them now with Facebook, as Facebook profiles become a means to hire or fire people. But when you have "self-policing in markets" there's always the question to ask why markets, if they are free, need these "self-police". What about organic law? That governs the issue of labour, pollution of the environment, etc. What else were you going to demand self-policers take on? The corporations of Silicon Valley are never discussed in the leftists' critique of corporations -- it's as if they are invisible. But when they do discuss them -- such as Anil Dash discussed Apple's app store last night on Twitter with me -- they have all kinds of politically-correct demands to make. Apple should sell the intifada app, even if it incites hatred of Israel and glorifies violence, and the drone app, even if it carries the Google logo or seems to be a crude coverage of war they apparently want to discourage -- and not some other app they don't like. Try as I may, I couldn't get Anil to accept the notion of pluralsim
Indeed, the biggest temptation -- and the affordances to make good on it -- that the Internet and mobile gadgets give to "progressives" is to make universalist, unitarian, blanket rules and norms for everything. They think they have the tools and the information to do this now. They can enter into a quest to make one big thing good, rather than tolerate the scrum of thousands of smaller things actly freely and enable market choice. They can believe it is possible to make one thing good (government, a corporation) through automation and "solutionism" -- which is a form of scientism.
In Second Life, it's possible to prevent people from entering your server by putting their name in the list. But there are many other varions on this that led one thoughtful programmer to conclude that any ban system is a weapon.
For one, a system that bounces you back to your "home" set sim, or bumps you hard away, or even makes you crash, i.e. forcibly logs you off, is rightly called a weapon.
But here's what else:
o bans based on the age of the account
o bans based on whether the account has any form of payment on file (this can be hard for Europeans, Latin Americans and many others who find it difficult to get a Mastercard or PayPal account accepted in the North American systems)
o bans based on membership in a group or lack of membership in a group (group-access only)
o IP-based bans (these can give false positives, althought hey work more accurately than admitted, and what they often do is expose alts)
In the world of the Internet-connected Internet of Things, how will these systems which we've experienced so horribly in wired onlined communities like Second Life, or for that matter Facebook or Twitter, actually function in the ideal version of these professors?
What happens when electronic bans can be set up everywhere -- you can't enter -- or at the very least, your smart phone or gadget won't work -- if you don't fit Facebook and other scraped-data criteria, including facial recognition?
The leftists usually contemplate this horror in the hands of corporations (it already is in their hands) and imagines them blocking people from stores, offices, government buildings.
But picture these powers in the hand of those invisible corporations like Google that the "progressives" don't imagine -- look at this appalling concept of "fiberhoods" brought to us in Kansas City creating broadband haves and have-nots in a system that was supposed to increase broadband -- see the subscriber-edition of Harper's by Whitney Terrell and Shannon Jackson, critiquing the much-ballyhooded Google broad-band project:
Utility-owned networks guarantee access to every citizen in a municipality. Google, by contrast, divided up Kansas City into 202 "fiberhoods" -- and decreed that between 5 and 25 percent of the residents in each fiberhood had to preregister for its service by paying a ten-dollar fee and opening a Google account. Fiberhoods that didn't qualify would be left out of the network. Worse, Google's fiberhood map bisected the city at Troost Avenue, a historical racial divide. It soon became clear that most lower-income black areas would fail to meet the preregistration quotas. Local teachers and librarians began canvassing door-to-door with Google employees, urging residents to sign up, and charitable groups raised money for registration fees. A majority of these fiberhoods ultimately qualified for service. But the frenzied volunteer push revealed an uncomfortable truth behind the city's "real partnership" with Google: Kanasas City had left itself poerless to guarantee service for its most vulnerable constituents. And it could not compel Google to redraw its maps in a less discriminatory way. (Of course, the vegan bakery, Pilates studio, and Italian deli next door to Google's subsidized offices received their fiber service for free.)
Or picture this in the hands of Rahm Emmanuel, who vowed to keep chik-Fil-A out of Chicago. What if this was achieved not just by the blocking of an organic paper permit, but made good everywhere with an electronic ban -- no person could come into the city limits if they were an officer or even family member of that corporation; they couldn't buy supplies; they couldn't do business.
The point is, automated processes of regulation devolve down to which ever political group is in power, and they come to power not just through pure democratic "participatory" means, but by coded systems, mediated by coders, with existing power-possessors managing them.
Behavioural Economics
Here's another element that I find a glimpse of that totalitarian future:
How can we apply research on behavioral economics and social pressure to promote better behavior among regulated entities?
We saw this used to win the election for Obama -- he kept his own team of behaviour social scientists on staff to help manipulate the narratives and the demographic drill-downs.
What are "behaviour economics" and "social pressure"? Selective economic boycotts? Who gets to decide them? Deliberation is never the strong point of social media -- even Morozov admits that. (I think he's willing to leave more room for deliberative politics than the automaters in Silicon Valley because he is still feeling safe in the belief that "the smart people surrounded by idiots" will still get to run things).
Recently I read an article which unfortunately I can't find now that described new research in behaviour and norm-setting. If you put up a sign in Yellowstone Park telling people not to take the stones or pick the flowers, they didn't listen. They picked the flowers and took the fossils anyway. Because they saw other people had. But if you put up a sign saying "Millions of visitors did not pick flowers and take stones" or "80% of our visitors did not pick flowers," then they would feel a norm pressuring them and would comply. People comply not with what they are told, but with what they think most people do. This can get very insidious, as you can just hear the fakery coming down the track
Who Runs the Real-Time?
Now this:
How can we create real-time feedback loops that provide information with
which the success of individual regulatory processes can be revised and
improved?
This sounds promising until you ask, again, who decides in the first place about all this, and who actually manages the "real-time feedback loops" -- possibly filtering them their way, just as Tech@State could filter away criticis.
Then you have to ask -- well what do you mean, exactly? What is it you are regulation? And how?
Inside the jpeg of the whiteboard included in this post, you can see:
Fuel efficiency, size, seatbelts, texting.
So these do-gooders want to get into people's cars -- or make them not even drive gas-guzzlers in the first place -- and force them to wear seatbelts and never text.
You could think of a super-automatic way to stop people texting -- include in each new car a text-zapper, or even a mobile dead zone -- but that could work against someone struggling to call for help in a car crash on a deserted winter road, and most people would fight that as too much intrusion.
So the efficiency gag at the "open government" conference suggests "notify receipient of texting while driving - social pressure". How? Have other people who spot him snap pictures and his license place and put it up on Twitter or Facebook? You know, like Adria Rich did at the PyCon about those bad boys who said "dongle"? Is that what you'd like? How about having the driver's boss fire him for extra good measure?
Of course, the free media's coverage of people smashing cars while texting also constitutes a certain social pressure -- news you can use -- but most people think they're the skilled exception. Police arrests of people in jurisdictions that have passed laws against texting while driving also serves as a deterrent. Do we need the "progressives" social pressure, their way, too?
As for size and fuel efficiency, well, who wants to waste gas and pollute the environment? The high price of gas itself does some of this "social pressure," but what are the ways in which the university gang would interfere with the free market to "optimize" their agenda? Pictures on Facebook of fat Wal-Mart shoppers driving big SUVs? And again, could you get them fired from their jobs, for good measure? Or hey, would local laws on emissions and demands to get inspections also work?
Just what needs to be automated here, and who gets to apply that lovely social pressure, and how?
There's lots more to say and analyze here, of course, but I have to move on. Suffice it to say that much of the open government movement isn't really open. It is decided at conferences like these, in "progressive" university classrooms like these, by power-possessors who get their candidates into positions like the FCC or the White House Office of Science and Technology. Most of the public is in the dark -- and the lefties would say it's their own fault.
But Congress never got to decide that gov 2.0 was either necessary or sufficient. They never got to debate it or decide it. Much of gov 2.0 was forcibly introduced as a Trojan Horse from Silicon Valley through the invocation of the magic word "innovation" and "technological upgrades". The entire "wikification" of government (that I submit is part of what led to WikiLeaks) happened without Congress, in spite of Congress. There's never been a hearing that was a critical examination of the premises and practices and products of gov 2.0 -- there has only been a few cheerleading brand-awareness sessions (by the former Sen. Ed Markey, for example).
Eventually, these intrusive gambits of revolutionary collectivism will get more examination, even from liberals, not to mention conservatives. It might be too late to role back some of the engineering the goverati have installed by then.
It's the typical geeky hysterical edge-casing trying to make a larger political point, but it's pretty suspect.
He's claiming that Apple "bans journalism" critical of religions:
“We have a lot of software that forbids journalism.” He refers to the
IoS [iphone operating system] Terms of Service for app developers that
includes text that says, literally: “If you want to criticize a
religion, write a book.” You can distribute that book through the Apple
bookstore, but Apple doesn’t want you writing apps that criticize
religion. Apple enforces an anti-journalism rule, banning an app that
shows where drone strikes have been.
Really, Anil? "A lot" of software? What on earth are you talking about?
Probably this, the intifada app. That's all. There likely isn't any other use case of Apple "forbidding journalism".
As for the drone strike app, they may have decided that if the US government declares them secret, there is no sense in facing a possible lawsuit over it, I don't know the specifics. Plenty of people report on drone strikes. Again, probably some of the news apps that *are* allowed on the phone contain this reporting.
My comment:
re really blocking “journalism”.
That sounds like an overheated exaggeration that is basically trying
to exonerate anti-Israel hate speech (or perhaps some other crude hate
war game against Muslims or something) that really wouldn’t qualify as
“journalism”.
They’re right that if you want to express your hatred for religion, a
book is a better format because you can capture more nuances and make
your arguments.
What is the “journalism” of any sort — about religions or any topic —
that would fit into an app? Obviously, they don’t mean news apps, as
there are articles in the New York Times or on the BBC which will
contain critical comments about Catholics, Muslims, and Jews, for
example. The apps carrying these op-ed pages or news articles are not
blocked for their content, obviously — which is journalism critical of
religion.
What Apple means specifically is the intifada app, that crudely
propagandized the violent Palestinian movement against Israel, and
denigrated Israel and Jews.
There may be others that involved such crude hate speech in the form
of the externals of the app itself, not the content it might bring.
Apple, as a private company, is going to create some standards of
taste and against hate speech that aren’t going to fit your own
extremist politics. Good! If you want a different mobile company, go to
CREDO. Maybe they have an independent app store where you can still get
the intifada app.
The key is having a market with pluralism, so that those who feel
they absolutely can’t live without hate apps can get them. The opposite —
where “progressives” could force private corporations to include
extreme political content they endorse — would not be freedom.
Luke Faraone is one of the legion of myrmidons volunteering at Wikipedia. With his coloured hair and impish geeky Justin Biebery looks, he's the face of most Wikipedia editors -- believe me, when I went to some of Wikimania as part of Tech@State last year, I saw that the overwhelming majority of the Wikipedia editors were white nerdy males, with some females, and very few blacks or Hispanics.
Maybe by straining and folding in their worldwide population of editors, the Wikinistas can claim to be more diverse, but let's face it, we can't know because many of them hide their identities. They are unaccountable -- and it's only because the complaints system apparently requires a real person to answer that I found the face of this particular little nerd who is controlling how my Wikipedia entry is edited -- and hence, as for many people who meet this fate on Wikipedia, maintaining the vandalism and tendentiousness of my entry, which of course is not only libelous but a detriment to my livelihood.
I'm a big critic of Wikipedia and open source software and all things geek -- and kid working now at Humbug -- and formerly at Google -- may know that and it could well inform his tendentious ripostes here.
I decided after seeing a huge slew of vandal attacks (obscenities were removed but other things stayed) and another warring over my much-wrenched Wikipedia entry, to go and complain to their complaints desk -- for what it's worth.
Below, you can see the correspondence that tells you all you need to know about the soul of Wikipedia -- narrow-minded little coders who believe what they read in Ars Technica bringing to the job of "all knowledge on the network" their atrocious set of beliefs and hobbling notions that fly in the face of reality. They are always trying to radically wish into being new norms and to wish away anything that doesn't fit -- and with Wikipedia, they have the power in their hands to shape most Google searches for information, as Wikipedia is the result that comes up first (and this creates a vicious circle of self-prophesying algorithim primacy).
In my persistence in refusing to be bullied and refusing to submit to any characterization of "racism," I really fly in the face of three of the most cherished beliefs of geekdom which grow out of their own precious sense of themselves, and their having contorted themselves to machines with binary thinking. Here they are:
1. That geeks are infallible and that they always do an unbiased and fair job of coding software untained by personal beliefs. 2. That we cannot make judgements about truths based on something being true most of the time, even by a high percent, because small percentages would "taint" it and mean we cannot make any coherent statement of fact about it. 3. That we cannot make obvious judgements based on the science of demographic drilling (a la Nate Silver) but must maintain a fiction around aspects of polls that are politically correct.
Hence, when I made these three claims, I went to the heart of the fallacy of geekdom, and their most jealously cherished beliefs about themselves and their coded world:
1. I said that if coders/developers are liberals/progressives/libertarians voting for or supporting Obama, they cannot do a good job for Romney. Their heart will not be in it. 2. A marker for voting for Obama is indeed race, whether we like it or ot: 96.4% of blacks voted for Obama. Therefore a judgement that a black developer will likely vote for Obama -- and his heart may not be a job coding for Romney or other Republicans is not racism, but merely a report of our times. 3. Maintaining the fiction that any black person anywhere still has a .6% chance of not being a Romney voter, and therefore we must pretend never to notice obvious demographic markers or face charges of racism is an appalling politically-correct fantasy, and means that we lose all sense and meaning about what is racism -- it turns out to mean whatever some geeks says it is in a quest for power.
In fact, in our new world of "red states" and "blue states" and Nate Silver math, we can't expect the Republicans ever to overcome their problem with having few minorities. It will be an impossibility, given the true math and the actual numbers. No matter what they do, the Republican Party, in this scheme, will be perforce racist because blacks are now perceived not as voting for a president merely because he is black, but because he is progressive. Thus even conservative blacks who might have voted for Proposition 8, let's say, in California, are converted into a "progressive" block of "the 98.6%".
Someday, fifty years from now, perhaps these solid demographic politicized blocks will erode. In time, people will become disappointed with socialist-style politics that produce nothing but debt and slow the economy; eventually there will be more black candidates of all political persuasions so that black people who vote for a conservative black or conservative white candidate will not be seen as "race traitors".
Right now, they are seen that way as we saw in Congress recently, and it will be awhile before this stark situation changes. But it didn't change yet, and my judgement, based on demographic science, that black developers are going to vote for Obama is not racist, but merely the report of the reality of our times. It's a system not of my chosing, as I never thought it was a good strategy -- deliberately pursued by Democratic strategists -- to try to paint all opposition to the Democratic Party as "racism" because there was a black candidate.
Yet this race-baiting continues, and it continues with my entry in Wikipedia and the harassment of me in different fora.
Real racism, as I explained, would be saying that black developers shouldn't be hired; that they don't do a good job because of their race; that Republicans should avoid black employees. I didn't say anything remotely like that, of course. I said that *Democratic voters* do not make good coders for Republicans and *for the job of campaigning for Republicans* you need those supporting that party. The Republicans should try harder to reach out to minorities, not just to capture that tiny percentage that might be available to them, but to try to end these harsh and rigid race-painted demographics.
On Wikipedia, the vandals tried -- and failed -- to get me put in a category called "American racists" -- and failed, because I'm not a racist. This blog post of mine is all the "evidence" they have -- and it's tendentiously portrayed first by Ars Technica, then in the editing of my Wikipedia entry.
Some people like the conservative/extreme libertarian/whatever she is La Russophobe have demanded that I "apologize" for this entry. The idea is that I can be browbeaten into saying I'm sorry and somehow "restore my good reputation". She has been this lately to others as well.
But that's insane. I haven't done anything wrong. I haven't said -- as the Wikipedia falsely claims -- that Mitt Romney shouldn't have hired black developers (!). All I've said is that Democrats don't make good coders for Republicans, and that in this much-discussed firm, the few coders there seemed like obvious Democratic voters, and therefore were not likely enthusiastic producers for Romney. Targeted Victory continues to be criticized by blogs such as Red State for their failure to win and their failure to come up with fresh stuff.
So what is the solution? The solution is not for them to fire minorities, of course, but everyone on the team should ask themselves: are we really into this? Are we going to give it our all? What benchmarks should we give ourselves to prove this? We had two apps we oversaw mess up. How can this be prevented for the next customers?
As for the Republicans, I think two apps messed up, the arrogance of Zac Moffat and his refusal to concede his mistakes, and their lack of performance all around regardless of who their staff are or aren't is a good reason to find another agency -- or really, to do what Obama's campaign did, which was to keep all the digital work inhouse.
Meanwhile, this Wikipedia entry and Faraone's tendentious ruling on it of course disguise the larger problem. How many minorities are there at Wikipedia, Google or any of these Silicon Valley firms? We all know that SV has a problem in going outside its white nerd-boy networks to hire women and minorities. That's why it's easier to savage me and take a twirl pretending you are beating back "racism" than really look at your own real hiring practices.
It's also interesting to note that in making this latest round of edits, Faraone deliberately removed the lines about me being a prominent WikiLeaks critic. Why? Because in his view, the citations for this weren't somehow credible or reputable enough. Most likely what he's really doing here is getting rid of the evidence that there *are* WikiLeaks critics!
From its inception, my entire Wikipedia entry itself is an act of vandalism and "griefing," i.e. harassment by 4chan and Anonymous hackers active in the online community of Second Life.
Prior to this attack by hackers, I was merely mentioned in other people's biographies as their translator.
Although I am a minor translator and minor blogger and known only in the specific field of Eurasia studies and human rights, as a result of vandalism and repeated attacks and distortions, my Wikipedia is longer than many, many prominent people with commercial or academic publications -- which I do not have. I have only nonprofit books and news articles as publications.
From the numerous arguments and vandal attacks and rewrites of my entry, you can see that a small and concerted group of people continue to harass and heckle me with this page to do harm to my privacy and my livelihood.
I am not the author of my entry and do not know how to edit Wikipedia and have no interest in editing Wikipedia, nor forming an editor's account, or having anything to do with the editing of my entry.
I am filing this abuse report for the record as I am being constantly harassed via your service with this libelous and false material.
I have repeatedly cited corrections in the Talk section, and noted the tendentious and false information, but that has only caused various Anonymous hacker hecklers to claim I'm editing my own material, which is ridiculous. Ask yourself if someone who has translated from Russian 30 books, many of them members of the Politburo, who has a blog that is only known in limited circles, would have in their biography copious amounts of material related to a mediocre commuter college in Woodbury, California, where I've never been. Answer; because a group of hackers in Second Life who have been repeatedly (four times) banned by Linden Lab from this virtual world and have their rental servers seized have decided to speciously insert this into my biography merely because I abuse-reported them for crashing my servers. That's all there is to it.
They've also tried to portray me as someone who hates gays or blacks, although I am a human rights activist with many years fighting for LGBT rights and against racism. This is merely an attempt to discredit me in my field.
The entry claims falsely that I condemned Mitt Romney for hiring African Americans. This is preposterous, as Romney, if anything, should have reached out more to minorities. I made a separate point that he should not have farmed out his digital analytics and app work to Democrats, and firms with Democrat voters in them -- which is not a racist point but a point about how you get people caring passionately about you. Obviously Obama didn't hire Republicans or Republican voters as his tech team.
I am not the daughter of a poultry farmer and have no AI poultry experiments of any significance. And much else -- read the Talk.
My entry should be considerably shortened, if it were to meet the standards of Wikipedia entries for people of my stature, and incorrect and tendentious material removed. The anonymous and unaccountable people who have repeatedly made entries to this page are in Second Life, they are anonymous, they have no Wikipedia accounts.
Finally, I should not have my IP address exposed on your site merely because I refuse to participate in your account and editing system. My identity is easily verified through email or phone calls and there is no need to expose me to further harassment through IP address exposure.
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
From: Wikimedia Support Team (Quality items) <info-en-q@wikimedia.org> To: Catherine Fitzpatrick <catfitzny@yahoo.com> Sent: Monday, April 1, 2013 11:05 AM Subject: Re: [Ticket#2013032110004408] Libelous Entry and Repeated Vandalism
Dear Catherine Fitzpatrick,
Thank you for your email. Our response follows your message.
03/21/2013 09:35 - Catherine Fitzpatrick wrote:
> The entry claims falsely that I condemned Mitt Romney for hiring African Americans. This is preposterous, as Romney, if anything, should have reached out more to minorities. I made a separate point that he should not have farmed out his digital analytics and app work to Democrats, and firms with Democrat voters in them -- which is not a racist point but a point about how you get people caring passionately about you. Obviously Obama didn't hire Republicans or Republican voters as his tech team.
What you said is that because they were African American they wouldn't be "dedicated", and assumed their political affiliation because of their race.
From
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/orca-was-no-fail-whale- says-romneys-digital-director/
| "Truly, how can they expect dedication?" She also singled out another developer who is African-American and "who has a 96 percent chance of being an Obama voter…
> I am not the daughter of a poultry farmer and have no AI poultry experiments of any significance. And much else -- read the Talk.
> My entry should be considerably shortened, if it were to meet the standards of Wikipedia entries for people of my stature, and incorrect and tendentious material removed. The anonymous and unaccountable people who have repeatedly made entries to this page are in Second Life,
they are anonymous, they have no Wikipedia accounts.
If there are specific cases of vandalism, they can be brought up and the relevant users blocked. If your article has persistent problems with IP editors, edit access can be restricted to autoconfirmed users.
> Finally, I should not have my IP address exposed on your site merely because I refuse to participate in your account and editing system. My identity is easily verified through email or phone calls and there is no need to expose me to further harassment through IP address exposure.
IP addresses for all editors who are not logged in are recorded for accountability. The only way to not have such information exposed is to create an account.
Yours sincerely, Luke Faraone
-- Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/ --- Disclaimer: all mail to this address is
answered by volunteers, and responses are not to be considered an official statement of the Wikimedia Foundation. For official correspondence, please contact the Wikimedia Foundation by certified mail at the address listed on https://www.wikimediafoundation.org/
Dear Luke,
You're a good example of the outrageous sectarianism
of Wikipedia and why it's not fit to have to control it does over
knowledge on the Internet.
Rather than use the tendentious
portrayal of my statements by Ars Technica, or your own tendentious
ideas of what I said, you should look at my original blog here:
I
didn't say " because they were African American they wouldn't be
"dedicated", and assumed their political affiliation because of their
race."
I said *because they were Obama voters they wouldn't be
dedicated* and I reported *accurately* that blacks have an extremely
high chance of voting for Obama -- both of which are true statements,
and not "racist" statements.
I said the
following about Mitt Romney's digital consultants:
"Sure enough, what I found were two guys who looked like very likely
Obama voters. And that's ok to say. That is our reality. That isn't
racism. That's a report on how the world runs now -- Obama won 50% of
the vote because he was able to count on minorities who voted in far
larger numbers, and count on the fact that the older conservatives are
mainly white -- and didn't even turn out for Romney (and not only
because the software broke down).
But if that was all there was, you could still hope that they were loyal to their job assignment.
Now HOW DID IT HAPPEN that the Romney campaign would hire Al Gore's dev to do a critical job like that?!
It happened because Romney hired a firm and didn't look at the
project worker list. Well, to be more precise: Zac Moffat just didn't
think that his former firm was something that might contain weak links
in it. And that firm stakes its reputation, no doubt, on "science," and
bi-partisan civic pride, right?
The other dev is Will Boykin, who has a 96% chance of being an Obama voter.
And there is nothing wrong with that, and that is the norm. But it
does mean you have to ask, if you are the Romney campaign, whether
someone who is going to go in the morning and vote for your rival is
really going to stay up all night with the Monsters and the Red Bulls
and do for you everything possible to fix your clusterfrack.
This is just due dilligence. But it's the kind that nobody wants to
talk about, nobody will mention, and I will be accused of "racism" for
even flagging. But it's the truth. And would you rather have me say the
answer is "incompetence" -- as Ekdahl is saying -- because they are
minorities? Or hear that they may not have done their utmost to
pre-test and re-test and trouble-shoot precisely because it wasn't a
vocation, it was just a gig, and they were voting for somebody else
anyway?
o if they voted for Obama, they would not be dedicated in their work for Romney o if 96.4% of blacks have voted for Obama, a black developer would have an extremely high likelihood of voting for Obama.
Again,
both of these are true statements, and are not racist statements. To
characterize them as racist is to reveal your own sectarianism. To
pretend that a highly accurate estimate that a black developer in a
digital consulting firm has at least a 96.4% chance of voting for Obama
is a report, not racism. That you think it is racism is why Wikipedia is
evil.
BTW, your friend Obama hired lily-white Harper Reed with
earings and a Mohawk cut, not any black developers -- indeed, all of
Silicon Valley, like all of Wikipedia, suffers from the problem of
failure to hire and promote African Americans. That's why you play this
game with trying to vilify people like me.
Once again, my entry
-- which would likely not even exist if it weren't for the determination
of Anonymous to dox and harass me -- is way too long, longer even than
figures like Evgeny Morozov with far more fame and publications. And it
is filled with tendentious dreck, like pretending that Woodbury
University is anything significant in my biography -- they are the
vandals.
My entry has already been persistently vandalized
numerous times and already should be limited to confirmed accounts for
that reason.
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Dear Catherine Fitzpatrick,
Thank you for your email. Our response follows your message.
04/01/2013 21:42 - Catherine Fitzpatrick wrote:
> That you think it is racism is why Wikipedia is evil.
I'm sorry you feel that way.
> BTW, your friend Obama hired lily-white Harper Reed with earings and a Mohawk cut, not any black developers -- indeed, all of Silicon Valley, like all of Wikipedia, suffers from the problem of failure to hire and promote African Americans. That's why you play this game with trying to vilify people like me.
There is no such plot, and that rationale does not follow.
> Once again, my entry -- which would likely not even exist if it weren't for the determination of Anonymous to dox and harass me -- is way too long, longer even than figures like Evgeny Morozov with far more fame and publications. And it is filled with tendentious dreck, like pretending that Woodbury University is anything significant in my biography -- they are the vandals.
I removed some references to opinions you hold that were not covered in reliable sources, which trims the article down a bit.
> My entry has already been persistently vandalized numerous times and already should be limited to confirmed accounts for that reason.
Your page is not *currently* the subject of such issues, and therefore such a request would be likely denied. If you want, you can request it at
-- Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/ --- Disclaimer: all mail to this address is answered by volunteers, and responses are not to be considered an official statement of the Wikimedia Foundation. For official correspondence, please contact the Wikimedia Foundation by certified mail at the address listed on https://www.wikimediafoundation.org/
Well, we can certainly see which side of the issue this blogger is on from the respected Opinio Juris! If if we didn't notice before that he is a proud defender of WikiLeaks.
But in fact, it's anything but -- he's engaging in wishful thinking. He must believe that the Swedish prosecution's wish to bring Assange back to Sweden for questioning is somehow based on their subserviance to the United States -- and that if Assange goes back to Sweden, he faces extradition to the US. This is a preciously and tightly-held belief of the "progressives" and hard left, for which there is no evidence -- but is nonetheless tightly-held because it underscores the sense of victimhood and creates false urgency around the WikiLeaks case.
It's nonsense, of course, because if the US actually had wanted to extradite Assange, they could have done it from the UK any time in the last two years, while he was there for so long, because they have an extradition agreement with the UK.
To be sure, given how other cases related to the Internet have gone, they might have faced obstacles getting Assange from the UK. But before you can even speculate, you'd have to have the US finding a law to try this foreigner under, then issuing the extradiction order to UK -- neither of which they did. It's pretty much victimology on the left's side, with hysterical hypothesizing to try to build sympathy. Opinio Juris readers and writers shouldn't be falling for it so uncritically.
First of all, if "chaos" is implied in the decision of one of the women in the case changing her lawyer, in fact, it seems anything but -- she's traded a controversial attention ho, by all indications, with a more staid attorney who will concentrate on defending her:
One of Mr Assange’s two accusers, political activist Anna Ardin, also
applied to the Swedish courts on February 28 to replace her
controversial lawyer Claes Borgstrom. Ms Ardin complained that she found
Mr Borgstrom spent much more time talking to the media than to her,
referred her inquiries to his secretary or assistant, and that she had
lost faith in him as her legal representative.
Chaos? No, more order.
Then the "abrupt" departure from the case of the lead prosecutor is also described as "chaos," although there are no grounds for thinking that at all. Being the lead prosecutor in this case must not be easy. It means constantly being harassed by WikiLeaks and Anonymous, possibly doxed or threatened as all persons trying to establish the rule of law over the unruly Internet and its hacknarchists are finding. The strain must be great, and you can understand any individual who decides not to continue to bear it.
But it's not as if the decision to prosecute this case is the whim of some individual prosecutor, some hate campaign he's cooked up as a US symp who oppresses Internet freedom blah blah. Another prosecutor can step in and follow the same procedures and look for the same cooperation from Assange in answering to these charges. It's not a sign that the case is dropped or that there is "chaos" except in the minds of those who want there to be chaos because they want Assange to win and "Internet freedom" to win -- even if it means stepping on women's rights.
I'd need a lot more information to see this as "turmoil" -- and the only proof would be if the case were suddenly dropped. It has not been. And if it were dropped, it wouldn't be a triumph of the rule of law or freedom, but anything but -- the chaos would be in indulging "the Internet" in its whims and allowing its Anarchist-in-Chief the latitude to abuse women and escape legal responsibility.
There was a simple solution to proving innocence and proving that the issue wasn't merely a US stalking horse -- coming back to Sweden and facing the music. If the charges were untrue, the case would be dismissed. If they were true, Assange would serve whatever sentence was appropriate. During this process, if by some remote chance, the US suddenly issued an extradition order, the Swedes, who have operated on good faith, could be expected to put the breaks on it if there were not merits and if it seemed opportunistic.
There is absolutely no evidence that a) the US will issue the extradition order b) that Sweden would honour it with any more alacrity than the US has honoured some of the US extradition requests related to Internet hackers -- who ultimately won the right to remain in their country.
News of changes in the Swedish prosecution of Mr Assange comes
shortly before Swedish Supreme Court judge Stefan Lindskog delivers a
keynote lecture on “the Assange affair, and freedom of speech, from the
Swedish perspective” at the University of Adelaide next Wednesday.
[snip]
Justice Lindskog is chairman of the Supreme Court of Sweden, the
country’s highest court of appeal. In announcing his forthcoming
lecture, Adelaide University observed that “as one of Sweden’s most
eminent jurists, he is uniquely able to provide an authoritative view of
the Assange affair”
But...the advertisement of Adelaide university isn't the same thing as what the judge will say, and we don't know that he's going to somehow violate Swedish law or practice here -- he may say exactly the generalities that their system enables them to say, and speak in a broader context.
And who are we getting this opinion that the Swedish judge is out of line? Not from Swedes, but from a biased Australian rooting for Assange:
Greg Barns, a barrister spokesman for the Australian Lawyers
Alliance, said it was a fundamental legal principle that judges do not
speak publicly on matters that are likely to come before the courts or
are yet to be decided.
“That a Swedish supreme court judge thinks this is acceptable tends
to confirm the fears people have about the impartiality and robustness
of the Swedish judicial system. It gives great currency to the belief
that Mr Assange’s case in Sweden has been heavily politicised.
Er, heavily politicized? Shouldn't Heller have told us that Barns isn't merely "a barrister spokesman for the Australian Lawyers Alliance" but Assange's very own political campaign manager?!
Where's the chaos, again, except where it is manufactured?
Even if Alexa O'Brien claims that the grand jury is still investigating "the owners" of WikiLeaks, so what? There is no indictment and no extradition order for Assange. It's been more than two years now.
I want a second and even third opinion about all this, and I want it from reputable people in Sweden, not Australians engaged in Assange whitewashing.
The train station in Soligorsk, Belarus, Morozov's home town. Photo by El Bingle.
I'm reading Evgeny Morozov's book To Save Everything, Click Here -- and it's both boring and fascinating because it's like deja-vu all over again -- I've written on exactly the same topics myself for nearly ten years, usually as a dissident surrounded by geeks who relentlessly hated and bullied me.
It's filled with the hypothetical hystericals that he castigates geeks for -- he's adopted this as a literary style worthy of Jeff Jarvis or Seth Godin. For example, he tells us the horror of something called BinCam that can document our garbage and put it up on social media so that -- in theory -- our neighbours or the vigilant state could examine our detritus and tell whether in fact we were recycling sufficiently or perhaps not even eating correctly.
The problem with these stories is that they are anecdotes. Nobody has BinCam. BinCam isn't anywhere installed in such sufficient quantities as to cause anything like the ruckus Morozov imagines. That's because nobody wanted it -- maybe a few "quantified life" geeks experimenting did. Or if it did get installed, it was not with the privacy-busting social-media-shaming factor, but with more of the mundane city planning capacity to tell where the garbage pick-ups could be deployed, to save energy and time and money.
It's filled with name-dropping and citation-dropping that most people won't recognize. Couldn't we ask whether in fact the theory of "flow" comes from Plotinus and not Heraclitus? Oh, and let's not forget my favourite quote from Heraclitus (I think): "Although reason is common to all men, most men behave as if they have their own private understanding".
When you have intimidating stuff like the invocation of Plotinus and Pliny, nobody might dare to say the obvious: but Evgeny, there isn't any software that has a message TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE. It doesn't exist. It's a sort of fable you've made, like your other fables.
Real software -- the ubiquitous Windows of the proprietary and much-hated Microsoft, on which everything is based -- simply says SAVE -- SAVE "as is", so to speak. Or you get the choice: "SAVE AS" -- and you *chose* then. Silicon Valley may not be as world-changing in its aspirations as you wish, at least without giving some agency to users! I can't think of a single application that actually says "TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE". Can you? Is this on a Mac or something? If it doesn't really exist anywhere, isn't that telling? It *might* -- it almost sounds as if it does! But it doesn't! (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
So yeah, I've been writing about the issue of the Silicon Valley hustlers for years and years on this blog and at Second Thoughts. But it's not like I'm vindicated with the appearance of the Sage of Soligorsk on the scene -- because it's like looking at the same landscape through a kaleidoscope, where everything is shifted 25% and skewed.
Each time Morozov is criticizing the same thing I've already criticized, and where he could point out their collectivism and -- dare I say it, technocommunism -- he shifts, and starts calling them some other name. Randians. Schumpeter-trumpeters. Or crypto-followers of some crazy Polish guy. Who in fact is no different in his scientism and socialism than H.G. Wells or Maxim Gorky, or for that matter, at the end of the day, Evgeny Morozov.
Oh, well, I get how it works, instead of working as a low-wage OSI worker for years on end, I should have been born in Eastern Europe and become a Soros fellow!
Still, for the record I'll note that I covered this topic back in 2008 when Morozov was still playing at being a Soros fellow or something, waiting for Lenny Benardo to give him research tips. (It's perhaps telling that Lenny Benardo absolutely refuses to speak about Belarus with me, because I might keep pointedly asking about the Soros mess-ups and question the priorities of grant-giving, whereas Lenny probably never has to talk to Morozov about Belarus, ever, because Morozov doesn't "do" Belarus, his homeland.)
Except to write his book at his parent's dacha there. Oh, the hissing samovar! The buzzing bees! The jam made by babushka from wild raspberries! And the skewering of Silicon Valley between sips of barely-diluted zavarka.
The kind of skewering I did without the summer house for years -- for example, confronting Jeff Jarvis both on his blog and in person about his "bill of rights" favouring collectivist ideas. Or having a long drawn-out battles about "gamification" back in 2008, when Jane McGonigal first appeared with this awful idea that "reality was broken" and that we had to gamify it to fix it, or the creepy TED talk about Jesse Schell sparked this debate in 2010.
Is Morozov going to mention that McGonigal worked for the Chinese government during their Olympics?
I had to sit through the vilification of being told even by a friend, Raph Koster, that my non-gamer culture and the culture of gamers (ostensibly superior) was the source of my problem with gamification -- and shunned because I dared to say that the deified Richard Bartle had social engineering-socialism in his games. I had to sit through legions of fanboyz villifying me because I dared to question the wackiness of McGonigal. Read it, it's truly extraordinary, in light especially of how much safer it has become now to criticize Jane.
With SL, Rosedale took the idea of reduced "coordatination costs" to come up with this idyllic notion -- never put in practice:
By putting up a page where thousands of people can cast a fixed number
of votes to prioritize (or modify) a fairly specific work list of
features and changes for upcoming versions of Second Life, we are
further blurring the boundaries between the ‘company’ of Linden Lab and
the residents of Second Life. We are asking for help (and I suspect
comitting ourselves substantially to what we hear) in what is generally a
very private and hallowed process – the setting of development
priorities.
Ultimately, Philip and his successors shut down the voting tool because people either asked for priorities the company, mindful of their competitors in the gaming industry, didn't think should be coded; or they didn't like some of the things asked for because they went against their geek religion; or they would prohibit the compay from being sold to marketers (i.e. IP masking). And this is how the whole Internet will go, as Second Life has often been used as a prototyper, deliberately or simply using its virtuality as an affordance for petri-dish work.
Back then, I asked whether a theory from efficient firms from 1937 was exactly the time period to be mining for ideas...In fact, the Taylorism that migrated into Stakhanovitism and later the Kaizen method in Japan was what we had to worry about -- was collectivizing everyone with open source software merely a way to reduce transaction costs for firms and ensure oligarchy for them, communism for the rest of us? You know, "We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us." So I had critiques like this one about the Leninism of the Linden Tao.
Now Morozov has produced a 16,000 word piece for The Baffler -- you wondered who they were going to get to write on tech after their co-editor Aaron Swartz killed himself. It's too long for a magazine piece and too short for a book, so it's a pamphlet of the sort socialists and the Catholic Church still specialize in -- where the author is erudite, wordy, didactic, and exasperated with the unbeliever.
Here's the nutshell of my critique of O'Reilly and his invasion of the State Department and government in general with his "gov 2.0" and even "civ soc 2.0":
Civil society is something I do know about, having studied it and
lived it for 30 years. And open source and web 2.0 is something I know
about, having studied it and lived it for the last 6 years. And I see
something very destructive and corrosive that could occur by the
arrogant imposition of the open source mystique and "business model" on
to the more fragile and complex organic human systems of civil society
that aren't mechanical like machines and the Internet.
It means monetarizing things for a few consultants -- like one man and
his team that maybe shouldn't be monetarized (and don't pretend that
the non-profit work of the O'Reilly empire is somehow unrelated to the
expensive workbooks and conferences and the high human cost of open
source in general).
It means low or no wages as a way of life and aspiration and
necessity to keep work tools free for people that have high sources of
compensation elsewhere.
But worse than all that, making everything into a stack and an ap
means less freedom and less participation in decision-making, not more,
*because the very decision about mechanization in the first place was
ripped out of people's hands before they could think about it*.
Indeed, despite his enormous study of the subject, Morozov hasn't really touched on the corrosive effect of the "Code for America" stuff invading cities all over the place, a debate I took on in 2010 here.
And Morozov barely discusses the pernicious evangelist role of Alex Howard, who insists, against all common sense and logic and reason, that he is a journalist, and not a propagandist or public relations agent -- as I did here, after a lot of discussion on Whimsley, where Tom Slee confronted Howard on the entire "gov 2.0" racket which is exploited by conservative governments (and leftist governments, too, I might add, as Obama has abused it) to hand out consulting contracts to cronies and pretend to innovate and avoid hard topics.
(Of course, I haven't read the book all the way to the end yet, so maybe that's to come).
I'll come back to do a more thorough book review when I can, in which I explain that funny twist that happens with every single critique -- where Morozov misses the moment to recognize something as in fact "Soviet," shall we say, or collectivist, or socialist -- and then declares it something else. For example, you have to wonder -- how did he get through his critique of Clay Shirky, whom he skewers, without ever mentioning his seminal "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" -- which might really be re-titled, as I've written repeatedly for years, "The Group Members Are Our Own Worst Enemy". And to miss Shirky's one big forray into foreign policy on the webzine of the same name, from his areas of expertise in Internet culture, where essentially, he tells people to forego their Twitter revolutions until the advance guard tells them it's okay, because they've become sufficiently mature for democracy -- an ideology Nazarbayev would be proud of, and in fact invokes (and maybe that's how he was able to win over Jimmy Wales).
For now, let's just look at the things hidden in the 16,000 word piece about O'Reilly.
Morozov decides O'Reilly is a Randian, because he's for entrepreneurs forging their businesses in the face of conservative big, ostensibly backward, proprietary-software companies. I guess Morozov never studied the role of the peredovik in Soviet culture and the winners of socialist competitions.
Ayn Rand, of course, is as Bolshevist as the Bolsheviks she countered, and she got that way having to counter them fiercely, but she's a product of her time and copies their revolutionary methods. The rigidity of her ideology; her hatred of religion; her relentless ideological struggle with other sectarians or the slightly-politically-incorrect within her own circles -- these are all products of the Bolshevik age we still live with. If someone worked harder in the collective farm of open software and also figured out how to make money with the $39.95 manuals to actually work this "free" stuff and also charged big speaking fees, they merit a spot in the Soviet Union of Constructors, not a blast as a Randian or hypothetically an exaggerated capitalist.
O'Reilly's earlier nods to Microsoft or to a hypothetical "choice" between open and proprietary software, even defending it as an intellectual freedom, was only tactical and only present 10 years ago. Today, Code for America culture adherents deride as "vendorocracy" any proprietary software that a municipality runs, and as we see from Cyrus Farivar's uneven critical examination of Code for America on Ars Technica, somebody making a zippy little startup with open source software and getting the city contract ahead of others is the "good guy" whereas those other contenders are evil (or companies that *should* be contending if you still kept a free-market competition system and competitive bids at city hall instead of ecstatic free software cronyism).
O'Reilly peddled that line only tactically for a time, like the pro-abortion crusaders used "choice" for a time until they could change their causes' title to "women's health" and beat any critic as wishing the illness of women and waging a war on women. So O'Reillyites at State today would describe as backward and fearful of technology and consumed with FUD anybody who suggests that an older vendor with proprietary software not as caught up in the giddyness of 2.0 might be better for security or privacy.
But here's the thing about Evgeny -- he loves open source software. He himself is not for the intellectual proposition of choice between types of software, even tactically until the Better Day comes. In this Baffler essay that many will read and write about as "a critique of the open source software culture" that is invading everything (and thinking it can even use the sectarian principles of agile software production on governance of people in general), in fact, Morozov roots most vigorously for just that -- in a more pure form unalloyed with any capitalism
Morozov is more of a Stallmanite that Stallman. He pretends to admit that Stallman is obviated by being preoccupied with licensing schemes at a time when "the cloud" has obviated them.
Of course, "the cloud" has done no such thing, as proprietary cloud software can exist; private firms deploy their cloud magic even with open source in ways they don't publish; and big companies still fiercely fight over what the standards of cloudness will be. At the end of the day, the cloud is just other people's computers, not your own. There should be a new study of server farms and server farm politics underneath the cloud, that Morozov hasn't gotten to yet.
Stallman isn't about license schemes, really -- he's more of a cultural coder than O'Reilly precisely because he hasn't converted his empire, still very active (with the friends of Bradley Manning, for example) into a cash cow in the same way and therefore has more street cred. The Stallmanite ideals -- that everything has to be free, that bugs are shallow to the thousands of eyes let in to see that software, in fact is something Morozov exhuberantly proclaims, with this telling paragraph:
Underpinning Stallman’s project was a profound critique of the role that
patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.
Perhaps inadvertently, Stallman also made a prescient argument for
treating code, and technological infrastructure more broadly, as
something that ought to be subject to public scrutiny. He sought to open
up the very technological black boxes that corporations conspired to
keep shut. Had his efforts succeeded, we might already be living in a
world where the intricacies of software used for high-frequency trading
or biometric identification presented no major mysteries
Now that's just sectarian clap-trap of the sort we thought Morozov was supposed to be critiquing, not embracing. See what I mean? There's a strange technno-determinism of the sort Morozov is supposed to be denouncing if he believes that "if only" we could see the magic code that enables traders to use the speed and amplification properties of the Internet to move markets perilously (to their own profit and sometimes to the detriment of countries), why, we could somehow cure the faults of capitalism. But the Internet is merely (sometimes) a capitalist tool, and the real problem for Morozov which he most decidedly disdains is capitalism and free enterprise and free markets themselves. Sure, capitalism should be regulated even in a free society with free enterprise -- and it is, and the debate about "how much" is what politics is about. Here, I suspect Morozov thinks that "transparency" on the kind of software some capitalists have made good use of will somehow enable a naming and shaming (or industrial sabotage?) effort or an "equalling of the playing field"...or some other socialist fantasy.
But in a free world, you have to ask why traders can't have proprietary software that gives them an edge in trading fast, and if your real problem is capitalism itself, this particular facet of it really isn't the issue; and if your real problem is that you just want to regulate some of the fiercest aspects of capitalism that can be destructive, you've never explained why you couldn't do this with organic law instead of transparency of the code to those putative million eyes.
As for biometrics, something that states from South Korea to Turkmenistan are using now -- while gas-rich Turkmenistan may not be able to supply clean water and jobs and even gas to all of its people, especially in remote areas, it has seen fit to rush to apply the latest scientific methods to create a biometric passport of the future -- and control its citizenry.
Knowing the software code that probably the Chinese wrote for the Turkmens or knowing the code of what might be implemented in the US won't change anything -- what's at stake here is the will of the government, its undemocratic nature, and its resorting to organic methods of control as well as electronic.
Morozov's critique of Silicon Valley-orchestrated collectivism -- yes, he does come up with an actual critique of collectivism now in rather a cunning way -- is that it is soulless. It's not "true" collectivism. That's because all it is, really, is a zillion individual actions -- clicks on likes, or retweeting of messages or copying of memes or whatever the individual act is -- without any sense of camraderie or joint purpose.Says Morozov:
This is a very limited vision of participation. It amounts to no more
than a simple feedback session with whoever is running the system. You
are not participating in the design of that system, nor are you asked to
comment on its future. There is nothing “collective” about such
distributed intelligence; it’s just a bunch of individual users acting
on their own and never experiencing any sense of solidarity or group
belonging. Such “participation” has no political dimension; no power
changes hands.
If you hold up a mirror to this paragraph to see what, then, Morozov might find ideal, not only might he himself disappear, but you see the yearning for collectivism nevertheless straining through as an ideal: It would be great if we did have collectives, just better, more meaningful collectives! It would be great if they actually democratically participated! It would be cause if they had a sense of solidarity and group belonging! It would be even better if they had a "political dimension" and actually took power! Hey, let's Occupy Wall Street with that!
I'm not talking about libertarian survivalism here and the lone individual on the range -- I'm just criticizing bureaucratic socialism. Really, how does Morozov's "better" group with solidarity differ from, oh, the Leninist notion of "democratic centralism" (the Politburo can debate, but nobody else) or Central Asian notion of the kuraltai (very free group debates with even the powerless included until the power-possessors decide after sifting out what they see as "the voice of the people" and then ruthlessly silencing all further debate) -- or Chinese "self-criticism" circles?
Morozov is still celebrating the group and its dynamics; he doesn't have a vision of the protection of individual rights or the protection of minorities, or how to change the group afterward, when it becomes "its own worst enemy", i.e. strays from the rigid ideal that may have been once "collectively" decided. What is the theory of change that really constitutes democracy, not just a glorification of "participation" that leads us to "participatory democracy" where the cadres end up deciding everything? Because not everybody participates. Because not everybody can or should have a stake. Why should a bunch of jobless students get to overthrow the stock market?
So I'd make a sharper critique of this Silicon Valley "collective intelligence" stuff than Morozov by pointing out --again -- the pernicious thinking of Clay Shirky in "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" which is really about how straying group members who revolt against non-democratically decided goals should be controlled -- or Beth Noveck, who thinks you can't have "here comes everybody" (which Shirky himself disavowed later) because you get people who aren't appropriate or are off-topic or are too stupid -- which is why a network of self-selecting experts under her guidance and filtration is the best kind of collective. You know, "the cadres decide everything," as Stalin put it so well. And he should know; despite being called "rude" by Lenin, he was eventually able to take over everything just by performing the simple task of keeping the minutes for meetings (and shaping them subtly) -- sort of writing the code for the group, if you will...
Of course, there's plenty of sense of joint purpose to go around among the Internet socialists on their campaigns, but I've generally found that the groups like Moveon or Daily Kos or Organizing for America are cadre-run, with the masses seldom having any real choice but to enthusiastically "like" and retweet what is peddled to them by a few cunning intellectuals at the top of the pyramid.
Morozov should be troubled by the bureaucratic socialism of Moveon or Center for American Progress, too, but never is.
And for him, the ideal of the collective still shines goldenly on the yawning heights:
As a result, once-lively debates about the content and meaning of
specific reforms and institutions are replaced by governments calling on
their citizens to help find spelling mistakes in patent applications or
use their phones to report potholes. If Participation 1.0 was about the
use of public reason to push for political reforms, with groups of
concerned citizens coalescing around some vague notion of the shared
public good, Participation 2.0 is about atomized individuals finding or
contributing the right data to solve some problem without creating any
disturbances in the system itself. (These citizens do come together at
“hackathons”—to help Silicon Valley liberate government data at no
cost—only to return to their bedrooms shortly thereafter.) Following the
open source model, citizens are invited to find bugs in the system, not
to ask whether the system’s goals are right to begin with. That
politics can aspire to something more ambitious than bug-management is
not an insight that occurs after politics has been reimagined through
the prism of open source software.
Again holding up the mirror and thinking about the shining heights, you see the recipe for the real Better World:
o challenge the entire system of capitalism -- it's time, comrades!
o have the code contributions disturb the system -- how about apps to name and shame every contributor to the mayor's campaign and dox them?
o take on issues much bigger than potholes -- why not march and demonstrate right in front of Jamie Dimon's house?
o don't go home to your bedrooms after your hackathon, camp in a tent on the square
And so on. In other words, Morozov is merely annoyed that O'Reilly, like the 1970s head shop owners, capitalizing on the zeitgeist of the SDS 1960s, began to profit from the sale of bong pipes and posters and black lights, is derailing the Revolution by selling open source software as something grafted on to capitalism -- at least, capitalism for some people in Sillicon Valley.
He castigates O'Reilly for seeming to "hate" protests -- by which he means, again, O'Reilly's actual cooptation of the antagonistic group dyanmics so often available online into "patch or GTFO" coder culture operations. He then picks anodyne things to work on -- a park -- rather than anything that might substantively challenge either politics as usual (which Morozov seems to believe is "bought out by corporate interests) or the socialist theories of the 1960s and 1970s (Ilyich) that rule the unions and the schools and are profoundly challenged by schemes like school vouchers.
Interestingly, O'Reilly mentions the Moldova Twitter protests in that piece positively -- up to a point:
The internet provides new vehicles for collective action. A lot of
people pay attention when social media is used to organize a protest (as
with the recent twitter-fueled protests in Moldova.) But we need to remember that we can organize to do work, as well as to protest!
He might as well be Lukashenka (never challenged by Morozov) telling the intellectuals to stop babbling in the cafes in the city and help bring in the potato harvest. Time to stop complaining and work, comrades! Patch or GTFO! In fact, the Twitter protests didn't lead to solutions of protracted problems caused by the Russians, like Transdniester.
Morozov's critique of O'Reilly, if he weren't burdened by his own idealistic vision of collectivism, could involve calling out the cadres who decide everything in gov 2.0, whether the Sunlight Foundation or the latest Google staff or collectivist academics installed in various White House agencies. That's what I do. Morozov doesn't, because his target is conservative Western governments that get in the way of old-time socialism, and to some extent, the Kremlin's agenda -- like the Cameron government in Londongrad. Hence gripey paragraphs like this:
At the same time that he celebrated the ability of “armchair auditors” to pore through government databases, he also criticized freedom of information laws, alleging that FOI requests are “furring up the arteries of government”
and even threatening to start charging for them. Francis Maude, the
Tory politician who Cameron put in charge of liberating government data,
is on the record stating
that open government is “what modern deregulation looks like” and that
he’d “like to make FOI redundant.” In 2011, Cameron’s government
released a white paper on “Open Public Services”
that uses the word “open” in a peculiar way: it argues that, save for
national security and the judiciary, all public services must become
open to competition from the market.
Market competition might be a good thing -- say, in competing for software contracts. I've often wondered if that enormously expensive boondoggle on the time-clock software for the City of New York was open or proprietary software, and what that story was really all about -- even if it turns out that the software is proprietary, the notion of the endless chain of experts required to keep it working because people can't be empowered to run it themselves normally seems to be at the heart of the problem. And the problem with New York City is in fact that it has outsourced to nonprofits and religious groups too much of the work of managing difficult populations that it needs to keep under one roof and monitored and kept transparent to the public far, far more than it does.
If you can get through the 16,000 words, you will be left with this: unadulterated worship of Stallman -- indeed, a fresh appreciation of Stallmanism with all the zeal of a new convert:
Once the corporate world began expressing interest in free software,
many nonpolitical geeks sensed a lucrative business opportunity. As
technology entrepreneur Michael Tiemann put it in 1999,
while Stallman’s manifesto “read like a socialist polemic . . . I saw
something different. I saw a business plan in disguise.” Stallman’s
rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types. Stallman
didn’t care about offending the suits, as his goal was to convince
ordinary users to choose free software on ethical grounds, not to sell
it to business types as a cheaper or more efficient alternative to
proprietary software. After all, he was trying to launch a radical
social movement, not a complacent business association.
But...go back to that socialism part. That was what was wrong with it in the first place.
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