Wired State

Bradley Manning WikiLeaks Defense: "My Transgender Made Me Do it"

Poster made by Manning supporter Think-N-Evolve.

MILITARY SUPERIORS TO BLAME

Of all the arguments that I would have expected the defense to make on behalf of Bradley Manning, the American soldier charged with stealing classified documents from the US State Department and causing Cablegate, I would never have figured they'd use his troubled attitude toward his transgender status as a defense in fact as Wired reported before the hearing:

The defense team for alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning is seeking to show a massive leak of classified diplomatic documents is the military’s own fault since it repeatedly ignored warnings that the former Army intelligence analyst was emotionally unstable, and continued to let him have access to classified networks.

I would have expected them to use as his defense the story he told himself about his supposed motivation (although I found it shakey) namely, that he witnessed some Iraqis rounded up for having a printing press and publishing a booklet supposedly about corruption (also mentioned by Wired), and he thought that was unfair. That is, to use some kind of anti-war or justice type of conscience defense. (The reason I find it shakey is that he didn't start his career with WikiLeaks reporting *that* and providing evidence, including cables about *that* incident; it seems to be forgotten. We also don't know if his claim is true that these pamphlets were only about corruption, and not incitement of violence.)

HACKER'S DEFENSE -- 'MY VICTIM IS TO BLAME'

I would have also expected the defense to use the typical hackers' scornful defense -- "the lax security of my target made me do it" -- shifting the blame to the US military's poor oversight of their computer files, enabling this young soldier to walk off with such an enormous amount of damaging files.

That would resonate with every hacker and nerd from here to breakfast, as they use this excuse for their criminality constantly -- it really is creepy to hear them rant and rage about companies' security holes, as if they are "begging for it" and therefore "deserve" to be raped.

But instead, the defense not only references Manning's troubled transgender status, it blames his superiors for not recognizing that he was psychologically disturbed, and not getting him into psychiatric counseling or admission to psychiatric treatment. So, instead of this supposedly conscience-driven young hacker having responsibility for his actions, we are to accept that his agitation about his transgender nature -- he had an online female persona and wished to become a female -- and the failure of his superiors to see his psychotic state over this issue should be some kind of exonerating defense.

It really sucks, and you would hope that LGBT people everywhere, and those who champion their rights, would stand up and cry foul over this. And maybe some will. I sure do.

If you accept that being transgendered, even given a possible troubled attitude toward it and a sense of shame or pressure from society, makes you so vulnerable you will commit crimes, or commit actions for which you cannot be held responsible, then you are setting up discrimination against transgendered and gay people everywhere! It's like the "PMS Syndrome" as a defense for a woman committing a crime. Or the "twinkie defense" -- that someone with high blood sugar wasn't in their right mind.

So this is all pretty awful stuff, all the way around, and I hope it will be seen as the gambit it is -- a gambit meant to try to play the rainbow card of gay rights, and distract everyone from the actual crime, even as it in fact undermines gay rights in awful ways. Will Andrew Sullivan at least speak up about this?!

I doubt the left will. For them, the cause of Bradley Manning not only as transgender, but also as sticking it to America and as a crusader for "radical transparency" and Wikitarianism will likely override any lingering doubts they have about using this kind of defense -- the coolness of Wiki and anarchic revolution against the Man will trump LGBT rights, you know? Or in some twisted way someone will claim it's all actually *about* gay rights, even though it isn't. Just watch!

We have to ask why the defense wouldn't have gone the route of pleading insanity, "not fit to stand trial," or somehow severely compromised by a psychiatric illness. But wait, that won't do, because being LGBT has now been removed from the diagnostic manuals, as it should be. How are they squaring *that* circle?! Blaming it on Manning's superiors -- it's really a version of the hackers' hate-filled claim that corporate practices are to blame for their hacking damage, after all.

JULIAN ASSANGE NOW CAUGHT IN A LIE

In any event, this circus shouldn't distract from the most important part of the hearing: Julian Assange has now been definitely caught in a lie, and the implications of the chat logs published by Wired are now validated: Manning has been found to be directly in touch with someone named Julian Assange in chat, and had his contact information on his computer.

Julian Assange and his lawyers of course have continued to lie about this. Assange claims he never got directly in touch with Manning. That's so that he can appear to keep his distance from the crime of inciting hacking. But now he can't.

Of course, duh, we get it that the person chatting with Manning under the name "Julian Assange" might not have been him, but it's likely it was, plus he had his contact information.

Furthermore, there's the Wired chat logs. The logs that Anonymous-champion Gawker cynic Adrian Chen inevitably validated himself. The logs that I've been pointing out over and over in fact show that Manning was in contact with Assange several times, and that he was even reprimanded by the "rat" Lamo for doing his bidding.

I wondered if the FBI would ever look at these Wired chat logs, and whether they would stand up in court. But they found other evidence, on Manning's hard drive, AFP reports:

Contact information for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was found on a computer hard drive belonging to Bradley Manning, investigators said Monday, as the US government built its case against the US soldier accused of spilling secrets to the site.

Testifying at a hearing to determine if Manning should face a court-martial, the investigators also said they found evidence of online chats between the US Army private and a computer user identified by the handle "Julian Assange."

ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY YIELDS FEW ADMISSIONS THAT US IS NOT A WAR CRIMINAL

I noticed when the year anniversary for WikiLeaks and Cablegate came around in November, there was hardly any talk. Oh, there were a few lefty blogs that made it seem like "oh, see, there was no damage at all."

There seemed to be little critical analysis of what a swindler Assange was -- essentially selling these cables by doling them out, getting a $1 million book out of it, making various deals with newspapers (was he paid in these transactions?), driving up his value, leaking in dribs and drabs, until finally, petulantly, spitefully dumping the rest of the whole 250,000 cables because he didn't get his way.

As one of the relatively few writers who has kept on the cables and written about them all year (most journalists gave up after the first round of sensations), I have to re-emphasize that indeed they *did* harm people. I always marvelled that "progressives" claimed there was no damage. It's as if they wouldn't be convinced until we could point to a dead man in a pool of blood clutching his WikiLeaks cable where his name was exposed, leading to his assassination by some deadly authoritarian country's secret police. As if people harmed were supposed to *harm themselves some more* by standing up and saying "I was harmed!" Good God, the stupidity and deliberate malevolence around this issue was astounding.

I personally saw ambassadors, USAID workers, human rights activists, UN employees, police and others who were undoubtedly compromised and who likely suffered in ways we can't even follow up on (because the countries are authoritarian, der.)

I personally found that trying to talk to certain officials after WikiLeaks was incredibly hard. They never talked again or ever flipped back emails again as casually as they might once have. Setting up an interview, you felt they were sweeping areas for bugs, metaphorically speaking or in reality, 10 times before they'd even speak off the record. And I'm just one little person who doesn't do many interviews. Think of people who really work full-time interviewing government officials.

What the "progressives" would not admit, either -- which was shameful -- is just how good Team America looked in this thing. We were shown doing pretty well. Julian Assange, whose main purpose was a Leninist "the worse the better" -- to try to force such openness on the US that it would be forced to its knees by its reactionary closure -- was all wrong. There were no really major scandals. There weren't *really* any cases that were so devastating, that the US government was brought down.

Yes, to be sure -- and I was the first to be writing about this myself -- there were times when the US sidestepped and danced and cavorted with despots and pulled its punches in reports and rounded edges that should have been fronted. We get all that. It's not that the US came out looking somehow purer than we knew it to be, I'm not saying that. I'm saying there were no earth-shattering major scandals in Cablegate (and I personally don't find the Collateral Damage video to be anything near the scandal WikiLeaks tendentiously claimed it was, along with WikiLeaks figurant Jacob Appelbaum.)

I'm sure there are those who have this or that cable that they pull out that shows the US to be up to no good on some favourite cause of theirs. I have a few that show the US to be craven to dictators myself. But I'm talking about the entire "opus," if you will, of 250,000 cables. They do not indict the US as a war criminal. Not by any stretch of the imagination. They show the US having to deal with lots of other leaders of the world who are war criminals, and not always emerging smelling like a rose, but they mainly reveal the world of diplomacy to be largely a place of having to deal with a lot of nasties -- everywhere from Sudan to Iran to China to Russia.

SPRING OF ARAB SPRING NOT IN WIKILEAKS

There are some people who have mounted the crazy thesis that WikiLeaks "caused" or "brought about" or "dramatically helped" the Arab Spring making it all "worth it". That just strikes me as whack. The forces that brought about the Arab Spring were not set in motion by anything Julian Assange did, or anything that the US was shown to do wrong in propping up some of these dictators. It was set in motion by the dictators themselves, who were too cruel, and people couldn't take it anymore, especially when they had Facebook to talk about it -- but not only social media, just real life, face to face. That's all. Any other claim does a grave disservice to the truth of change: that it is brought about because of cruel dictators and people's bravery in fighting them, not "US neoliberal policies" blah blah. Credit where credit is due, you know?

PUNISHMENT IS DUE

Should Manning get court-martialed and sentenced to an entire life in prison, at the age of 24? I don't know, I'm not a military lawyer or judge. I do believe he should be punished for stealing classifed government documents.

The answer to this case isn't,  as some libertarian youths tell me, "Oh, we shouldn't classify so many documents."

No, kids. We shouldn't steal so many classified documents. Shifting attention to the issue of what should be declassified is entirely wrong. It's like the erosion of the concept of theft that we've seen from the Google/EFF lobby telling us that copyright infringement isn't theft, or worse that copying content really isn't theft anyway, because it should all be "liberated."

The US is a liberal democratic state -- and is under the "progressive" president Barack Obama now, for God's sake. It will not get more liberal than this. So a liberal democratic government doesn't get to classify cables? Why? It has to deal with some of the world's worst regimes, and take confidential reports from people in some of the most vulnerable positions. Why can't it classify documents?! Of course it can, and should, and will, despite what the lolbertarians think about it.

ASSANGE IMPLICATED -- AND WHY ELLSBERG IS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

So now there's the question of Assange. He's shown to be in direct touch with Manning by the military's forensic reports, and that means he is directly implicated, not just the New York Times reporting about the Pentagon Papers, not news media, not a journalist, but a source helping to commit a crime to get classified documents. Daniel Ellsberg leaked his own memo -- his own content, if you will -- that he himself had written in a government study group, as a matter of conscience.

Bradley Manning and Julian Assange on the other hand stole and leaked other people's memos, and as an act of vindictive anarchic destruction against authority. Manning's pose of a man of conscience striken over the round-up of the Iraqis with the printing press kind of falls apart when he doesn't just leak that story first, and doesn't find material to back up his claims to leak on that story, but deliberately grabs huge quantities of stuff "because he can" just to stick it to the Man.

The whistleblower defense seems to hold for Ellsberg over the years, even if he himself doesn't seem to grasp the big difference between himself and Manning and Assange.

Of course, by the time the Reddits and Slashdotters get done with it, this evidence will be picked apart and dismissed and scorned, but yet, it stands.

DO TELL

So, people, let's not make this be about "being gay" -- claiming that a man serving in the military before the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" gets to steal documents and commit massive destructive acts against the United States because he is troubled about his transgendered nature. That's bogus.

And let's realize that if Manning was directly in touch with Assange, and the military now has evidence for that, then we now have proof, if we didn't before, of what a liar Assange is.

Hatred for the Holidays -- and Troubling Response from Sen. Lieu

The story of a company pulling its advertising for a sit-com about American Muslims under pressure from a conservative family-values group has a lot of people mad on both sides of the issue.

Lowes Home Improvement, a furniture company (not the movie theater), pulled its advertising from this show about Muslims in Detroit after the Florida Family Association wrote and complained it would have "propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda's clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values."

That all seems overblown and extreme, when the worst thing that's going to happen to American Muslims is that they're going to get the same vacuous sit-com treatment that Jews, blacks, Hispanics, gays and other minorities have gotten on American TV, and be trivialized and homogenized. Maybe that's a sign of "having arrived" or "being accepted"? Maybe it's silly or politically correct? It's hardly likely to unleash the mullahs' murderous propaganda on to unsuspecting couch-potatoes.

The answer to speech that seems hateful and racist is more speech, however, not less, and that's not what the left or Sen. Ted Lieu are reaching for as solutions.

Moveon.org is agitating for Lowes to return their advertising support, and Sen. Lieu is looking for laws he can prosecute Lowes with (!). This is very bad stuff, and frankly, worse that the original offense of the conservative group, because these moves by the left and Lieu attack the whole system supporting the First Amendment, and don't just spread hate and mistrust.

The left has a hard time accepting the idea of the corporation as person, or the corporation as a profit-making entity, or the corporation as anything, really. They love collectives, but not in the form of corporations. So they think the solution to a speech problem they don't like is to impose behaviour on a free agent in a free market. That's wrong. They don't get to do that under American law. But of course, they are busy trying to erode that law.

No corporation can be forced to place or withdraw advertising. It's a free act in a free market and depends on the judgement of the corporation itself. Moveon.org, a nonprofit and a PAC, would ask for no less for itself. What if some moral majority somewhere in some state were able to compel Moveon.org to give some of their money to rightwing causes and support conservative businesses, out of some notion of "balance"? That's why I definitely oppose signing the petition about this.

Sen. Ted Lieu is worse. First, he said he would respond with some kind of legislation about this incident, as if he could write a law forcing corporations to support loopy sit-coms that are supposed to mainstream minorities -- the melting pot method used on every other minority in America. Or force corporations to do *anything* regarding their advertising. There is no way in hell that should pass.

Worse, he is casting around for California laws (Lowes is in California) that could be used to prosecute this speech of theirs -- this decision first to advertise, then pull the ad, then put up a Facebook explanation apologizing for putting their foot in, then pulling the Facebook.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong of Sen. Lieu. But how did he get like this? What on earth drove him to reach for these outrageous authoritarian solutions -- suppressing the speech and actions of corporations?!

It turns out Ted Lieu is an immigrant, his family came to this country from some Asian country not specified when he was 3, and he had a hard life, starting out in a basement, working in a store, working his way up. So he is very sensitive to the idea of immigrants and minorities being harmed by conservative groups like the Florida Family Association. Understood.

Ted Lieu did so well under the "American Dream" (and, despite George Carlin's dark propaganda, he didn't have to be asleep to enjoy it). He went to Georgetown Law School, and also served in the military. He has an impressive personal record. But how did he get through Law School, and clerk and not learn a thing about the jurisprudence of the First Amendment?! There isn't any possible law in a state or in the nation that could force a company to advertise a show they don't want to advertise, just because they once *did* wish to advertise with it, and then changed their mind.

That he could even tell a reporter that he was going to look for such a law is just extreme -- and gravely troubling. I could never, ever vote for such a senator. All he is doing, in fact, is reinforcing the stereotype and fueling the fears of the conservative Florida group that classic liberal American values are undercut by alien ideologies.

If he doesn't find a law to prosecute Lowes with, he's going to pass some kind of condemnatory resolution -- really ill-advised as bullying and a chill on speech and a misuse of legislative power -- and also organize a boycott of Lowes -- something that elected officials should not be doing -- it's more the prerogative of civic groups or unions.

You can't force people to engage in politically-correct behaviour in society at large, in the marketplace. To be sure, there are rules imposed on schools and workplaces for such behaviour, and some would debate this is a good thing. But in the outside marketplace of ideas, goods, and services, there isn't such a "code of conduct" -- and can't be. It would be impossible to create and enforce without doing huge damage to the notion of free speech.

Lowes didn't do anything wrong. They caved under pressure from a community group, but that's their business judgement -- they saw a controversy brewing, and they wanted to remove their brand from it. If 30,000 people hate that, they can just not buy Lowes stuff. But they can't force Lowes to say things they don't believe, or enter a politicized fray.

Once again, there's another troubling undertow to all this in the Wired State. Nobody can say anything bad about the obviously bad Islamic agenda in a place like Iran without fear of political incorrectness or fear of having it somehow apply to American Muslims in Detroit. The left goes around braying constantly that they don't want to be accused of antisemitism just because they ferociously single out and criticize Israel,and constantly complain that they're in a context where they can't criticize Israel without being called antisemitic -- doesn't that same principle apply to Islam? And I'd add that in many cases, the leftists *are* antisemitic because they've become absolutely obsessive, unhinged, and hateful about Israel.

Has the same thing happened with this group in Florida, on the question of Islam -- the inability to distinguisn countries and individuals related in some way to them? It seems so. They should at least wait until the show airs before pouncing on some actual thing that actually undermines American values!

Meanwhile, Sen. Lieu and the left are the ones in this story actually active undermining American values supposedly in the name of tolerance. There are plenty of other ways to respond. They could condemn the group in Florida and Lowes, but rather than trying to deny them their First Amendment-protected speech, they should find new advertisers for the show.

 

 

The Boys Have Made Another War Game: Google Street View with a M4A1 Assault Rifle.

Wow, this is stupid.

Google Street View, with a M4A1 assault rifle, so you can browse around the world and shoot stuff.

Some wit already dubbed it "Google Theft Auto".

Is that really the best you can do, guys?

It's like the Lindens, when they made the first iteration of their 3-D virtual world, they concentrated on shooting stuff, even blowing up the ground to terraform.

What I'm trying to figure out is whether Google itself developed this, or a third-party -- it's probably a third-party given the URL.

 

 

 

Why I Have My Doubts About the Magic Pike Software Ushahidi Golos Used -- Just like the Kremlin Does

I can't think of anyone more cunning and devious than the Kremlin gray cardinal Vladislav Surkov.  Sergei Lavrov is somebody we used to meet with here in NY at the UN and he was more of a perestroika liberal a decade ago than he is today; now he's the grand sourpuss of the Russian Imperium, presiding over everything from threats to Georgia to re-writing of World War II history. And Putin, of course, is a thug. Not only for what he said about drowning the Chechens in their outhouses. But for many things.

Yet oddly enough, I share their criticism of Ushahidi, the software platform that is the latest magic fairy-dust sprinkled technology panacea that is supposed to Empower the People and Bring Democracy if not Peace and Prosperity.

The Kremlin calls Golos an "outside interference." And that's exactly what it is. Not because it is funded by US foundations, government or private. I'm all for having the US have a democratic foreign policy that involves supporting like-minded dissidents abroad in democratic movements, with circumvention technology and social media. Good! If the Russians find this "interference in internal affairs," they are trying to turn the clock back before 1975, when the Helsinki accords affirmed that human rights concerns are NOT interference in internal affairs.

I will, agree, however, that Ushahidi and newfangled social media crowdsourcing technology is outside agitation, is rooted in "netroots" and not organic communities and is empowering only a thin layer of wired elite -- who are in fact terribly vulnerable to being coopted as we shall see, if not marginalized or simply DDOS'd out of business.

[Yeah, I get it that Golos uses some "Russian brand" of Ushahidi that "isn't" Ushahidi. But Ushahidi is open source. Golos tekkies surely looked at the code. If they adapted it or reverse-engineered it, so what? It's still Ushahidi! So I will call it that as a generic.]

Golos claims "7,000" violations were recorded. And that this is "20 times more" than in 2007. Really? How do we know? What if measuring lots of complaints causes more complaints to be made? A known bias that occurs in any system. What if a lot of those 7,000 complaints are hearsay, duplicates, or wrong? Is anyone checking? Who's going to watch the watchers now?

Let me explain.

I should do a separate post explaining the back story of Ushahidi, the very legitimate critiques to be had about it, the very relevant criticism about it from people actually doing emergency humanitarian work in the field, and more. And I will soon. Meanwhile, here's someone who has probably said it better than I could:

There is no crowd of open-source developers ready to attack every problem. In fact, most open-source projects are the product of one obsessed individual who wrote the software to meet his own needs. Often this individual was joined by other programmers who shared the founder's vision and, under his direction, created great software

But the short form is this: when you have a giant "magic" sieve that is supposed to sift out the democratic "golos" or Voice of the People (er, People's Will, anyone?) what do you have? In fact, you have a very big thing full of holes. It doesn't take Kremlin TV to point this out, for their own nefarious reasons. Democrats and liberals should point this out, too.

The first thing to understand about any piece of magical software is that it really only empowers one set of people: the coders. The software engineers.

Many people using magical pixie-dust software don't realize this. They think as users they are empowered and they are doing magical things with this magic pike. But they aren't. They are, as Jaron Lanier explains, making themselves into gadgets, and adapting themselves to the software.

So the first thing that goes wrong with crowd-sourcing software is that the crowd disappears and loses access to it even as the crowd grabs it because the geeks running it, who have a certain culture, a certain set of beliefs, a certain ethos (or lack of ethics, even), a certain bar-camp je ne sais quoi, become horrified. They hate what they get. What they get are "trolls". Or "griefers". Or "idiots". Or "the clueless" or just "random noise" and so they hurry to filter, curate, collate, manage. Managed democracy. That's what happened to the bunch running the forest-fire "crowdsourcing". It's really more "curated crowdsourcing" or, well, I'd call it "managed democracy". It's not truly open. Only you can prevent forest fires, I noted -- but the devs know better.

I don't know the specifics of Golos and how they used this magic pike of Ushahidi. But I wish they hadn't. Because its magic isn't real, and it has lots of problems. It's not only that if you really had everybody using it, it would produce a lot of senseless crap and a firehose of information that would paralyze the system.

It's that it prevents normal human judgement from being empowered, which is really what you want to empower instead of software.

Let's take the example of Haiti: lots of people call in to the map, let's say. So people with smartphones who have lots of garbage and debris still in their street call in because people are getting diseases. Or people call in because their well is filled with dead animals or human excrement. Or they have a child with a slight fever. Meanwhile, the person under the rubble doesn't have a smart phone and can't call in. The mother with the child who is actually dying from an injury or severe illness can't leave to go to the phone or her battery died. And so on. The system creates a mirror world that isn't the real world; humanitarians go running off to take care of garbage or fevers and the worse stuff is ignored because they don't go out and talk to real people anymore life, face to face, but wait for messages on smart phones. They get dumb from the smart phones.

You know what would have been so much better, and that is what we do in this country (and which was done in Russia, too, to some extent, but was crippled by the DDOSing of the main independent websites like Ekho Moskvy): exit polls. Get some really well organized journalists with cell phones and a really well-organized relay, and do exit polls and relay the information to some dedicated website outside the realm of the FSB's ability to DDOS it. Radio Liberty, perhaps, although they can be wary of getting involved in anything that seems like inciting unrest (and rightly so). Some honest broker that they can set up to handle the calls and the data and make the map -- but not based on Ushahidi, on human intelligence. Not based on zillions of dots for Golos, but the actual human voice saying who they voted for. To be sure, people don't always tell the truth, and sometimes in Russia, they also play to the interviewer in particular. Even so, you'd get the story, with some margin of error.

Ushahidi is designed to destroy organizations and organic structures, even as it cunningly hides its tracks and claims it is about "empowering people" and "linking communities" and all sorts of other wonderous things. (That one powerful original founder and his or her likeminded founding followerings of course would find that concept abhorrent because they think they were all wonderful and democratic.)

But it is, indeed, designed deliberately to forcibly replace organic institutions -- governments, civic movements, nonprofits -- with a meta-layer or network on the Internet run by coders. That's what's wrong with it, inherently. Coders who arrogate to themselves the power of meta-organizers, outside agitators, if you will, destroy whatever institutions there are to be destroyed in meat world (perhaps only metaphorically, but increasingly, really), and then refashion things by their lights.

It's pretty insidious. Only they can see what's happening in the system, and whatever claims they have of transparency, there are always issues. Always! There are always democratic discussions that ought to have been had about how the software functions itself, all the decisions, bugs, trees -- and these aren't had by the general public, in the belief that they "can't understand technology". But issues about velocity of information, display of information, prioritization of information, geolocation of information, verification of information, collation of information, algorithms installed on searches of information, relevancy and weight for information -- etc. etc. etc. -- these are all governance decisions that the public didn't have a say in, but must now, perforce, use, to have a "golos". Not fair. Like all software things. Not fair.

I saw the Tor freaks bragging on Liberationtech today, for example, that "no one can see their code because it's so complicated." Like...that's a good thing?! For democracy?! For freedom????

Now, from the perspective of some movements and parties and activities, if Ushahidi and crowdsourcing software and other social media have the power to destroy institutions, isn't that a good thing if the institution is the Kremlin? Or the institutionalized siloviki cabal running the Kremlin? (which I would hope at least most people would understand is worth keeping in a reformed and enlightened  *government*).

Well, yes and no. If you create something entirely "meta" and networked above and beyond the Kremlin, what is the Kremlin? It's an old fortress next to a red square. If you create something above and beyond "parties," what is Just Russia or United Russia or the ill-named LDPR? Just bunches of people arguing among themselves. The "real" world is now meta-meta, and is the Wired State, run by coders and their friends. Do these include the smart descendents of the KGB's Fifth Directorate to control dissidents? Oh, I don't know. Does it? Or not?

If the Kremlin, if they were using this same software (and it may come to that), would not be any different with it. They'd let it fill up with their own networks and own circles just like the devs of the "good guys" do. We've already seen the fake veneer of "direct democracy" (which is never really direct and never really democracy) in this voting on a fishing law -- anodyne fake stuff -- which is merely cosmetic, merely a feel-good.

Is there any honest broker that could run Ushahidi sufficiently and truly democratically and fairly?

No, there is not. That's because the entire process of software production -- decision-making about how socialware is made to serve actual communities -- is not democratized and won't be for some time (and perhaps never, because of the geeks' grab for power).

Today, the secret police merely take down the sites. Tomorrow, they infiltrate the bar-camps. Look out! They're already everywhere.

Is anyone else troubled by the idea that Russia has only one independent election monitoring group? Shouldn't there be dozens? In a country the size of Russia?! Shouldn't each party and news outlet and group be starting up watchdogs? Something about that "one-ness" doesn't add up for me.

Global Voices is talking about the "net hamsters" and deciding that now it's all about the hipsters and the cool kids and not "violent nationalists". We're going to be ENDLESSLY hearing about how this election was "won" (well, successfully challenged and fraud exposed) "due to social media". Until, well, it really becomes clear how the Internet can't really win things because it's not sufficiently democratic and liberal. It is vulnerable at one very obvious point: it is in the hands of coders. Switch out some of those coders already bar-camped by the Kremlin, and your meta is now Surkov's meta.

The reality is, these people protesting are nationalists, too, just not Putin's or Nashi's nationalists. I wrote yesterday that now that smartphoners and Facebookers like Alena Popova (business woman, start-up supporter) and Ilya Ponomaryov (head of Duma technology committee) have experienced what it's like to get arrested and beaten by police (something the dissidents and human rights activists have already known for 50 years), we will see if they become radicalized -- with Putin's help -- or co-opted -- with Putin's help.

I'm expecting the latter. I'm expecting Just Russia, as the one lone commentator noted in Popova's FB stream, to join or merge or get eaten by United Russia and I'm expecting any holdouts to get marginalized and called that most horrible of Russian names, the marginal. We'll see.

And the reason I think this is because they have been weakend by software. Watch the cell phones all go off in a heart-beat like they did in Turkmenistan. Or watch certain people suddenly lose their accounts like they do in Turkmenistan. Or simply watch a few people get strategically beaten up badly like Kashin.

 Nick Judd at Tech President seems shocked that invincible software and the meta-republic that is the Wired State has taken such a beating in Russia. How could this be, when the Russian-American commission pledged to help civil society with technology! How can this be when Yandex claimed they wanted software developers to help civil society!

 

 

Alexander Howard @Digiphile Washington O'Reilly Correspondent Blocks me on Google+, Fears Debate

One of the things I've watched with a very weather eye since its inception a few years ago is "Gov 2.0" or "the open government movement" or "open source goes to Washington." That's because I see it merely as a Silicon Valley stalking horse of big IT and the ethics-free hackers trying to take power. Lobbying is a sacred tradition in our country. Lobbying is legal! Lobbying is good! Lobbying should be regulated, and registered. So it's not that they lobby that bothers me; it's that they say that what they do isn't lobbying.

What the Wired State hackers and big ITsters do who claim they oppose evil corrupt corporate lobbyists is pretend that they aren't lobbyists, they aren't evil paid agents, but are authentic, true, "direct democracy", the "netroots" if not actually the "grassroots". They pretend that because they have social networking technology, they are "of the people" and "for the people" even if not exactly "by the people" because no one has elected them. I really do hate the scam this entails. I hate the sheer hubris and phoniness of this pose. Of course they are lobbyists, and well-paid lobbyists, at that.

To describe Alexander Howard as a "journalist" is really stretching it. He doesn't report news; he shapes public opinion about technology. Different! Different!

Chief among the snakeoil salesmen of Silicon Valley is Ted O'Reilly. He has a huge publishing empire of course, is beloved by many a geek, and has a huge position from which to serve as one of the great Silicon Valley influencers. I have read him for years and watched his videos and speeches for years and I see him as basically peddling that "your information wants to be free, my information is available for a fee" kool-aid that I find the essential Big Lie of the Internet as we know it.

Alexander Howard is the Washington O'Reilly correspondent. At first a few years ago or whenever it was that he started out on Twitter, with the handle "digiphile," he seemed like this nice guy who was kinda curious and kinda enthusiastic about technology and basically an interesting geek, despite, of course, the sect that he came from (O'Reilly).

But I found that as time when on, he has become more and more outspoken and influential and less and less willing to debate anything.

When I saw him peddling the Participatory Budgeting stuff (which is a kind of political-sect-meets-software-sect operation), I really had to sigh. Why does someone like this do the agitprop work of Working Families? (These politicians who are "experimenting" with the Participatory Budget, the latest fad in "direct democracy" are from or related to Working Families and other leftist platforms).

Hence, this discussion, which I cut and paste here AFTER logging out of Google Plus, because on my dashboard, it shows "this post no longer exists" because I'm blocked from this thread, and Alex is shown as someone who "doesn't share with me" and Google suggests that I "add him to my circles" and maybe he'll share with me.

Sigh.

He's blocked me -- that's what that means. Google is really Orwellian. They should inform people when someone else has blocked them, or inform them when they are blocked from a thread or deleted. That's just normal, common courtesy. That they don't is function of a) geeky insecurity and thin-skinned demands for "privacy" which is a cover for lack of accountability b) discomfort about transparency about how much their "open" systems are actually filled with closed stuff like this.

Here's what Mr. Open Gov does to me, a critic of his peddling of a software cult. Howard couldn't be more wrong when he claims that "the means of production haven't been socialized." *Of course they have, Alexander* because a software program/website/opensource outlook has collectivized the action, and with only one certain "progressive" perspective, has invaded a public space under camouflage of "democratic participation".

Proof of what I'm saying is easy to establish: you don't see this method applied in or near a Republican office or even something to the center or right of these leftists. That's how you know. It's not a neutral tool.

Notice if you criticize anything on the left, and if you utter the word socialism, you are immediately branded as a nut, a Tea Partier, etc. etc.

Some other comments --

o note how Howard accepts only "constructive" criticism of Gov 2.0. Why does it have to be "constructive"? why are we genuflecting to this cult?

o Working Families is criticized even on the left. It is associated with the controversial ACORN. I'm for health care, better public schools and jobs, but I would try never to vote for any candidate that I see on that cult list unless there was absolutely no other choice. I really don't like the "fusion ticket" method for that reason. This party could never stand on its own, and it bleeds into Democratic Party politics and tickets and gains a foothold.

o Working Families has supported openly and recruited for OWS. That's definitely not a mainstream Democratic Party position.

o Imagine, if you criticize socialist parties and people with questionable organizing tactics and extremist beliefs, you are suddenly "unable to give up your guns" (!) or are for "expensive housing" and "inaccessible health care". What a loon! I don't have health insurance, you dumbass. My kids go to public schools. Do yours???

o Howard says he has no religion of software. But the entire open-source open gov movement does tend to be religious and magical in its thinking about how it will "empower people" or bring about "progressive" goals.

o I've bothered with Alexander Howard over the years precisely because I thought he might be intelligent enough to reason with. But proximity to power may have dimmed that intelligence. If he can't take somebody "messing up" his lovely propaganda piece about a software sect helping a political sect, what can you do? Do what you have to do in any closed society -- route around. Log out of G+ and not bother with him or them at all -- or log out and search for his public comments and continue commenting on them anyway, as relevant.

o Dominic Amann  -- if he doesn't want to hear it from me, he can hear it from the devs at Disqus and Drupal who believe they have indeed baked their beliefs into the software. As for Working Families, it has 35,000 registered members. This is a city of some 8 million people. The Democratic Party usually wins. Ok, then.

o the most creepy part of this exchange is this:

When one looks at the aggregate of the comments you've made on my updates here and elsewhere on the Web, however, along with the public attacks you've levied in person, there's a pattern which many parts of the community has both recognized and called out repeatedly.

This is awfully, awfully creepy. It makes it seem that there is something called "the community" (there isn't). It makes it seem that he, Alexander Howard, is in charge of, or in some sort of leadership position in this putative "community" and can decide to pronounce on someone's behaviour or not (he can't). It makes it sound like there are "many" people who are somehow unhappy or disturbed or righteously indignant about my vigorous attacks on the closed society of "open source" (there aren't, although he may imagine it).

So there you have it. Another closed, tiny  mind of the "open source" movement. Proving my point, yet again. Afraid of debate. Afraid of labels, especially the label "socialism". Afraid of controversy or strife.

Below, the post G+ the social net-nanny tells me now "no longer exists" -- *chuckles* -- but which Google the search engine can still find:

Alexander Howard  -  Yesterday 2:51 PM  -  Public

A well-calibrated endorsement from an expert on participatory budgeting.

#opengov #gov20 #edem

Tiago Peixoto originally shared this post:

It is not that simple, but pretty much of the basics are here. Still, a very nice advocacy piece for citizens and officials who want to start engaging in the debate. Well-calibrated for US audiences.

Shareable: How to Start Participatory Budgeting in Your City

+3

1 share  -  Catherine Fitzpatrick

17 comments  -  Alexander Howard, Jim Stogdill, Dominic Amann, and Catherine Fitzpatrick

0 older comments

Catherine Fitzpatrick  -  How socialist planning by the few can apply a thin veneer of Gov 2.0 glam, and call it "democratization". Just by wiring up and showing up. Resistance? Hell, yes. THAT'S THE ELECTED OFFICIALS' JOB BECAUSE THE PEOPLE ELECTED THEM, NOT YOU SOCIALISTS.

Yesterday 3:08 PM   

Alexander Howard  -  To quote Wikipedia (one of your favorite sources, I imagine):

socialism "is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy."

participatory budgeting is a process of democratic deliberation and decision-making, and a type of participatory democracy, in which ordinary people decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget.

Citizens participating in the budgetary process is not "socialism," by that standards or any other. The means of production have not been "socialized" in this paradigm of budgeting. Regardless, it's up to cities and their citizens to decide whether to adopt these methods for allocation, not to "YOU SOCIALIST" -- whoever they are.

Since I believe that you're a resident of NYC, perhaps you might raise your concerns to the proponents of Participatory Budgeting in New York City and see if they hold water.
http://pbnyc.org/

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Yesterday 3:24 PM   

Catherine Fitzpatrick  -  Yes, I will sure be doing this, since I didn't elect PBNYC, and I see instantly what kind of people they are. It's not democratic deliberation, that's a scam and a ruse. Democratic deliberation takes place in the institutions to which you elect people, not in side bars erected by socialists. Socialism is EXACTLY what this is about, Alex, because they want to take over the budget by force when they are not elected and apply their notions of "social justice" which are not the majority's. If they really believe they are "leveraging expertise" and all that other buzz word nonsense they can form a watchdog NGO and interact with elected politcians or gasp run for office and see if anybody shows up to elect them. This is just the latest in yet another stealth-socialism methodology to try to take by duplicity, coercion, and propaganda what cannot be obtained by true democracy.

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Yesterday 4:10 PM   

Catherine Fitzpatrick  -  OMG, this is even worse than I thought, it's part of the Working Families cult and cabal. yeessshhhh.

Yesterday 4:19 PM   

Uriah Maynard  -  Whine whine SOCIALISM whine whine CULT whine whine SOCIAL JUSTICE IS BULLSHIT whine whine. Do you listen to yourself, Catherine? Because you sound like a tea party nutjob extremist. Planning budgets as an open process? SOCIALISM! Public schools? SOCIALISM! Highway funding? IT'S A SOCIALIST CONSPIRACY, I TELL YOU! Jesus fucking christ, get a hobby or something.

Yesterday 4:53 PM   

Dominic Amann  -  +Catherine Fitzpatrick - Sure, you would much prefer deliberation to take place in the offices of elected officials, behind closed doors with only the lobbyists and campaign donors to influence the politicians. Much more democratic than actually allowing the voting public to attempt to sway them.

I mean if ordinary people without tons of money were able to sway politicians, we might get, you know, some Wall St crooks thrown in jail, or get billionaires to pay as high a percentage of taxes as I do. Perhaps while checking on the definition of socialism, you should check on the definition of democracy, conspiracy and cult while you are at it. You will find (if your brain is actually functional, and not completely overridden by tea party dogma) that there is in fact a conspiracy, and you will find it BY FOLLOWING THE MONEY. Not by focussing on a few poor people trying to get government to do what they were voted to do (instead of what big business is paying them to do).

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Yesterday 5:04 PM (edited)   

+1

  

Jim Stogdill  -  I once attended a school board meeting in my town. I guess I must be a socialist. Damn my luck.

Yesterday 5:27 PM   

+1

  

Catherine Fitzpatrick  -  Yes, coming from the Working Families cult, it is socialism, and as a liberal, I oppose socialism because it harms our freedoms. It's not about the Tea Party or being a "nut job" but about being a good liberal. The mystery is why you aren't a good liberal and don't see this for what it is -- a scam.

The four people running this have a decided political agenda and viewpoint in NYC. If this was the open empowering pluralistic "people's" thing you claim, we'd see a wide variety of perspectives -- Republicans, Democrats, Independents -- all making use of it. Instead, we see Working Families cultists. If a district in Queen is now all Republican, why would Democrats in the minority or the Working Families cult get to decide how the discretionary money should be doled out in that district, just because they show up with smart phones?! They don't. This is decidedly UNDEMOCRATIC and empowering only those with a certain agenda and perspective. Which is why I call it out.

Yes, I'd prefer deliberations behind closed doors with ELECTED officials than having sectarians show up and grab things by their lights, yeah, I sure would! But I don't have to wait for smoke signals from behind closed doors. I call up my elected officials or email them. Do you? I see them walking around my neighbourhood, in fact, and I talk to them about housing, heat, recycling, health, etc. issues in the area. Do you? As a single working mother I don't have lots of time to go sit in meetings and fight sectarians from Working Families, but I do shout out when I see that they might encroach on the more liberal DEMOCRATIC leaders I've elected, NOT THEM.

I have a lot more faith in lawyers or business people from my neighbourhood I've seen all my life with political and management experiment parsing out money that my FREE MEDIA tells me is being done so I do have some check and balance on it, than I do have for secretive political cults like Working Families doing this with their various pretend-democrat cadres showing up for meetings and taking over. "The tyranny of who shows up*. It's not about Wall Street. It's about My Street, big guy.

Um, I don't subscribe to Tea Party dogma. Indeed, when I read their materials -- I read materials from all viewpoints -- I see it is dogmatic, supersticious and unfinformed. You know, like the Marxists in Working Families? Like Internet People like yourselves and like Jeff Brown, who is a total obsessive loon? You know, like that.

I follow the money in my neighbourhood with the people I elected. I don't need the smart-phone set to take my tax dollars away from me.

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9:32 AM   

+1

  

Dominic Amann  -  +Catherine Fitzpatrick - you simply shouting about CULTISTS and SOCIALISTS is empty and meaningless. I can just as easily shout out about UNEDUCATED and IGNORANT people who think they know what's good for themselves - and I would be equally undemocratic. Everybody has a "certain agenda and perspective". That is because no two human beings are identical.

If you happen to be right about Working Families (and I don't really know much about them other than I happen to agree with a few things I have heard), your style actually harms your cause - because you come across as a libertarian nut job instead of a democrat. As is more likely the case, (and what you appear to be), you are a shill for the tea party, pretending to be a democrat and bashing the tools some democrats are using to counterbalance republican ownership of fox news, the tea party and powerful corporate interests. I see an increasing number of "letters to the editor" and blog posts that are from "I normally vote liberal" or "I consider myself unbiased" followed with "but on this issue I am changing my vote..." which, after the first dozen or so, start to smack of some kind of low level orchestrated campaign to sway the opinions of the drones who feel that voting is an exercise to pick the winner.

Much the same thing happens in tech columns, where MS has paid shills who opine and advocate on MS behalf in any debate they can find. Apple has a similar thing going, but they don't have to pay their shills ;).

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9:56 AM   

Dominic Amann  -  +Catherine Fitzpatrick - equally inconsistent in your post is that somehow it is Ok for you to harrangue your elected officials - call them up, converse with them on the street about issues that matter to you, but you are bent on denying another group of people the right to organize and encourage others to do exactly the same thing.

Perhaps you need to actually explain to those of us who are uninformed exactly what makes Working Families dangerous / marxist / socialist - otherwise I am afraid that all you are doing is name calling, and that carries absolutely no weight with me whatsoever.

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9:59 AM   

+1

  

Dominic Amann  -  +Catherine Fitzpatrick - thanks to you, Catherine, I am now better informed about Working Families. They appear to stand for "well-paying jobs, affordable housing, accessible health care, better public schools and more investment in public services". Frankly, these ought to be the goals for ANY political party or grass-roots organization. Seriously, are you asking your poiliticans for lower paying jobs, or more expensive housing, or less accessible health care, or worse public schools etc?

Or are you saying that these policies are a smokescreen for some nefarious communist plot to take over the country and force you to give up your guns? If so, then I am very curious as to your evidence.

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10:19 AM   

+1

  

Alexander Howard  -  Despite the name calling and yelling early on, I'm heartened to find commenters on Google+ willing to take on the arguments on the merits, particularly in thinking critically and independently about them.

10:30 AM   

Catherine Fitzpatrick  -  There isn't any "name-calling" here, Alex, stop clutching your pearls. It's ok to call Working Families a cult. Are you familiar with them at all? Do you live in New York? Do you follow socialist politics at all? Or do you just paste out of dictionaries and Wikipedia from your perch in California or wherever? I am thinking critically and independently about this completely misrepresented report about some very biased software and "direct democracy" proponents -- that's EXACTLY what I do (and you don't). Direct democracy is ALWAYS suspect these days because it's a code word for a self-selected "progressive" bunch with smart-phones trying to take over.

You find criticism of your software religion every time to be somehow crazy, nutty, biased, guilty of Latin Boys School "crimes" like "ad hominem attacks' blah blah.

But do YOU EVER think critically of the software and the cults associated with it that you hawk so regularly and often, Mr. Digiphile? It's ok if you don't, but don't then try to tar others who do as nutty name-callers.

Participatory Budgeting is yet another attempt at people with very, very definite and sectarian leftist political views to make themselves appear as if they are broadly democratic and "fixing" what they say is a corrupt, unrepresentative capitalist-ridden system. That's their right to do. But the rest of us who aren't in that less than 1 percent occupying Wall Street don't see it as they do. We're happy to go on voting in the Democratic Party. We're happy to go on discussing budgets with elected politicians with other social media like Twitter and Facebook and email without the "help" of software cultism engineered by four politicians from a very definite tendency to look like something its not.

"Participatory Budget" has red flags all over it, and reasonable, liberal, intelligent people should be calling these out all over the place. Instead, they are gullible, they mindlessly pass it along and retweet it and copy it and give it legitimacy.

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11:41 AM (edited)   

Alexander Howard  -  +Catherine Fitzpatrick I live and work in D.C., a fact that's readily apparent to anyone who follows me or my work. I don't find constructive criticism in the sphere of open government or Gov 2.0 to be "nutty" or "crazy" or "biased" in general, to use your words, not mine. Governments are trying to adjust to a very different landscape brought on by technological disruption. Many people are critical of those moves, with justification.

I'm happy to stand by my own record of critical thinking, none of which includes the conflation of religion or cults with software, which is the signature thrust of your own oeuvre.

When one looks at the aggregate of the comments you've made on my updates here and elsewhere on the Web, however, along with the public attacks you've levied in person, there's a pattern which many parts of the community has both recognized and called out repeatedly.


It's abundantly clear that your behavior over the years speaks for itself.

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11:56 AM   

Dominic Amann  -  +Catherine Fitzpatrick - so its not name calling if you say so? Because "it's ok to call WF a cult" why - because you say so?

Names used by yourself without explanation or relevance: socialist, marxist, cultist, agenda, digiphile (excuse me - don't you actually run a blog yourself, and espouse the use of twitter and facebook - and aren't you right now using a bleeding edge techological media?)

You have yet to state ONE THING that WF support or espouse that is undemocratic, or even that you personally disagree with. The entire "substance" of your statements is name calling. If this is the extent of your critical thinking, you merely wind up sounding like Sarah Palin.

And what the heck is "biased software"? Have we not only invented artificial intelligence, but gone on to endow it with unmerited opinions already? I must have missed the memo or the nobel prize.

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12:14 PM (edited)   

Jim Stogdill  -  Where is that unsubscribe button. +Catherine Fitzpatrick Perpetually cranky or just a crank? Criminy. I don't know why you are so angry at the world, if I knew i'd probably feel some sympathy, but why go out of your way to piss in this end of the pool?

12:17 PM   

Alexander Howard  -  +Jim Stogdill +Dominic Amann I've followed the advice of many people I respect and blocked her from hijacking any more of my discussion threads on Plus. Goes against the grain but there it is. Thank you for the comments.

12:21 PM   

+1

 

Software Values Permeating Everywhere. Ouch.

It's great when I don't have to write 4,000 words to explain how software programmers bake their ideologies into the software -- when they do it all on their own, so I don't have to turn blue trying to explain how software really isn't a neutral tool. (It's a human artifact with a great deal of personal will baked into it; it is the concretization of human will -- it is sadly the concretization of one set of humans' wills, that other humans' wills often can't affect and find inflexible.)

So here we go, right from the Disqus people:

Disqus rarely gets in your face with their hacker culture propaganda, and keep their notices to a minimum, which is as it should be with a service you need to "see, but not hear."

Children, they say, should be "seen, but not heard." Translators should be "heard, but not seen." Software production fits into that space somewhere, where it should be useful and accommodating and not rigid, and not make itself known like a stone in your shoe.

But Disqus sort of went out of character to speak up against SOPA here.

It’s probably pretty strange to hear us talking about politics, but SOPA presents a direct threat to both Disqus and online communities everywhere. We’re not alone in this: opponents to the bill include Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Wikimedia, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and countless other online companies.

Yeah, it is strange, and of course, it's all whipsawing by the EFF and Google. I'm not sure how Disqus exactly benefits from the California business model since it's a commenting service, but they likely do, somewhere, given that they are FREE.

So, I sounded off (my account on Disqus is Prokofy):

I don't want to be using a service that injects its political views into the software. As Jaron Lanier says, engineers need to keep their religion out of the software.

Daniel Ha of Disqus replied as follows:

Thanks for the thoughts. We don't want to preach, but I will say that all of our software reflects the people behind it in big ways.

User experience is the obvious point, but we'd like our values to permeate throughout too. Hopefully it didn't affect the way you used the software.

Doesn't this explain EVERYTHING that is wrong with software and the Internet! And so well!

We don't want to preach, but our software contacts our religion, anyway -- it reflects it in "big ways". Arghhh.

User experience is important, but not as important as propagandizing our values.

A frank admission of something many of the Better Worlders won't admit -- better to be honest about it. And ugh.

Values...permeating...software. Ouch.

This isn't just some goofy branding exercise. This is a utopian totalitarian idea.

The Origins of Life-Streaming

I was interested to see this story about "Rethinking the Digital Future" in the Wall Street Journal and be reminded of David Gelernter, who was made famous for being harmed by the terrorist Unabomber, but who is now getting more attention for his prescient writings about the web, and his concept of "the life stream". I remember reading about the "life stream" back in the day and not finding it very appealing. But it's interesting now to think about it in terms of Twitter and Facebook feeds.

I've had yet another flotsam and jetsam invade my consciousness as I opened up Facebook and found out the "news" (that really isn't the word we should use for this...info-emission) that somebody was listening to some song and somebody else liked somebody else's photo. I hear there's a way to make that emissions feed really tiny so it doesn't bother you, yet no way to turn it off. Since about once every 3 days there is some actually useful real news in it, i.e. from a country like Russia I follow, I leave it up, but meanwhile, just to stay "friends" with some of my ersatz friendz, and not insult other real friends, I have to cull through the Spotify dreck to find the real stuff.

As I said on Scobleizer the other day, I really should be able to thin out Spotify if I myself haven't installed Spotify and haven't "given permission" for it to tell the world I'm listening to some song. I'm not one of those people who listens to music all day. I'm old-school -- listening to a song is something that I almost never combine with some other activity.

I don't like those Guardian and Washington Post aps either that are telling the world what article I'm reading. I don't quite see how that happened -- I think I joined those "social services" attached to those news sites merely to be able to post comments. Now I have to "watch what I read" as it is broadcast everywhere. Actually, I don't "watch what I read" because I don't care. But every time I see that I have become "news" for what I'm reading, I wonder. Hmm, *should* I "watch what I read"?

Actually, I was frog-marched into joining the Guardian "social network" merely because a RL friend had an article posted via this service to her profile. I clicked on that article. But I didn't get that article. Instead, I got messages and screens driving me to join that network -- or else I couldn't see the article. I backed out, trying to see if I could force up a view of the URL. The best I could do is maybe remember or cut-and-paste the headline and plug it into Google to find it free of "socialization". Sigh. So I ended up force-joining because it was easier. That's how they get you.

Life-streaming turns out to be something that I don't control then, see.

David Gelernter had some other things to say about how files should be abandoned as an architecture. Jaron Lanier says this, too. Files don't bother me as much as they do those geeks. That is, I don't like some of the artifacts of file-ness like the need to rename things all the time to avoid them deleting other things by the same name, i.e. it's too bad things don't have UUIDs on your desktop like they have in SL. In SL, you can have numerous things called Object that are all different (actually, a pain in the ass) but also you can name something Pretty Thing and it will not wipe out the Pretty Thing you forgot you made in 2006 because each thing has its unique ID.

I've talked for a long time about how I want a big dashboard on my desk top that enames me to push things in and out of view -- where file-ness really, really bothers me is email and folders that aren't used and aren't useful and big inboxes. I think it finally occurred to me that the reason companies want email to stay like it is -- in these boxes and all, impossible to copy usefully -- is so that they can keep you as a customer. If it were easy to copy my content out of Juno, I'd be gone along with the $9.95 a month. Ditto Yahoo, which is free. Also, having these boxes and structures as they are makes it easier to scrape my data, and then pitch to me ads along the sides, or look the other way while spam comes to me based on my email keywords.

It's interesting that Gelernter is now consulting with Apple to make essentially a Facebook-killer, and has the ideology that "Facebook won't be around forever." I don't particularly like Facebook; I only like it as a hedge against Google and Twitter.

(BTW, I've now discovered that the theory of big titans clashing and creating freedom for ordinary people as an uneasy byproduct as expounded to me for years by Vitaly Komar is in fact published in the form of an essay by Komar in The Other Russia edited by Misha Glenny and Norman Stone.)

I may disagree with what Gelernter ultimately has to say but here's something encouraging:

About Google he also has mixed feelings. He values Google's efforts to make the world's undigitized documents, such as out-of-print books, available to the worldstream. But he also mistrusts Google. "Google impresses me as wanting power more than beauty. Although Steve Jobs was no friend of mine, I admired the fact he was in pursuit of beauty. I don't pick up any of that at Google. The important engineers are the ones who are dominated by aesthetics, not just engineering."

I'm a critic of technology and technologists and I resurrect the reputation of the misunderstood Luddites quite often, but I can't imagine endorsing anything like the Unabomber or even his writings, shorn of his public terrorist actions.

I don't know why Ted Kascynski came to hate David Gelernter such as to actually attempt to kill him and result in maiming him and confining him to a life of pain which he has eloquently overcome. It's just chilling and horrible. I don't believe in this cabin-in-the-woods stuff. That is, I enjoy going to cabins in the woods as much as the next person, and I grew up going to more cabins in the woods probably than most people, and often had to see woods I played in as a child turned into housing tracts or malls or roads. At some level I feel sorry but I also realize people need houses and malls and roads, they aren't the evil that some urban-based utopianists imagine. Ordinary people need them. Perhaps there can be a better balance, but seeking that balance would not start with some ideological hatred of industry, mass culture, fast food, etc. all of which have their place.

The solution to the creeping totalitarianism of the Internet -- and especially the elitist mobile devices based Internet -- is not less technology but more democratization and checks and balances on technology with that same technology.

Actually, Voltaire's Candide may have been the first lifestreaming project. Of course, it used to be called "a novel".  Or perhaps it was one of those other French tell-all autobiographies that everyone said was the first public life lived. Or maybe it was the moocow coming down the road and the nicens boy. Or maybe it's "Now Esau was a hairy man..." Remember all those begats? Those people who loved following the begat thing would probably have loved Facebook and Farmville.

 

Why Seth Godin is Wrong About The Erosion in the Paid Media Pyramid

Since the invention of media (the book, the record, the movie...), there's been a pyramid of value and pricing delivered by those that create it:

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Of course what totalitarian thinker Seth Godin leaves out of his "pyramid" explanation is himself and his class -- the class of people who need *other people's content* to be free and appear to "cost zero" so they can sell consulting and "business ideas" (like "give away content to make a consulting business").

It's terribly misleading to say that YouTube's cost for "one more copy" of something is "zero". Ask Google why Youtube was hemorrhaging money in its first years. Servers cost money. Serving ads cost money. Managing customers costs money (that's the sort of thing ALWAYS left out of the calculations of the copyleftist totalitarians like Seth Godin). Oh, and licensing fees cost money -- Google has to pay some of those to music companies to keep grabbing their content.

The cost of gaining attention isn't trivial either.

What's really eroding -- and why there is a struggle for people like Seth Godin and Fred Wilson -- is the California Business Model (free accounts on platforms that have "zero costs", free uploads of content without regard to IP concerns, then "catch me if you can" with DMCA takedowns).

That model is under assault from Congress with SOPA and IP protection legislation. But more than that, it's under assault with the over-vaulations of IPOs, and the shakiness of things like Groupon that try to perpetuate the entire "ad click" model that customers are growing weary of. (People are preferring to click on their friends' recommendations of what to buy, rather than strangers' ads, and that's why Facebook wants to get all up in your grill and find out your personal information so they can get in the middle of friend-to-friend transactions and try to get a piece of that pie.)

Seth Godin makes a living consulting trying to get businesses into that friend stream too. There's nothing wrong with that; it's a service. What's wrong with these little service-provider middle-men that get in the way of businesses and customers, however, is that they keep imposing on us all a collectivist worldview that is entirely self-serving. It's entirely self-serving to merely their own consulting businesses and to *some* platform providers, notably Google, that want free bandwidth and free content so they can sell ads, too.

Norwegian Killer Found Insane; Video Games Do Affect Your Brain

Few people are going to link this story about the Norwegian terrorist responsible for killing 77 people at a youth summer camp, with this story about how video games affect men's minds.

So I'll link them for you because it's relevant. Sure, they're separate seemingly unrelated items but they are worth examining together to understand our times, the Internet, and the Wired State.

The game industry and the geek universe in general fight vigorously and viciously to disclaim any research indicating that violent video games have any negative effects on people, or that they can cause people to become violent in real life.

If you claim they do, you will be accused of advocating censorship and the Net-Nanny State or worse, get pizza delivered to your home unasked or your web site hacked. There is nothing more violent and ferocious than young male geek gamers insisting on their right to play violent video games, while claiming your moral or psychiatric or legal concerns are irrelevant.

Oh, wait, yes there is:  the game company and their geek developers who make a profit and a living from video games who hate anything that might undermine their bottom line. This is an industry with billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of customers and they lobby really hard for their interests so you will not win. For example, if there is a scholarly conference on gaming, the companies will make sure to donate to it or sponsor speakers or cover costs or supply panels of experts or loyal professors in order to prevent anyone from taking too harsh and critical view of what video games are and what they do.

So, first, the Norwegian killer -- we went through weeks of frenzy while all the lefty pundits declared his atrocity and crime against humanity to be caused by...right-wing bloggers in the United States. Or creepy nationalist groups in England or Germany. Or Christianity and its history of the crusades. There was an ENORMOUS amount of stuff in this light and I recall making some notes to try to counter some of it but didn't find the time, and I felt that some kind of period of mourning should pass.

I remember a colleague wrote a rather pious blog with a title like "An Ordinary Terrorist" to imply that hate movements, right-wing belief systems, fundamentalist Christianity, etc. in combination with the Internet were producing this new sort of monster like the Norwegian fanatic. I was going to write a blog titled "An Extraordinary Terrorist" to illustrate how there were other factors at play in bringing this person to commit such a horrendous crime and that his obsessive writings in fact didn't even contain the references to American bloggers or even Jesus Christ such as to find some credible linkage between these figures and terror against other human beings, and that in fact there isn't the correlary that you might think.  And among the points I wanted to mention was his war-gaming and desensitization to human suffering in this fashion.

Oh, I'm a very big believer in the idea that online affects offline, and that simulations don't end at the log-off. I've seen far too much of it around Second Life. But I do think you have to examine the correlations closely and concede that it's a percentage, not a blanket situation. Funny how so many people were willing to believe that Breivik could get insensed and kill people because he read...Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs, a stridently anti-Islam conservative blog. Yet they couldn't wrap their mind around the idea that maybe he shot people because he had been practicing to shoot people virtually for thousands of hours and had killed thousands of virtual people.

Interestingly, the furor died down about the Norwegian. The atrocity, as awful as it was, fell out of the news, to be replaced by the conflicts in Libya and Syria and whatever other issues attract people of conscience. After the memorial services in Norway, people stopped speculating and just let the investigation continue quietly

Now the preliminary examination is concluded and after 36 hours and 13 meetings, two psychiatrists have pronounced Breivik not fit to stand trial by reason of insanity and recommended that he be incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.

This finding still has to be reviewed by a court and there may be opposition opinions.

But despite having said earlier that Breivik might be sane because he seemed to plan his murders so methodically, the psychiatrists are now saying he is delusional.

And, given that he thinks he is a commander with an avenging mission against Muslims and leftwing parties in Norway, in a movement consisting evidently of just one person, himself, and maybe a few sketchy links to some networks of haters, he does seem delusional.

The question is how somehow who can make preparations for murder, i.e. buy fertilizer and various chemicals over the Internet, study maps and approaches and timing, etc. and then coldly execute murders of so many people, could be out of touch with reality. Usally people who are crazy can't do things like drive a car.

I can only submit that maybe we don't know everything that can be known about the modern forms of crazy, and maybe one of those variables is the new ways in which video games affect brains.

Breivik was an active player of online and offline war games and this can be seen on his Facebook page and from other evidence. In these games, you endlessly kill other humans or beings remorselessly, and if you yourself are killed, you  just respawn eventually or take a potion and get back in the game.

Recently, the LA Times wrote about research showing that violent video games do change people's brains.

Dr. Yang Wang, a radiologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, and colleagues divided healthy men who were 18 to 29 years old and not frequent players of violent games randomly into two groups.  One group was asked to play a shooter video game for 10 hours over the course of a week and to refrain from playing the game for a second week.  The second group was instructed not to play any violent video games at all over the two-week period.

All of the study subjects had functional magnetic resonance imaging tests at the beginning of the study, after one week and at the end of the study.  The analyses showed that at one week, the game players had less activation in parts of the brain associated with cognitive function and emotional control than they had at baseline, and than the control group.  Activation increased again after the second week, when the men didn't play the game. 

Yeah, I'm sure the Giga Om and Massively and Reddit lolbertarians and others are all fiercely disputing this like they often dispute the connection between online child pornography or simulation of child pornography in a world like Second Life and offline crimes against children. No matter. Law-enforcers and psychiatrists find the connections in practice and work toward remedies.

Just because your brain changes doesn't mean it changed for the worse, but if the areas affected are things related to "emotional control," maybe you can start to wonder about creating generations of people without remorse, who don't feel empathy for another's suffering.

I remember reading years ago in all the child development books popular in the 1990s that there was a window for establishing empathy. There was a certain time period in a toddler's life, say, 18 months or 32 months, when they realized that the green peas that they were rapturous about, for example, were not something that other people liked, even if they squished some right on their face. Or that they didn't like getting sand thrown in their eyes or a bop on the head from a shovel anymore than the toddler himself did. The lightbulb goes off during this phase and people develop empathy -- or it doesn't. Maybe it never has a chance to go off when a child is constantly plunked down by TVs or now even ipads or videos or distracted babysitters and never has an adult interacting with him in real time and shaping his impressions and providing feedback.

Apropos of early infant brain development: The other day I saw Laura Rozen, a columnist who used to be at Foreign Policy and is now on Politico write something awful on Twitter. I thought about responding to her because it really bothered me, but then got busy with something else. Today, I see she's deleted the tweet from her feed. It was a late-night parental frustration tweet that she was trying to deliver as something satirical and funny.

It went something like this: "Violated the number one rule for getting a toddler to go to bed, made eye contact." I can't find it even in Google cache now, it was 2 days ago or so.

I remember thinking, Good Lord, Laura. I realize you're an uber-important politico blogger and all, but geez, you can't nurture your child at night? You can't spend 30 minutes putting him to bed and reading him a story and *making eye contact*? You'd rather tweet than do that?

And if he gets up even at 11 pm because something's bothering him, you can't make eye contact and hold him and sing to him? Really? You really think that *not* making contact and leaving him to cry in his room is going to work?

These early years don't repeat. Can't you just invest in them now so society doesn't have to deal with a psychopath down the road?

No doubt as a professional upper class woman she does all the right things with her kid and maybe even stays at home and makes cookies. But I found that "don't make eye contact" tweet just...chilling. It wasn't funny to me.

As for the Norwegian killer, maybe what video games do for people already predisposed to looniness is make them develop skills. Enable them in fact to exercise executive function and have routine memes like "shooting" become mechanical expertise that kicks in even when they are so crazy they might not be able to drive a car somewhere. Maybe that's how it works?

I can only keep asking these questions. I think there's a link. I don't pretend there's an easy one to establish, or that all players of violent videos then go out and commit crimes against humanity. But some do, and even one such monster is one t0o many.