Wired State

Anonymous b-tards cut their teeth on the virtual worlds of SL. Here they are griefing the Sutherland Dam; note the Mr. Moneybags avatar that prefigured the LulzSec meme. Photo is from 2009.

Adrien Chen, that secret-sharer and golf-clapper if not cheerleader of Anonymous hackers, has a piece dumping on that evil Lamo, that sneak, that rat, who tattled on Bradley Manning.

I don't get the Gawker comments policy, as they aren't transparent about it. It used to be they said forthrightly that they only selected certain people they liked (imported from the old Valleywag policy) and only let them post. It was utterly arbitrary and there was no way to appeal. At some point, I'm not sure how, I was selected, or maybe they changed their policy. I posted for awhile, and then suddenly after their big hacker attack I couldn't seem to get back on -- they had changed everybody's passwords, or cancelled them to force you to make new ones. Then I had a hell of time ever getting back on. Even though the Gawker.com mailer I've subscribed to never has any problem making its way every morning to my mailbox, a password retrieval request never even gets in the spam file. I finally got logged on again today as "Prokofy," my account from years ago that was previously cleared for comments, but I don't show up. Oh well, be that way.

Hence, my repost here in response to Adrian:

So, interesting, you're authenticating these Wired chat logs, Adrian? Scumbag though he may be (and he's followed the absolutely reliable rule of thumb that the b-tard types always out their own and are rats by nature), there are some important elements to this chatlog that could well serve as Manning's indictment:

o the chat logs tie him definitely to Assange, and directly. Assange's counsel claims he had no association with Manning, but these chat logs shows he talked to him directly

o furthermore, that relationship was so close and dependent, that Lamo himself called out Assange on it, asking him, essentially, why he was doing what Assange told him to. Ahah! And that would seemingly tie Assange to deliberately inciting Manning to hacking in order to harm the US.

So, seriously, if you could suspend your sneaking admiration of hackers for a minute, and your sense of solidarity with the anti-American anarchist people's forces, take a fresh look at the whole stack of chat logs again. They may not be admissible in court. But they don't only show Lamo is a scum, they show that Assange and Manning are guilty of deliberate theft of classified government documents.

And then, while we're studying the miscreants, here's another post from Adrian, on those evil people attempting to fight LulzSec on their own! Vigilantes! Horrible!

Well, Adrian. First of all, are you going to comment on all those media reports about how LulzSec "disbanded" when...that was all fake?

Secondly, if these folks are all, so, um, anonymous, how do you know who is doing what to whom?

Thirdly, what could be possibly wrong with attempting to expose hackers who cost Sony $171 million in damages, and have caused untold damages in their vandalism and harassment on other sites, many government sites?

Yes, the script kiddies love to victory-dance, and that's their downfall as you can trap them in the IRC channel bragging about their exploits. So when one set of bad guys outs another set, is this Nature's Way in the hacking world that we can only be grateful for?

It's terrible that this man's life is upended by the b-tards setting him up with the usual pizza delivery/SWAT team call meme to harass him -- in RL. But ultimately, what are you saying here? That good citizens can't hunt for these malicious hackers and out them? That law-enforcement authorities shouldn't use their propensity to out each other in their investigations? Of course they should. Overeager, amateur or not, it's ok to try to expose these criminals, you know? And no harm, no foul if in fact they aren't guilty, it will be easy to be exonerated as Sabu has apparently been by showing that he sold a domain name.

I'm just not getting your indignation and cautionary tale against vigilantes when they go after creeps like LulzSec, which is strangely absent about LulzSec's own vigilantism in the first case

The Bias in Al Jazeera's The Stream

Nowadays, the smart smart-phone set considers themselves edgy and cool if they have the Al Jazeera news app on their phones or follow@AJStream.

They call it "AJ," affectionately, sort of like the way you call Kentucky Fried Chicken "KFC" to take the objectionable fried-fat connotation out of it.

Yesterday I saw a colleague chat casually about why he didn't like "the stream" because it over-emphasized the role of social media. He didn't refer to it as a proper name, "The Stream," which is a "community" that AL Jazeera has set up on social media, but off-handedly as "the stream" as if...it's the stream always coming in you know, man, the Zen stream of life.

And of course that's the idea, to get people streaming Al Jazeera constantly as their news feed not only on the Arab Spring but events all around the world, and of course, that ever-solicited critique of neo-liberalist imperialist US policy blah blah.

Like the Kremlin-sponsored Russia Today (which also shortened it's name to RT to take the fat out of the "Russia" part), Al Jazeera has a crew of very edgy cool young British-accented people in a rainbow of races and origins but all with that reliable British-socialist tilt to their world views that put them in AJ comfort zone. They all purport to be eager and critical and even impartial world citizens delivering their cool take on the world, but the packaging frankly doesn't fool this old connoisseur of Soviet propaganda.

The very reason why it over-emphasizes social media is part and parcel of a Marxist-style collectivist world view that features "the People" as in "the People's Democracy". Social media is authentic and free; social media corrects the "narrative" put out by governments; social media is true and fact-based when it needs to be an passionate and subjective to overturn corporate data rule when it needs to be. Social media is perfect humanity!

I've always marvelled at how entrenched that old Soviet propaganda stuff is in the Arab world. It's partly because Nasser was schooled in the Soviet alliance to a third-worldist view that demonized the West; it's partly because the Soviets spent a lot of time training and schooling Arab leaders and professionals as part of an overall global strategy.

I'll never forget this:  When the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Soviet Union was replaced by Russia at the UN, and Russia finally had a more independent delegation at the Vienna Conference in 1995 to discuss the relationship between civil-political rights and social-economic rights, a Russian reformist now finally taking a critical stand on his own country's and his allies' human rights failings marvelled at the Latin Americans, Asians, and Arabic countries still flogging the old Soviet line.

"They were our best pupils," he lamented. And so they still are. The Soviet Union is long dead in some respects; in lives on in oppressive state policies in all the post-Soviet states but it also lives on in the form of an entrenched anti-Western third-worldist ideology. Look at any UN development these days. Why can't Brazil, India, and South Africa, all promoters of human rights for years, especially of the socio-economic kind, step up and condemn Syria in a resolution or oppose Iran's nuclear ambitions? Answer: Western imperialism -- they don't want to aid or abet it. Libya is viewed through the prism of Western capitalist imperialism; no further action on Libya or God forbid, on Syria or Iran can happen due to the urgent need to oppose Western imperialism. No matter that more than 1500 people are killed, and 13,000 arrested, and they could at least muster an ICC referral, which would balance those saddle bags they are so troubled by with the ICC's tendency to try African cases (because that's where the mass crimes against humanity tend to be). Syria is an old ally of the Soviet Union's; Russia will not act against Syria; the new democracies steeped in Soviet thinking take their cue -- no action on Syria. It's truly disgraceful.

For me, the uncritical stance (or even news blackout) on Al Jazeera on certain issues and countries, and the skewing of other issues to the anti-Western perspective, and the mining of still other issues for their anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist gold, are all features of that Soviet communist worldview in which pan-Arabism was steeped. And these Arab authoritarian countries' parties don't have to be specifically communist or even socialist in order to have absorbed that Leninism -- the cadre parties with partiinost' (party discipline) and rigid ideology; the secrecy; the disinformation and propaganda techniques; and of course the ruthless violence and cold and calculated use of state terrorism. These are Lenin's heirs.  Yes, Nasser courted the Egyptian Party and the Muslim Brotherhood and allied with them and then blocked them later.  But where did the anti-Western and anti-imperialist ideologies in the Arab world come from if not from the Comintern, if not from the Kremlin's propagadna in the third world?

And don't forget what those evil imperialists the US, France and Great Britain were up to when they opposed Nasser's nationalization of the Suez canal -- his alliance with the Soviet Union and recognition of China. Again, the third worldists like my Indian Twitter stalker like to focus their microscopes selectively in these cases, and turn on the clock when they wish. If you start from a healthy recognition that the Soviet Union massacred tens of millions of people (I think the figure of 50 million is realistic, but even if you only accept 15 million, it's still more than any other regime in history), and if you recognize also Mao's great crimes against humanity numbering in the millions, you can accept that it was reasonable to attempt to contain and restrain and even battle such murderous powers that not only massacred people in large numbers but set out to take over other formerly autonomous regions and whole countries. If you don't start with that healthy recognition of the profound criminality of communism -- a recognition that is very stunted and muted in the West where it is not taught about sufficiently -- then naturally you will find Western imperialism's sins in combating these great evils to be magnified.

Regardless of how you analyze the provenance of pan-Arabist collectivist and anti-Western thought and its appearance in our time in Al Jazeera, you can still parse "the stream" and see plenty of examples of bias. I've tweeted quite a few of them, and if you turn on Al Jazeera any day of the week, you will find many more:

o utter silence on Syria. @AJStream has had absolutely nothing to say about Syria. I mean...nothing. Not even a short factual report. Not even a comment, in the usual stilted AJ manner, that yes, this particular Arabic dictatorship has done something bad, but "the West made him do it" -- with pressure, with encirclement, with pro-Israel policies, whatever. Silence. And that's because Qatar, liberal Arab state that it may be, is not going to go against Arab League consensus, which is "We say nothing about Syria. Nothing. Ever."

o very selective coverage of Sudan -- people often point to the coverage of Sudan as their proof that AJ is non-biased. The problem with the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic States is that it has not acted on Sudan and doesn't seem to pressure Al-Bashir, the head of state wanted for crimes against humanity by the ICC. Of course, many ask why the Muslim world can't care more about this violence by Muslim leaders against Muslim people. But...if you poke a little at this coverage, you always see the same tired memes -- moral equivalency of the crimes of Sudan with Western crimes (utterly dwarfed by the Sudanese massacres, of course); or blather about "constructing alternative narratives" by which they mean discussing Sudan purely in humanitarian terms, or purely in NGO terms, rather than exploring the guilt of the leadership and the entire Arab League for perpetuating this violence. Reports in fact celebrate social media that is "constructing an alternative narrative" by which they mean "a plague on both your houses" to the government and those meddlesome do-gooding Westerners who are just after oil!

That sort of Marxist mindlessness forgot to look at China. China is the big oil grabber in Sudan, whatever the West's aspirations. I don't see AJ critique China much but I'd have to make a more thorough study. But generally, the Arab League tries to stay away from antagonizing China, so that makes sense.

Another aspect of Sudan coverage is a kind of sophisticated lament -- oh, why is South Sudan lost to the Arab world!  In this perspective, South Sudan wouldn't have seceded (which it definitely wanted to do for a whole host of reasons) because of a "failure" of "the Arab world." If only the North had "made unity more attractive," as UN diplomats moaned themselves for many years, well past the sell-by date. Typical of this rant is the following paragraph, utterly devoid of any reference to China, which invited Al-Bashir to Beijing recently for good reason, and which had its operatives out ready to sign new deals with the South months ago:

Arabs should look at their serious blunders and moral failures by facing the fact that the South Sudanese are an oppressed people whose grievances were against Arab rule and not against Western domination. It is true that the people of South Sudan may still find themselves prey to greedy Western governments interested in their rich natural resources, but that does not change the reality that people of the new state celebrated the end of what they viewed as oppression by an Arab and Muslim elite.

Er, China's not greedy? Is extraction sanitized when it is backed by the People's Red Army? Oh, and for extra credit, see this hint of a bit of criticism of Syria -- but only in terms of its failure to hew to the correct pan-Arabist path:

But while pan-Arabism was initially an anti-colonial movement, some of its branches - especially the Ba'ath Arab parties that ruled Syria and Iraq - demonstrated and practiced destructive chauvinist policies and actions against other ethnic groups and nationalities. The case of the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq testify to different degrees of exclusivist, supremacist and racist policies by both Ba'athist political parties.

See, the problem is that these Ba'athist parties just didn't hew the proper pan-Arabic line, otherwise they'd be fine.

o picking out the anti-imperialist motifs of Belarus -- I wondered if our pal Al would stick around after the initial coverage of the December 19 crackdown. They didn't. They covered it a bit, as sort of a world news story, but once they saw the US and EU criticizing it, they skidaddled. We didn't see much more. Now, as the movement of protest grows more mass, and as ALJ can't keep its "social media" and "People's" creds even among the largely leftist and liberal twittering masses, there is more coverage. But protest is analyzed as being all about fuel price increases induced by Russia (which here, will serve as a stand-in for evil world imperialist oil companies) -- only a part of the story in a very profoundly oppressive situation that is about both Russian and homegrown Stalinism.

o on Russia itself, Al Jazeera is picky, too -- yes, to coverage of the murder of Natalya Estimirova, a Chechen woman who was murdered two years ago today for her human rights work uncovering the victims of the local government, backed by the Kremlin. Al Jazeera will go to bat for this Muslim people in the North Caucasus -- but up to a point. They won't feature all the Moscow-based dissidents because some of them would just be too liberal and too pro-Western for those refined third-worldist tastes. Navalny is perfect for Al because he is tacitly approved  as the fighter against corruption with a mass following, but doesn't go too far. 

Here's a good test: did ALJ ever cover the Magnitsky case? No, doesn't seem so, from searches of the site and Google (correct me if I'm wrong). Why? Well, Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer working for a Western investment company, Hermitage, who died while languishing in pre-trial detention due to deliberate mistreatment by Russian officials, after he uncovered alleged tax fraud on their part. That whole story -- capitalism, West, etc. -- just doesn't fit "the stream" template. There could be tons of tweets, Facebooks, signature campaigns, videos made on this subject -- a social media subject of the region you couldn't ignore. But for ALJ, it doesn't exist on their radar screen because it falls outside their narrative.

Al Jazeera is great on exposing the torture and other crimes of the Central Asian authoritarian states, I'm happy to read and use their material here; it's great on occasionally covering the story of how the Kremlin torments its Muslims; of course it's great on the Arab Spring, up to a point (as I endlessly argued with Jillian York, it never covered the story of the US female journalist sexually assaulted by an Egyptian mob because it didn't fit its narrative, which was to feature Egyptian demonstrators exclusively as a positive force.)

But it's silent on so many topics -- and of course Syria is a glaring example. It over-emphasizes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as so many leftist media outlets do, of course. And it ads that anti-Western, third-worldist touch to so many other stories (Russia, Belarus, Sudan)

So it's definitely biased, but many liberals find it too cool now to subject to any kind of critique. When a Washington Post blogger (black, liberal, hip) expressed some trouble with the failure of ALJ to cover the story of the assault on the correspondent, he was savaged in the comments. Few get up the strength to question "the stream".

Mainly it gets shielded from common-sense, adult criticism that most liberals secretly feel about it because they get defensive and protective of something they feel is being attacked on racist and isolationist grounds from a backward Tea-Partying religious right in the US. I actually don't see the right making any kind of serious critique with ALJ as that would require serious engagement. While some may resist the idea of having it on cable television on theological grounds or something, I think it's not at the top of the right-wing agenda. They likely feel it self-discredits. And to some extent it does, and of course, that's why something like The Stream is concocted by Arab propagandists in order to get into the DNA of the conversation, so to speak, under colour of edginess and supposed unbiased coverage.

Should Al Jazeera be allowed on US airwaves? Well, Russian-language Russian Kremlin TV was allowed on cable, simply because New York City TV had a budget for it, thought it was interesting to Russian speakers, but then dumped it during budget cuts, and then a Polish company picked it up for awhile -- but ultimately, it died. Not enough listeners, and couldn't compete with the independent Russian TV in the area which rebroadcasts select state and private TV more "normally," i.e. not as a propaganda operation.

What about English-language Russia Today or RTV?  Well, as a function of a cable purchase in a free market, why not? The marketplace should be a free bazaar of ideas. Should city tax dollars sponsor Kremlin propaganda or Arab League propaganda? No. I see no reason for that. Pay for it as part of your cable subscription and don't demand that the camel gets to put a nose under the tent without any resistance.

 

Did Turkmen Social Media -- or Emigre, Russian and Western Media Shine on Abadan?

There's been a debate brewing over at neweurasia.net and registan.net (which are symbiotically connected in ways I don't fully grasp) about the role of social media and "citizen journalism" in covering the tragedy of Abadan, an explosion of an ammunition depot in Turkmenistan near the capital of Ashgabat.

You would think with this much shrapnel, and this many bodies blown to smithereens, there'd be enough disaster for everyone to cover in all forms of media -- traditional, mainstream Russian and Western media, alternative emigre and Western news sites, and yes, domestic Turkmen-language social media on fledgling chat sites --without people arguing about which is "better."

But the narrative has cropped up immediately, before the buildings ceased to smoulder and the bodies, many no longer intact, were buried, that there was something especially authentic, indispensable -- and even requiring a new political strategy -- about the coverage of Abadan by some brave Turkmen citizen journalists. As Annasoltan laid out in a very didactic and political piece counseling that new strategy, we must cease our (alleged) lecturing from the West and our presumed pressing of social movements into the straitjackets of the West and East, oh those Cold-war templates, and allow "Turkmens to decide for themselves."

I find that to be a narrative that Western "progressives," and some of their emigre friends, often spin, as a way to grab social media as a tool and a phenomenon for their own particular political purposes. And I call them on that, because I think social media has to be for everyone, open to a wide variety of purposes and causes, and you can't script and impose how the outside world and inside world of social revolutions are going to interact.

Joshua Foust has also waxed very enthusiastic about Turkmen social media -- but it comes with a hortatory message, like Annasoltan's, with whom he is "in violent agreement" about how social media interaction has to be "engagements" and not "dictations". That is, he's giving us a dictation about an engagement, see...

My comments didn't get any response from Foust, but an anonymous person with the nickname of BEgenc has come to flog me as "an old guard of the traditional media with a monopolistic approach [who] is defending at all costs her own business interests and that of her allies who are certainly to lose influence if the media situation improves in Turkmenistan because their experise would not be needed as much."

Sigh.

My reply:

Oh, stuff it, BEgenc, I'm no "old guard of the traditional media" and I don't have any business interests, don't be silly. I have several of my own independent blogs, I am an early adapter on Twitter since *2007* (when's your join date?), I run Second Life servers, for Christ's sake. All the news services I write for are non-profit operations, not businesses, and I don't seek profit or influence whatsoever. Do you see the world in this skewed fashion because *you* do? Neither are available in the low-paid non-profit sector I work in, trust me on this.

Impugning malign motives to someone who merely criticizes a claim of "explosions of sites not blocked in Turkmenistan" when...they all seem to be blocked now...means you aren't really a worthy interlocutor. However, I'm going to look over your shoulder at other people reading registan.net and neweurasia.net and go to some length to answer you on my own blog because these are very important issues, that will shape the course of events in Turkmenistan and other countries similarly living under authoritarian regimes.

What I do see here is the sort of manipulation of the story I've seen elsewhere in the region where there is both irrational exuberance about "Twitter revolutions" (which I have a lot of time and support for, unlike Evgeny Morozov) and also a vested agenda of the "progressives" to harness social media to bring about certain kinds of social revolutions, baking leftist and often anti-Western doctrines into the tools themselves. (I took up this theme with Ethan Zuckerman regarding Moldova.)

And I see more of this today with this very one-sided concoction of Christopher Schwartz's on Al-Jazeera -- never mentioning chrono-tm.org, the Turkmen emigre site which has led the news coverage (although using their video) never mentioning Russian independent media Ekho Mosvky and others which are tremendously important, never mentioning (for ideological reasons, no doubt) RFE/RL, although they have published footage of a journalist who risked his life and may have died already for getting pictures of the fireball of Abadan. Honestly, you can't zoom out past your own parochial interests?!

I spend a good deal of my time reporting civic activity in Turkmenistan, such as it is, and wish it very well. Sorry, but I don't believe criticizing nascent civil society is the same thing as somehow not believing in it or not supporting it.  (And what I'm mainly doing is criticizing how *outsiders* are portraying insiders.)

What I am saying is what's truthful about this situation -- the social media presence is extremely limited in Turkmenistan, and if it were not for the replay value of the emigre, Russian, and Western media, both alternative and mainstream, it would not be heard. That's the serious reality of this situation, and portraying the tragedy of Abadan as a story where only fledgling Turkmen-language social media sites bravely saved the day, making all these other forms of media obsolete, is dangerously ideological, and deprives those very brave citizen journalists of the real outlets that they will necessarily need to work with as they get out their story.

In fact, frankly, I don't see the people *inside* Turkmenistan fussing and fretting about that evil imperialist Western or Russian or emigre media with its agendas, but I do see some "progressive" bloggers doing that outside the country.  In fact, the people inside the country risking to cover Abadan themselves sent their photos to chrono-tm.org, fergananews.com, rferl.org, eurasianet.org without any scripting or prompting -- they sent them *anywhere* they thought someone would care.

The government heavily controls the Internet. Good Lord, the authorities shut down cell phone service for *2.4 million people* on MTS. All the links that Annasoltan supplies in her story are dead -- they died some months ago in some cases or they are inactive. To be sure, there is this evidently very vibrant chat site teswirler, and that's great, and the people there can talk to each other in Turkmen. But Turkmen isn't a Google-translatable language even, and no one else is going to understand it -- well, except for Annasoltan and the editors of chrono-tm.org  I kept checking teswirler during this disaster, and I didn't see the links she provided refresh with much new text. Maybe there are different chat channels that change like IRC does but whatever the case, and whatever it's use, it isn't accessible to the outside world, and requires then sherpas to interpret it.

 

Does Google Have a Killer App that Could Kill Second Life?

I wonder what all my years of sojourn among the geeks is worth if I don't have an invitation to Google+ yet, but I've been reading about it, and today the Times suggested that Google+, the new social network Google has in beta competing with Facebook, has a "killer app" in combination with Hangout, it's socializing tool that enables real-time video communication in groups.

I don't know if the lightbulb has gone off in Rod Humble's head yet, but instead of (or in addition to) referring to Second Life as a "shared creativity tool" he should start buzzing about "real-time f2f face shared-space socializing" or something that lets the world know that Second Life has already been around for seven years doing exactly what Google+ and Hangout are doing on video -- and better (because you are all actually in the same room, able to manipulate content together.)

I used to wonder in the early years whether Second Life would be completely obviated by having video become more interactive and ubiquitous. When everybody has a cam that is interactive in real time, and you put them all together in an Internet-facilitated room like Hollywood Squares, and when video conferencing becomes better and cheaper and easier, why would you need to fumble with avatars and downloading clients and fussing with a wonky UI?

Answer: because it's not enough, you can't control your environment and you can't introduce user-generated content with ease through the barrier of the squares.

I haven't seen how the Google+ Hangout works yet, although I did see the Lifehacker Youtube, but if it is merely panning around in serial fashion to each person talking in a row sort of like Hollywood Squares (Hollywood Bars?), it's not all in a room at once, really. After all, when a bunch of video talking heads bump together in a shared space, they aren't reaching into each other's space or sharing a common space where they can do things in common. That is, all those Lifehacker geeks are all yucking and loling up a storm, but that's because they are already in the shared space of their work or their cliques --

(I'm also reading that Skype charges for group chat and Google isn't going to charge at first.)

To be sure, it might be thrilling in that shared space on Hangout -- like it is on Yahoo Messenger to paint together or push elements in pictures together -- to share a Youtube and do a karaoke.

But...that's actually been a feature of Second Life in viewer 2 for more than a year -- get together in your Second Life virtual home, put up a prim on the wall, and find your Youtube to show off to somebody. Sing along in Voice if you like. Of course, in SL there is the issue that not everyone is looking at the same stream -- there's a Zen Koan to this that involves everybody not stepping into the same stream but seeing their own at the same time, but not exactly.

Time until Google+ Hangout turns into Chat Roulette -- with the statistical given that we know from Second Life, too, that in anonymous social situations, men inevitably turn to showing you and each other their penises?

Well, supposedly, by having known people with names on a Facebook-like network, you remove that. Oh? But it isn't Facebook. Gmail is filled with nicknames. Google+ may make its mark in fact being the anonymous network that you don't have to put in a real name for -- we'll see.

In fact, if your first answer to my question posed here is "Oh, no, never, because SL enables anonymous avatars" -- what if Google enables anonymous real-human accounts? That aren't tied to real name or place? To be sure, you can't easily change your gender then or other attributes, but you do get a level of anonymity. Just ask the maker of Chat Roulette!

But aside from the flying phallus problem, didn't the demise of Loic Lemeur's video talking and sharing site, Seesmic, teach anybody anything? "Video conversation was too early," he tells Mashable. "It did not grow beyond a great but small community and wasn’t viable,” explains Le Meur."

Well, exactly. I remember I kept meaning to join this well-meaning Seesmic, and never did. For one, I had only a really crappy $30 Radio Shack video camera, but I didn't feel like fussing with video cameras or Skype video or anything. It just didn't feel as easy to me as Second Life.

Has the appetite for video conversation grown? Oh, if a lot of carefully-groomed geeks in the beta claim it's the latest cool thing, it may get a big surge, but I think most people will be a bit more cautious.  It's not that it's early. It's that it's not for everybody. After all, not "everybody" has a video cam, and even those that do, don't cyber with it.

The big lesson for me lately in Second Life, with the travails of Viewer 2, is just how much people have stage-fright, or don't like being online in a situation where they feel compromised, or don't want to be "shining on". Trying to make their entry into the virtual world easier, to get past hazing or confusion, is critical. And remember the power curve: 10 percent of the population make most of the content for the other 90 percent.

I see the main problems (that Loic also had to deal with and others with this kind of service) for Google:

o Privacy -- once the videos start easily spreading out of the originally trusted smaller circles, once the URLs and the other data can be grabbed from the shared media (RedZone anyone?), privacy will be compromised and people will feel burned -- they always do, even as geeks like Reid Hoffman keep egging everybody on to give, give, give more, more, more data so he can become rich. The issue has already surfaced, as the Financial Times reports, and Google is putting the fix in after complaints in beta, instead of fixing it before it reached beta, which isn't reassuring, as it was an obvious no-brainer problem. And likely one not fixable, for the reasons Jeff Jarvis says, about the impossibility of stopping the spread of information on the Internet. It will be interesting to see what sort of fix Google does put in to prevent Circles from going outside their Circles...

o Governance -- there's the phalluses, and then there's the shared media -- the demand for media shifting, as Fred Wilson has explained it, that fuels "innovation". Not just sharing a clip from Youtube, but then sharing it to others throughout the system, so that it becomes a new channel of unlawful distribution even less controllable than Youtube, which is a non-real-time interactive service. Once Youtube bleeds through all the real-time Google+ Hangout chat groups, copyright is even more compromised. Some will say they don't care, embrace the inevitable. OK, do tell me your plan for making money for artists and distributors. Ads to click on while you're in your Hangout chat room?

o Inability to control your environment -- unlike what Google Hangout sounds like, the richness of Second Life involves being able to manipulate not only your own presentation to the world in the avatar, but to make homes and offices and planets and whatever -- and in real-time, to enable people to build together. You can all in a room construct the same data visualization, or try on the same dresses or examine the same pieces of furniture or read the same texts. As I understand it, the Google thing will involve serial panning of a camera. The wall isn't broken through. Yet people will want it to be. Then they want creativity -- and they want sex. On Facebook, people are content to remain for hours showing video links or links to blogs or pictures, asynchronously, but at least, within a few seconds. Google might speed that up with Hangout. But both are still limited by contrast with what you can do when you really have shared real-time creativity. It's like a friend of mine said last night in Second Life -- describing a feeling that I recall vividly from The Sims Online -- when another human being can come online, go shopping with you and try on a dress, and buy it for you for under $3.00, it's quite something. How many women in real life have the experience of a boyfriend or husband who takes them out and buys them a mink coat? Very few, really. In SL, millions can have that experience. Oh, it's not the same? Well isn't it even better, for having the ease, and for not having to kill any RL minx?!

o Governance -- with the burst of creativity and sex online comes the usual range of issues like copyright and adult behaviour and child pornography and gambling -- they all come in a rush, and Second Life has worked its way through every one of these issues, developing policies, banning, segregating, pruning. Google proved with Lively, their failed virtual world, that they were completely uninterested in governance -- griefers could invade your space and mess up some of your communication tools and the abuse report never went anywhere, there wasn't the granularity of controls on the space that Second Life built up with long experience, and the short-lived but effective Metaplace by Raph Koster also developed. Governance is what you should start virtual worlds with -- and this is a kind of virtual world, this Google Hangout -- not what you should end with, and yet it's unlikely that in the rush to compete with Facebook and the Microsoft buyout of Skype, that a lot of thought has gone into how to govern the Hangouts.

o Archipelago of Egos -- I always used to discuss the myriad private islands in Second Life, with their closeknit, claustrophobic little socializing groups, some of them very elite and restrictive, some of them even sinister (Goreans), as the antithesis of an open society. It was like the cells of Communism, and the atomized but collectivized pseudo-institutions of Soviet life in a way, where people couldn't communicate horizontally, but where policies and communications took place in a heavily-controlled vertical space. Imagine if you are not invited into a Google Hangout. Imagine if only the cool kids get to go here or there.

In fact, such honeycombed worlds become very brittle and vulnerable to memes. It is very, very easy to take seemingly independent little grouplets and spread rumours and disinformation through them -- oddly enough, the rigidity with which they isolate themselves also makes them incapable of tolerance and diversity in debating the rumours they hear.

Second Lifers are big users of other social media like Twitter and Facebook and Plurk and Skype. You go to Skype when you want to "get outside the game" and make sure your conversation is not recorded -- at least, not recorded by people who will use it to ban you from the virtual world. Lovers in SL turn to Skype as well, they shift back and forth between the avatar and the real person -- but it's the avatar that enables people who are removed in space and time to be able to actually build something together, or make love.

Perhaps Google+/Hangout will increase the appetite for virtual worlds, and perhaps they will get working better by the time there is really a pressure of millions wanting this. Perhaps not. It might still be at the small number of people that Loic attracted -- even using the considerable power of the Google ad agency to hustle more participation.

 

 

The Cynical Amorality of Our New Cyber-Industrialists

There's something awfully cynical and amoral about our new robber-barons of Cyberspace, the Metaverse magnates and financiers making their millions now in Web 2.0 and its social networking and applications. I constantly find it troubling.

Oh, sure, the robber-barons of the 19th century were cynical and not without sin, but when you think of the Astors and Rockfellers and Chases of the world, you can now look today at streets and buildings and hospitals and banks, at art and culture, and of course, the economy of the United States, battered though it may be, as the result of their lives. There is something of a legacy; there are bricks and mortar that stand. If a Vanderbilt or a Harriman put through a waterway or a railway and cut corners or broke the law on the way to making their fortunes, at least they physically moved people from place to place, and left colleges and institutions in their name with their fortunes behind them.

Somehow, contemplating the waterways of the Metaverse, the moving of your cat pictures and your breakfast contents on Facebook and Twitter just don't seem like they have the same gravitas. And maybe as a result, the millionaires that got rich having you click on their ads or sign up for their offers have worse morals to match. And one wonders what institutions they leave behind, contemplating the institutions they've destroyed -- the businesses of media and news and even government.

Take Mark Zuckerberg -- whose worldview I thoroughly analyzed some years ago when he made a rare and long philosophical speech -- as typical of the "Betterworldism" we associate with all the new cyber millionaires, but coupled with strange authoritarian inclinations and goofy (if not sinister) ideas -- and that's usually the way when people get to wanting to make a "better world" for lots of other people who don't have a say in the matter.

All the new cyber millionaires profess some higher ideals of "helping humankind" -- people like Craig Newmark of Craig's List may have made his fortune selling ads to escorts and keeping people coming back by enabling porn chat for free in the personals, but he gives to charities with various noble ideals of helping veterans (a calculated crowd-pleaser and mainstreamer), helping Silicon Valley companies that lobby Washington to pry open government information (like Sunlight Foundation) and such. Craig may have enabled an environment where prostitutes could get killed, where the states attorneys general moved in because they began to see the free-for-all environment as conducive to crime, and of course, along the way, destroyed the news business by undermining ad sales for them with $0 job and personal ads on Craigslist, but all along the way, he believed he was Connecting People and Doing Good. (Wonder what happened to the site mentioned in the 2009 piece allforgood.com -- it's down.)

That's what's particularly creepy about all these people, I find. Vanderbilt or Rockefeller or Frick may have played fast and loose with the rules, but you didn't see them professing such ambitious world views to control people, make their world Better, and yet undermine other basic principles of society. At least, I think it would be ahistorical to start ascribing such monumental ambitions to them.

But then, none of them could say they had *600 million customers*. There were only a fraction of such numbers -- the total population of Facebook, and growing -- riding rails or buying tobacoo or using heating oil -- and those were all concrete goods, and all helped people live or maintain livelihoods. Again, that indignant rant I posted on a comment to an article on Facebook; that ad I may have clicked on for some political cause; that funny video -- weren't these really all just forms of entertainment and leisure? Calling them forms of education would be stretching it...

Take Reid Hoffman, the venture capitalist now in the news because one of his investments, Groupon, has gone public. He's also co-founded LinkedIn, which now has 100 million users and also recently had an IPO. The Wall Street Journal has a feature on him sitting in the cool room-wrapping seats of his Silicon Valley office, with a view of trees.  Hoffman cashed out big on PayPal, and has gone on to invest in 114 tech start-ups, all the big companies like Facebook, Flickr, Groupon of course, and Zynga, which is also going to go public -- all companies that you look at, and wonder what their business model is, or whether it can last -- and yet he has "taken cash off the table," as the venture capitalists say.

Hoffman articulates the classic Betterworldist Silicon Valley worldview, which he got from his fellow venture capitalists and players "in the space" of social media.

"The Internet has become a medium in which we are all participants," he says, almost as if it is a mass religious experience. "And then our mobiles enable all kinds of abilities to communicate, search, collaborate and socialize our experience in the electronic medium" -- as if connectivity is an unmitigated good. The Betterworldists always sanctify all the chatter with the term "collaborate" -- it may take the form of calling from the bus 10 times on a cross-town ride that you're on your way home, and even announcing that your call may drop now that you're in the elevator; you may be chattering endlessly and texting mindlessly for hours about nothing, but it's all good, it's all "collaborating" if not just "socializing."

"We also have a deeper stack of expertise as to what works and what doesn't," says Reid briskly, comparing Web 2.0 potential bubble and Web 1.0's bust. "Stack" is one of those tekkie terms that geeks use to signify a sort of column of subject matter -- there's the social stack, and the civic stack, remember, from Tim O'Reilly? Stacks are data structures, folders, software implementation -- you can think of it as a pile of folders and the point is, it is mastered by these technicians and they talk about it briskly.

The last burst bubble was because "a lot of the businesses had been financed without any real fundamentals behind them." Naturally, we're wondering what the "fundamental" for Groupon is, other than that people imagine if they leverage groups and social networks and they get a discount, they're getting a deal, but as TechCrunch has been reporting critically (and they may have an agenda there), Groupon deals can be destructive to small businesses, and in the end, perhaps the public will find it all too annoying. Group has hemorrhaged a lot of money on the way to its IPO.

Hoffman believes we aren't going to face a bust now (I think he's wrong) because the current crop of entrepreneurs grew up with the Internet -- and here's the BetterWorldism part -- "They are actually building products that they think they need and that the people around them need."

Oh, I *need* to check into my local deli and become "mayor"? I *need* to find where the nearest Dunkin' Donuts is on my app? I *need* another Facebook friend and another round of Citiville?

And here's more:

When we are evaluating new business pitches at Greylock, we look for product people and deeply passionate people. To make a great product, you have to be passionate about it in order for it to become something that will improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

That's why Apple succeeds -- product. Nobody thought everyone would want to share 140-character messages -- but they did. So now you have millions "needing" -- automatically conferring a BetterWorld.

Yet it's not only that the belief that millions are "bettered" and they "need" these things -- these things that are not roads, hospitals, railroads, colleges -- but the sheer massiveness of the systems that these nerdy guys get to control -- and there are so few of them, and they are so unaccountable!

"I am motivated by how you handle massive improvement in large human ecosystems. Most often I am only interested in an idea if it's going to get millions of users."

Oh? Who died and made you king? And do you need these large human ecosystems because only when there are millions, you can generate enough revenue from the ads? After all, we're learning now that we have 30 more times a chance of winning MegaMillions or 40 more times chance of giving birth to twins than clicking on ads. Kind of inexorable, eh?

It would be one thing if the stewards of these millions and millions had some uplifting plans for them, other than just the general belief in making them "better" or "building products that people need."

Except, then Reid gives away the store when he candidly tells you how his various companies build up these millions:

"Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed."

Ugh.

Then -- the apologia and the self-justification for scraping the data of millions -- "benefit":

Some data matter and some don't. People think, "Oh no! This company has data about me!" To that I say: OK, so a website or mobile application knows that you're a man or a woman, and it's giving you ads based on that. That's a benefit, not a bug. But you should also try to provide a direct benefit for every piece of data you collect from the users. Everything you gather, the user knows it's there because they are participating. They are buying into the benefit of it, and you are getting the benefit too. Data will be foundational in the next wave of mass applications that go to hundreds of millions of people.

So, I lose my privacy. But in exchange, I get an ad pitched to me for a dating service of men age 55 and older!

Well, at least there isn't active enabling of crime with Groupon, as there sometimes is with Craigslist, and there certainly is with 4chan -- and now we hear of another celebration of the hackerist culture from Mark Zuckerberg, who has hired, of all people, GeoHot to work as an engineer at Facebook.

Don't Try to Stop "Trials by Media" -- It's Press Freedom

Countless times during the entire saga involving Dominick Strauss-Kahn, former head of the IMF, we heard criticisms about "being tried by the media."

And now we can see that despite "being tried in the media," now DSK is being exonerated by that same media -- or at least, the stage is being set for him to plea down his alleged offense, or for the case to completely fall apart.

Over and over again, we heard how awful it was that the media "tried people" and somehow disrupted the principle of "innocent before found guilty."

But now we are watching through this self-same media how the prosecutors are in fact unravelling their own case and admitting where the holes in it are, that have to do with the character of the purported victim, other circumstances that impugn her honesty and so on.

I'm wondering how they could find DNA on her -- the defendant's sperm, we are told -- yet not come up with a sex offense in the end, but perhaps that's explained away by allegations that she is a prostitute -- allegations she is vigorously denying and even filing a libel suit about.

There's other past offenses, and another alleged victim coming forward in France with a tale of rape as well -- yet we're still hearing endlessly from the left, from the socialists, from all kinds of people that this is "a plot" and a conspiracy to prevent a socialist president from being elected in France. Hmm, seems like a great length to go to, to prevent socialism, as the French people already are capable of rejecting the socialist path at the election booth if they chose.

The fact is, if you were to somehow prevent this "trial by media," you would do grave damage to press freedom. And even the much-maligned "perp walk" being questioned now by leftists as well as by libertarians is something that is essentially a function of press freedom, and the "people's right to know" -- to see that the authorities have a prisoner in their custody.

There is a notion that this "perp walking" is somehow done triumphantly, with some kind of bravado. Maybe sometimes it is. But I think people unfamiliar with the police and the courts in New York City don't realize how most perp walks in Manhattan happen -- on a lonely side street behind a huge building at 100 Centre Street, without any witnesses. Thousands of prisoners come into the Tombs, as it is known, this way, their hands handcuffed behind their backs, and nobody even notices. After all, they have to get from the place of arrest into the police car, and into the police car into Central Bookings somehow. Isn't this better not being a routine that happens in the dark? It's only with the notorious cases or cases of celebrities that the press shows up to watch this mundane exercise -- and then there's a show. Even so, the idea that the public *can* see what the police is up to is better than not knowing what the police is up to.

As for "trial by media," you have to contemplate what it would be like if we had a gag on the media until a trial was set -- as they do in places like Belarus or Kazakhstan. It can be awful then, in those authoritarian conditions, where nobody ever gets to try to investigate a case outside the system -- not private lawyers, not human rights groups, not family members -- no one, under pain of criminal punishment. I've known of a number of cases of Eurasian journalists jailed themselves for discussing court cases critically -- it's called "divulging the secrecy of the investigation." Yet adversarial defense requires media freedom, not just an independent bar and an impartial judiciary. You have to enable both the media and the public at large to be able to discuss cases. Countries that enable libel suits to be launched by public officials and that muzzle journalists aren't countries with fair justice systems.

That the system of enabling media freedom works better is can be seen in this very case of DSK -- the case is being examined and information brought to bear, and from the beginning we heard DSK's side of the story, through his lawyers, although they did not yet say what they knew. That came out later from the prosecutors themselves and several sources.

Has this man's career been needlessly ruined and is he a victim of terrible injustice? Well, let's not forget that he fell into this situation not for the first time, and that his falling into it was in part a function of a justice system that did not want to favour the rich and famous, and could find the ability to bring a suit even by a poor immigrant cleaning lady. Now it turns out she has $100,000 in her bank account -- and the details are not known.

The DSK case may have irreparably harmed the reputation of district attorney Cyrus Vance, although his reversal of his own allegations and willingness not to follow the path of political correctness in fact may testify to his integrity, as Dorothy Rabinowitz writes in the The Wall Street Journal. US relations with France, or at least New York City's relationship with France are heavily damaged, and socialists will go on making hay with this scandal forever.

But what shouldn't be damaged by this case is press freedom -- press freedom was needed to find the facts all along the way, making the allegations, and then retracting them.

There is a lot of hype about "trial by media," and yet, it's hard to find cases really fitting that category. In this case, another Wall Street Journal editor wrote honestly that the media bit into this red meat too hard -- it was too delicious, the "champagne socialist," the international civil servant living in $3,000-a-day hotel suites, and so on. Journalists don't always apologize when they are wrong; the WSJ did.

Interesting, just as the DSK case has been breaking, another case surprisingly led to an aquittal that seemed to have long ago been tried and found guilty by the media -- the case of Casey Anthony, charged with murdering her two-year-old daughter. She was acquitted because of the rigorous laws of "trial truth" -- she was not proved guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" because they could not find her DNA on duct tape on the child's mouth, and other evidence didn't materialize. The case fell apart too, unexpectedly, at the end, and the jury did not take more than a day to acquit her. When there isn't evidence linking a suspect, well, there isn't evidence. As with OJ Simpson. All the trials-by-media then don't matter because in a jury trial, the jury generally really does look at the facts as presented, to decide whether the state has made its case. After all, it's not as if Casey Anthony was dragged through the mud needlessly by the media -- she was found guilty of the misdemeanors of lying to prosecutors about various alibis she made in the course of the case.

Ultimately, when you become indignant about "trial by media," you have to ask yourself what would be involved in the complex matter of stopping such trials and even stopping such perp walks.  The thorough-going suppressing of media and society involved in preventing what is viewed as an undermining of innocence and justice would itself soon begin to corrode that justice.

 

Anonymous Bolsheviks Take On Bullying Elected Government in Orlando

Creepy terrorist-style video from Anonops.

Ugh, the Anonymous fucktards are now imposing their rigid and hysterical notions of Bolshevism on a real-life town -- they can't keep it on the Internet.

Are people now starting to concede that malicious hacking is not a victimless crime, that not only does it cause millions of dollars in damage, but that it assaults our democracy?

Imagine, getting all in the face of a town and its laws, just because they didn't suit your particular brand of Internet-bred communism.

Anonymous has shown up this week to hack the web sites of the city of Orlando because they don't like town ordinances that prohibit mass feeding of homeless people in parts.

I find absolutely nothing wrong with that law, because parks are not for the homeless to hang out in and for do-gooders to practice their charity in. Parks are for the majority of people to use as places of rest and relaxation. The charities that run soup kitchens have buildings, there are other facilities, and they can supply their meals there.

The laws are made by a democratically-elected government in a liberal state. It's ok to have laws that prevent homeless people, squatters, and their lenient sympathizers from overrunning public spaces that are meant for other purposes: strolling, sitting and reading, having a picnic for the regular people in the society. It's ok to have societies that are not hijacked by radical minorities.

A park is not a homeless shelter. As is well known, many of the homeless are drug abusers and alcholics and severely mentally ill people. They need help, but that doesn't mean that they get to invade the public space. I see this every day myself around Union Square in New York City, which is a constant drug fest and homeless hangout zone as well as a very popular place for teenagers and breakdancers and office workers struggling to find seats on benches that aren't covered with urine or needles. The police have this area under constant surveillance and there are constant incidents there. The heart of this issue is the failure to provide housing for the mentally ill and substance-abusing poor, that's all. That issue cries out for solutions, but the pendulum of "returning them to the community" has swung way too far, as people are returned to the street, and that means parks and public libraries and streets.

Florida is a state absolutely overrun with the prescription drug painkiller abuse menace, and that's contributing to this situation, of course.

The local homeless advocates claim that this local law is "hiding the homeless." Well, wait a second. Hiding? Or demanding that they not take over the public space in a liberal-induced tragedy of the commons? The problems of the drug-addicted and impoverished are complex. They don't amount merely to provision of a Happy People Eating Noodle Salads moment and a shelter as many do-gooders have found. They should be cared for in proper facilities, not in open street situations that just breed a sense that the entire world is the street people's kitchen and toilet and flop house.

Interestingly, even the lefties running the homeless advocacy campaign don't favour Anonymous' tactics:

Members of Orlando Food Not Bombs condemned the cyberattacks. “We have absolutely nothing to do with Anonymous or any other group that is doing this kind of thing,” said one member, Ben Markeson. “And what Anonymous is doing is a distraction from the real issue at hand.”

It isn't "criminalizing poverty" to insist that the public space of a park be used for its intended purpose by the majority of the community. I'm four-square with what this unfortunately nameless official has to say:

“We will continue to enforce the city ordinance,” said the spokeswoman, who asked not to be identified out of a concern she would become a target of Anonymous. “We must continue to focus on what our Orlando residents want and not the desires of others from outside the community.”

And here she is witholding her name for fear of reprisals, as if she were an Iranian dissident! And this is America!

The youtubes and press releases have the usual word salad:

“Anonymous believes that people have the right to organize, that people have the right to give to the less fortunate and that people have the right to commit acts of kindness and compassion,” the group’s members said in a news release and video posted on YouTube on Thursday. “However, it appears the police and your lawmakers of Orlando do not.”

O rly b/tards?! The people who have the right to organize are the people of Orlando, not the people of the Internet preventing them from their lawful free expression and passing of laws in their democratic community. Overrunning parks with the homeless, and disabling websites are acts of vandalism and lawlessness, not kindness.

Once again, shame on these thugs from Anonymous, and may the FBI round them up for this assault on society.

And I wonder how long the hacker press and the tech press, with its sneaking admiration, will go on claiming that this sort of thuggery against democracy is "good for security" and "helps web site ownes find flaws in their system" and all that other bullshit.