Wired State

The Deep Moral Revulsion I Feel for Electronic Frontier Foundation on Twitter Censorship Issue

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has always deeply disgusted me because I always felt they were telling a very Big Lie.

Now this is very clear in their taking Twitter's side in the decision to censor tweets on behalf of censoring states. EFF is helping to set up a new paradigm whereby we judge right and wrong and freedom and tyranny not by universal principles, but by "what's good for the platform" -- what's good for the Internet companies! Ugh!

EFF and other lobbyists claim to be for "Internet freedom" and against censorship and claim to be fighting the good fight so that copyright doesn't become too overly restrictive, while ostensibly still honouring the concept of intellectual property.

But it's all fake, and all they are is merely the nonprofit lobbying arm of the Silicon Valley behemoth of Google and other giant platform providers for social media and the web.

I could first see their Big Lie years ago when they wound up undermining intellectual property rights in the online virtual world of Second Life. They would shrug snarkly that we had all signed a Terms of Service giving away some of our rights, so it was all our problem. They never had any imagination or vision about this because basically, they are all about undermining copyright.

You can see it very starkly in the Youtube videos of John Perry Barlow -- he acts as if digitalizing content automatically liberates it -- and compares attempts to copyright it to a hypothetical attempt by a doctor to copyright his prescription.  The scrip is just a scrip, a means to an end; so is all code.

Where we can really see the hypocrisy on parade now is in EFF's duplicitious behaviour with regard to SOPA/PIPA, the Congressional bills to protect IP, which they zealously fought, hysterically claiming that efforts to prosecute piracy constituited "censorship". They could concoct this fantasy -- whipsawing millions of people who didn't bother to read the bill or understand how the legal system works -- by claiming that there was some remote edge-case possibility that someone with a web site that had some pirated material would be shut down entirely. (BTW, some are pointing to the prosecution of Megauploader now, trying to exonerate this pirate site by the fact that some people used it to upload original material for which they owned the copyright). Or they would claim that merely posting a link to a pirate site would get your blog removed. Ridiculous. Nothing of the sort is inherent in the bill or able to come out of it in practice, given all the narrow definitions, remedies and defenses.

The EFF master manipulation of the very meaning of "censorship" in this propaganda campaign, joining the Google lobby and other big platforms lobbying against SOPA, was part of eroding actual universal legal meaning and common sense. We could all really tell the difference between shutting down a site filled with stolen music videos and movies, and "harming creativity" by shutting down somebody's music review site or "crippling innovation" by dinging somebody's ap that searched stuff on the web. Truly we could, although EFF and Google and others fictionalized a notion that the distinctions would be blurred.

What was being blurred was meaning itself -- "censorship" became anything that got in the way of the Big Heist that Google commits with Youtube, hijacking movie and music companies' content to sell ads. "Censorship" became anything that got in the way of entertainment of the endlessly coddled youth online. "Censorship" became anything that just got in the way of the "flow" of liberated content that benefits programmers and consultants but not content creators.

So having undermined the very meaning of "censorship," it's not surprising that when Twitter decides to serve as an accomplice to repressive governments in their censorship, EFF and the whole Google gaggle are now claiming that there is no censorship at all, and that we're all over-reacting.

They are really sinister and this is why you cannot have them take power over the Internet. This is why I fight them.

Yeah, we get it that non-state actors cannot technically be "censors" (and that's why, when they shrieked about companies "censoring" with SOPA they were ridiculous, especially because they never explained why companies didn't have to abide by their own terms of service!).

No, only governments as state actors can censor, post and prior to publication -- but that's not the point. In our day, platform providers like Facebook with its 650 million users or Twitter with its 30 million users are more massively populated than actual states in the real world.  Facebook is twice the population of the United States. So it and other platforms become even more massive than a state in their actions and law-makers begin to contemplate how they will be suborned to the rule of law instead of growing larger and greeder and more abusive.

The very people rushing to justify the "law-enforcement" of tyrannical states now don't seem to be willing to subject these big platforms to any law in this country, such as with SOPA/PIPA. That's quite the glaring "internal contradiction".

What's nauseating about the justification of this move we're seeing from EFF and others is that they claim that because Twitter is refining its censorship capacity -- fine-tuning it by country and by individual tweet -- and allowing us to see the tweet outside the country, that it doesn't have to face the angry hordes concerned about their actual censorship involved in doing that. There's even a sly -- but silly -- notion that by allowing re-tweets, that Twitter will "route around" censorship even back into countries -- as if the authoritarian states won't simply block Twitter completely rather than put up with that nonsense.

In fact, the entire notion Twitter is peddling now depends on a liberal democratic state being the practitioner of the new policy -- selecting censoring some tweets but generally allowing others to go through. Of course the real opppressive states aren't going to play that game.

Let's be clear about right and wrong here: Twitter could just not do business in countries that censor. Oh, does that mean that it would not be able to do business in Germany because Germany censors pro-Nazi sentiment as a crime? Won't everyone agree the world is better off censoring that speech? Those who worried about SOPA being a big hammer will likely not worry about trouble distinguishing among extreme right-wing speech they don't like and what might be "permissible".

So could Twitter just say "We won't do business in Germany" (or China or Russia or Syria if it ever comes to that). (By "doing business," they mean having staff and offices -- obviously anybody with a phone or computer connection can log on to Twitter pretty much anywhere unless it's blocked).

What's most revolting is the justification that the platform "should have a right of way" and just spread and spread everywhere.

Why?

Who says platforms have to go everywhere? They don't. If they can't have a basic climate of freedom and free flow of speech, then why are they there? The kind of country that is so oppressive of speech that it blocks dissent on the Internet will tend to be a country not so conducive to business either -- the kind of state that jails dissidents also tends to be the kind of state that suddenly nationalizes your investment (like Uzbekistan). Why be there?

There's another option -- Twitter could give the technology that it is planning to use itself to block tweets to governments (or open source it) and then let the chips fall where they may. Wouldn't everybody find that horrible?

There's nothing to be gained by seeing masses of censored tweets -- because it validates censorship when everyone can see the act transparently and then begin to discuss it -- why, that tweet was rightfully censored, why, this one was wrongfully censored. The alchemy of how this will spread will be awful to see. People will begin to form opinions of what is "civil and acceptable speech" and begin to back some countries, especially the more politically correct states, in their censoring.  Large bodies of people will begin to form influential opinions about what is "ok" to censor because they will constantly have this bad example before them, bleeding into the entire Twitter-space.

Cindy Cohn, legal advisor of EFF, says pragmatically that Twitter is merely doing what all companies do. They all take down stuff; they all have TOS rules they do enforce, even if unevenly. The idea that making these bad acts transparent rescues them morally is simply reprehensible. It doesn't. All that EFF is doing here is smacking its lips over the notion that in the US, they will suddenly see zillions of DMCA takedowns of infringing content (not censored political speech) that they think they will be able to exploit to advance their undermining of copyright.

I'm glad Reporters Without Borders spoke about against Twitter's censorship -- and it really is fair to call it that given the massive nature of Twitter across borders.

Rebecca McKinnon postured like other Google-facilitators did -- acting as if this is a "tough" decision when platforms branch out to other countries. Again, you don't have to go to China or Russia. No one is twisting your arm. If you are only going there out of a need to sell more ads or scrape more marketing data, colour me unimpressed.

 

Ugh, the Whole Google Gaggle is Falling into Line Behind Twitter's Censorship Decision!

The whole Google gaggle -- the gurus who always align with Google lobbying positions although they are in theory independent scholars and journalists -- are praising Twitter's decision to cave to censorship demands from dictators -- which is explained carefully in its marketing press releases as the ability to censor by country -- which it hasn't used yet.

No accident, comrades.

All of the "netizen" leaders who style themselves as such "Internet freedom fighters" -- fighting against SOPA and for "net neutrality" (that is, alternately, for excessive government control over commerce, and then, for no government control over crime) are all falling into line behind Twitter's bad decision to agree to censor some tweets in some countries. Ugh!

Let's see. There's Jillian York -- she tried to claim I was the hypocrite on Twitter for saying the company should so something -- because I wouldn't line up with her anti-corporate take on surveillance equipment - although she's the hypocrite for supporting Twitter merely because they're a cool company and Cisco isn't as cool to her, I guess.

Twitter could just not do business in countries that wrongfully censor people's legitimate free speech, you know. That's still possible; indeed, it should be imperative for a company that claims it is bettering the world.

On her blog, Jillian sighs piously that "Twitter is not above the law," while acknowledging the Saudi prince and the OWS conspiracy theorists may have a bit of a point.

Then there's Zeynep Tufecki who writes posts even longer than mine, this one justifying every chapter and verse of Twitter's prostration and finally groveling: "my conclusion is that this isn’t a mediocre but acceptable policy; rather, this is an excellent policy which will be helpful to free-speech advocates."

Ugh! This is why you cannot have these people running Internet policy.

Tufecki goes into deep detail about how Twitter has to "comply with the law" as well --she is even more of an Orwellian realpoliticker than Jillian as she's had more time to work at it as a scholar:

The policy is realistic–and non-realistic policies are not better as they won’t work. The idea that Twitter can just ignore court orders everywhere is not only unrealistic, it would result in more countries to try to block Twitter completely–or make it accessible only via proxies and thus greatly restrict its power. The Internet is not a “virtual” space, and cyberspace is not a planet which can float above all jurisdictions forever. In this move, Twitter is acknowledging this fact while complying within the bare minimum framework.

I'm going to remember that bit about how the Internet is not a virtual space, next time Tufecki wants it to be to further some "progressive" political goal of hers by pretending it is, whether "net neutrality" or anti-SOPA or her other plans for that corporate-free Internet that will move to darknets. It's extraordinary that she doesn't think the medium in which she lives and moves and has her academic and intellectual being (and social being and everything being like so many of us) can "float"? Then why does it get to "float" on so many other ideas of hers?!

Then she even warbles this nonsense:

The policy provides tools for free-speech advocates. Twitter will publish list of blocked tweets, along with links to the original tweet –so everyone who is not at that particular country can see what it’s about–as well as a copy of the court order or enforceable takedown notice at http://chillingeffects.org/twitter. Free-speech advocates have a transparent and powerful tool.

So censorship is basically ok, just as long as you show the blank spots, you know, like Soviet newspapers or certain documents you get back from filing a FOIA with the US government.

But here's what's really WRONG about all this: the notion that what other countries that censor Twitter are invoking is "the law".

Law has to be just; judicial systems have to admit adversarial defense, due process, evidence and so on to be properly understood as falling under the "rule of law". Otherwise, its "rule by laws" -- the state above the law, instead of subject to its own laws.

These people don't know right from wrong -- their justifying of wrongfulness is appalling.

A court order censoring a Chinese or Egyptian dissident is not a valid concept under international human rights law (Art. 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Why call that "law"?

Currently, all Twitter has up of this nature is various DMCA takedown notices satsified from motion picture company requests.

There's another side to all this, too.

Let's say there is a valid libel case in the UK, where it is easy to bring a libel suit. Under the "country-by-country" notion, Twitter would censor the offensive speech that deliberately defamed somebody under UK law, where the judge made a finding, but let it stand and be visible in the US (if I understood the action correctly -- maybe it won't be visible, but a court order will be). Or let's say an even  hard-to-bring suit in the US is successful, but Twitter lets the libel stand for the Netherlands or Iceland, forcing people who have a legitimate ruling protecting their reputations to chase Twitter from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Twitter is being awfully coy if they censor an Iranian or Egyptian in their own countries, merely to avoid having their entire platform blocked (so they can get marketing data and ad clicks still), but then let everybody else see it in the diaspora and the news-curating junkies on Twitter elsewhere. Enough of that goes on, and those countries will block the platform anyway. So why play the game?

Why are all these Googlian gurus conceding anything these oppressive countries do to suppress free speech to be "law"? They should be explaining to Twitter executives -- and each other -- that this isn't just law, and Twitter simply shouldn't be in those countries.

Enjoying a Day-Long Fast From Wikipedia!

I think it's absolutely wonderful that Wikipedia is blacked out for a day. It may be possible for all our brain pans to clear of that toxic disinformation.

Of course, its SEO won't be hurt as it still technically to be found in Google, but then jumps to that black page. Oh, kinda like what would happen if you typed in a pirate site in search, it would get blocked and show you a placeholder page. Oh, so Reddit and Wikipedia and all these hysterics blocking their site's view for the day are actually helping to show us that the Internet would not get broken or die if we blocked a few pirate sites. Yay!

Meanwhile, on your Wikipedia fast from all that factology, read my article about the Evils of Wikipedia

Obama Loses My Vote over SOPA

Statue of Alexander Hamilton, Washington, DC. Photo by dbking.

This is a sad day for our liberal democratic government with its systems of checks and balances.

My comment on this ecstatic Forbes article (they actually jump the gun on this but that's part of the awfulness):

So there’s a new instrument of executive power called “making a press statement” that trumps congressional bills even before they reach the president for veto? That’s lovely.

And why aren’t we surprised Daryl Issa (R-CA) opposes the bill? His constituents are in Silicon Valley and they think it harms their business model to stop piracy. They don’t care if other people’s businesses are harmed.

It’s not about appeasing the White House. It’s about Google whipsawing inhouse geeks in the Administration with the bully pulpit of the hugely influential tech blogosphere and sites like Reddit and BoingBoing.

It’s not a good thing for representative democracy — which is a lot better than misrule by geeks, believe me — when 80 members are of Congress are on the record as supporting the bill, only 30 have opposed it, and yet “the Internet” — the tyranny of who shows up — can trump the represented millions. This is scary. Direct democracy is not democracy; its Bolshevism.

The collectivization of property has cost the jobs and livelihoods of million in the newspaper, book, movie and related content industries; meanwhile Google and other big platform providers all taken together only provide less than half a million jobs.

Google testified that it had received *a whopping 5 million takedown notices last year of which 75 percent were satisfied and the content removed*. Imagine! They hijack other people’s content and make ad revenue from it and then you have to fight them with lawyers to get your revenue-generating content back under your control. Extraordinary. The other 25 percent probably didn’t have good lawyers. Google’s California Business Model — upload for free and force others to ‘catch me if you can’ — is a great racket but it harms other people’s livelihoods and doesn’t replace them for our whole economy.

Geeks have never adequately explained with all their hype and hysteria how it is that they can block malware sites, and not scream that the Internet is broken if the DNS is blocked, but have such a hard time blocking obvious dedicated piracy sites. They’ve never been able to explain why they have told us for years that you “can’t” encrypt content and “can’t” have DRM, but you “can” have DNSSEC encryption. They are self-serving and non-transparent and unaccountable on these matters.

It’s not about congress needing more “remedial help” from arrogant script kiddies. It’s not about their need for technical expertise when they have plenty of technical experts on board and who have given input. The geeks could use some lessons in reading the law themselves, and understanding what remedies and definitions and defenses are all about before they scream falsely that entire sites can be taken down for one piece of content. That’s just patently untrue.

There’s the context of the rule of law and an independent judiciary that works in complex fashion, not like binary self-executing code, like the geeks imagine it. Law-enforcers would have to make their case; the definitional and remedy tests would have to be made. All of these “free speech” issues have been contrived. Prosecuting piracy sites and illegal drug selling sites is prosecuting crime, not harming free speech. The geeks are deliberately blurring these distinctions in self-interested ways.

Obama has lost my vote over this. I will not be voting for him again. This is sad for me, because I don't see any figure on the right in the Republican Party that I feel comfortable with. Certainly not Ron Paul or Rick Santorum, and I don't really quite understand yet what Mitt Romney stands for. Am I going to be writing in Gorbachev?

Debate with Andrew Feinberg

I'm going to paste in this debate from Facebook with Andrew Feinberg, a Washington, DC tech writer whom I've sparred with many a time before (starting with the famous trip by Scoble to Washington). Facebook is annoying for debates because of the way the columns are set up -- you can't make paragraphs with "return" without in fact posting your comment. So everything is smushed together. Facebook dumbs down debate. In that sense G+ doesn't impose that smush on you, but it has other problems.

I didn't debate everything he said -- I didn't have time. So I'm going to come back and answer some of the challenges he made to my ideas. But I will say this to the common nonsense that corporations don't have to supply the First Amendment blah blah. Why always cede everything to corporations? Why give up y our rights just because you come online?

And the context here was indeed about GOVERNMENT Facebook and Twitter and livestream activity. I've been in a Second Life government-sponsored meeting in which I was told to shut up when I typed a query about the war in Afghanistan. That can't stand. It's one thing if someone crashes a server or has particle wars or spams or retypes a million dumb comments urging the legalization of marijuana. There you might want to move posts to a rage pile, or even mute if it is spam or obscenities, like television would. After all, this is a kind of public broadcasting. But if I sit quietly in the backchat -- not speaking aloud in voice, but typing in the room chat -- that the US would make its peace claims about supporting civil society in Egypt if it didn't have the Iraq and Afghan wars on its conscience (this was a meeting about Egypt way before the unrest in Tahrir Square) -- then I shouldn't be told to shut up.

BTW go on any OWS Livestream and watch the moms on there -- it's always the 40-something moms who take this role -- censoring the crap out of everyone -- muting people whom they view as disruptive. It's scary. Direct democracy brings you this sort of thing instantly; it's not free at all.

As for corporations, they should strive more for First Amendment standards than they do. I'm not for coercing and compelling them to do this, as that trumps freedom of association. But I'm for them raising the bar past the million nasty geeky abuse reporters right out of the police state who want to shut down other's speech and rattle platform owners to do so, or for the nuisances claiming libel or hate speech if you merely disagree with them.

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick via Alec Ross

‎21st Century Statecraft seems to involve collecting a lot of ardent fans and talking about the tech -- like Scoble! Reprinting my comment in case it gets "hidden" or I get "muted":

Alec, can you make clear whether you are for or against SOPA, because saying worries about laws that are only bills isn't a persuasive argument for already-hysterical technologists. Alex said that you said that ""What applies to the telephone applies to social media," said Ross. Ergo, due process and lawful intercepts apply to e-criminality." I took that to mean that the Internet can't hide behind being special forever. SOPA *is* in fact all about due process and lawful takedowns -- law-enforcers have to make their case. But Alex has taken another comment of yours about the balance between openness and security to be an anti-SOPA statement. So...does that what social media ultimately enable officials to do, appear to be all things to all men? Which is it?

https://www.facebook.com/alexhoward/posts/127265427392326

www.facebook.com

Like · · Unfollow Post · Share · January 11 at 2:21pm

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    Andrew Feinberg

    I'm curious, why a) the seemingly random attack on Scoble and b) the apparent paranoia about getting "muted," which I guess you think would be done by some "powers that be" reacting to your comments, which I guess you see as a threat to some established order that favors people who plunge headlong into acquiring an inordinate number of friends with whom they can share their opinions, which are almost always favorable towards the newest kind of technology.
    
    I get how you might disagree with Alec's politics or be skeptical of his ideas. But why does it always come back to Scoble with you?

    January 12 at 2:04am · Like
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    a) it's not an attack on Scoble at all; it's merely an explanation of the cultural patterns laid down by the Silicon Valley Early Adapters -- they collect gadzillion fans or friends, the use social media like a broadcasting device, then they mute/ban people they don't like. Scoble doesn't have me on ban as it happens, but others do. And recently Arrington, Leo Laporte and others began to bemoan the inability to mute/hide people on Facebook, which they've come to thoroughly enjoy on G+. What that means is that these big guys come on, articulate whatever enthusiastic policy or tech talk or political idea they like, their fans ooh and ah, and any critics are called trolls and muted. All social media works in that fashion. While you might concede that Scoble as a private person or representing a private company gets to do that, I've always STRENOUSLY questioned these memes and patterns and cultural habits as I knew that before long, they'd migrate to government. And here we all are. And here Ross and others are doing the same thing, collecting lots of friends and fans, broadcasting, and basically just using it as a PR thing. It remains to be seen whether they will mute or ban or turn off comments, like Beth Noveck did during her time at the White House. As for "paranoia," the only Facebook-related big tech influencer who has muted me is the Fastbook gal Lora Kolodny, she didn't like my probing of her anti-SOPA views which she tried to pretend she didn't have. It's not about some narrow notion of "the new technology," either. The new technology comes with an ideology baked into it which is why I oppose it often, it's not free. That ideology is basically technocommunism. I hope to blog on Ross' thing soon and make it more clear.

    January 12 at 8:05pm · Like
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    Andrew Feinberg

    I'm curious...so what if Mike Arrington wants to be able to ignore people that annoy him? When last I checked he was a private citizen with who owes nothing to no one. Yes, he, like others are influential in some circles. But does that confer on them a responsibility to listen to the rants and opinions of everyone who reads him? I feel like you credit so-called influencers with wider influence than they actually have.
    
    As for Alec (who i admittedly knew back when he ran One Economy), I don't see him thinking or acting any differently in his current role than he did in the private sector. Now I am just as annoyed as you are when official government blogs turn off comments, but you have to realize that the alternative isn't reasonable. Any attempt at moderation to prevent real trolls or plain obscenity would risk crossing the line into censorship. Better to disable them and let discussion take place elsewhere. Or do you have a better idea.
    
    I fundamentally disagree with your assertion that social media has ideology "baked in" in any way. The same technology gets used by groups up and down the spectrum.
    
    I remember a few years ago, when I was planning Robert's trip to DC, you adamantly insisted that we had some sort of hidden partisan agenda and were driven by some ulterior motive. I wonder now if your real problem is that not only are many so-called influencers and their followers liberal, and but now that there is a liberal administration in power, they get to use the visibility that comes with power to push (you say broadcast) their ideas.
    
    I'm sure you have unfairly been called a troll when you choose io start screaming in an unfriendly forum. That doesn't mean that all social media is imbued with your ideology, but that you are not in the right place.
    
    Oh, yeah...as many people told me from 2001 to 2008, elections have consequences. If you dislike what government officials are saying in public forums, you get a chance to take away their soapbox every four years.

    January 12 at 8:39pm · Like
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    Mike Arrington needs to grow a thicker skin. But he lets it get to him. He has a funny solution. On his blog, he allows comments. Possibly because he has the tools to remove the really hateful ones there. On Facebook, he shut comments down completely, leaving only "like" and "share" Oh, you and your geeky snarky "last time I checked". Arrington isn't a private citizen; he's a public figure and investor in technology and blogger with enormous influence. My critique of the Silicon Valley influencers, from day one, when your friend Mr. Scoble went to Washington to get Congressmen on Twitter, is that they were using tools, into which they had baked ideological principles, where they had the advantage as early adapters and beta testers as the devs' friends, to take over the public space, indeed take over the state. Indeed they DO have to listen to rants and raves WHEN THEY TRY TO TAKE POWER. These are not mere bloggers; these are people TRYING TO TAKE POWER. Haven't you watched their insane, hysterical, crazed and well-funded onslaught on Congress over SOPA? No intellectual property owner is safe! Of course you had a hidden agenda, and it's working out well -- you have the Goverati of Gov 2.0 in power everywhere, and Ross' meetings are an exemplary of this -- the South African writer he touted sums it all up: the purpose of social media is to put in power small groups of people, and disrupt the existing institutions. Absolutely. He's absolutely open about the essentially Leninist agenda. I don't care if I'm called "a troll". I'm a persistent dissident when it comes to this huge power grab and I'm right to be -- our very body politic and our very freedoms are at stake. If your geek pals had their way, it wouldn't be that they take away officials they don't like, *they'd take away the system of voting itself, they'd take away Congress itself" and run everything from their smart phones with their pals. This is not an exaggeration; read what they write.

    January 12 at 9:46pm · Like
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    The First Amendment MUST apply on these government social media jamborees. Absolutely. The right of the people to assemble and express their grievances! That you think that government officials get to shut off "trolls" means you think the First Amendment has to end because some thin-skinned geek pal doesn't like getting criticized. I don't trust you to know the difference between what really is unprotected speech and what SHOULD BE protected. As for baked-in ideology, if you don't want to hear it from me, read what Drupal's founders say about themselves, and read what Disqus wrote to me about their lovely ideology bake-in. You're soaking in, that's why you think it's "for everybody". It's not. I just explained how it isn't, due to these very tools of mute/ban/hide/filter etc. The very fact that we can't "dislike" or "vote no" on things on Facebook unless we make a stupid poll says it all!

    January 12 at 9:52pm · Like
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    Andrew Feinberg

    What about Dropal or Disqus? Are you saying that ALL implementations of Drupal or Disqus are imbued with the politics of the people that developed them? That's ridiculous -- technology itself is non-ideological even if an inventor is himself an ideologue. You ascribe far too much power to people and things that are only as powerful as the systems they inhabit allow them to be. Second, I don't appreciate being told that I don't believe in free speech because I question your logic and think you are seeing conspiracies where none exist and giving people and things power they do not have. Number 1, a PERSON'S Facebook account is PRIVATE. That means YES, Michael Arrington (who I am not good friends with and hardly speak to despite our Facebook friendship) can block you or me or anyone if he wants to on Facebook, for any reason. He has NO obligation to interact with you or me or anyone on his personal Facebook account. I agree that he might be a public figure (in the same way that I've been told I am one as well) but he is still a private citizen. Even a public figure has the right to ignore you on the street if he doesn't want to talk to you. I also don't know why you call Facebook as a whole a "government social media jamboree." It's a private company. It;s not a public utility. Oh, and even a government employee like Alec Ross can ignore you on his own Facebook account. And BTW, if you had read what I wrote above you would have seen that I said that GOVERNMENT WEBSITES that disable comments are not idea, but because I BELIEVE IN THE FIRST AMENDMENT I understand why not allowing public comments on a blog is better than having any sort of moderation. You have many, many ways to express yourself and publiish your ideas. Commenting on a blog is not a right, even if it is a government-owned blog. If they don't have comments it in no way restricts your ability to write a rebuttal or comment on a blog post of your own. For an anticommunist you seem to have a problem with the concept of private property. And for someone who cares about privacy you don't seem to care at all about certain people's privacy if they are a popular blogger.

    January 12 at 10:49pm · Like
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    Andrew Feinberg

    Let's be clear, here. Facebook doesn't give the option of "turning off" comments -- but you can adjust your privacy settings to restrict comments to friends. "Like" and "Share" are the only options because the code has limitations. Not because of some desire to manipulate people's freedom of expression. Michael Arrington isn't trying to silence you, he's just not your Facebook friend. And let's remember that even if I accept the premise that people like Mike and Robert are public figures, being a public figure does not mean that someone loses the right to ignore someone in their own home. To be a public figures means you lose some legal remedies under tort law. But even a public figure doesn't have to let you run amok over their private space, or even their social networking accounts. Even a public figure can have some privacy, such as it is. The President is always covered by a reporter wherever he goes. But he can tell the pool photographer to stay out of his bedroom. Similarly, as a blogger, Mike Arrington has a public space where let you rant and call him all sorts of things . He's a blogger, and it's part of the job. But his own Facebook page. isn't theTechcrunch comments section. You rail against people who oppose SOPA, possibly because you care about property rights. But you don't seem to respect a person's right to be left alone.
    
    I also do no see where you get the idea that technology influencers wield outsize amounts of influence in the realm of public policy. You attribute to them ego and ambition that would be normal for someone who is a successful community organizer or someone who travels in circles with close proximity to the real levels of power in the country. I think if you got to know Mike or Robert (and I have only spent significant time with Robert so I am really guessing about Mike), you'll find that they are pretty happy with what they have accomplished while writing in their own little niche catering to a niche audience. Niche audiences can be large, but they are still niche audiences with little impact elsewhere. For reasons I cannot decode, you see something sinister in these people who in truth, have very little name recognition, much less influence, outside the world of technology and telecommunications. They're TECH BLOGGERS!!!
    
    I am an educated man, but I am truly baffled by your assertion that tech bloggers and silicon valley social media entrepreneurs are engaged in some sort of meticulously planned and carefully coordinated campaign to seize control of public discourse and through that the state. I think you will find that while many entrepreneurs have outsize visions of their company's impact bordering on the messianic (see Zuckerberg, Mark),, their companies started to develop pragmatic solutions to mundane problems. Facebook was a tool to let college students to communicate with other students. Twitter began as a side project, and for the longest time no one was adding features with any sort of grand vision for the site except for it to stop crashing under the weight of its rapid growth.
    
    I also categorically disagree with the idea that social media users are mindless sheeple baahing at the beck and call of Scoble and Arrington, the great early adopters. FACT: Scoble wasn't even close to being an early adopter of Facebook. I was on here in 2004, years before it was open to the general public. And even when the public came, people like Scoble and Arrington weren't able to increase their influence by leveraging power gained as an early adopter of Facebook. Even when Twitter was at its most buzz-worthy, Robert only had 10,000-some followers out of the hundreds of thousands that joined. He evangelized the hell out of Friendfeed, but did that become as widely adopted as Facebook? No. Is Google+ growing because of Scoble and Arrington? Not really. Geeks may flock there because of them, but sites don't make money because of geeks -- they survive on the people who don't care about Robert Scoble or Michael Arrington. Early adopters don't have any more power than the mainstream crowd. Even the Silicon Valley influences have limits.
    
    And finally, Let's look at the anti-SOPA campaign. Honestly, I don't see much difference from the reaction to the 1996 Communications Decency Act save for the fact that the campaign against the CDA was waged in the courtroom because it was passed as part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act rather than as its own bill. I also see no difference between the outcry over SOPA and any other group's attempts to influence legislation. I'm unsure what the danger you say IP owners are not safe from is other the reaction of an angry public over a piece of legislation that may have a legitimate purpose, but is rather ham-handed and overreaching in how it seeks to achieve its aims. I certainly wouldn't call the anti-SOPA campaign hysterical. Passionate, yes. Hysterical? No. And the reason the anti-SOPA sentiment is gaining traction is because people are realizing this is a poorly written bill that gives copyright holders the power to silence a web site singlehandedly, without any sort of judicial finding or jury verdict. You worry about techno-communism, but using the power of the state to protect the property and interests of corporations without regard to its impact on the rights of citizens has a name too -- it's called fascism.

    Friday at 12:05am · Like
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    No, you don't get it, because you're rather just sound off and sound superior, than study the actual events of the past week. Go and read Arrington's and Laporte's and other's posts. These are their PAGES not the "friendship" thing. They are people we SUBSCRIBE to, not people we are "friends" with. So naturally people object (and far from only me) -- we are supposed to subscribe, give the influencer the custom, but we don't get to comment or talk back? That's wack. There's no need for that. He has the power to go over to the little arrow and HIDE any comments he finds disruptive -- instead, he cuts all comments off because he can't be bothered to deal with possibly hundreds of trolls in his posts that get thousands of views, can't you grasp that? It is indeed about his own attitude and his hijacking, like all the big guys, of the social media tools for BROADCASTING. It's wrong. None of us are in anybody's "home" here. That's the biggest silly fraud on two legs. This indignation that someone isn't "civil" in "your home". This is the Internet, Andrew. it's not your frigging front porch. It's not his, either. It is a public square. Public issues, not his private life, are being discussed. Matters of politics and policy. So none of this "get off of my lawn" crap is justified WHATSOEVER.

    Friday at 1:28am · Like
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    Of course they're sheeple. By the time you get to Lora Kolodny (go read her), you have nothing but gushing, adoring fans who justify her every ban like a bunch of police informants. It's sickening to watch (another event I will have to blog on later). Of course they're involved in a meticulous plan, that's not a conspiracy theory, it's a report. Have you been actually watching the anti-SOPA campaign? It is extremely widespread and methodical with the most manipulative methods in the metaverse. Viral videos without outrageous hysteria; "secret messages" from geek to geek in insiders' gamerz video; Tumblr blocking their own site with a hysterical message; Reddit going to darken their site in protest. Where have you been? Of course it is planned and operational. And there are 100 things like that. You're completely wrong that the early adapters and influencers don't have influence. Of course they do. Taken as a class of people, they have completely hijacked the SOPA debate, as they did net neutrality and many other issues, technical and political (immigration, China, etc.) The geek tech news sites are the highest traffic in search in Google; they are privileged then in a sense and they have massive influence. There are millions and millions of people they whipsaw in their enormous empire; it makes moveon.org look like a block party. The outcry over SOPA is far, far more furious, hysterical and widespread. Every teenager on Facebook and Tumblr is in hysterics. You just haven't seen it. SOPA isn't poorly written. It's had enormous numbers of changes to it and expert advice and technologists have in fact participated in it, and pro-Silicon Valley elected representatives like Issa, who are agitating against parts of themselves now. It's just that the most extreme technologists haven't had their way. Copyright holders definitely do not get the power to silence an entire site over their one piece of content. That's one of the many propagandistic idiocies propagated in this fight -- read the damn bill, there isn't anything remotely like that. If an entire site is devoted to commercial benefit with large amounts of pirated material, *then* the site might be ordered to cease and desist and eventually closed but that would have to be a site *devoted to piracy*, not some teen's Tumblr blog or not some music site with one wrong video on it. The dajaz1 example is completely dodgy as I've explained on my blog. There isn't any "fascism" in a normal, liberal, democratic effort under the rule of law to stop crime. Crime doesn't get to hide behind the Internet.

    Friday at 1:36am · Like
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    Again, Arrington or LaPorte or Dan Gillmor all want the glory and the exposure and the hits and the influence that come with the masses, but they don't want to let the masses talk back. They want all the power, and none of the democratic legitimacy and accountability. And u ltimately, the reason we have congressmen instead of Mike Arrington is because we don't have direct democracy where everyday, a congressman has to deal with a million people in their face trolling in the comments and screaming about the legalization of pot, even as the majority of people in their district don't want to legalize pot -- in other words, that's not how representative democracy works. The congressman has staff; he has automatic mail; he deals with some constituents; he gets some interactivity going, including even with social media, but he's not required to answer everything nor be run like a puppet from commentariat. The problem with the tribal/social media model that Arrington uses is that he wants the tribal leadership but then he gets stuck with direct democracy from the commentariat who won't let him go and wear him out. He doesn't have staff and he can't work as a *representative* instead a lightning rod. Direct democracy isn't democracy. It's the tyranny of who shows up.

    Friday at 1:40am · Like
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    Andrew Feinberg

    But tech bloggers aren't congressmen -- and they don't need legitimacy to maintain readership, they need credibility. That's why even on their pages to which people subscribe, are they under no obligation to allow feedback. But what I want to know is how you can go around shouting dire warnings about some coordinated lefty plot to take over the state using social media other than the sort of advocacy that is part and parcel of the political process. I get that you don't approve of open source software, but using open source doesn't mean you don't believe in property rights.

    Friday at 2:40am · Like
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    They don't believe in property rights, especially other people's property, especially digital content. They want to seize power. And they aren't just a lobby or a constituency, they are the tool makers who baked their ideology into the tools. They indeed aren't congressmen, but want even more power than congressmen, to tell people what to buy and how to use it and to invoke its features to utterly shape the discourse. Indeed there is a dire plot and indeed I will go around shouting warnings -- SOPA will be a very big indicator of whether organic life can go on controlling the machine of the Internet with human judgement, or whether coders and code-as-law will defeat organic democratic institutions. It's indeed a frightful moment.

    Friday at 2:43am · Like
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    Andrew Feinberg

    Wait a second, even if I accept your premise that being against SOPA means being wholeheartedly in the "code as law" camp, SOPA failing would not represent a defeat for organic democratic institutions, but it would show that anti-SOPA groups were able to successfully make use of those organic democratic institutions. One can believe in other people's property rights under the law while acknowledging limits to what actions should be permissible to enforce those rights. As someone who studies Internet policy for a living, I don't think SOPA should be litmus test for property rights. Even if you don't believe that copyright law as it is today provides adequate protection for intellectual property in the digital age, the solution put forth in SOPA would likely have a chilling effect on both online commerce AND technological innovation unless a provision like the safe harbor language in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. But the problem is that SOPA contains such overly broad SOPA as to preclude a safe harbor provision. Either way, I think you are being a bit alarmist at this point.

    Friday at 3:14am · Like
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    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    No, no, no. They wouldn't be making use of them at all. They would have in fact succeeded in overthrowing them with sheer force -- the force of blackmailing and persecuting businesses like Go Daddy that supported SOPA; the force of overwhelming all major social media platforms and bombarding Congress with screeching hate mail; the force of Google with its enormous bear footprint stepping in howling; the force of Silicon Valley lobbyists weighing in everywhere and threatening to remove their cooperation on other compromise deals (like net neutrality and other FCC issues). Currently, most congress people involved are FOR SOPA; only Daryl Issa and some of the other Silicon Valley representatives like Zoe Loefgren are offering amendments, but not opposing the whole bill. So if this bill is defeated out of nowhere, through massive acts of "self-immolation" (Reddit going dark, etc.) and even hacking protests and other forms of vandalism, then that means that democracy, our representative government, isn't holding against the networked mob. It means that what we vote for doesn't count and is overthrown by radical grouplets. It means my congressmen, Charles Schumer, who supports SOPA, and whom I support, with my microbusiness in SL that depends on intellectual property, and with my largely ideological (not business related) support of SOPA, doesn't count, even though he represents hundreds of thousands of people. Copyright law isn't adequate because technologists daily overthrow it. Google blandly reported 5 million DMCA notices of which a whopping 75 percent they complied with -- the rest weren't necessarily bogus, they just didn't have good lawyers and persistence. The DMCA is merely a sop to make people run and fetch and Google say "catch me if you can". You've obviously never been involved in a DMCA takedown procedure or you wouldn't glibly refer to it as remedy. There isn't anything overly broad in SOPA. It's to stop piracy. Piracy on mainly a few dozen sites. And to get corporate responsibility out of Google on Youtube. Alarmist is definitely what i'm going to be, and if SOPA doesn't pass I will take it as a very, very bad sign for our country that the Bolshevism is truly beginning, and I'm not kidding when I say that.

    Friday at 3:13pm · Like
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Open Society, Ltd.

 

A video clip of a conversation between Arianna Huffington and Bill Moyers about the victimization of George Soros features Moyers' claim that Fox News and right-wing pundits have become "Orwellian." Really? Orwellian? As in "like the Soviet Union" where dissidents are thrown in the Gulag?

This kind of overblown characterization strikes me as a troubling indication of the apparent limits of the open society as conceived by Soros, and the need for defense of pluralism of viewpoints  and even basic First Amendment speech rights even from their premier proponent. Yet as I think of it, pluralism for its own sake, and ensuring the devices to maintain pluralism don't appear to have ever become the mission of his foundation or its grantees.

Increasingly, I've felt the left -- and the Soros-funded left in particular -- suffers from an inherent problem: rather than creating the conditions and mechanisms for a truly open society that is pluralistic with a range of viewpoints from left to right, rather than nurturing a climate for necessary adversarial debate, they are aggressively bolstering one perspective only, the "progressive" one, and in some places, in increasingly shrill and rigid forms.

It's worth reflecting on what the proposition is here: do the Soros board members and executives feel that the "progressive" view is so in the minority in a sea of conservativism that they have to artificially game it ahead? Or do they feel that the objective of the open society is, among yourselves, privately, to insist on maximum liberties but only to come to the "right line" and then propagate that line with all your might as correct?

Where's an example of a debate between right and left sponsored by Soros? Is the controversial grant to NPR about bipartisanship and fostering pluralism of debate and "empowering" local democracy? Or is there an inherent expectation that if liberal young i-phone-toting journalists tweeting and Livestreaming with the power of social media go wake up sleepy statehouses, they will prevail with their own "progressive" perspective inevitably?

EXAGGERATION OF THE CONSERVATIVE THREAT AND ELIMINATIONISM

Increasingly, I see an eliminationism that is profoundly troubling to me. When Bill Moyers  -- describing Soros' views as he heard him at board meetings for years -- says that the right is *Orwellian* that's simply preposterous. Does he realize that? It's a horrible exaggeration. It's not true. The right is bad enough without demonizing it and setting up the proposition that *it has no right to exist because it is attempting to eliminate others' point of views*. An attempt to eliminate others' views would involve shutting down their funding or literally blocking their airwaves. Did that happen?

I try to understand how a seemingly thoughtful liberal man like Bill Moyers whose talk shows I've often enjoyed and who has always espoused liberal values could come to this illiberal proposition. Fox News is tendentious, and for a time even had the extreme provocateur Glenn Beck on it. But it only has 2 million viewers! Even allowing for the echo chamber around it in the form of all kinds of right-wing blogs and radio shows like Rush Limbaugh, which gives it some millions more, it still isn't any kind of real challenge, numerically or politically, to the left and liberal media amplified by social media.

Obvious case in point: Huffington Post, the online flagship of the "progressives" and liberals in America, has 35 million unique visitors a month. Now to be sure, some are only coming for the cat pictures or the missing babies, but many, many millions are absorbing the politics as well, as we can see in their replay of the vast hugely influential tech press (TechCrunch, was bought out by AOL, as was Huffington Post) and all the related "alternative" (but increasingly influential) web sites like Redditt. The many, many more millions that Huffington has in her empire and on people's i-phones absolutely dwarfs the old conservative bastions, even in TV.

Does anybody realize that?! Network TV and its more lefty variants like MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and now Current TV with the wayward Olbermann also have millions and millions of ardent fans and high-profile connected blogs like Daily Kos are enormously influential. And look at the comments under Paul Kruger's columns -- thousands of them -- or the liberals of the Washington Post -- even more thousands -- and you see the left and the liberal media and social media are heavily influential and command the mindshare of millions and millions of people. Why all the agida about Fox?

This was the question I put to Michael Massing, when he began the eliminationist drumbeat with Fox News in a piece titled "It's Time to Scrutinize Fox" -- he believed it should be investigated, like the Murdoch properties in England over the cell phone hacking scandal, even though there didn't appear to be any probable cause -- "just because". That is, he was just for having an investigatory look, because Fox was so bad. I don't have TV or watch it, and when I glimpse Fox in a doctor's office I get why he finds it biased or unappetizing. But all in all, I found his demand for "scrutiny" of that sort troubling -- as he'd find it if Rush Limbaugh demanded it of the New York Review of Books itself.  It bewildered me, coming from a man whose lifetime was devoted to founding CPJ and many other ventures for the protection of independent journalism. Isn't the premise of free speech to allow more of it when bad speech appears? It's as if having independent journalism and funding it through foundations and having a voice and even being quite influential with books and articles in The New York Review of Books is never enough. The leftists want total power, too; they want hegemony; they don't want Fox News even in the view.

Although in fact their existing hegemony enabled them to put Obama into power -- a vote I shared with them -- the reaction against some of Obama's "stealth socialism" caused the right-wing and Republicans to prevail in the House in the Congressional elections, and now poses a real challenge to a second term for Obama. And I think -- I hope -- that it's merely election fever now for  liberals when they express such a fear of backlash from the right, that they have decided that it so constitutes a threat that we must describe it as "Orwellian".

I see it differently. I see the backlash as induced by some of their own extremism and ideological rigidity, and their own inability to persuade Americans to adopt their "progressive" agenda or reassure them that they are not eliminationist. And there's a small but persistent movement in Occupy Wall Street that believes you don't try to persuade or reason anymore, you just occupy, and push over police barriers, and commit civil disobedience not by going limp, but provoking and pushing cops. They are backed up by the e-thugs in Anonymous who have caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to websites from Sony to Stratfor to even Gawker.

FACTOLOGY AND SCIENTISM

A key reason why liberals can mount this dubious "Orwell" proposition these days about Fox (instead of worrying more about Anonymous) is because the rise of 24/7 news cycles, social media, and enormous capacity for investigating and leveraging information (including through crowd-sourcing) has fed a particular ill of our time: the idea that facts are always findable and always right and always interpreted correctly by those who wield them.

Usually, this flaw -- when seen in the right -- is called by liberals like Steven Colbert as "truthiness". But on shows like Colbert's own or particularly the Jon Stewart Show, the proposition is, in fact, that "truthiness" of their sort wins: we smart urban sophisticates can find the facts to nail you to the wall, and we can expose your lies every time, without fail. Over and over, every night, we watch and marvel at the ability of the Jon Stewart Show fact-finders to dredge up old newsreels to show hypocrisy, or dig up statistical facts that completely blow O'Reilly or other targets out of the water. The findings are legitimate in many -- but not all -- instances. Yet the act of endlessly "fact-finding" without any self-doubt inevitably creates a wall of illusion of ominipotence that prevents fresh perceptions.

What such self-righteous "fact-finding" modes create is an environment for scientism to take root -- a topic Leon Wieseltier has taken up recently regarding an atheist's book, with great insight. With scientism, there is a belief not only that science has all the answers, but more practically, that the facts are all obtainable by imperfect humans, now especially that they have the Internet and all of social media to help them.

In the old days, you'd have to be I.F. Stone, dredging up old Congressional hearing transcripts and literally dogging the feet of officials to get such detailed facts and answers. Today, you merely have to Google or read a WikiLeaks or look at an old show on Youtube. That power makes you feel invincible; it makes you feel as if you really can find all the facts and the other side, with its opinions so different than yours, is really completely stupid and unscientific. You have absolutely no reason to listen to another point of view -- you have all of Wikipedia and all of Factcheck.org to help you clobber the opposition.

That's why, for Jonathan Stewart, the figure of Sarah Palin isn't just representative of a constituency, a culture, a way of life, a perspective that is legitimate in its own terms; she's guilty of "having a little box of crazy under her bed" and guilty of the worst kind of seeming factual errors, like saying she can see Putin in Russia from her window or saying that Obama's health care program would give us "death panels". The philosophical and lifestyle and cultural realities behind her words that resonate for a good many people don't matter for the factologist -- just the facts, m'am, and let me nail you to the wall on the base of scientism alone -- especially my scientism plucked from my ever-ready "progressive" Wikipedia.

Dissident Cats Aren't Cute Enough; Technologists Only Want to Take Over

"The fascists didn't detect the spy. Stierlitz was inimitable once again." Russian LolCats. This one draws on the line of jokes related to fictional spy Stierlitz.

Ethan Zuckerman's "cute cats theory of revolution" is getting a lot of attention now and given it's already-viral subject, it's likely to become a staple theory in communications departments in many places. But it doesn't work everywhere, especially in the places where Ethan -- or the Internet itself -- don't tend to go, namely the countries of the former Soviet Union (only 30 percent of Russians have Internet access; this thins to 20 or 10 or less in Central Asia).Where will the cute cats of Belarus go with the new anti-Internet laws that appear to criminalize the registration of domains and even the use of foreign web sites?

While cats are cute, dissident cats aren't cute enough. When Oleg Kashin was brutally beaten into a coma for covering the environmental protests in Khimki and other critical blogging, only a few hundred people spoke up and probably only a few thousand followed his fate. His writing and the news of his beating relied on the Internet, but numerous chatters and bloggers on Live Journal and Vkontakte and even Twitter didn't feel any solidarity -- at least, not enough to overcome their fears or sense that the dissident had "gone too far," to stop looking at rap videos.

Today, Kashin is a figure with far more prominence as hundreds of thousands of people have spilled out on to the streets with their iphones, pledging first on Facebook to appear. Those people weren't looking at only cat pictures the other day -- they are intellectuals who work in banks or scientific institutes or nonprofits and discuss the issues of the day more privately, not even with a blog pseudonym. But they are not protesting -- and won't protest -- what happened to Kashin. They are protesting a sense of indignation and shame that Putin could merely switch places with Medvedev and cancel out their vote.

When a communist organizer of protests against the vote, Sergei Udaltsov, was arrested on the pretext of jaywalking and went on a hunger strike, only a few hundred people showed up to protest, even though only days before, 50,000 more had appeared in a sanctioned meeting. That lets you know where "the Arab Spring" stands in Russia. Internet or no Internet, solidarity has its limits, especially if it is a matter of principle, for someone whose views you may not share (he is a radical communist).

And just like the Arab Spring is problematic, so are the Russian upheavals. The "Youtube Cop" who was so popular last year with hundreds of thousands of views, speaking up about corruption in the police such as bribe-taking and beating, is now living in obscurity. Not only because the civil rights nature of his cause never caught on, but because he himself tends toward the extreme -- he is a survivalist, with guns, and has been spouting Ron Paul-like stuff now on Youtube, and turned off most mainstream users. And that's how it goes. Russians can raptuously listen for a time to the holy fool, the downtrodden victim of the all-powerful state, sometimes in surprising ways -- but then just as quickly turn their back on them.

Lots and lots of people have adapted to social media and enthusiastically use Youtube and Facebook. Facebook has become particularly important to the Russian anti-corruption and anti-election fraud movement as Live Journal has proved politically and technically unreliable.But ultimately, the anti-corruption movement is what some more powerful political leaders and corporate bosses use against others who are less powerful -- it's a tool for struggle when everyone is implicated.

I feel that when theories like this are developed, technologists are mainly celebrating social media as an instrument of their own establishment's power, baking their own technolibertarian or technocommunist ideologies into the tools. It's not people's inherent decency or the capacity for organic solidarity with other humans that is celebrated, but a tool that compels people who didn't care and won't go on caring to selfishly fight at least for their cute-cat privileges. It's reductivist and cynical. Ultimately, Zuckerman privileges the revolutionary capacity of networking technology over organic people; they seem not to matter. He believes that lots of cute-cat lovers who wouldn't become involved in condemning police brutality will become radicalized if their cute-cat-loving tool, Youtube, becomes threatened by the state, and then can be instrumentally and opportunistically enlisted in radical causes. It comes from the same "progressive" opera as the notion that people don't want to be separated from their guns and religion.

People are more complex, of course. First, the people aren't so stupid as to only love cats. The class of people who tend to show up first as early adapters and then the later social users themselves are not typical of their countries, especially in countries with low Internet penetration. They're not such dummies; they're already predisposed to alternative culture and already may share the views of those who are publicly more active but simply wish to hang on to their state-provided jobs or have a healthy disrespect for "professional revolutionaries" after centuries of upheavals.

More worrisome, while liberals can be empowered, a significant segment of the people who aren't dummies and have more to them than cat-loving aren't necessarily a force for human rights. In Russia and the other post-Soviet states, there is a class of young technologists who, if anything, have been hostile to past and present movements for human rights and if anything, harbour views antithetical to them loyal to a strong, nationalist state. It's no accident that Surkov, the Kremlin's grey cardinal has been put in charge of "modernization" and "innovation," such as the Russian "Silicon Valley" project of Skolkovo. The Kremlin recognizes that the class of young technologists are their social base, alongside the millions of pensioners and state workers they hold in thrall with state salaries who don't have Internet access. The bar-camping set are utterly cynical about universal human rights and have never read Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov; they don't talk about dissidents past or present because they are carving out a space where they can live comfortably with the state -- active, creative, but managed.

When Microsoft gives grants to NGOs in the US, they select organizations involved in a wide variety of causes from anti-poverty to women's rights; the Russian Microsoft very selectively gave donations only to benign groups involved in culture or children, even as some NGOs involved in more challenging programs such as environmental protest were arrested and speciously charged, with the help of Microsoft lawyers, for supposed software piracy. I went many, many rounds of argument with the Microsoft RU representive on Twitter over these issues; the cynical arrogance with which these technologists feel they can ignore basic due process and civil rights and privilege themselves as state loyalists is shocking. Lolcat lovers (as distinct from real sentimental cute cat picture lovers) don't make for good democrats; they are not "for our freedom and yours"; they are for freedom of expression for me and not for thee; your information wants to be free, mine is available only for a fee.

This bureaucratic-technological class is visible all over the former Soviet Union; the group of bloggers taken on the official trip to Zhanaozen in Kazakhstan are a good example. Their job is to serve as the new technologically-aware loyal opposition -- to criticize the obvious about mismanagement or corruption, but not to threaten the state and the current regime itself. They're good at this; they're technically savvy, good communicators on blogs and Youtube and they've learned how to become like good Silicon Valley influencers using the same formula Scoble or LaPorte or Arrington use -- gain lots of followers and friends, and then deploy social media, which is inherently a talk-back tool, in fact to broadcast to the masses, identify fans and critical but docile supporters, and mute or ban or hide everybody else as "uncivil". The tools are great for filtering like that.

Cory Doctorow's gushing enthusiasm for Zuckerman's cute-cat theory isn't just a theory for Internet penetration and more broadband for the masses. That's the cover story. What he makes clear in his Guardian piece is that he wants social media companies to "harden up" for the job of social revolution, and for Western governments to get out of the way of the Internet with things like the Stop Online Piracy Act, so that they aren't "snooping on populations" and behaving "just like" China.

In other words, he wants a wired state for himself and his likeminded friends.

Can't We Do Better Than This?

The New York Times on the socializing that goes on in games...

Can't we do better than that?

 

Cerf is Right for the Wrong Reasons Or the Humming Engineers

Vincent Cerf has a surprising essay published today in the New York Times which argues against making Internet access a human right.

He's right, but for the wrong reasons, because he is self-interested, on behalf of his company, Google, a massively multi-user online platform with free search and paid ads.

Vincent Cerf, on behalf of his business interest Google -- essentially no different than any other oligarchic corporate interest -- wants to make sure that he does not become liable in any way -- by law or by moral pressure -- to secure access for his customers to the machine that makes his products. The Internet isn't just a work tool for Vincent Cerf, like a lathe; it's like wood or water or coal for other industries -- it's a utility. A utility that has not been treated as a utility by anybody, really -- not governments or corporations -- but treated as an inexhaustible natural resource.

Cerf is right to take up that seemingly selfish position based on pure business interest because it isn't fair or just -- no freely-associated entity -- business, union, nonprofit, club -- should be forced to do things it does not want, to provide goods for people at its own expense; to take members it does not want, to say things it does not believe -- unless there is a really compelling legal requirement, i.e. against incitement of imminent violence, or theft or fraud. Freedom of association is really important and shouldn't be trumped by freedom of expression -- that is, one group in society should not be making another group "do something," i.e. supply a social good like access, and the government should not do this either as a compulsory law -- the inevitable question that arises is: who will pay for all that access? I've only got a regular Verizon DSL line. Shouldn't I be entitled to FIOS? How much broadband?

Cerf's assertive complaint comes at a time when Google is being asked as a company to take on various free-the-Internet chores -- give secret aliases to revolutionaries or pseudonyms to dissident writers under authoritarian regimes or victims of domestic violence on Google+, the new social networking platform; stand up to authoritarians like China that want to block search or people's free expression; lobby against various pieces of legislation that seem to "break" the Internet like SOPA; and take on various other ethical obligations (as it seems to have done, but not really, in the GNI).

But Google doesn't have a budget to connect everybody to the Internet, and neither do most countries or the UN. Obliging them to provide broadband, free or cheap service, and guaranteed online time are all social goods, but they are achieved not as "negative" rights, where the state merely has to get out of the way not to stop freedom, but achieved as "positive" rights, where the state has to create policies and spend funds to secure them. The former belong to the realm of civil and political liberties; the latter to social and economic rights that the UN and some countries, but not the US, recognize. The US believes that achieving social goods is done through free politics, making policies, and democratic budget-setting, not by constitutional law.

As the veteran civil libertarian Aryeh Neier once explained in a debate with the economic rights proponent Philip Alston, who has held a number of UN positions, if you make health care a human right, as South Africa did after the end of apartheid, then you will end up with cases like a demand for kidney dialysis to save a patient that the country cannot afford, and the state making a decision by a court of law not to save a life. Canada can afford to take care of dialysis patients; South Africa cannot.

Policies don't always become viable or visible at their extremes, and you could still argue about a state's obligation to provide a basic set of health services -- perhaps school vaccinations and pap smears and mammograms and EKG tests or something. But these are *debates* and setting international norms and constitutional norms about them to set them in law doesn't work if you have a capitalist system with a free market. Which is what benefits Cerf and Google.

Vincent Cerf has adopted this anti-rights position with an ideological flair, not making the arguments that UN experts might about positive and negative rights -- or another argument about justiciability -- i.e. the ability to declare how a right is violated and how to find a remedy through litigation. He's done this in terms of moral duty rather than law, because of the implications of litigation and liability.

Example: I had a lovely blog here with 10 points written a few months ago when I read the report of UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, Frank LaRue, on the Internet, where he basically calls on states to create a "right to the Internet". This idea is very attractive to NGOs who want to add it to the repetoire of international norms that they see themselves as securing (and thereby helping to put themselves in power). But the reason LaRue in fact stops short of an outright call is that there is no treaty supporting it per se, and demands to negotiate a new treaty among states would immediately bring in the "defamation of religion" debate that continues to trouble UN bodies and which hasn't been entirely put to rest by the US-Egyptian co-sponsored resolution at the UN Human Rights Council.

But my lovely blog was eaten by a browser crash and the blogging software didn't save a copy as it is supposed to -- and voila, my Internet rights were violated. See how that works? When you make access to the Internet a right, like the right to water, when God or Nature doesn't let it rain, when your computer crashes, technology or other higher forces become the dispenser of that right.

When the US argues at the UN against economic rights, it says they are aspirations that should be the subject of politics, not law. Neither the US or Somalia have signed the Convention on Children's Rights, yet arguably children's rights are far, far better secured in the US than Somalia due to a host of factors in and outside of law.

Cerf, too, calls the concept of Internet access as a right to be aspirational -- he defines this as a goal, not an obligation. Furthermore, he makes the technologists' quintessential argument -- technology is just a tool -- it's neutral! It's not a thing-in-itself, but only a bridge to other things. So don't hold technologists responsible for what happens with technology!

At a simple level, sure, Cerf is right. The Internet is just a series of tubes, remember? Or as I always say, a telephone hooked up to a truck. It's not special. It's not an Autonomous Region. It is not Second Life with fairy wings!

But at a more complex level, he's misleading. Because in the end, Cerf says "Improving the Internet is just one means, albeit an important one, by which to improve the human condition." Ah, so he does believe, after all, that this "tool" isn't neutral, but should have welded into it a do-good mission.  He is articulating the Silicon Valley geek religion that technology is salvational -- that it betters mankind. That it is also an instrument that led people to lose their teenages sons and daughters to suicide isn't a problem he accepts as his; and he certainly doesn't care if the Internet demolished the newspaper, book, music, and movie industries, and even government itself, in WikiLeaks. Oh no, technology is only a tool, and people in fact use it to worsen the world -- possibly because they don't, like Google, have a mantra: "Don't Be Evil".

Along the way, we get some other glimpses into the Cerfian metaverse:

Yet all these philosophical arguments overlook a more fundamental issue: the responsibility of technology creators themselves to support human and civil rights. The Internet has introduced an enormously accessible and egalitarian platform for creating, sharing and obtaining information on a global scale. As a result, we have new ways to allow people to exercise their human and civil rights.

In this context, engineers have not only a tremendous obligation to empower users, but also an obligation to ensure the safety of users online. That means, for example, protecting users from specific harms like viruses and worms that silently invade their computers. Technologists should work toward this end.

At one level this is corporate double-speak -- one of the rights-campaigners for the Internet like Rebecca McKinnon might well ask -- but if you support human rights, then why not make Internet access one of them? Or at least ask for a policy or a program that adds broadband to poor neighbourhoods or champions the rights of dissidents imprisoned for their blogs.

But at another level, it's a vision of people who think they already rule the world, but can and should be persuaded to do it ethically -- at least, by their own notion of ethics.  For Cerf, "safety first" here doesn't call up to mind bullied teenage suicides or the loss of media jobs, but threats *to the technology itself* like viruses. Of course, this is an excellent example of selectivity -- technologists find worms to be a threat -- vandalism by other technologists -- but not piracy, stealing of content. They will block the one and declare the fight against one an ethical goal; they will not do so with piracy. And...that's one of the reasons why you don't let people who tell you they are "empowering" you -- as if they can do that? -- to run everything -- and take away or give you rights.

In fact, Cerf is also laying the groundwork endlessly laid already on LiberationTechnology, the subscription Stanford University list, for some kind of engineer/geek/progressive-driven body or network (a wired state) that would "run things" because, oh, governments, corporations, individuals, etc. are all so corrupt and, well, not progressive.

Ultimately, the right to Internet access depends on them more than it does on governments.

Cerf finishes by talking about the IEEE -- the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers:

It is engineers — and our professional associations and standards-setting bodies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — that create and maintain these new capabilities. As we seek to advance the state of the art in technology and its use in society, we must be conscious of our civil responsibilities in addition to our engineering expertise.

Sounds boring and benign, no?

I've spent many an hour fighting the IEEE's virtual worlds subsection as it sought to gut out property rights, in obscure places like their discussion lists or the SL JIRA.  At some point when the edgy techno companies like Linden Lab and other virtual world makers dropped out of attempting to make their worlds interoperable, of all things, the US military stepped in -- something I've protested mightily, but of course, alone, and in obscurity.

In the course of trying to understand what another standards-setting body is and does -- the IETF -- I found out how they don't vote on things. There's no vote. It's not a democracy. They say they can't have one-man/one-vote because they never know who might show up at meetings. Say, 100s of IBM engineers could show up all of a sudden and skew the vote. Or some company profoundly affected by X or Y decision rushes through a vote, or whatever.

So they do something else: they hum. They hold meetings, and they hum. It's kind of a "voice vote," if you will. If people like an idea, they hum. They may then be intimidated into humming because their neighbour is humming -- that's the kind of thing that happens when you don't have a secret ballot! -- but no matter. The hummers have it! (It's kind of like the way the Occupied Wall Street urban campers wriggle their hands to signify approval or not, looking disturbingly like autistic children -- anything but one person/one vote and a secret ballot, eh guys? Democracy...)

Yes, they do indeed hum -- and you can see about this and many other geek-cultural dogmas here:

Another aspect of Working Groups that confounds many people is the fact that there is no formal voting. The general rule on disputed topics is that the Working Group has to come to "rough consensus", meaning that a very large majority of those who care must agree. The exact method of determining rough consensus varies from Working Group to Working Group. Sometimes consensus is determined by "humming" -- if you agree with a proposal, you hum when prompted by the chair; if you disagree, you keep your silence. Newcomers find it quite peculiar, but it works. It is up to the chair to decide when the Working Group has reached rough consensus.

 

The Year of Anonymous

PNs make a creepy simulation of my real-life self as an avatar in Second Life, then stalk me with it.

Few people get a bead on Anonymous.

It's not because they are elusive but because it's hard for those bothering to think about it to get past the scrim of their own vanity. Not preconceptions, vanity.

It's usually covered by geeky young tech writers who seem to have flying-penis envy for the channers when they see them in action.

Or you get wannabee geeks in more mainstream magazines or news sites (Forbes) that want to seem edgy and cool and seem to have a grudging admiration for the script kiddies.

The there's the griefer-professors who come along with the goons for the ride, whose entire scholarship is embedded in this cynical madness without any pretense at objectivity.

So while this Voice of America writer still tends toward the second category -- the youthful male who seems a little overawed by the bad-assed geekitude of Anonymous/Lulzsec, he still says something very important, almost accidently, in a piece titled An Anonymous Year.

For just about every significant news story this year, some part of Anonymous’ digital shadow hung large.

Let's say that again, ok?

For just about every significant news story this year, some part of Anonymous’ digital shadow hung large.

Doug outlines some of it, and everybody knows it -- WikiLeaks and PayPal, Gawker.com, Sony, Stratfor.

I should have realized when documenting Anon/4chan/w-hat/b-tards/Woodbury (yeah, they're all kinda different factions, whatever) in Second Life for all those years that they were metastasizing faster than we knew to real life. Scientology...the Save Darfur installation...Anshe Chung's press conference...the Edwards campaign...lots and lots of things, including even just Robin Harper's going-away party, not to mention my weekly discussions at the Sutherland Dam.

So Doug Bernard gets it right about Anonymous being behind every major upheaval -- first The Wrong Hands/JLU, then Stratfor, eh? -- and he should have mentioned Occupy Wall Street! -- but then he says this, the mistake everyone makes, after describing how his own computer was hacked and he got email messages from them:

But truth be told, I don’t fully understand you. Nor, I think, does anyone, really. For any given attack, there’s no sure way of knowing if Anonymous was behind it, or just some free-lancers looking for a little Internet mayhem. And then again, who’s to say what Anonymous even is? There’s no board, no director, no organizing structure. Just hundreds, or thousands, of web lurkers stirring up the digital pot. Anonymous is like fog: you can see it, but no matter how hard you try, you just can’t grab it.

Would you ever write, "I couldn't tell whether it was the Crips or the Bloods, or just initiates or new recruits to the Crips or the Bloods."

At one of the meetings organized about WikiLeaks by Persondal Democracy Forum last year at NYU, one of the speakers refused to concede that there was something "new" about Anonymous, or something "emergent" or "innovative" as they'd say now. He said they were called vandals in previous centuries, and that's what they are.

What's to understand here? It's a franchise, as I keep saying. The McDonald's don't make sweet-potato fries. They make those other fries with the beef by-products that they make. Of course, any inner-city youth can be hired to dunk those fries in the Fry-Max and flip those burgers, but there's only one recipe, rigidly followed. He might be fired and another put in his place -- it's not like the burgers will be different. But only that individual kid made that individual milkshare to hand to you.

So to speak of some "McDonald's swarm" like unfathomable fog is silly. There's the McDonald's franchise and the recipes. There are the individual kids. You must make your own decision to go to McDonald's and flip that particular burger.

The person that hacked Doug Bernard's computer is an individual -- only one person at a time can do a thing like reach in and write an email using your email, something all too easy to do. It might take bunches to do something like DDoS you, but only one person says "let's get 'em" and waits to see if anybody else objects. Maybe *one* might, and then that one individual is no "hacker hive" but an individual. And that one making the decision and the command isn't a "hacker hive" but an individual. With morals, or absence of them.

Of course there's an organizing structure and rigid -- brutal -- principles of organization. "Because none of us is as cruel as all of us." How does something like that come into being? By relentless humiliation and bullying and exclusion, mocking through layers of ritual.

There only *one* who sits down and writes the nasty, self-satisfied gloating note to the victim. Just one. And usually, that person victory-dances somewhere, on the IRC or Facebook and that's how they get caught. They go to jail.

Found these old pictures! Imagine, you're in a virtual world with a different avatar, not resembling yourself in real life. And someone stalks you with an avatar made of your real self that they've gotten somewhere from pictures they've obtained.