Wired State

The Razorblades in Morozov's Apple of Knowledge

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.

So, Morozov beams and tweets triumphantly that he has found that exact place in a video about Mark Zuckerberg, where in fact he revealed long ago his plans for world domination that are now being examined today in his call for some kind of Silicon Valley sort of PAC that would work on issues like start-up visas and immigration. Well, I found that exact spot on that video more than four years ago in 2008, with "We Are Not 69 Million of Anything" -- back when the threat that Zuckerberg could harness all of us in creepy ways was limited to only 69 million, not one billion. I examine the connectivity cult (the same one Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen of Google have) in ways I think Morozov doesn't -- but now he's covering it in his book and will forever be credited for "discovering" this particular critique of Zuckerberg.

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.

Or take even the (formerly) obscure essay by Coase. Why, our own Philip Rosedale was reading it (not just O'Reilly) long before Shirky, back in 2005, because Mitch Kapor gave it to him, and touting it as a way to run a company today -- even the ultimate company without employees!

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.

And here, too, two years ago, I was criticizing O'Reilly very specifically, as I had for years in SL before that to his fanboyz. Morozov of course has produced the state-of-the-art critique in 16,000 words, complete with his intellectual antecedents, but yet, he never mentions O'Reilly's outrageous speaking fees and the scandals around them. He alludes to, but never really quite explains how open source is a racket that Big IT benefits most from in its California business model.

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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"Keep up the criticism!"

Yes, that's what Evgeny Morozov wrote to me in 2011 at an event during Social Media Week in New York City, not because he enjoys my criticism -- of him. He just wrote that to make it seem as if he didn't care about such criticism and would be charitable enough about it to someone willing to spend a day's grocery money on his book.

In fact, I'd sparred with him before that date a number of times, despite originally enjoying his piece on the FSB outsourcing hate in Russia in the comments sections.

Why? Because among many other things, I saw what an opportunist he was. It's okay to be an opportunist. This is America! Opportune all you like! But I found it rather, well, facile the way his views went from NGO-ish, when he worked for Transitions Online, then turned to exposing the FSB when he was a Soros fellow, then blasting certain excessive Internet guru types while a Yahoo fellow and at the Berkman Center,  then the whole Silicon Valley thing while at Stanford -- interposed with periodic blasts on the State Department and their Internet freedom program.  He's at New American Foundation today in the heart of the Soros-funded "progressives" -- there isn't a soul around Morozov, critic or supporter, who will ever care that he endorsed Angela Davis. That's the problem.

I write this as my daughter reads aloud in frustration her homework assignment for tonight (I'm not kidding): write a Marxist critique of Jane Eyre. Yes, I'm not kidding. There's even a little capsule summary of what Marxism is. Marxism is, according to the New York City School District's handout today, the following:

The Revoltion

The continuing confilct between the classes will lead to uopheaval and revolution by oppressed peoples and form the groundwork for a new order of society and economics where capitalism is abolished. According to Marx, the revolution will be led by the working class (others think peasants will lead the uprising) under the guidance of intellectuals. Once the elite and middle class are overthrown, the intellectuals will compose an equal society where everyone owns everything (socialism - not to be confused with Soviet or Maoist Communism).

Mkay, we'll be sure not to do that! And next week's assignment -- and again, I'm not making this up: critique Jane Eyre from the perspective of a "third-wave feminist". In case you don't know what that is, here's the handy tip-sheet: "early 1990s-present: resisting the perceived essentialist (over generalized, over simplified) ideologies and a white, heterosexual, middle class focus of second wave feminism, third wave feminism borrows from post-structural and contemporary gender and race theories to expan on marginalized populations' experiences."

See, this is why I bother with this stuff -- look at the kind of minds we will get coming to college -- where even worse awaits them.

But to get back to Morozov -- he didn't like my criticism, but when he happened to meet me after his presentation at the Soros Foundation, when I still worked at EurasiaNet, he saw that I was in the milieu of people that he couldn't really dis so outrageously. So he pulled back. He tucked in his claws -- for then. The minute I announced a year after that or so that I had left the Soros realm, then he went back to making nasty -- nastier -- comments.

The Sage of Soligorsk!

BTW, note this: his entry is yet another Wikipedia entry that is much shorter than mine, barely perceptively critical although he is very controversial, and contains hardly anything on his publications and articles -- even though the person is genuinely famous, has books commercially published, he has has academic positions, etc. which I have never had. Why? Every blog post that some griefer didn't like is given direct quotes and links and tendentious assessment on my entry, and he gets nothing of that treatment.

But yes, I give Morozov his due -- he has accomplished a tremendous amount since he left that god-awful irradiated shithole of Belarus run by Lukashenka a wacky Soviet-style tyrant -- who cancelled the Soviet holiday International Women's Day only because it conflicted with his proclaimed day of mourning for Chavez, one of his biggest financial and political supporters.

I wouldn't ever expect anyone to stay in Belarus -- I tell any of my friends or colleagues there to get out if they can, it's a hideous, awful place in so many respects and not easy to change with both Russia and the EU dedicated to pretty much keeping it the way it is.

But Morozov just never criticizes Belarus -- at all. Maybe he thinks it's self-evident. Maybe he is a jaded, hipster youth hating on all authority. Now, if he has relatives back there, I wouldn't ask him to do that, either. But then he goes out of his way to be nasty. He makes cracks, like saying that the Belarus democracy movement's hashtags are "trending only in DC" as if they are only of interest to politicians wanting to make hay of them, or as if revolutions are only paid for by the US government or something. Sure, the US criticizes Belarus because it can, it's a little country it doesn't depend on, like Russia or Uzbekistan, where it is more circumspect about its criticism because it depends on them now for the exit from Afghanistan.

Yet the intelligentsia of Belarus are among the bravest people I know. While Zhenya was tweeting snottily to me that he was "30 km. from the action" during the big democracy demonstration in Minsk in 2010 (he was home for the holidays in his provincial town or somewhere else in Europe), other people, including the independent presidential candidates, were getting their asses kicked and being beaten and thrown into jail for years, some of them still there. I don't require bravery. I don't require somebody joins every dissident movement. But I think the moral thing to do if you have left a situation where other people are still fighting the good fight is to have a bit of humility. To not shit on them, at the very least, you know?

The number of people who track Morozov on what he says about Belarus and its opposition movements is likely: 1. I realize that. Who cares, in the larger world? But it tells you what you need to know about his character, and that matters. I want to understand what I'm getting in a society when somebody critiques Big IT or the Internet utopian fallacies, which I also critique.

And what I don't want in that society is communism, particularly of the violent, radical Black Panther sort of Angela Davis.

Yes, that Angela Davis is the one Morozov has praised first in his New York Times opinion essay on Internet movements, then later in his book.

And that forms the basis for this Twit fight, recorded here on Storify. Enjoy!

Whimsley has a review up -- I'm not among the privileged to get a free book to review, so I will have to buy it in the remainder bin at the Strand one of these days.

 

TED Cult Spreads Through Camp Meetings - Part II

A painting of a camp meeting by J. Maze Burbank from 1839. Read the history of camp meetings here.

I've been meaning to blog this -- I've been surprised at hundreds of visitors coming to my blog from a discussion on the TED site about whether or not TED is a cult.

Of course it's a cult, as I wrote back here -- and somebody in that discussion linked to my article and that's why I got all those visitors.

I didn't want to bother to have to join the site, post content on TED.com and then only have them delete it if they felt like it. But I really had nothing more to say. TED is a cult. I started analyzing at length Grace McDunnough's TED talk (she's one of the Feted Inner Core in Second Life) but then I just got tired of it. I will come back to it some day. It reminded me of one of my favourite forgotten hippie songs from the Ultimate Spinach. That is all:

 

I felt bad that such a slight article -- short (for me) and hardly substantive -- could get so much readership and linkage. It just states the obvious: that TED talks sit squarely in the American tradition of the camp meeting, the revivalist religious movements in the 1800s which were famous in upstate New York, where I'm from, which is even called the Burnt-Out Place because the Holy Spirit passed over it so many times. (We have the Mormons' Hill Cumorrah, for example, too, where the Angel Moroni appeared). I even went to camp meetings myself 40 years ago and somewhere around here I even have a cassette tape of Brother Cornwall. So the tradition is all very familiar -- the only thing is that I don't mind if a religious meeting selects its doctrines and doesn't let people ask questions during the meeting and doesn't present conflicting points of view -- I do resent it when a tech meeting does that.

That's my main critique of TED:

o the selection process is arbitrary and secretive and it's just a "gut feeling" of the organizers without any sense of accountability or transparency

o there are never conflicting points of view represented in a panel format with a debate

o there are opportunities for the audience to ask questions

This is not going to change, so somebody else has to make something different and call it FRED or DRED, FOR REAL EDUCATION or DAMN REAL EDUCATION or whatever.

And then there's this odd thing. You can still see the Google cache of the critical "conversation" on the TED site itself linking to my blog, with the title "Are TED Talks becoming a kind of weird technology & religious cult ..." but if you go to the site you now get something else -- "TED is evil and here's the proof" (citation of a lot of Transhumanists among its speakers). You also see a lot of the comments were deleted. Oh, well. That was my instinct from the beginning -- don't waste time there, they'll just delete it. So hurry to see that Google cache if you care.

Still, it's good to keep up with the critique of TED and someday I may take more time to critique individual videos -- there are so many horrible ones (gamification).

Nathan Juergensen has done what he calls "an epistemic" critique of TED which is good -- most people stop at the juncture where they realize its elitist or costs too much, and then the TED zombies shut them up by explaining how they have free meetings and free videos now and invite People of Colour and all the rest.  Juergensen explains what's really wrong -- not the corporativism, but the pretense that it isn't corporativism:

Perhaps the biggest complaint I heard was that TED smells of corporatism. With the Facebook IPO around the corner, we are all well aware of the big venture-capital sums floating around Silicon Valley (the new Wall Street?). What’s infuriating is how Silicon Valley capitalism consistently attempts to sell itself as outside or even above corporatism. In announcing Facebook’s IPO, Mark Zuckerberg, whose company has consistently violated user privacy in the name of profit, stated that “we don’t build services to make money.” He actually said that.

Yeah, Zuckerberg did say that, I blogged about it at the time, it was so telling, the awful socialism of these people making billions from others socializing. You can't help thinking if there were less of that technocommunist glitz, Zuckerberg might have had a better IPO for his investors, geez. For Juergensen, TED is like the medicine show, another historic American social phenomenon:

“Consumers” are savvy, and they know when they are being sold to. So many of the TED talks take on the form of those famous patent medicine tonic cure-all pitches of previous centuries, as though they must convince you not through the content of what’s being said but through the hyper-engaging style of the delivery. Each new “big idea” to “inspire the world” and “change everything” pitched from the TED stage reminds me of the swamp root and snake oil liniment being sold from a wagon a hundred years past. As Mike Bulajewski pointed out in a Tweet, “TED’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ mask capitalism as usual, giving it a narrative of progress and change.”

And there is the religious framing which he noticed as well:

The conferences have come to resemble religious meetings and the TED talks techno-spiritual sermons, pushing an evangelical, cultish attitude toward “the new ideas that will change the world.” Everything becomes “magical” and “inspirational.” In just the top-ten most-viewed TED talks, we get the messages of “inspiration,” “astonishment,” “insight,” “mathmagic” and the “thrilling potential of SixthSense technology”! The ideas most popular are those that pander to a metaphysical, magical portrayal of the role of technology in the world.

I don't mind capitalism the way these folks do, but I agree that the medicine show is the archetype, since the gadgets they're selling are always supposed to make you "better". Who doesn't doubt that SixthSense, this augmented reality thing, is coming soon to a Google Glass near you?

Another critic of TED I've found is in the New Statesman, a journal I have been coming back to more to read critiques of technology.

This piece by Martin Robbins is hilarious:

I’ve long been amused by the slogan of TED, makers of the ubiquitous TED talks. TED’s slogan is this: ‘Ideas worth spreading.’ Apparently TED has some ideas, and we should spread them. What ideas? Ideas that TED in its infinite wisdom has picked out for us, ideas which are therefore implied to be true and good and right. What should we do with these ideas? We should build a message around them - slick presentations by charismatic faces captured in high definition - and we should spread that message far and wide

The genius of the format is that nobody really watches them: we play them on iPods or we run them in our browsers while working on other things, but it’s rare that people put one on the television and sit down and really focus on them. They come at us from the side of our vision, sneaking past our preoccupied neural circuitry and planting little seeds in the nooks and crevices of our minds, like mould spores on a damp window frame. In the darkest hours of countless nights I’ve woken convinced that a solar-powered cup holder will end third world debt, but not really knowing why.

Read the rest, LOL material for sure -- the News Statesman is our only hope now in the world of the little journals, now that The New Republic has been bought out by a Facebook billionaire, Chris Huges.

Whimsley, who is one of my favourite bloggers also critical of tech excess calls out the lack of women in TED.

If you want something really cringe-worthy about TED-as-a-cult by somebody who thinks that's a good thing, read this about TEDXWomen.

There were over 70 speakers from over dozens of countries, ranging from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright to a 20-year-old college student who founded a nonprofit at the prodigy age of 15.

The event kicked off with the candid acknowledgment that the idea of having a women-specific conference is controversial.

The First Lady of Malawi led a Conga line of CEOs, founders, visionaries, and entrepreneurs while Beninoise singer-songwriter (and UNICEF ambassador) Angelique Kidjo started a dance party on stage.

There was not one, but two roboticists.

Okay, I've had enough, take it away, please.

At least I've done my civic duty now so that anyone coming to this page wanting more about the TED cult now has more meat on the bones from people who have written it up better than I could.

 

Internet Subsistence Farming

• Subsistence farming was a way of life on the Eastern Shore in Virginia.
  

  Mason/Holland family photograph. From neh.gov

My ancestors spun looms at home or dug potatoes or peet in Ireland. In this country, they either worked their small family farms in Virginia or Kentucky or they ran a small tavern and inn on the wrong side of the tracks, where the whole family worked, serving the rail workers and traveling salesmen in Corry, Pennsylvania. One grandfather took care of horses and then cars at the Hotel Quebec.

Today, I often think that while a century or even two centuries separates us from our ancestors, we're not really substantively different. I still have to spin my Internet loom late into the night to write news copy for websites or translate articles or books; my aunt prepares book indexes; my brother fixes people's websites and servers.  How different is it taking care of somebody's horse or car and taking care of somebody's web site or server? How different is working your fingers on a loom to spin thread or typing on a keyboard to spin words? My great uncle Ray died from a mule kick to the head on the family farm. When the power was knocked out for two weeks during Hurricane Sandy, I wondered what we would do if it stretched weeks -- our family farm of computers and a router burned out in the blackout were all we had to sustain us. A FEMA worker asked me if I had lost any "tools for work". "My router," I explained.

I've seen the nonprofit and news industry, where I used to readily find jobs, shrink to a fraction of its size. I don't whine about this because I've always adapted and done other kinds of consulting and of course translation. But I don't glamourize the new "work at home" online businesses and Internet-ized "sharing" businesses involving homes and cars and errands because I see they are never going to be a decent living. Only some people with already pre-existing assets are going to benefit, and the managers of them benefit most of all, with a huge discrepancy between their lifestyle and that of their Internet minions. Shouldn't all those Occupy Wall Streeters who couch-surf care more about this 1%?

Whimsley has had a very interesting discussion challenging the whole unregulated -- and unethical  -- area of the Air BnB type of Internet-ized services and has even written an open letter challenging Timothy Wu who was touting them at the New York Times.

Peer-to-Peer Hucksterism is exactly the right title for this blog. Whimsley is more of a socialist or "progressive" than I am, certainly, so he approaches the problem of the Silicon Valley hustle from the perspective of the regulated social state -- what horrifies him more than the collectivization of private property involved in these entrepreneurial escapades is that the democratic state cannot properly control them so that people are not harmed. I agree regulation is needed, and I don't mind if the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which people regard as crooked because it charges huge fees for medallions, is the entity to regulate -- and therefore ban -- Uber. Uber was unconscionable during Sandy, gouging prices for rides like common Russian mafia karservisy. Disgraceful.

Paul Carr has a really great series of articles calling out these Internet thugs in Uber and the other businesses here, here and here.  He calls out their Randian "Atlas Shrugs" attitude -- one blog is delightfully called "Asshole Shrugs". Myself, I call out their technocommunism. I don't favour Randianism at all, I just think the Leninist NEP that these entrepreneurs are hawking isn't an improvement over traditional free enterprise in a marketplace that in fact doesn't have to be over-regulated to still be under the rule of law and the courts. That's what bothers Whimsley as well.

Now comes Tomio Geron at Forbes touting "AirBnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy". The comments are filled with predictable snots who tell others to be disrupted and die while they make their fortunes, and Brazilian third-world sharers who sneer that those who can't accept sharing must "adapt". Ho hum, this is an old story played out in the Russian Revolution and lots of other revolutions.

So here's my intervention at Forbes:

Look, we are not glamorous, we Internet subsistence farmers, and trying to pretend that the jobs that are going away for good are going to be replaced by our Internet subsistence farming doesn’t impress us.

I might make my income each month by translating something online from Russian for somebody in Vladivostok or an international agency in another country, or copy-editing somebody’s film script within an hour turn-around, or re-renting my Second Life servers and selling digital furniture for avatars, or taking in revenue from Google from my blog ads. The Future is Here! the Future is Now! Except, the future is unevenly distributed. Whoop-de-doo. I’m poor.

I don’t have a car; I live in New York. I can’t rent out part of my apartment — I’d lose my lease in a building where the landlord zealously polices sublets and enforces them by video camera surveillance and electronic card-entry to the building with cards that can only be issued to paying tenants and approved residents. This Air bnb stuff is not a plan for the third world; hell, it’s not even a plan for Rochester, MN or Rochester, NY. It’s *just* a plan for sunny California where hipsters have houses in Malibu and Prius cars that they can chop up, collectivize and let the new oligarchs sell for them under this technocommunist regime. The rest of us are going to be scratching in the digital dust.

We can’t be unionized even by the freelancers’ unions — they require letters from employers, and what, I’m supposed to get 100 letters a month from people I did two pages of translation for or 20 minutes of errands picking up an item they need or re-renting 1024 square meters of Second Life server space for US $1.50 a month? Please. I’m all for micropayments and Mechanical Turks, but you need to look at the nature of the work and jobs on all these task rabbity sites — they are very, very marginal and the only people who really make decent wages are *coders*. Once again we are seeing geeks pretend that they are making a Better World.

I’m not complaining — I chose my Internet subsistence farming after the nonprofit I worked for failed with loss of funding after 9/11; I chose it after my conventional media companies downsized because the Internet killed them. I could be working at Home Depot and have health insurance; instead, I chose this. It’s all good.

The most disturbing thing about this new collective farm where we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us, however, are these new oligarchs who make billions why we make 17 cents from somebody maybe clicking on a belly fat ad.

Hey, when they’re ready to get out of the way and let their systems be run by robots and in fact people like us, and get the tycoons and VCs out of the way, maybe we can believe in their revolution. I don’t think that will happen any time soon. Collectivization isn’t going to work in the virtual world any better than it did in real life. I’m for free enterprise. That’s not what this Brave New Internet World is. It’s “capitalism for me, communism for thee”. It’s not just.

***

Then there's one person who thinks that the resistance to the "sharing economy" is about traditional "phobia" in America against communism and socialism and that technological advances will make this go away.

Nonsense. There’s a good reason for the ‘phobia’ about socialism and communism in America — a lot of the people among the immigrant populations know first hand about the horrors of mass murder under communism and suppression of entrepreneurialism and human rights under socialism. So they came here. They are telling the truth about communism — she isn't.

In fact, the worst aspects of the collectivization we knew in real life are in these digital services — the lack of accountability, the lack of transparency, the ability of a few to exploit the labour of many fervent collectivized believers who don’t have union benefits or retirement plans but just get to chop up their personal property into more and more time or space slivers.

Work on the Internet collective farm is not everything that it has cracked up to be. Write when you get work.

Some of the commenters at Forbes point out to the reputation management aspect and the "curation" or -- once again, the customer service state which would have to supervise that "curation" by the lovely commuuuuunity.

Here's the problem with having collective brow-beating to manage the collective. Group-think kicks in and fanboyz and the "community managers" -- not elected or accountable, but just corporate drones  -- then become harsher and harsher trying to maintain order. We've all seen this in the virtual worlds and the game worlds -- this is going to be awful to watch as it leeches out into real life! Ugh...

Imagine if someone doesn't think the thread count on your Egyptian sheets or the view from your urban window is as wonderful as they thought seeing the picture, and they downrate you. Now you've gone from having a thrilling and fun sort of Internet hobby like that B 'n B you always dreamed of, to having some Internet dickwad threaten your livelihood because they arbitrarily leave a bad comment. You have nowhere to go for adjudication or fairness because the company will not care or have the resources to manage these things. It will be like "Rate my Professor" on steroids. Your only hope, like on Amazon or ebay, is that after enough sales, you could right the bad rep some thin-skinned nerd has given you.

The worst thing I saw at the beginning of Air BnB was that when a woman wanted to protest the horrible thing that happened to her, where lowlifes who rented her place set up a meth lab and stole and wrecked her stuff, was that Robert Scoble told her she was whining and to shut up -- the company was just getting its next round of VC cash and this was more important to nurture than responding to the complaints of one disgruntled customer. The company at first ignored her. She had to shout and shout and scream and put up with the nastiness of the Internet boys on TechCrunch and such until she finally started to get normal mainstream press attention and the company had to turn around on her case and make it good. They did, to their credit, but you got a sense of just how hard it is to challenge these Silicon Valley favourites and their horrid fanboyz with high traffic and views in the tech blogosphere. It was impossible to be heard above the noise when I tried to criticize Uber in New York -- I was hated on and drowned out on TechCrunch. It took Paul Carr from the alternative Pando Daily to get heard with these same kinds of obvious concerns anyone would have.

Meanwhile, without a car or a rentable apartment what assets do I have to rent out timeshares on? Would anyone like a dilapidated pepper plant half-eaten by a cat to grace their home temporarily and give it that lived-in look? How about a shelf of do-gooder and idealistic books that will make you seem intellectual? Say, need two well-mannered and drug-free teenagers that wash their own dishes and actually pick up their rooms? Okay just kidding.

 

Google's Terribly Misleading "Transparency" Report

Here we go again with Google's hugely misnamed and misleading "transparency" report.

I wish I had a big old blank page with minimal graphics visited by billions needing to search for stuff to counter this blatant propaganda the way Google purveys their own, but, I don't : )

It is not transparent because we never learn the *criteria* and the *reasoning* and the *process* for how takedown judgements are made; it's just raw Google executive revolutionary expediency, and that's it. Google is now the Global Glavlit. We get a handful of examples of "takedowns we didn't do" -- any of them could be argued on the merits but we don't have enough information and there's no appeal process; indeed, no due process as all as people cannot face their accusers, mount an adversarial process, etc. It's just what Google decides.

All these lawfaring lawyers screaming about US prosecutors overreaching need to stop kvetching about cases that didn't ever come to court, or which led to probation, and look at the huge overreach Google has acquired to adjudicate cases completely outside any national sovereignty, international  treaty body, or any court of law whatsoever. Look at this:

Why do you remove some URLs but not others?

It is our policy to respond to clear and specific notices of alleged copyright infringement. Upon review, we may discover that one or more URLs specified in a copyright removal request clearly did not infringe copyrights. In those cases we will decline to remove those URLs from Search. Reasons we may decline to remove URLs include not having in enough information about why the URL is allegedly infringing; not finding the allegedly infringing content referenced in the request; deducing that the copyright removal process is being used improperly (see next FAQ for examples) or fair use.

 On what basis does Google decide what does and doesn't infringe copyright? On the basis of whether they can continue to earn ad money themselves on that stolen content? That's the question to ask about this blatant conflict of interest with the search loss-leader for the world's biggest ad agency.

By publishing stark numbers on spare white pages -- like the huge increase in takedown requests related to copyright, or huge numbers of requests from the US government -- Google can ensure enormous resonance through all its tech media mouthpieces and loyal outlets to make it appear that evil Amerika is the worst in the world and evil Hollywood moguls are the worst at suppressing us all in our liberties.

But...the reason there are more copyright notices is because there is more piracy, and more piracy with impunity, and Google's help in monetarizing said piracy. Not to menion its own hijacking of content for the sale of ads and its own largesse made from this practice.

We never learn how long the content remains on Google's servers *before* it is taken down, and how much ad money Google earns on other people's content before they must reluctantly let it slip from their giant paws. Now that would be transparency; we don't get that. What we get is something else in the FAQs -- they remove content generally within six hours of getting a DMCA notice of infringement. But it can take awhile to prepare those, and the IP holders don't always realize there is infringement at first.

The reason that you don't see the real authoritarians of the world in absolute numbers of the sort that geeks with 0101 thinking can understand and the tech media can be impressed by is that countries like China, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan etc. don't submit any takedown notices or at least very few -- they just block all of Youtube. Or all of Facebook. Or all of sites they don't like, when they want. Different!

Tajikistan, which just closed off access to Facebook, Twitter, other social network sites and their own opposition sites, isn't shown to have a single takedown notice to Google. That's because "takedown" is already the gentleman's way of doing things on the Internet -- the real thugs just cut the cable or shut off the Internet or block all the sites, period.

Russia, which has huge aspirations for Internet control and achieves them in a variety of ways, from thuggish blocking to thuggish beating of journalists, as well as many more subtle ways, has only 176 requests, 174 for national security in violation of the extremism law, and two on "defamation".

The purpose of Google's report is to serve the cause of copyleftism, and try to prove that the real culprit in the world is the US government, which they fight more assiduously than China, and the real problem in Internet "innovation" is the call to remove stolen content. You can see the nakedness of their intent, with its thin global veneer, in the Faqs.

All the examples of "intentionally abusive copyright removal requests" come from the US and the motional picture industry or advertisers in the US or UK, not the authoritarian Egyptian or Russian or Chinese governments dealing with their own dissenters. That's because what Google is interested in is not free speech, but freedom for its ad agency.

They hope by publishing these skewed and misleading figures they will prevail in their own self-interested struggles for their own ideological and business interests. Their report tells us nothing about how they make money from ads with rampant piracy they encourge, and tell us little about the actual state of freedom in the world and how governments suppress it.

Another Human Rights Lawyer Joins the Copyleftists

I was sorry to see that in addition to Robert Amsterdam, another prominent human rights lawyer get on the band-wagon with the copyleftist gang -- Scott Horton, a veteran human rights advocate and international law expert who has a column at Harpers and who has done a lot of important work on rendition, torture, and the defense of political prisoners in Eurasia. He used to be my boss at the International League for Human Rights and I've known him for my whole professional life, that's why it's particularly sad to see him joining this circus.

I can understand why he has taken up this cry at Harper's, which is a liberal bastion and publisher of many a "progressive," but he really ought to talk to publisher Rick MacArthur about just how duplicitious the copyleftists and hackers are -- they really ought to have this conversation and even a public debate because it's just plain wrong what is happening.

The hackers community -- ethics-free, anarchist, scornful of the rule of law, ignorant of how justice works in the round, and eager to scapegoat and persecute people they think get in the way of their freedom -- have shouted enough and screamed enough and bayed enough that they have succeeded --with the tech media's very deliberate help -- to try to convert hacking into a human rights cause. This is actually part of a much longer march of the institutions that began a decade ago I've written about. It's actually personally very sad for me; when I first came across the people I would come to understand as the new Bolsheviks scornful of human rights in Second Life and later on social media like Twitter, Facebook and G+, I always thought they would not succeed because when their wave of revolution from the West Coast came crashing against the East Coast establishment liberals, despite the winning of the technologists of the war of the Two Cultures, some sense would get knocked into them. I thought the combination of Congress, universities, human rights organizations, intellectual publications that the East Coast has to offer as a challenge to the West Coast's criminalized Internet anarchy would be a tempering influence and the result would be if not prevailing of sense at least a tempering. I'm beginning to despair that this is the case now.

To make sure my comment isn't buried on his blog castigating Carmen Ortiz and calling for her head, here's my response:

Scott,

I totally understand your long-standing need to slap down US prosecutors for all kinds of legitimate reasons you have acquired over the years. But you shouldn't convert piracy and hacking into a human rights cause; it isn't one.

Carmen Ortiz did her job and applied the law correctly, as Orrin Kerr has aptly explained here.

And while not being a lawyer, and merely a human rights activist knowledgeable about hackers, I've refuted everything that the chief witness for the defense says here.

As I've written about copiously at my blog Wired State, Swartz committed a braven "propaganda of the deed" to demonstrate a point for a cause he had worked in for years. It was a form of civil disobedience; really, it was 'direct action'. He knew the consequences but thought his friends like Larry Lessig would get him out of this jam; they didn't go to bat for him after preaching copyleftism and essentially inciting him to this act.

You, like others pursuing a crusade against prosecutors for other reasons, fail to mention the six-month plea bargain he was offered. You also fail to note that these two congresswomen, Lofgren (who opposed SOPA) and Warren (who is a champion for the "progressive" cause) are highly ideological and using this case for their pre-existing cause of copyleftism and the "California business model".

I know how it happens among liberal lawyers who persuade themselves they are fighting the good fight against "the Man"; they pile on; they tell each other taller and taller tales; they accentuate the victimology. But I hope you will come to see you are undermining human rights when you set the stage for thuggish hackers to succeed like Bolsheviks, and take away free choice on the Internet.

This "standard trick" you claim is used by prosecutors to "scarify" is one that Kim Dotcom and his lawyers scoffed at and fought -- and so far have kept at bay. Yet suddenly, we're supposed to believe that such prosecutors are ineffectual in Dotcom's case but deadly in Swartz's case merely because he committed suicide? That's hardly persuasive and the attitude toward prosecution in both cases is stark and tends to undermine the wild caricature of US prosecutors as evil bullies who torture innocent geniuses bent only on "innovation".

Swartz was offered a plea bargain; don't start with the Fisking about the results a felony on his record would have with the kind of friends he had;  and Ortiz noted that his lawyer could have sought probation. Indeed. The challenge for all you human rights lawyers suddenly converting to the copyleftist cause is to look at *precedents*. Where on earth in America have you see a case of a hacker go to jail for 50 years, 35 year, or even 7 years? It doesn't happen, Scott; they get off; they get nothing; they get one or two years. They turn state's evidence, like Sabu; in the UK they use the Asperberger's defense and avoid extradition to the US. There are no hackers sitting in jail for 50 years, don't be preposterous.

I fail to see what Ortiz's husband's "false statements" were on Twittter, or why you think he "failed to disclose" something that "the Internet" found in seconds. He challenged Mitch Kapor -- the greatest founder and funder of all the copyleftist organizations, including Swartz's -- with his failure to acknowledge the 6-month plea offer -- and thereby contriving a scary exaggeration of the case along with the rabid tech media. That was absolutely the right thing to do -- and true -- the sort of truth repeatedly drowned out by the mob on this case.

You claim that Ortiz "whitewashes the facts" by stating that she never claimed Swartz sought profit. But she didn't. Where do you find that she did? The damages claimed by MIT is a separate issue.

Judge Kozinski can say what he likes in Nosal, but he can't wish away the facts in Swartz:

o that he used an alias
o that he created a fake account
o that he wrote a circumvention script called "keepgrabbing.py" to do just that, stealing 4 million files
o that he accessed servers to which he was authorized through Harvard as a student, by hacking MIT
o that he hid his face with a bicycle helmet
o that he logged in from a wiring closet when bounced out to circumvent the standard checks at MIT
o that he ran from police

Swartz and his defense have never disputed these acts; instead they've attempted to accentuate other aspects, like the alleged mere "inconvenience" this caused MIT; or that he returned the files; or that JSTOR dropped their charges.

But that doesn't take away from the cause Swartz was bent on pursuing aggressively and zealously with this dramatic act: he wanted to "liberate" university files, like the Pacer court files, in the "information wants to be free" revolution. How can you whitewash the sorts of *Bolshevik* activities that anarchist hackers do like this, Scott, when you're willing to raise Kozinsky's being born in Communist Romania?! If he was born in Communist Romania, then he should realize that *when people thugglishly deprive everyone of choice on the Internet, and harm commerce and the ability of organizations to offer paid content and walled gardens, they are no better than the communists*. And you should understand that as well, if you weren't so busy climbing on this bandwagon for other reasons.

Whatever is wrong with the DOJ,  prosecutors, the criminal justice system, torture, renditions, and on and on, is not something solved through *this case*. And trying to convert a hacker case into a human rights cases harms the cause of human rights in the long run.

Only those on the hard left pushing the hard "progressive" agenda could conceive of a prosecutor who is a Democrat, appointed by a Democratic president and sworn in by a democratic governor with Holder as the Democratic attorney general, as being "bullies" merely because they lawfully and properly pursued an obvious, large-scale hacking case with MIT's cooperation in the interests of the law and deterring future hacking.

By baying for the heads of these prosecutors along with the copyleftist anarchists and their storm-troopers in Anonymous who out the private of law-enforcers they don't like and harass them, you're actually helping to undermine the rule of law and erode human rights on the Internet for all of us. You have no idea!

Lawrence Lessig is the one who has serious questions to answer about this case; so does Hal Abelson. The prosecutors are just doing their jobs.

 

The Socialism in Obama's Inauguration Speech

If you're like me, and you've been steeped in human rights for 35 years, you will read this handy meme poster from wh.gov and ask yourself "what's wrong with this picture".

If you're looking for the "guidestar" for the struggles for women's rights, the rights of blacks, and the rights of LGBT, and you were mining the preamble of the Constitution, wouldn't you pick "they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalieable rights"?  Isn't the inherency of rights acknowledged in the Constitution -- regardless of whether you believe in God -- your lodestone? Sure, "all men are created equal"  -- but given that the "men" who first wrote that line didn't include women, blacks, or gays, don't you think it's helpful to root your struggle in the second line, about "inalieable rights" -- the means by which "equality" actually got its meaning? And couldn't you put them BOTH, when it comes down to it? Why would you go out of your way to accentuate the first as "the most self evident" in this fashion? Why?

I hope you will be sincere and think about this and realize that the answer to this question comes in the socialism that informs Obama's persona, regardless of whether or not "he is a socialist" in some rigid definition.

Let's go through and find the socialist memes in Obama's Inauguration Speech, shall we?

Already, whitehouse.gov is busy making social-media-ready posterlets you can meme around -- like this one above -- and there is gushing on Facebook and Twitter everywhere in the land about all the moving things the president says.

Well, I didn't vote for him so I beg to differ. I'm glad he mentioned gay rights and climate change -- but of course, even there he is merely dog-whistling and meming to leftist constituencies and not really going to the mat for a federal law on gay marriage rights -- but as I'm finding, gays are apparently easily placated. The climate change stuff sticks out to somebody like Newt Ginrich, who derided the "goofy leftism" in the speech, but only by responding to that red meat, then he doesn't take any intellectual leadership on the real intellectual problems of socialistic thinking in the speech -- and maybe that's deliberate.

Climate change doesn't bother me as a topic: if somebody wants to stop pollution, improve recycling, use alternative energy, I don't see anything wrong with it -- I don't have a car and I live in a small apartment. The theology and righteousness around the climate change crowd is annoying, and unlike Naomi Wolf, I surely don't think we need to install communism to have it, but eventually, I'm confident reason will prevail and compromises will be found. To be sure, what Obama tries to pull off here -- as so many do -- is a confusion between consciousness of the facts of climate change that appear before us like floods with an imperative then to all think the same way about what should be done about these realities. The debate that is always about whether or not to believe the dogma on climate change should be transposed to a debate about what leftists then want to do about it, because then we can smoke out the ideological from the practical.

What worries me much, much more is the culture of socialism propagated in this speech.

I've noted it before in general about Obama's platform, and specifically in speeches like the Human Rights Day speech that torqued age-old memes in the socialist direction. The Inauguration Speech will likely get many more views than some of these other speeches and that's why it's more worrisome.

He begins by affirming faith in "the enduring strength of our Constitution" and "the promise of our democracy" so that you can't possibly suspect any socialism/communism here and if you do, why, you aren't as American as the president!

What makes us American -- and I agree -- is our allegiance "to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago," says Obama: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

No one has ever successfully used these words to try to back up their socialist platform, let along their communist platform because they speak about rights and liberty, two things that those systems, in the hands of authoritarians (let's not have that usual boring debate about Sweden) never have.

But Obama's speech writers cunningly succeed in twisting this.

Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.

Right. Translate that as: "let's adopt these very well-worn and familiar memes to our socialist agenda if we can".

For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.  (Applause.) 

Well, they can't be self-executing, big guy, invoking God as you will. That's because freedom means that they don't self-execute. But when you talk about securing him by "His people here on earth," you must mean yourself, because what you lay out is a vision of state-supplied security.

The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob.  They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed. 

Oh, bollocks. "We are the 99%," eh? The US isn't a country with only "the privileges of a few," even though the New York Times breathlessly reports that distribution of wealth in Manhattan is "like Sierra Leone". Sigh.  At least he is willing to concede that we shouldn't replace tyranny of a king with "rule of a mob," although that is exactly what we are getting with technocommunism on the Internet. See SOPA.

Now Obama warms to his topic. This republic was never very great because it was only "half-free" because it was "half-slave". Not everyone would see it that way. Increasingly, there is a school of thought that says the institutions created by these framers are tainted because they did not include women, minorities, and gays at the very beginning. That people used the second sentence in the preamble to get the first sentence for all seems to escape them..

Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play. 
 
Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.

I'm actually in agreement with the idea that there have to be rules against monopolies and cronyism and fair play; I'm not a Randism, a Friedmanite, a market absolutist as some of the libertarians are that dislike Obama (or on the contrary, voted for him for other reasons). Social justice doesn't bother me. Laws against pollution or for clean air or alternative energy don't seem to me to threaten business, but require innovation for business because we can't endlessly use up resources. But I'm not sure that when Obama, the product of DSA, the Socialist Scholars' Conference and the community organizing movement talks about "rules" that he means the same thing as I would. I suspect not.

Here is where everything goes horribly, nightmarishly wrong in the speech, and I hope people are paying attention:

 Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone.  Our celebration of initiative and enterprise, our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, these are constants in our character.
 
But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.

No. No. No.

First, despite the changes of times, er, we do retain our skepticism of central authority -- especially of Obama. Those constants in our character I think will bring us out of the Obama socialistic phase. We do not need "collective action" -- code word for collectivism. You preserve individual freedoms by exercising individual freedoms, not forming collectives and embracing collectivism. Don't confuse collaboration of free individuals with collectivism.

How dare Obama invoke the fight against facism or communism as something that people "couldn't do alone" in service to his collectivist ideology?! There's a difference between people forming associations, parties, movements, concerted factions in government and fighting these things through celebration of the rights of the individual, and what he's talking about, which is collectivism of the very sort that those ideologies fought. That's why this is so sneaky.

And here's where it gets preposterous, demagogic and dangerous:

No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores.  Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people.  (Applause.)

Er, really, what the hell is that all about? We've never had a single person who did those things. It wasn't Ford or Rockefeller, if that's your point; it wasn't Robert Moses. Obama seems to be dog-whistling here to those who hate rich industrialists but it's an absurdity -- communities, religious organizations, unions, these have always been what built and trained and researched and did business, not big industrialists, who are only part of the economy. What is he going on about?

And more woo-woo about "endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention"; we are "made for this moment, and we will seizit it" --  but again, that collectivist call "so long as we seize it together"

No. We don't to collectivize even to have a spirit of bi-partisan cooperation -- which we don't really have and I'm really not certain that it's a bad thing. So often when we get the eye-rolls from Michelle Obama about Boehner or the ranting about how Congress is "blocking progress," we're getting a socialist steam-roll -- we're not allowed to have debate; we're not allowed to question where the hell we will get all the money to pay out all those social entitlements. Too often this debate is caricaturized on the left as a "call to abolish Social Security and Medicare" and blah blah, even if somebody just wants cuts. It's insane.

And here -- more 99% hogwash -- "For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

If there is a shrinking few, the reasons are complex, and are not fixed by socialism. Does anybody ever ask whether the boom in credit cards in the 1970s that preceded the boom in mortgages in the 1990s might all be part of an excessive realization of the dream by living beyond your means, i.e. an end to that ethos of hard work and sacrifice the president wanted to invoke earlier? These "shrinking few" still pay the overwhelming percentage of the state budget with their taxes. Shouldn't somebody say thankyou?

The rhetoric about little girls born in poverty brought applause, but that little girl existed even before Obama, in a country that made it possible for Michelle Obama herself to come to power.

And now comes the Soviet speed-up, the Soviet Stakhanovite labour; the Soviet collective farm; the Soviet perestroika:

We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time.  So we must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more, reach higher.  But while the means will change, our purpose endures:  a nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American.  That is what this moment requires.  That is what will give real meaning to our creed.  

Whenever someone tells you they need to empower you, head for the hills.

And now, the deft emotional manipulation to try to get the people who complain about too many entitlements to feel as if they are uncaring -- but with a heavy dollop again of collectivization:

We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few.  We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm.  The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative, they strengthen us.  (Applause.)  They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.  (Applause.) 

It's fashionable for the New Realists to slam the neo-cons whom they think brought us war for democracy abroad to ensure our safety at home and failed at both. But they should realize their favourite president is far more an idealist than the neo-cons. For one, he thinks that the decade of war is "over" merely because he decided to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. It is far from the case. For two, he thinks "enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war" as if automatically, all terrorists and hostile nations will stand down just because he thinks so.  His policy of "engagement" which can "more durably lift suspicion and fear" and avoid war hasn't worked through his first term (see Iran; see Russia).

And look out here for what is to replace that "perpetual war" and what will animate that "engagement" -- no human rights:

 And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice –- not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes:  tolerance and opportunity, human dignity and justice. 

None of those four things mentioned are about human rights; they are about careful progression of the status quo, at best.

Now comes the money graph that no one will criticize because they find it the most stirring:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.  (Applause.)

I'm all for Seneca Falls (women's rights, and I bet not everybody got that reference), Selma (black rights) and Stonewall (gay rights). This is all indeed a stirring and alliterative section of the speech.

But no framer -- no interpreter -- nobody -- ever said that there are some truths that are more evident that others -- that "the most evident of truths" was that "all of us are created equal".

That's just not true. In fact -- while that is mentioned first in the preamble -- I wouldn't say that this is "the star that guides us" . The star that guided us through Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall (I guess the speech-writers couldn't think up an S-word for disabled rights) is in fact the second sentence in the preamble: "that they are endowed by their Creator by certain inalieable rights".

It has always been the characterization of struggles in the US that they fight for MORE rights by invoking the inalieability -- and the inherency -- of rights and by invoking "equality before the law" (that's why I oppose fighting for gay rights by trying to take away the rights of businesses or people who don't agree by trying to silence and boycott them -- I think the fight through the legislature is more rewarding and doesn't undermine all human rights for all).

The guiding star is the inalieability, but then, this president is not a human rights president. He doesn't like the term. He doesn't like the talk. He doesn't like the walk. It's alien, as it is for all the DSA types -- it doesn't fit.

Our individual freedom, actually, isn't inextricably bound to every soul on Earth. This is important, because this is where liberals and even leftists can disagree. Some people think that if a country is not totally free, and only some are free in it (South Africa), why, then the country is not free. Unfortunately, that isn't the case; you can have some free people and some unfree people, and the state then is partly-free. That's why you would not get a lot of people to somehow concede that America wasn't free until it could free all slaves or that it isn't free today until every minority reaches if not prosperity, at least a decent standard of living. They will persist in seeing in pre-Civil War America some free, and not free, again, because of how they look at inherency; they won't even concede a country as "half-free" if a minority in it are not. This seems like an unimportant wrangle over semantics until you realize what is happening when you try to declare "unfreeness" -- you are undermining inherency.  You are saying freedom or rights are *conditional on* some sort of state arrangement. But I would submit that the emancipation of the slaves came about not because of some collectivism but because of a widening application of equality, based on the inherency of rights.

I really don't think inherency of rights exists for Obama, in his ideological framework.

Oh, but here comes Mr. Magnanimous, Mr. Ideologically Open: "Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time."

Doesn't that sound like someone not conditioned to the socialist meme? Willing to concede there is a debate about collectivism?

Oh, no. Because like all socialists always do in every debate or controversy, at some point they claim, "let's stop all this talk now and get down to action" as a technique, as an instrument for getting their way.

"We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate," says our Community-Organizer-in-Chief; says our Net Nanny-in-Chief.  Each one of these things is in the eye of the beholder, but Obama actualy thinks that if he can just demonize Republicans opposing his socialism, and make it seem as if they are a "spectacle" or merely engaged in "name-calling," he can prevail. Naturally his own fellow leftists do the same.

I'm not interested in making a "common effort" with this president because I really don't believe we have a "common purpose," no matter how stirring he makes his words. That's because I do not believe he has at the heart of his ideology a robust view of all human rights for all, but what he has done instead is replaced it with uravnilovka, equalization, collectivization and invoked the language of equality to cover his tracks.

Now, I'm well aware that challenging the socialism of Obama is the greatest taboo of our time. I first realized this when I went on Steve Gilmor's Gilmor Gang show back in 2008 and actually had my mike cut off when I tried to explain that Obama's infamous comment at the Silicon Valley dinner about "clinging to guns and religion" was straight out of the "opiate of the people" lexicon of Marx. (And  now Clinton is recycling it.)

Unfortunately, the critique of Obama's socialism has almost exclusively been on the right; not enough effort has been made by true liberals to call out his utter absence of a human rights paradigm and absence of a forthright embrace of capitalism and free market economics. Worse, there's never any endorsement for free speech -- there is only calls for "dignity" or denunciation of other people with other views as "a spectacle" or guilty of "name-calling" -- as if that were against the law (it's not, see Times v. Sullivan -- from the very era of civil rights that Obama purports to draw inspiration from -- and about the right to call a racist names).

David Horowitz, a former student radical who became conservative when he saw all the ills produced by the illiberal extremists of the 1960s, calls out the new communism in a debunking of Oliver Stone's new agitprop film.

Stanley Kurz, who doesn't seem to be any kind of entrenched conservative but who is only recognized by conservatives, is the author of Radical in Chief about Obama's socialism. Here's an article of his that summarizes the background:

the people who trained Obama, who funded Obama and who sponsored Obama’s political career right through the Illinois State Senate to the U.S. Senate, and frankly they’re working with him today in ways I can talk about, if we have time, these people were all the Socialists–the stealth Socialist leaders of the Midwest Academy who very deliberately decided that you don’t talk about your Socialism out loud.

Independently of him -- and because I went to those same Socialist Scholars' conferences and all the sort of DSA activities in New York of that time -- I came to that same term, "stealth socialism" to describe that strategy of deliberately dividing up the hard-core socialist agenda into "single issues" and trying to form community fronts with unsuspecting liberals to push those single issues, and then slip in the rest of the socialist sectarianism.

The result of all those two decades of "stealth socialism" since the 1980s when the Socialist Scholars decided the strategy in the Reagan years was essentially to go underground was that the "s" word was scrubbed out of frank speach. No one could ever say the "s" word. Socialists got very, very good at this scrubbing -- so good that they got conservatives to be scared to use it as well, for fear of seeming too triumphalist and even McCarthyist.

Nonsense. In Europe, people call themselves socialists without hesitation; even in Canada. Get over yourselves and start being honest.

I'm also well aware that there is an effort to deflect criticism of socialism in culture by having demonized something called "cultural Marxism".

I must say I had never heard of this term and its associations until recently. I read Gramsci or Adorno long ago and didn't feel I was necessarily imbibing cultural Marxism, just reading socialist theories on civil society or whatever. But then, I studed at the University of Toronto, then went to a country of "really existing socialism," the Soviet Union, and studied at the University of Leningrad. So maybe I missed this.

Apparently there has sprung up a school of thought that argues against the "Frankfurt School" and sees them as "taking over everything". No theory of people "taking over everything" will ever be credible because there is always that human nature that surprises you. For example, I think we're all headed to damnation in a Wired State run by technocommunists that Obama is helping to usher in with stealth socialism. But I think it will be a fight and a struggle, the result will be something like that 1970s commercialism that remained after that 1960s idealism, with the beads and the bong pipes and the roach clips turned into recipe card folders in head shops. Oh, and I could be wrong!

Apparently this "cultural Marxist" set has become so rabid that the Southern Poverty Law Center has declared them a "hate group". I'm happy to take their word for it, but that doesn't mean we can't criticize Marxism, communism and stealth socialism -- if anything, it makes it important for liberals to draw the distinctions. I myself have had people grab me by the lapels at big conferences and tell me that Obama is a "homosexual Muslim sabboteur". Just because that's crazy doesn't mean that you can't call out the socialism he was busy nurturing and studying for years before he became an Illinois senator.

As always, what I fear more than Obama, are his passionate supporters, who come up with gems like this guy on Facebook:

Jose Rosa on Facebook

This speech was so beautiful, so inclusive, so far reaching, so grounded, so based in
history, so longing for the future, so patriotic, so realistic, so eloquent and made me
so proud.

If you know someone who can listen to these words and say they take issue with them, then you know who the struggle is against.

So vindictive; so nasty; so tear-jerking, and then so hateful. If somebody disagrees, let's get them. Let's make it personal; we know "who the struggle is against". So full of that viciousness of Latin American revolutionary movements -- echoing the Soviet Bolsheviks. Ugh.

 

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Why Isn't Kim Dotcom in Jail?

Just for asking this question on Twitter, I got a slew of hate mail, including one Anonymous tweeter who asked "Why aren't you in your grave"?

I'm going to keep asking this question right through to August, however, because the Internet mogul *is* indicted, and faces another hearing then.

He's obviously a very flamboyant, aggressive, and cunning character who gets his way by just one outrageous stunt after another. It reminds me so very much of Anonymous in Second Life in the early days, where all these things were seemingly prototyped...

All that dancing around and pretending innocence, that Eddie Haskell shuffle. Oh, laff riot: when the FBI copied some of his discs (they were ordered by the court to do so in 21 days) as evidence of his theft in the indictment, he and his lawyers screamed "theft". LOL! Wait, I thought if somebody copies something, and you keep your original, it's not theft? What, you get to copy content at will regardless of intellectual property rights, and the FBI which is responding to lawful complaints of those IP holders, can't copy the evidence? Huh?

Annoyances on Twitter like this fellow @LeoLouisIV, a lawfaring lawyer with an obviously highly political organization called "People over Politics" i.e. a "progressive" lawyer -- pastes "lessons" for me about how piracy "isn't" copying -- this is the meme the script kiddies all think is so "brilliant" lol -- to wit:

But here's my (admittedly primitive -- I'm not an artist) infographics that shows what really happens and the difference between digital commerce and piracy:

If your digital art is sold and someone pays for it -- it retains its value -- picture the first frame going into the shopping cart. The Lessig Creative Communism shill says that if you just release it for free, and just ask for attribution, you "contribute" and "get your name out". But you "contribute" and "get your name out" by selling copies, too -- people still see your content and still see your name and they are free to buy it again and keep distributing it. There's this fallacy that somehow you get no recognition or distribution if you put a price tag and a PAY ME on your digital content -- or that you distribute less. Even if you do, obviously getting *paid* for what you do makes up for that "free spreading of your name" that you supposedly got out of CC.

More to the point, look at what stealing actually does in the bottom frame: it steals the intrinsic value of your digital commodity -- the ability to sell it. Piracy goes beyond even the Creative Commons shill -- it says you get to share whatever the fuck you want because *you can* technically and the owner still has his original. Yet it decouples copying from commerce and breaks that connection -- deliberately. Hence the dead cat. The commodification essence of the content is stripped out for you, and you can't sell it any more successfully, even if you technically "retain your original" (the specious argumentation of the copyleftists). The juice is gone.

Worse, as those dollars leak out of your pocket, they go into the Kim Dotcoms of the world because the pirates then put your purloined content next to ads, get people to click on those ads, and use your stolen content to make ad revenue for themselves (or even sell the stolen content itself).

That's why Kim Dotcom is a millionaire, and you aren't. Dotcom makes the interesting point that what he did by running MegaUpload -- letting everybody do whatever while he sold ads and the storage services for whatever -- was no different than Google. Google looks the other way while you upload whatever you feel like to Youtube or your blog, and then sells the ads against that. This is the notorious "California Business Model" -- and catch-me-if-you-can with the DMCA takedown notice. He's right Google does exactly the same thing, but didn't your mother ever tell you that just because "everyone" is doing it, it's "not" okay? what if "everyone" were jumping off a bridge?

I'm not going to get into the merits of the case now, and all the twists and turns of Dotcom making himself a dramatic victim so his lawyers could make solemn and noble speeches in court, but I want to make three points:

1. All those people who were gasping in horror over what prosecutors asked for Aaron Swartz -- which really was a six months plea bargain on charges that only theoretically added up to "35 years" -- are now found to be hypocritical They all found the indictment scary and the prosecutors guilty of overreach in *that* case.

But those same types -- when you ask why Kim Dotcom isn't in jail -- RUSH to tell you that he is innocent until proven guilty, that an indictment isn't a sentence, and it all doesn't matter.

Oh? Well, why couldn't you say that about Aaron Swartz's case, then, you nit? Here's another lawyer @botolo86 posturing around the copyleftist myth with exactly this point. Don't these types see their horrid internal contradictions? If prosecutors don't matter for Kim Dotcom, who scoffed at them, why do they matter for Aaron Swartz, who supposedly killed himself over them? Well?

2. I was really disappointed to see Robert Amsterdam, a prominent human rights lawyer who has a blog on Russia and has been involved in Eurasian issues for years, sign up with the Kim Dotcom team.

I see this as all part of the "march through the institutions" that the copyleftists have been waging -- as they get into organizations like Committee to Protect Journalists (from Electronic Frontier Foundation) or National Democratic Institute or Human Rights Watch or whatever. The Mitch Kapor-funded gang have always had a very deliberate plan to try to spin the entire anti-copyright fight as a "human rights struggle" -- and they've played that card constantly with the anti-SOPA fight with regrettably some success -- they can win over more mainstream people by bleating about "a chill on free speech" or "human rights" than they can about "due process for pirates and hackers" obviously.

What they really do is undermine the rule of law and deliberately destroy the ability to commodify digital property as if that were something evil -- and they destroy choice on the Internet to have either open source/copyleftist OR a walled garden and pay wall. Given a choice, most people chose the walled garden; given an option, many people pay. Creative Commons "licenses" are not used anywhere near as widely as people imagine, and those who use them do not get revenue in some convoluted way from this giveaway in anything like the amounts the boosters claim.

Amsterdam took up the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which was the right thing to do. Many criticized him and others for defending Khodorkovsky, from that same leftist perspective that hates commerce and capitalism that brought us Creative Communism. The pro-Kremlin "progressives" had trouble understanding that even if he wasn't some sort of human rights activist but an oligarch, when Khodorkovsky became a victim of the regime for very political reasons, and his case involved all kinds of due process violations and punitive practices, then he did indeed rightly became a human rights case.

By taking up the case of the notorious Dotcom, who is widely conceded to be a properly indicted pirate (even those hipsters at the Wall Street Journal think so), Amsterdam risks having those same critics claim then that his defense of Khodorkovsky wasn't warranted.

Of course, human rights lawyers always tell you that they defend clients like this precisely because if it were up to society, they would not be just; if you have principles, you can't chose your victims. Well, whatever. It's one thing to defend Kim Dotcom from excessive state interference -- if the charges that the New Zealand police wrongfully spied on him and intruded on his privacy stick.

But it's another to pretend that piracy is a form of free speech, which now Amsterdam is doing -- and that's awful. That's just extreme leftist or libertarian agitprop. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't say that you can use your claim to freedom of expression to endlessly hide from the police or steal property. In fact, Art. 30 says that no one right may be used to trump another. The UN is constructed as such that it does not defend the right to private property -- at the time it was formed this would have been impossible to get past the Soviet delegation, and today remains impossible because of the Soviet Union's many apt pupils who remain in the world. Even so, the UDHR isn't a document you can use to bless piracy, child pornography, purchase of illegal drugs online and all the rest.

3. What's funny is that there are already quite a few complaints about Dotcom's new service. First, there's that horrid script kiddy @kaepora, who is able to silence legitimate criticism of his excesses, who has complained about it not functioning as it claims, i.e. it breaks his own Cryptocat thingy -- or perhaps is a competitor to it that won't play nice with it or something. You tell me.

Other Anonymous types quickly figured out the downside -- they are now on the hook for responsibility for theft by signing the TOS, not the site owner. Supposedly the encrypted key you get to your "locker" will prevent the feds from snooping on your stolen stuff. I wonder if I should make an account and have a challenge quest to see who can hack into it first.

See the Softpedia article by Eduard Kovacs in the recommended pieces below, he recounts how Anonymous is already hacking and DDOSing Mega -- which is why it has been down, not only because of the "huge demand" -- and they are most pissed about what they claim is Dotcom's "snitching" on another pirate. No honour among thieves, including Anonymous!

The Register, my favourite tech publication, has obviously trashed Dotcom's claims to various new "business models".

Orlowski always takes a position against copyleftism, which is generally El Reg's line -- and that's a good thing -- but as soon as they see his name, the copyleftists discount him. For the rest of us, he makes all the cogent arguments. I'd love to read that UK government paper that got "revised down" with the fake claims of "openness" being "good for business".

BTW, I should start a count-down site on the outrageous claim made by Alec Ross, the "innovation" official at the State Department, who claimed at the OSCE conference in Dublin in June 2012 that engineers in Silicon Valley had assured him they could indeed engineer against copyright theft -- and that this was just a matter of time (and money). Nonsense. We've all been told by these same engineers not only that they can't, they won't, for ideological reasons. When they are ready to -- we'll see the Internet become liveable.

And frankly, while not mentioning Dotcom, this Pando Daily article, despite the title, also questions that airy "find a new business model" claptrap -- it lets us know that these streaming services just aren't doing that well. It seems that the really big acts like Taylor Swift don't release their new songs to these services precisely because they fear they won't sell then. And it seems the record companies still have a lock over these streamers -- and I think that's a good thing. I honestly don't see how all those urging "new business models" have ANYTHING to offer except more belly fat click ads. And that's an old and annoying business model and eventually it will go away, nobody can live on it.

Once again, cases that are meant to serve as "models" are the result of the copyleftist thugs on the Internet refusing to allow Congress to draft and pass a law like SOPA and/or PIPA.

 

 

Related articles

Anonymous Hackers Boycott Mega Services, Call Kim Dotcom a Snitch

Kim Dotcom claims over one million Mega users during outrageous launch party

Megaupload indicted founder Kim Dotcom launches new site

Aaron Swartz Committed a Crime But Would Not Do the Time

Aaron Swartz in May 2012 evangelizing in Washington, DC at a conference about his anti-SOPA crusade. It involved an outright lie in claiming that there would be "Internet censorship" merely because the government legitimately prosecuted large-scale piracy sites for commercial gain. This was typical of the entire hysterical anti-SOPA campaign.

Oh. So now we're learning that there was never any "50 years" or "30 years" or anything remotely similar; there was an offer of six months.

Six months.

And Aaron Swartz knew that before he killed himself; his family, lawyer, close friends and supporters all knew this. He just didn't want to do that time, and his doting and coddling family and lawyer felt he was emotionally too fragile to do that time and felt he should get an exemption as neurologically atypical.

Tragically, they were right, but he sentenced them all to something much worse: a lifetime of guilt and torment and grief.

So all this ridiculous posturing with the "50 years" that we got from the likes of Declan McCullough, the craven sell-out copyleftist scribe for CNET, was complete tripe. There were never any 50 years!

DEFENSE TURNS DOWN OFFER OF ONLY SIX MONTHS' PRISON

Here's what the Daily Call and Boston Globe reported:

Swartz’s lead defense attorney, Elliot Peters, said today that both he and Swartz rejected the plea deal offered by the office of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, and instead were pushing for a trial where federal prosecutors would have been forced to publicly justify their pursuit of Swartz.

But at the same time, Peters said, he was worried about Swartz’s emotional vulnerability and planned to try and bypass trial prosecutors, Stephen Heymann and Scott Garland, and use a letter-writing campaign from local academics to convince Ortiz to change the proposals.

“As eager as I was to try to win it, I didn’t want to expose Aaron to the risk,” said Peters.

Imagine the sheer gall of this well-paid attorney accusing the prosecutors Ortiz and Heymann of "overreach" when his client was offered only six months for these serious crimes!

And now we have the additional Internet spectacle of Andrew Good, Swartz's former lawyer (we don't learn why he's "former") saying that his client was suicidal and therefore could not serve jail time (!). We're to hate "The Man" more because the prosecutors replied that he'd be safer in prison. Actually, if we had mental illness internment in this country in any kind of humane and sane fashion, Swartz could have been put in residential treatment if that was the issue -- and likely should have been if he were that depressed -- and he might be alive today as a result.

PROFESSORIAL OVERREACH

Swartz's family said in anguish that their son's death is "the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." And I realize that they are grieving and sincere in their beliefs.

But I have to cry "nonsense" for everything that is sane and right and not about their own selfish interests and sectarian beliefs. Truly, instead, their son's death is the product of "professorial overreach" in trying to build by fiat and force an imaginary world where everything digital is collectivized and the coders come to power and do whatever they feel like. A world where we are forced to live with coder intimidation, and that if you refuse to go along with this totalitarian world, you will be hacked, your privacy will be exposed and you will be endlessly bullied and harassed -- see the online vigilantes demanding Carmen Ortiz' head merely because she did her job and prosecuted computer fraud and theft. My God, this is outrageous. It now has over 25,000 signatures which means we're likely to get some smarmy, self-serving sufficiently vague but dog-whistly response from the Obama Administraiton. Ugh.

Aaron Swartz committed a crime and admitted that he had committed these acts that were indeed rightfully deemed criminal. Evidently he and his defenders just thought he should get a doctor's excuse from the law.

GUERILLA MANIFESTO TO "LIBERATE" ALL DIGITAL CONTENT

His guerilla manifesto outlines the criminal intent to "liberate" all and also outlines his technocommunist beliefs -- corporations are greedy and evil (instead of legitimate entities in a free enterprise system that create value and provide jobs); everyone's property should be "liberated" because anarchists say so; politicans are merely "bought" and therefore we shouldn't have free speech, democracy, campaign contributions, elections, and instead have coders run things and "code as law". No thanks!

Indeed, he outlines his intent to steal and "liberate" -- the first sentence is not qualified by any notion of copyright and the subsequent reference is merely yet another item on the list:

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with  the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

COMPUTER FRAUD AND TAMPERING

Read the indictment and quit listening to the Anonymous gabbling on Twitter. The indictment establishes (and these acts are not denied by the defense or Swartz himself) that Swartz:

o broke into a closet to commit the hack

o diguised his identity

o used a false identity and also physically covered up his face from security camera view

o use circumvention software called "keepgrabbing" to grab millions of files rapidly in a way not intended for the system

o intended to distribute separately for free these files normally available only to universities at cost to the institution and for free for students

o disabled the MIT computer network for a time because of the enormity of the download

o caused damage to the computer system due to this hack and downloading that required the IT people to clean up and repair the hack

All this word salading about how he accessed "unrestricted files" is pure nonsense. If he needed to access what in fact were to him, as a Harvard student at the Ethics Center (!), unrestricted files, he didn't have to take a crowbar to the system, he could just log on and get the articles he needed for research.

BUT THAT WAS NOT HIS INTENT OR PURPOSE OR ACT. He accessed these unrestricted files in a way not intended by the managers of the system for the purpose of smashing the system. Duh!

This is just like Julian Assange's rational for WikiLeaks -- it's not really about whistleblowing and isn't whistleblowing and he himself explains this in his own writings and interviews; it is to smash the liberal state by making it clamp up and become unlike its open and democratic self, and therefore collapse. That this lovely notion isn't applied to the states that really need transparency and don't have it, like Russia, is only a function of the similarity of the anarchic hacker movement's goals and methods being similar to communist and post-communist authoritarian states -- they want to make sure that no one can use the Internet in any way except the way they, as hackers, decide -- or else.

This fast-talking tap-dancing that Anonymous does in lying about criminal acts like this is typical of everything they do. They wish to cover their criminality by trying to get the public to focus on some little piece of the event that might appear as "legitimate access". But they are lying about and obfuscating the purpose, which is to commit an anarchist act to smash the system.

Lessig, Doctorow, Barlow -- they're all for anarchy. They really want to smash this system. They work very hard at smashing it rhetorically and in various campaigns like "stop SOPA". They stop a little shy -- like Road Runner coming to a screeching halt right before the cliff -- of actually smashing. But they were happy to sic a young man like Swartz on the job or look the other way while he published his "guerilla manifesto" and swaggered around all the tech conferences bragging about how he would defeat the Man. As we know, Barlow dog-whistled to his followers in Anonymous and told them outright that they were the "foot soldiers in the war" and that they now knew what they had to do to defend WikiLeaks -- which they proceeded to do by hacking PayPal and Amazon. Barlow tried later to wriggle out of this and claim he meant they should just put up mirror sites and they "went too far" -- but his tap-dancing shuffle was not convincing.

Swartz did not access open files properly or legitimately -- he hacked into them by disguising his identity, making a fake account, and fraudulently downloading millions more files than were intended by the system, and through circumvention of the system.

YOU DON'T NEED A CROWBAR TO USE JSTOR

If you want to use JSTOR, it is open and free to use if you are a student of a university. Aaron Swartz was not merely needing to use JSTOR for research -- that was not his intent or his action.

JSTOR was in fact the wrong target if you were intending to go after "evil corporate greed" -- JSTOR is a nonprofit entity that gives away their content in large amounts for fees from universities that can afford it -- to cover their costs in digitalizing, maintaining, organizing, storing, providing, etc. the content. It's normal. The fees are not excessive. As this commenter closetothetruth Brian Bulkowski said under Lessig's post

I feel terribly bad for Aaron Swartz and his friends and family. As posted elsewhere here, I don't much agree with prosecutors throwing the books at him. But it is very hard for me to understand what principle or what freedom is represented by his actions, unless one believes that honest labor does not deserve honest pay. JSTOR made the materials it distributes (the digital copies of articles otherwise existing only in hard copy). It continues to add to the archive. It is a non-profit entity created by a consortium of universities and its purpose is to make materials available, and by any count those materials are much more available today than they were before JSTOR or would be without it.

It would be great if I could feel bad in the way that this Brian does -- then I'd fit in, then I'd be part of the commuuuunity. But I don't fit in and would never want to be any part of this immorality. I feel only a white-hot fury and intense revulsion at what I see Lessig, Doctorow, Barlow and all the others doing on two counts, as I wrote -- a) not having the courage of their convictions to really defend their cause (which I do not at all share) and defend this mascot for their cause who took it to their logical conclusion; b) having an immoral cause even in the first place that smashes civil society and human rights which I hold dear. It's wrong, wrong, wrong.

The "community" Aaron Swartz lived in and whom he was ostensibly "helping" had no need of this "liberation". Any one of them as a professor or student or member of a non-profit organization in many cases could access this material. The use case for "liberation" might be some one like me, not affiliated with any university, who still wants to study and learn. But I have no need of such "liberation" either -- I simply pay the fee. Or I go to a university library and explain my research and get help. What people often do is ask someone who is in a university to get them the PDF from JSTOR -- and JSTOR does not police this one-off sort of usage.

"THE PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED"

That's not what Aaron Swartz did. What he wanted to do was "make a point" and deliberately, defiantly downloaded *4 million* documents -- a huge trove, as he had criminally done with the PACER material and as Bradley Manning did with WikiLeaks. Like any anarchist or terrorist, he was out to make "the propaganda of the deed," that is, he wanted his deed not just for its own sake, but for the larger "message" it would send and viral resonance it would have.

It's exactly that sort of thing -- a deliberate and defiant and large-scale act of theft in criminal hacking -- that the authorities cannot play professor with and pretend we need linguistic lessons from Prof. Peter Ludlow. Because it's about upholding the rule of law, and as I keep pointing out, enabling all kinds of people to use the Internet freely, including by having walled gardens and pay walls if they desire to cover their costs and maintain their livelihoods!

Aaron Swartz only wanted to smash this capacity to privatize or commodify as "evil" -- as a technocommunist -- because he thought he was making "a better world". But it's not better when you don't have the freedom to have free enterprise, and you are coerced into collectivization by anarchists. That is totalitarianism, and that's what these people who support Swartz offer -- with themselves in charge.

A commenter in the New York Times named Michael Lissak summed up the problem as well -- that people who make moral crusades with stunts like this expect the prosecutor and judge to go along with their "civil disobedience" and concede that it was all just an interesting moral lesson:

I have just finished reading the entire court record (or at least the parts which are not under seal). It is clear that Aaron believed he had the right to do what he did and wanted the governments evidence that he did it struck from the record. It seems likely that his lawyers told him this approach was unlikely to succeed.

Aaron's mental health issues aside, there is a pattern of not being willing to take responsibility for one's own actions and then bearing the consequences. Like a professional athlete or a Hollywood star this young man seems to have been shielded from "reality: by well meaning friends who in sum were doing more harm than good.

Aaron's legal defense seems to be "but in my moral system this was a good thing." And it is exactly that defense strategy which demands a vigilant NO from the government. Having one's own moral code may play well to the Internet blog/twitter set, but if one is not prepared to accept responsibility for the consequences when that moral code conflicts with society's all that awaits is disaster.

The lesson from this is to stop coddling "genius, talent, or fame". These people are just that -- people -- and they too must learn to deal with the real world. Aaron Swartz should be a lesson to Lindsey Lohan and Charlie Sheen.

The government, MIT, and Carmen Ortiz have done NOTHING WRONG here. The tragedy is Aaron's. The loss is of Aaron. And the blame game needs to stop. Aaron did this to himself.

Yes, I agree Aaron has himself to blame, but he had clear-cut, established enablers -- Lessig, Doctorow, Barlow and others and the blame does have to be aportioned to them. The prosecutor is not to blame and must indeed act when there is a large-scale assault on the system like this. Not because there's some sort of corporate neoliberal blah-blah that "has' to be upheld -- that's how these posturing lefties paint it -- but because the rule of law has to serve the whole community and the Internet has to remain free for a variety of models of content to thrive on it. People need to get paid. It's okay to charge. Not everybody is a consultant to MIT on intellectual property (!) like Aaron Swartz's father, wealthy enough to send their wunderkind to Harvard.

"The Internet" set think that the system is corrupt and it's okay to smash it. I think they're corrupt because they smash, and the world they want to make with themselves in charge is a claustrophobic, unfree horror in any event.

As we saw, JSTOR eventually released 4 million documents. What ostensibly Aaron Swartz was fighting for (but wasn't really) might have been achieved non-coercively and non-violently without smashing systems -- with a letter campaign. Maybe just not as fast as the little tyrant wanted in his tantrum.

SUICIDE AS COERCION

I always view suicide as a tantrum, quite frankly -- or worse, a kind of coerciveness of everyone around -- not just friends and families and all those professors fretting and clucking who wouldn't go to the mat for him last year -- but all of society following this.

And all of Swartz's friends and family and supporters are playing along with this script now and trying to coerce us all into the mania. We're supposed to be guilt-tripped into accepting now that it's okay to hack computers and smash systems -- or else. We're supposed to be coerced into accepting the "liberation" of information online or else we are uncaring monsters. Sorry, not playing.

Suicides never impress me. I view them as cowards and manipulators; I view suicide as a sin, not victimhood. It's a deliberate act of torture of all those people who cared about you, sentencing them to a lifetime of torment and gnawing conscience and "what-ifs". How can you have any respect for anyone who does such a thing? I realize this runs contrary to all the modern psycho-babble; I don't care. An entire industry has sprung up of "helping profession" that want to "destigmatize" suicide and medicalize it and make it a disease as they do with so much else that represents a failure of will and morality in society, like drug addiction and alcoholism and pedophilia. I don't care how politically incorrect it is to point out that suicide is wrong; it hurts other people, and it is throwing an enormous tantrum to get your way. There is no humility in suicide; there is only self-aggrandizement.

 

 

 

Lessig and "the Internet" Are The Bullies; the Prosecutors Are Only Doing Their Jobs

Lawrence Lessig, the leader of the copyleftist movement and founder of Creative Commons, the movement to devalue content on line and decouple it from commerce, blames the Massachusetts prosecutors seeking to establish the rule of law over the unruly Internet as the "bullies" reponsible for the death of open source cultist Aaron Swartz.

As expected, the people who call themselves "the Internet" -- the motley crew of Anonymous anarchist hackers, professors of computer science and linguistics, and various technocommunists and cyber-libertarians, are waging a ferocious campaign to discredit, defame and destroy the prosecutors in this case and make them out to be monsters merely for doing their job.

This furious storm of protest against the prosecutors disguises the fact that those most to blame for Swartz's depression and suicide are his "friends" in the copyleftist movement who didn't really fully back him, and who in any event cunningly incited and sent this kid to his doom in the first place on the destructive utopian errand of "liberating" information online.

LESSIG, COPYLEFTISTS ARE COWARDS WITHOUT COURAGE OF CONVICTIONS

So my case against Lessig, Cory Doctorow, John Perry Barlow, Danah Boyd and others is twofold: a) they don't have the courage of their convictions to support criminal hacking to the end if they really believe "information wants to be free" and hacking isn't a crime -- they value their credentialed and highly-paid positions too much and prefer coyly pretending their cause is more mild b) their cause is immoral, wrong, and criminal and the acts that they cunningly incite others to do are in fact rightly prosecuted; they should be called out resoundingly on their sly edge-casing and posturing. They are cowards; they are also immoral thugs.

It's at a time like this that people who care about human rights, civil society, and the rule of law, and don't want to see America turned into an authoritarian country run by Internet thugs no different than the Bolsheviks have to stand up and say: no, that's not true, the prosecutors are doing their jobs; the hackers are the criminals. But almost no one is doing this -- if anything, influential public figures and liberal media are claiming the opposite.

LESSIG IS TO BLAME FOR SWARTZ'S DEATH

Using his bully pulpit of cult-like popularity and his credentialed positions as a Harvard professor and even an Obama campaign advisor, Lessig is claiming in a blog that the prosecutors are to blame for Swartz's death.

I find this absolutely appalling, and I contend that it is really Lessig who is principly to blame for this young man's suicide -- after, of course, Swartz himself. I'll be the first to say that the individual bears responsibility for his own demise in a suicide, but in a context where everyone is discussing the contributing factors and blaming the court case on Swartz's sense of despair and depression, I will point out that a) it's Swartz's big Internet freedom friends who left him in a lurch and b) they were all wrong about this anyway and it was a crime and Swartz should have been willing to do the time if he were willing to do the crime. Evidently, he was demoralized not only by his friends' lack of outright and solid support, but the prospect of getting even some time in jail and a record as a felon; he came from a good family.

LESSIG SAID SWARTZ "CROSSED A LINE" BUT WOULDN'T CROSS IT HIMSELF

In an extraordinary cunning and crafty statement, Lessig distracts from his own complicity in an entirely diabolical way. Lessig was a mentor for Swartz since he was 14, as we can see from The Awl. Yet when Swartz was arrested, Lessig protected his own ass and his credentialed position by saying that Swartz "crossed a line" -- he knew that with this big a heist -- 4 million documents -- combined with breaking and entry, use of a false ID and attempt to hide his facial recognition to cameras, and disabling of the network -- all the charges we can see in the indictment -- he was going very deep into "hacktivism" that in fact even Lessig would have to concede as criminality.

Or could he? This is what is so outrageously diabolical about Lessig's posturing on this tragedy: on the one hand, he claims Swartz crossed the line, and he could not serve as his lawyer or consultant because of a conflict of interest, or so he thought:

Since his arrest in January, 2011, I have known more about the events that began this spiral than I have wanted to know. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer. He shared with me what went down and why, and I worked with him to get help. When my obligations to Harvard created a conflict that made it impossible for me to continue as a lawyer, I continued as a friend. Not a good enough friend, no doubt, but nothing was going to draw that friendship into doubt.

Obligations, or ass-saving? If Lessig were consistent with his principles, if he believed that in fact Swartz was prosecuted wrongly, if he really believed that the prosecutors were "bullies," he should have had the courage of his convictions. He didn't -- just as the others posturing around the case like Danah Boyd and Cory Doctorow. In fact, he didn't campaign for his case but merely thought he could get away with that sort of cunning semblance of distance and a wink and a nod.

All those lefty professors now "defiantly" passing around free PDFs of their turgid and boring scholarly articles are worthless to the cause -- if they really believe Swartz wasn't wrong, they should all be hacking their university servers, you know? But they won't do that not only because quite a few of them still think that is wrong, but because those that don't still want to hang on to their jobs.

It truly is morally revolting. This young hacker went the distance on Lessig's actual views -- the views that he is coy about really expressing when he claims Creative Commons is merely a way to share and gain attribution for those who enjoy collectivism of culture. Lessig in fact it goes further as I've noted to destroy digital commodities on line as a very concept by decoupling digital creations from commerce deliberately - and Swartz went further still in a massive hack as "propaganda of the deed".

Yet here is what this cunning and duplicitous manipulator Lessig has to say about the case, although he is a lawyer and could read the indictment:

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

Lessig is the one who needs to feel the shame and sting of guilt. The indictment doesn't say the files were "worth millions"; it says they were over $5,000. Another reference to "$50,000" is only to what a university might have to pay for a subscription to JSTOR. I couldn't find any reference to any prosecutor or person of authority claiming that "millions of dollars of damage", but it's hard to find old stories on this with the crush of new links pushing Google results down. Even if there were some prosecutor who said this at the time, so what? The valuation would have had a very careful scrutiny at trial, and the fact that JSTOR itself dropped charges and that MIT's actual damages were minimal and finite in its temporary loss of the normal use of the system and the cleaning up of the hack, it's unlikely that anything remotely involving "millions" would have stood up in court.

[Note: the original press release cited "35 years" but in fact as the lawyer admitted later, there was a plea bargain offer of only 6 months in jail.]

THE RULE OF LAW AND JUSTICE

What most infuriates me about the crusade against SOPA -- and now this crusade to combat any value of any digital commodity online -- is that the anarchists and outright terrorists running this campaign refuse to concede that due process in courts does take place and will take place in these cases, and that the absuridites and excesses and scarifying tales they tell will not happen. SOPA was not going to "censor the Internet" and take down teenagers' Tumblr blogs; it was going to prosecute people like Kim Dotcom who make millions from piracy. That is all. Legal defense applies; the jury system applies; the judge's ruling applies; the prosecution is only one part of the story. The indictment is not the sentence; this is not Russia or China. Of course, it is part of the anarchists' strategy always to pursue the Leninist "the worse the better," and make it seem as if there is some horrid draconian state willing to eradicate everyone's fun and study and communication because the true situation -- that lawyers, judges, and juries weigh the evidence and are generally fair and just -- doesn't fit with the worldview that mandates the big smash of everything.

And as Lessing himself admits elsewhere, an indictment is not a sentence; it's merely the charges. Just because in theory these charges have punishments attached to them that might add up to 30 years -- or even 50 as some like the irresponsible Declan McCunnough of CNET claim -- doesn't mean that there is any remote case at all that the defendant will actually serve those terms. First, the state would have to prove their case on all those charges -- that would not likely happen, and they would be left with only some of them. Second, they would not necessarily prosecute "to the fullest extent of the law" and the judge may not then issue the maximum sentence. Given that there doesn't seem to be evidence that Swartz would financially benefit from this attack on MIT's system, that would factor in the sentencing. And of course, various witnesses for the defense would have been summoned, there would be a guarantee media circus (as there is now) with hysterially emotional kids on the Interner and their adult enablers in universities screaming at the top of their lungs, with the absolute best legal help and support money could buy and all the rest.

WHY DIDN'T EFF DEFEND SWARTZ?

Except...I do have to wonder why in fact the copyleftist front organizations like Electronic Frontier Foundation in fact didn't campaign for Swartz specifically as a case -- they don't have an amicus brief in his case on their website that I can find. Sure, now that he's dead, they're saying "let's campaign to end draconian computer law" but that's different. They did not make Swartz a poster boy for their cause -- because like Lessig they also knew that he had "crossed a line" and in fact didn't make for a good poster boy (as I will examine in another post); indeed this is the anguished discussion his fans are having.

Hey, why couldn't Swartz appeal only for legal defense money, not only for a defense war chest but for a possible huge fine?

There's a Bradley Manning defense fund and defense movement, but these professors and fancy people working at Microsoft like Danah Boyd and Lawrence Lessig at Harvard couldn't help raise money? Why? What's up?

PROSECUTORS DOING THEIR JOB

The chief prosecutor in the case is Stephen Heymann -- and not surprisingly Anonymous is now harassing him by posting his private information online and siccing persecutors at him. Swartz's lawyer claims -- on the basis of no evidence we can see -- that Heymann was "bullying" Swartz and "making an example of him". All of this is despicable.

Swartz's lawyer claims that Heymann wanted to make an example of his client:

Heymann was looking for "some juicy looking computer crime cases and Aaron's case, sadly for Aaron, fit the bill," Peters said. Heymann, Peters believes, thought the Swartz case "was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper."

Once again, I'll point out that if you don't want one case after another of young computer hackers to be made examples of, you should support SOPA/PIPA or the equivalent legislation that establishes the rule of law, defining when prosecution is appropriate and what use cases do not fit the definition. It's precisely the absence of a law that creates this situation of "lesson-teaching" -- although I believe that notion is wildly hyped in any event and these prosecutors are just upholding the law.

A frustrating thing about this discussion is that because the defendant has committed suicide, the prosecution's case automatically disappears (the charges are dismissed as a technicality, not dismissed because the defendant was found not guilt). And prosecutors are not required to say what they were planning or what they might have done. That's a pity, because if they could speak out -- or if the media were more ethical and reported this story with less obvious bias -- we could find out what their goals were and understanding of this case and it might go a very long way to dissipating this absolutely crazy hysteria about the "50 years" and the "bullying".

Like Manning's lawyer, who let his client rot in pre-trial detention and only let Anonymous thugs do the talking on the Internet in order to get the Allen rule and time off the sentence, Swartz's lawyer seemed to realize he had a guilty client that would have to face the music and probably figured that only stalling with various tactics and trying to bargain for lesser terms would work rather than challenging the substance of the charges. He never really did that.

Yes, we know JSTOR itself dropped their charges and even recently released 4 million documents, under pressure from the copyleftist community. But MIT pursued the case, and from all indications, legitimately -- because Swartz's hack was deliberate, demonstrative, large-scale, and grand-standing "propaganda of the deed". It was an attack not just on MIT, but like the PACER attack, an attack on the very concept of any entity anywhere being able to decide how they wanted to treat their own property online -- whether they would be aggressively collectivized and nationalized by the anarchic mob of Anonymous and friends, or whether they could decide what kind of walled garden or pay wall they wanted on their communities -- in other words, whether they would have liberty, or whether they would have technocommunism.

MIT GOES INTO GUILT MODE; APPOINTS HORRIBLY BIASED INVESTIGATOR

What's particularly disturbing about the way this saga is unfolding is MIT's guilty response. Naturally an expression of regret and sadness and condolences to the family is in order.

But instead of a straight-forward and normal response consistent with the rule of law, that they pursued this prosecution in good faith because criminal acts were indeed involved, they throw the whole thing open to question:

"I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy," MIT president L. Rafael Reif said in the statement. "Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT."

Appallingly, instead of appointing a neutral panel to investigate this matter, they put the investigation into the hands of only one professor, and one who is a notorious apologist for the free software movement, who, as Wikipedia tells us, is "a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, a fellow of the IEEE, and is a founding director of both Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation". Good God, what could be more outrageously biased in favour of computer hacking and exoneration of Aaron Swartz?! It's truly an outrage.

SWARTZ'S FAMILY BLAMES PROSECUTORS

The most emotionally-charged statement in this case naturally comes from Swartz's family and partner. Understandably -- but wrongly -- they speak of Swartz's crusade against "Internet censorship" -- SOPA would not have chilled free speech -- that's only the hysterical Google-fueled version of the story, as it involved prosecution of piracy for commercial gain -- and frankly, prosecution of the kind of terroristic "propaganda of the deed" that Swartz perpetrated to smash the rule of law on the Internet. They see it as "bullying":

Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles.

It's hard to imagine that there is "intimidation" in a case where the defendant is...allowed to go free, and allowed to speak and gather defense for himself all over the place for more than a year (although as I've pointed out above, he didn't have much concrete backing given that most of his "friends" seemed to think he was really guilt, but that the system should still be merciful just because he was smart and cool and founded Reddit.)

It's hard to see any "prosecutorial overreach" in pursuit of compliance with the law. It's especially disenguous here because the lawyer himself -- instead of conceding that his defense would have been at least partially successful -- is misleading characterizing the prosecution as literally going after "30 years". Or "50" if you believe Declan McCullough, the hysteric at CNET who pretends he's for copyright supposedly because he cares about his own articles online not being stolen -- pretty fake, given that he's paid regardless of whether they are copied illegally, and he has no idea what it's like to make a living with digital content.

And it's not true that Swartz's crime is a "victimless crime" -- the irresponsible whine of the Internet children -- because in fact MIT's computer system was damaged, even if not permanently, and the effort to commodify digital content was smashed -- and generally eroded and not only for MIT but for JSTOR as a system and all universities. The goal of Lessig, Doctorow, Barlow and all the rest is to ensure that everything -- everything -- online is free. Except, of course, their own consulting services and speaking fees.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE -- EXCEPT FOR LESSIG'S AND DOCTOROW'S LECTURE FEES

Your content and my content "want to be free" -- and they will liberate it by force -- or rather, like the Saudi princes who pay for Palestinian suicide bombers -- they will tacitly send hackers to liberate it while they posture and frown about certain "lines crossed" . As I've always said about these con artists, their motto should be "Your information wants to be free; my is available only for a fee."

All in all, I find the suicide of Swartz -- if he intended it to be a suicide bombing for his cause, which it seems his friends and family are bent on characterizing it as -- and all the posturing and cavorting around the fake "Internet freedom" cause -- to be among the most morally revolting events around the Internet I've ever seen.

WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN

It's my hope that:

o the prosecutors will come out with a firm and detailed statement that rejects blame for suicide -- to establish the credibility of prosecution free from blackmail by such self-terrorism -- and that they will outline their reasoning for their continuance of the case;

o that if for some reason of professional ethics, these prosecutors cannot speak, that others with professional credibility will speak out on these points -- rejecting suicide as a way of obtaining exoneration and proof of innocent, and rejecting the notion that this case involved "50 years" or was inappropriately prosecuted

o that contradiction between those professors who sit in their high-paid positions and send kids to their doom, and those kids and their aspirations, will become so sharpened that both the gurus will lose their credibility and the kids will lose the leadership of their discredited movement and it will dissipate

o that legislators will defy the bullying of "the Internet" and work toward legislation that establishes the definition of piracy and the punishments for piracy in circumstances were the theft was intentional, massive, repeated, and for substantial monetary benefit

o that university officials at MIT and elsewhere will not be bullied into thinking that they cannot have walled gardens or paid content walls and will not be seduced by the copyleftist siren call to techocommunism and doom

I don't want to see communism, that rightly failed in real life because it was anti-human, succeed on the Internet just because anarchist hackers and their coy enablers in academia succeed in their erosion of the rule of law.