Wired State

The Time Machine

I had a chance to read H.G. Well's The Time Machine over the holidays. I read it back in 1974 when I took a "gut" course in science fiction in first year in university. I had forgotten it and then remembered it again by the time I got to the names of the creatures, the Eloi and the Morlocks.

Of course, this brings to mind, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani," Jesus' last words as He hung on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  So the "Eloi" were like gods.

The story has been studied and criticized to death, of course, but I wonder if anybody happened to notice that coincidence -- the one version of Jesus' last words which are rather discouraging (and ultimately, not true, as the Son was not forsaken by the Father, according to our faith) -- as contrasted with the more altruistic and upbeat "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do."

Usually this story is thought to be actually about time travel, thinking about the fourth dimension -- time -- and discussing how time travel could actually be effected -- and of course the problems ensuing like atoms occupying the same space from different times when they do collide in time, and possible explosions or disintegrations.

But really, I don't see it so much as being "about" the Time Machine so much as the Time Machine is a vehicle to discuss and play out various theories of humankind and civilization, and ideas for arranging society.

And of course the chief preoccupation here is communism, and the character says it first (the mayor) and then the narrator himself speculates that the futuristic society he sees is perfected communism, then abandons it for another theory where he imagines that there is a kind of "1 percent" and "99 percent or "47 percent and 53 percent", the Morlocks, the workers toiling away underground in the dark, in order to keep the Eloi in happy, playful lives where they just run around all day raising flowers, making flower wreaths, making love, eating delicious fruit, taking swims, and not really caring when some of their number disappear below -- although in a few scenes he describes their fear of the dark.

Then he revises his theory again, and declares that it's really more about the Morlocks, while they must toil in darkness and sweat, being like ranchers, as they pasture the Eloi, then eat them as their meat.

Well, anyone who has seen "real, existing communism" in action would say that this is still communism, as indeed communism tends to destroy people, spirit and body, one way or another.

But the Time Traveller, as the main character is called in this paperback version of the book, seems still to retain admiration for the Morlocks, even though he fears them and flees them and has to wrest his Time Machine back from them - he likes the idea of their toiling, and is contemptuous of that carefree life the Eloi live among their flowers. Over and over, he comments at how child-like and even stupid they have become, how weak and pale and short, as if the good life ennervated them and destroyed them in evolution over the centuries because they didnt have to struggle, they reached the point where they didn't have to work.

Clearly, H.G. Wells -- the Time Traveller is usually taken to be him -- idealizes the labour and like a lot of British intellectuals who fell for socialism thinks there is something transcendental about labour, and even spiritually sanctifying about labour, like Tolstoyans in the Russian woods.

Interestingly, Wells writes a somewhat unflattering remark about the Time Traveller, which I immediately wrote down to save as it summed up for me all those purveyors of utopian ideals like the TED fanatics:

I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine.  The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed; you never felt that you saw all round him, you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.

H.G. Wells makes short work of capitalism in one little interchange:

"Then there is the future," said the Very Young Man. "Just think! One might invest all one's money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry on ahead!"

"To discover a society," said I, "erected on a strictly communistic basis."

Of course, we think of discussions of communism revolving around the Soviet experiment and ensuing Soviet mass murder. And usually some wit tells you that communism was a great and good idea, but just implemented poorly. That is has never been implemented well and always leads to mayhem and mass murder never seems to "stick" as a hard fact.

But H.G. Wells wrote this story in 1895, long before the Bolshevik revolution, but of course, exactly during the period when all kinds of Russian and German socialist theories were fermenting.

Some people admire Wells as some kind of futuristic and visionary thinker or something, but I find him a didactic old bore, as all socialists can be, especially with insufferable Darwinism. Darwinism seems likely true as it goes as a theory of change for organic life, but that doesn't necessarily mean it applies as "science" to other aspects of human life on earth, i.e. to theories of governance or politics or whatever. And yet, so often people apply social Darwinism especially in the world of software and increasingly of any social media platform. "Patch or GTFO" and all that, survivor of the fittest with the most followers...

What's strange about the Darwinism with regard to The Time Machine is that Wells actually posits a negative evolution -- the Eloi who are evolved in the year 800,000 something are in fact weak and dying out and unfit -- they became that way because they removed through intellect all the elements of their existence that would have kept them fit and did for many years -- struggle, want, etc.

Was he unconsciously doubting his own theories or merely playing with them in the narrative? In fact, not only do the Morlocks and Eloi merge to become merely jumping rabbit-like dimwitted people, dial the Machine a few more million years and all that is left is this huge, ugly, encrusted red crab with green slime all over it and creepy eyeballs, coming for him. And yeah, that's a good metaphor for communism!

Wells was a die-hard socialist (Fabian Society, William Morris) and his early experience burned in his loathing of the "1 percent" -- he struggled in school, his parents didn't have money,  the shop they bought when they moved out of the labouring domestic servant class failed as it was in a bad location and had poor goods, and his father had to make tips as a professional cricket player -- until he broke his thigh and then couldn't play anymore. His mother had to return to domestic servitude and was not allowed to bring her family with her to the house she worked. H.G. had numerous fits and starts in schools, pupil-teacher jobs, apprenticeships he hated, etc. which gave him a lifelong hatred of the wealthy and privileged and obsession with the "distribution of wealth". He was an auto-didact; auto-didacts can be the most didactic.  He wrote many books about how to get socialism to work; he wanted to get it to work.

Now, once he gained familiarity with the "real socialism" in the Soviet Union, he may have been a bit critical. But in fact, the Soviets liked him and he was friends with the paramount Bolshevik, Maxim Gorky. He and Gorky wanted to make a kind of "Great Books" collection, a shorter and dumbed-down version of all the worlds' best books in a kind of encyclopedia, which the workers would read in order to become enlightened. In other words, Wikipedia...

This is how Wikipedia describes it, without mentioning Gorky, however:

In 1936, before the Royal Institution, Wells called for the compilation of a constantly growing and changing World Encyclopaedia, to be reviewed by outstanding authorities and made accessible to every human being. In 1938, he published a collection of essays on the future organisation of knowledge and education, World Brain, including the essay, "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia".

Did you know H.G. Wells was the father of "miniature war-gaming?" And also had a conception of a "world state" (like Gorky and other Old Bolsheviks). Read Wikipedia on all this. Wells admired Stalin, although he thought he was a bit narrow-minded, and would debate socialist reform ideas with him. And not surprisingly -- all of these ideologies go together -- Wells believed in eugenics; he advocated a kind of fascism for the sake of this socialist world state. No accident, comrades! Oh, and he hated the Zionists, too! Really, Wells is a most loathsome character and is an iconic example of all the strains of ideology in England at the time that still manifest today, more than 100 years later.

In short, H.G. Wells is the founder of the ideas of the Wired State; he would fit in perfectly in Silicon Valley with do-gooding reformist-minded software tycoons who want capitalism for themselves and communism for you. Oh, and where does this better-worlding take us, this itch to reform man that always ends up abstracting him away into non-existence? In his last book Mind at the End of its Tether (1945) he considered the idea that humanity being replaced by another species might not be a bad idea."  Cheerful stuff!

C.S. Lewis spent a lot of time countering Wells -- Wells disliked Christianity and particularly
Catholicism as well. The character Jules is meant to be Wells, in That Hideous Strength, my favourite book, by C.S. Lewis.

Among the lovers of Wells (his wife was said to sanction him having affairs) wasn't just the feminists and Rebecca West but Moura -- the Russian woman in Berberova's Moura:  The Dangerous Life of Baronness Budberg another one of my favourite books. Wikipedia doesn't mention her, but from Berberova's findings, Wells seems like a cranky old man whom Moura stuck by out of loyalty -- I believe she was with him when he died. I have to get that book again, I had borrowed it to read it and I can't find the passages I need on the search on Amazon.com.

Socialism! Improvement of the race, then leading finally to elimination of the human species all together! And War of the Worlds!

Google Has it Wrong About the ITU

As the ITU meeting approaches, a lot of posturing and jockeying for position is going on. I've covered Russia's attempt to grab Internet governance.

Now the UN and ITU have claimed that Google has it all wrong -- states aren't bidding to take over the Internet.

Suddenly, the ITU claims that the fact that it incorporates UN human rights treaties into its charter is the same thing as actually having its state members really comply with those treaties. Nonsense! Look at the UN Committee Against Torture's conclusions on Russia this week -- awful! (Scross down to the Russian report and the experts' conclusions on the far right column). Beatings, jailings, murders of journalists -- a terrible indicator of lack of press freedom. Obviously, signing a treaty isn't the same thing as doing it.

And the tech press has now misleading reported Russia as "backing down" from its position, although it hasn't really done anything of the sort -- that was just a dodge to confuse people before the meeting, its position is hardly changed as you see from reading the text referenced.

Meanwhile, Google is no better, in its heavily-publicized manifesto -- using its high-view "Take Action" page that helped rally 7 million people to oppose SOPA last summer.

But Google has two things wrong.

First, it sets up the proposition that having closed-door meetings is somehow evil and non-transparent. You know, like Google isn't transparent in its Transparency Report about HOW it comes to make decisions about what content to remove or not remove, thinking we'll be satisfied merely with the aggregate report of WHAT.

But there's nothing wrong with closed-door meetings of states per se. States have to negotiate. They can't do that in the glare of the press. States negotiate all the time behind closed doors, on everything from the disabled rights treaty to the resolution on Gaza that the US said it would veto. That's life in the real world -- governments negotiate behind closed doors. The governments, ideally, are democratically elected and represent their peoples' interests when they do that. They don't represent Google's interests, but then, they're just one company with one copyleftist concept and the California Business Model (hijack other people's intellectual property to use to sell ads and wait for the lawyers to call).

Google isn't even a member of the ITU -- as The Register points out, it prefers to spend its lobbying money on Washington. At least Apple bothered to join. So what is its standing at the ITU? It's like a lobbying NGO -- did it even get an observer pass or what?

Electronic Frontier Foundation and the other lobbyists screaming about the ITU -- which of course shouldn't be let anywhere near the Internet -- seem to think that they clinch their case for evil-doing by saying the meetings are behind closed doors. Oh, like EFF board and staff meetings? They imagine that just because the ITU member states are governments they "have" to be public when they try to reach consensus. But of course they don't have to be public; that's not how diplomacy works.

Sure, you want international meetings to be as transparent as possible -- with open documents and open agreements, openly arrived at. But not everything is done that way  or realistically can be done that way -- if you force countries into holding open sessions, as we know from many of the now-open sessions of the UN Security Council, first of all, those NGOs that clamoured for them to be open don't even bother to follow them much of the time, and second, you just drive the secrecy further into more informal settings of basement meetings, receptions, dinners, etc.

More troubling, however, is the second thing that Google gets wrong -- out of Silicon Valley idealism and desire to "make a better world" and "change the world" -- which no one has really asked them to do except for their own cohorts.

Google has about 50,000 staff people now, up from 30,000 when they acquired Motorola. It's a private company and even its rank-and-file employees don't get to participate democratically in its political positions, i.e. about how the Internet should run. Probably they have a lot of ideological support among their own ranks, but they haven't participated in the decision. More to the point, we haven't! Google doesn't represent America or even the political party whose candidate they helped get elected to the White House again -- at least not formally.

Yet Google thinks that anyone who shows up should have standing at an international meeting, and the Internet Governance Forum, where governments and NGOs and corporations alike are at the same table should get to make decisions about the means of communication and livelihood for us all.

I can only say: no fucking way. Again, we did not elect Google. Google does not represent the American people. Unless the Obama Administration has deputized the same executives who serve in the Administration itself in the Google-US revolving door system -- but we haven't heard that.

I'm not forthe ITU taking over the Internet for all the obvious reasons; but I'm also not for the NGOs taking over -- the "progressive engineers," the EFF, and all the other international jet-set that shows up at these meetings, and give us "the tyranny of who shows up".  I definitely don't want Google's NGO stalking horses running the Internet either -- New America Foundation (Rebecca McKinnon), Center for Democracy and Technology, etc.

I'm happy to have my government, even the Obama Administration I didn't vote for, represent the American people at the ITU, where the official position, thank God, is to push back and not let Russia get the upper hand. And I'm happy to leave the Internet Governance Forum as a talk shop.

Really, Google needs to be paper-trained for international meetings. They don't understand how the international system works; they don't respect; they want to overthrow it with crude revolutionary programs that their geeks decide in a vacuum undemocratically. The Internet has to remain diverse, with all kinds of actors freely engaging on it, from individuals to nonprofits to businesses to governments.

 Sure, we need a free and open Internet that governments alone -- and intergovernmental agencies that contain so many bad actors like Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, etc. -- should not determine. But the answer is not to let unelected and unaccountable NGOs and corporations decide everything undemocratically either. Whatever millions of people Google can whiplash in its networks, it is not a country, it is not elected, and it has no due process for reaching decisions by deliberation. It can't decide our future online.

 

 

 

The Inherent Unfairness of Geek Coded Voting Tools

Yet another lefty Scott Walker- hater geek codes up a site and thinks he can be viewed as an honest broker in the voting business. He says his business failed, but his idea is great and is just waiting to be picked up by "the people" who will "carry the torch". Nevermind that this is a guy that thinks anti-Walker protesters "convey information" but by implication, then, their opponents "purvey falsehoods". Fortunately, reason, common sense, and fairness prevailed and the geeks and the lefties and the "scientists" of the Democratic Party who muscled in unions, Occupy, Michael Moore, etc. could not prevail. Scott Walker was not recalled. You lose, good day, sir.

The market voted on this failed web site -- it didn't serve people for all kinds of reasons. He blames the failure on features of his team or his location or lack of full-time programmers or sufficient VC capital. But the reality is, a voting site like this is UNTRUSTWORTHY and will only gain like-minded geeks and their "progressive" pals who want to socialize with each other and reinforce each other, not people really interested in authentic debate and real deliberation leading to consensus in a liberal democracy. These things are awfully hard to replicate anyway online, but they are even more difficult because of the heavily-biased utopian Marxist-style ideals that geeks like this bring to the task.

So typical of the "scientism"of the left. The people who protested against Walker weren't merely "conveying information". They were *expressing an opinion* that they believed municipal unions should enjoy unlimited collective bargaining rights even though they are state unions paid out of the taxpayers' pockets, not in private industry. And these people with "information" in fact then *lost* the recall vote, and Scott Walker was not recalled, despite their hatred of him. Other people had voted for him and wanted to keep him and his plans to reduce the deficit. And you know, when you win an election, that's that, hey don't be a sore loser, as Obama gloaters are telling us now.

Voting is not "broken". Geeks are broken in their understanding of what safeguards are needed in elections. If it were up to them, they'd abolish political parties (Sergei Brin's proposal), and they'd just code up a platform where we'd all vote on prepared propositions and "like" them (Sergei's friends). No thanks! I want real democracy with yes/no votes and deliberation that results in propositions, not "science" that produces them.

You and your geek friends with your worldview may love "OurBallotBox," but the rest of us don't share your views, and you don't have a better idea for us than "patch or GTFO" or "remove" as in "Harper Reed's tips for problem solving". Sorry, but that's not a democracy, it's totalitarianism.

Every single one of your ideas for "fixing" the problems of "political social networks" in fact perpetuates the real problems of geek networks antithetical to democracy:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/11/socialmediaengineering.html
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/02/the-seven-deadly-flaws-of-online-democracy-.html

The typical Redditt style mass site has features like "downvoting" that make it possible for aggressive minorities or intolerant majorities to eliminate dissent from the view. Surfacing and sorting in fact amount to algorithms that usually favour the devs' friends -- the early adapters get more followers, they get listed as the recommended people to follow, they are the power users on the power curve, etc.

Open data? And who gets to slice and dice it? Your friend Nate Silver? With science? And you're sure Nate Silver never makes a political judgement, ever?

You just hate it that "certain radio hosts" can articulate an opinion and get followers, don't you! You wish you could just rule everybody with your Twitter account as a "thought leader"!

Change.org like all left-leaning platforms pretending to be for "everybody" have several severely built-in flaws: a) their cadres promote some petitions and not others that fit their views b) if you ever develop a difficulty in registering and fielding a petition, they simply have no customer service to help you, like all these big platforms, you're toast c) your petition is only as good as your social media network to promote it, if you aren't chosen by the devs. Very, very unfair system.

POPVOX has a very heavy bias problem whereby it lets people post comments only in favour of their vote, and not in criticism of the opposite vote. It is not a real simulation of real democracy where people argue and deliberate with fair conditions. POPVOX also fronts and promotes the ideas they like, they don't create a level playing field:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/02/popvox-or-poxvip-how-a-voting-platform-intrudes-on-democracy-and-skews-the-views.html
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/02/email-from-marci-harris-of-popvox-and-my-reply-are-you-building-lists-for-lobbyists.html

All the makers of all the platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, etc. claim to be wanting to "effect change" and to "make a better world". What they mean is that they want to weld their own ideas into the platform and then let it be hijacked by data-miners from Obama for America. You see these tools as Trojan horses and stalking horses for your own perspective. And that's why people don't view you as fair and will go on disrupting what you do. Of course, you'll try to deal with them by mute, ban, block but the Internet routes around.

Accordingly, what I saw to all these wannabe totalitarianism who want to code these platforms to engender the "disruptive" -- revolutionary -- change that will destroy "the old order," here's what you would really have to do to ensure real democracy:

1. Not just verify identity but have a plan for fighting those who will insist on preserving anonymity and invoke all kinds of notions of repression of dissent in order to justify their unwillingness to face accountability.  This might mean separating the voting apparatus with secret ballot but verified identity and pseudonymous discussion (backed by real identity).

2. Any propositions must be allowed to be submitted, and allowed to attract votes, with no time limits or thresholds  to be viewed. None. Absolutely none. Every geek-driven site from the WhiteHouse.gov to SecondLife.com injects various restrictive notions to suit their own notions, but these have to be jettisoned. There is absolutely no reason why any system can't have an unlimited number of proposals, votes, and comments, and be reviewed as needed by elected officials. The limits geeks devise here coming out of clutchy little notions of tidiness of binary notions of numerics have to go. In a world where *search* is used to find propositions of interest, any effort to restrict size, frequency, numbers of votes, etc. etc. is unnecessary.

3. Search algorithms must be open and publicized and any notion of secrecy for the sake of preventing "gaming" have to be jettisoned. Devise an open algorithm that has red dye on the gaming, or don't make a voting system. End of story. This is the central flaw of all voting systems.

4. Leave gamification out of the system. Nobody needs any net nerds who get badges and reputational points for posting the most, voting the most, getting the most passed, etc. Democracy works, well, when it works.

5. First Amendment level protection of free speech. No speech codes, terms of service with overbroad language about "incivility," no abuse reporting accepted for "hate speech," etc. etc. Unless somebody has a successful judge's decision from a court proceeding in a libel case or a case of "incitement to imminent violence," they cannot have the platform provider remove speech. Accordingly, no blocks, ban, mutes, downvotes, etc. on speech grounds whatsoever. Offenses like malicious scripts with spam bots may be punishable under the TOS, but not statements that hurt the feelings of thin-skinned geeks and forums divas.

6. Independent, separate, impartial civilian review board that reviews the work of the voter platform. Ideally, a voting platform constituent assembly made up of any registered party, not just geeks who turn out mainly to be technocommunists and libertarians and Democrats, but all parties, should be involved in the decisions about the coding and features, and allowed to vote on feature requests and bug prioritization.

7. NGOs, movements, trade unions, astroturfs like moveon.org or Daily Kos or Red State should also have meaningful participation but not an equal vote to registered parties that developed platforms which their members get to vote on at conventions.

8. No repeal of Citizens' United, and allowance of any political speech in the forum of ads.

9. No one can close anyone else's proposal or proposition, or suggest that it "can't be done" or devise a minimum necessary number of votes for it to be featured or looked at. Surfacing of proposals can be done all kinds of ways, from automatic 15 minutes of fame at first posting, to random features in one column, to most popular displayed. But this has to be looked and debate constantly as to its fairness, or flashmobbing takes over and only the popular get popular attention. No vote is removed if it is "defunct," and not voted on. Get over any fear of "clutter" as this is the Internet where it's only a miniature storage issue. Independent free media is the necessary partner of any voting system.

10. No automatic reputation systems, i.e. through downvotes or upvotes, likes or dislikes, or number of postings. The independent and free media and blogosphere can cover people making propositions with the information they gather about them and the judgements for which they take responsibility.

I'm sure there's lots more, but I can see this is going to be a growing battlefield. We need to get the geeks out of this business and have a serious coalition of normal people enter this field and bat away all their totalitarianisms or we will lose our freedom. I'm not kidding.

 

 

 

Evil Capitalist Black Friday, Good Small Business Saturday, Awesome Cyber Monday

I knew the hate-on-Black-Friday movement was really gaining steam when a socialist acquaintance way up in Canada was asking, puzzled, "What is Black Friday?" but willing to sign a petition to protest mistreatment of Wal-Mart workers.

Black Friday is being reported as a wild frenzy -- and mainly from Wal-mart as that is the target of the anti-capitalist campaign this year. We've already had the obligatory story about the guy who left his girlfriend's toddler in the back seat of the car over night while he bought a big-screen TV and went home with it with a friend.

Some people don't even realize that the origin of the term has to do with the accounting idiom "in the black," i.e. not "in the red," and the point in the year when you begin to make a profit, after expenses. Since many stores would make most of their revenue from the Thankgsiving holiday shopping period, they began more and more to create "Black Friday" sales when they would "get in the black" for the year. People were happy to shop the day after Thanksgiving, when they had the day off from work and could find some bargains. I remember 20 years ago, we would use "Black Friday" to go to the warehouse stores like Sam's Price Club or Costco and buy Christmas presidents or bulk staples for bargain prices.

In the recession, the day has become more frenzied and even mean, as people get more and more desperate to get a low-priced item. People admit that you don't always really get a bargain, given the mark-up before the discount, but, for example, my son was just able to find a floor lamp for $8.

Still, it has gotten more and more crazy, and this year, when our friend made a run at 8 pm to 7/11 to get miniature marshmallows for the Watergate Salad - how could you make it without mini mallows! -- he had to go to Wal-mart when 7/11 proved to be out of them, and was shocked at the lines of grim shoppers. That's because Black Friday, which used to start with people lining up at 4:30 am, has now stretched back into Thursday night, or even Thursday during the day.

That's going too far for some people, as they feel that Thursday is the day you should stay home with your family, helping to cook, feasting on turkey and dressing and sides like cranberry and sweet potato (the little marshmallows can go in there, too), and then after clean-up, settling into an evening of board games.

But a lot of people aren't traditional in this fashion any more, and don't cook. They go out to eat on Thanksgiving because it's too much work to thaw, dress, stuff and cook the turkey and all the fixings.  Then after they've already driven out to the commercial strip or the mall for dinner, why not shop, too?

My friend felt it had taken on a grim quality -- and I think the socialists agitating against capitalist excesses don't get what this day or weekend is all about: they need to save money because there's still a recession, and they need to find lower-priced stuff. Like for me, it's a winter coat.

That hasn't stopped the socialist Occupy Wall Street and similar movements grabbing on to the occasion to hate on that large and emblematic target of tacky consumer capitalism, Wal-mart. To be sure, what got a lot of people to sign petitions to Wal-mart this year, including me, was the widespread belief that they, like other big stores, were not going to let their employees have the day off with their families on Thanksgiving. And this seemed a vioation of sacred tradition. There were even claims that Wal-mart was suppressing worker dissent and punishing critics of their practices in their labour force. Well, this may bear checking, but I decided to sign the petition anyway.

What I did find humorous is that none of those socialist agitators against tacky Wal-mart, where in fact a lot of their cherished working class and the apple of their socialist eye, the poor, were getting bargains and *wanted* to shop -- were bitching about Cyber Monday.

Cyber Monday arguably involves even worst labour abuses, with all those electronic gadgets and i-phones made in China and other Asian countries with poor working conditions. Yet to many of the hipsters who congratulate themselves for hating on the place where fat people who drive SUVs shop, Cyber Monday feels clean and green and "right". It's online, and the lines and greed don't show up so visibly. But Cyber Monday is no less crass -- it stakes out a day when people are still in the shopping mood, even if they have gone back to work, where they will shirk work and surf bargains on the Internet or even go to Best Buy that day during lunch hour or in the evening.

But for the true vegan fairly-traded organic Portlandia types, there is now another option for indulging in their shopping natures but appearing to be sticking it to the Man and Evil Capitalism -- Small Business Saturday. On that day, you can pledge to buy from a "small" or "independent" store. No matter if that small store has the same tacky unnecssary products like snuggly blanket outfits to wear while watching TV, or the same gadgets as Cyber Monday but probably at a higher price, the "smallness" is blessed as "beautiful".

Even -- especially! -- our Community-Organizer-in-Chief -- announced that he had shopped at an independent bookstore to promote small business on this day organized by the "progressives". So capitalism is ok -- as long as it comes in smaller sizes with higher, boutique prices and doesn't practice economies of scale.

And did you realize what is sponsoring Small Business Saturday? A gigantic American corporation with offices everywhere overseas -- the credit card company American Express. They don't care whether you shop in disgusting excess elbowing aside other piggy fat people at Wal-marts, or shop in slender yuppie peace in a boutique book store, or click online while sitting at your desk, they still get the same percentage.

 

Today, Facebook Takes Away the Vote on Facebook; Tomorrow Social Media Engineers Take Away Voting in Real Life

Queens, NY polling station, November 6, 1012. Photo by Joe Shlabotnik.

Soon to be obsolete? These new "voting booths" don't have as much privacy, and there is no more lever to pull. You fill out a paper ballot at this desk, then take it to be inserted into a scanning machine that handles votes then electronically. It's part paper, part electronic -- and part online as to tabulations. So it won't be long before it is ALL online -- and what goes with it is a jumble of bad practices and oppressive belief systems and habits that geeks already have welded into social media in their own culture, antithetical to democracy. Today Facebook, tomorrow real life.

The New York Times reports with more clarity on something that we all got in our emails from Facebook today and were puzzled about. Puzzled, because it was in double-speak and it wasn't clear what it was really about until you clicked through a lot of screens. The Times spells it out: Facebook is getting rid of features voting. They have some techie patter about it--too many comments came in and it "incentivized" quantity over quality -- or so they said. What they mean is they don't have the resources or will to create "the customer service state" as Edward Castronova called it in his book The Exodus to the Virtual World.

The retraction of customer democracy in Facebook, an event that many millions of people won't care about is familiar to us who went through this some years ago on a smaller and more intense scale.

In the online virtual world of Second Life, about six years ago the Features Voting System was very active. Customers made suggestions and some were incorporated. But the engineers in Linden Lab, the company that makes Second Life, didn't like having the constraint on their business. They -- and their defenders -- kept saying companies aren't democracies. They have to make decisions consistent with what they think will serve them and their venture capitalists (or shareholders for public companies). And that's understood. But even engineers among the customer base would point out that if people paid money for a service, or supplied content for their free accounts and turned over data available then for marketing and sales, they should have a say in the features and bug priorities.

This is how I developed my theory of the next stage of computing as "socialware," that software could no longer be the closely-guarded realm of coders and engineers, and not only be about occasionally heeding "customer requirements," but that customers would get to contribute -- not as expects, making patches and solving bug problems, but really getting the features and bug prioritization that served them and their needs, not the arcance needs of coders who code for code's sake, with "code as law". This is, of course, revolutionary, and heartily disliked by the coders who want to stay in power over software, and who constantly make up technical reasons, or wither with scorn the non-technical person, claiming they aren't feasible. But of course, they often are. Somebody might say copying was impossible to stop; but they did curb it in Second Life to make the economy viable. Somebody might say scraping of marketing data and sale of ads based on customer clicking was necessary and hard to stop but customers hated it and Facebook was forced to stop the Beacon program, for example. They were forced to re-word their terms of service to concede copyright of content and not grab it away, as many platforms do with customers.

In Second Life, the online democracy was short-lived -- I developed my "seven deadly sins of online democracy" based on this bitter experience. For one, an aggressive sectarian with elaborate ideas of how people needed to be governed, who himself was a devotee of the BDSM cult and ran a "capture rape roleplay maze" in Second Life for furries (!) became a helpful" friend of the developer and pruned everything he didn't like politically out of the features list -- one popular proposal was to introduce the ability to vote "no" which enabled people to apply a necessary democratic adjustment to flashmobs who whiplashed networks of their friends to mob a feature vote and make it appear as if it were popular. Without the ability to vote "no," and with comments sometimes heavily moderated and dissent discouraged, it was hard to garner any resistance to some ideas even if they would adversely affect the whole population.

The Linden designers deliberately left out the "no" vote as they felt it was too "negative". I discovered this was a common opinion among developers of social media and games and worlds in general -- they feared dissent, they feared negative comments about themselves, so they "engineered for positivity" by offering only the "like" vote -- what we see today on a Facebook page, even though if you look under the hood at the script for this function, it could easily admit a "dislike" as well -- but doesn't for just this same reasoning.

In Second Life,  many people voted against a global banning system that anyone could add to; they felt it would be misused and was misused in private hands to eject anybody disliked for any reason, not just actual bad behaviour or violation of the terms of service. They voted against removal of the telehubs which were centers of commerce based on Jane Adams idea of urban design that were hubs of socializing and shopping; a determined minority of older customers whose stores were far away from these hubs claimed they were tacky and lacky, and the subway-like system impeded movement, and insisted on point-to-point teleportation. The BDSM/Gorean cultists loved that p2p as well -- it helped in their capture and control of recruits if they could bring them immediately to their side with a click offer or a portal board.

The Features Voting System was re-done by the company when they changed forums software as a bug reporting system, with the ability to suggest features, but anyone could remove them. They used the JIRA software system whose developers also share the widespreade tekkie belief that you should not have "no" votes -- I tried to suggest it or ask if it could be added on as a module and was told that if I wanted to make a feature proposal on their system, I could do so, but it wouldn't attract votes as no one wanted it.

So I fought for the ability for all proposals to remain so as to enable votes to keep running -- the friends of the developers would go around closing proposals they didn't like for various political reasons, often under a technical excuse.  And to give you an idea -- the political of software are enormous and vicious and deeply rooted in the ideologies of real life. For example, I found a flaw in the group land tools that enabled people who were not allocated the power to remove prims or building blocks from the simulator or server in the group -- a check-off box -- would be able suddenly to remove those prims if the item was put in "share" -- a function that people would use to be able to move things around together and add to them. That meant that non-copiable items returned from the server would be destroyed. This played havoc in group rental systems where people would return shared prims as a form of griefing or harassment, or sometimes by accident.

Meanwhile, the developers, notably Soft Linden (each of the company employees make a first name and have the last name "Linden") said that on the contrary, the function of being able to return others' builds at will was a great boon for collective building and was a feature, not a bug. I checked with the original coder. He admitted it was a design flaw. But it wasn't one he cared about or would change, because he was inclined to like collective building as well. I pointed out that it wasn't much of a collective if one more aggressive builder could return anyone else's pieces against their will, but he didn't care. This is how collectivism works -- it starts as collaboration, it ends as communism. I was for putting restraints on that. The technocommunists and libertarians weren't. A similar battle was waged over permissions on objects -- some people who believed in open source sofware and Stallman type philosophies wanted everything to be made copyable and not sellable; others wanted to protect their intellectual property. The copyleftists undermined the default permissions system by demanding the first step toward eventually ending it -- the ability to make global permanent permissions changes. Again, billed as a builder's boon, it contained within it the problem of erosion of the inherent copyright DRM that in fact was not demanded by builders or creators, but by ideologues among scripters -- whose scripts couldn't be copied as easily as textures and meshes and such rendered by the client because they executed server-side.

Over time, some proposals on the Second Life JIRA would get thousands of votes, but the devs didn't want to do them for various reasons, political or technical or merely the issue of priorities. Customers wanted the privacy-eroding ability of other customers to copy and store their IP address if they came on their server to be blocked because they didn't like their privacy outed or alts outed; the company wanted to retain that aspect for their own feasibility of a platform for marketers. Yeah, we got it that you can't track a person to their home with an IP address necessarily, but finding out a general location and matching it with other clues often served as a means to expose someone's anonymous identity; certainly it aided in the exposure of their other alternative accounts that some people didn't realize were all related.

Eventually the customers won on this privacy issue, but not by technical solutions,but solutions within the TOS. More demands came to be made, and the developers hated this, and began to threaten people with banning if they kept commenting. I was banned for pushing the "bug not a feature" and the copyright issues, accused of an "editing war" although coders who disagreed were not banned; they were part of the tribe.

Eventually, voting was stopped; all one could do was merely "follow" a bug report. When people still continued to express dissent in the comments, then finally the very view of the bug reporting system was blocked to everyone except a handful of loyal cadres in the developer customer base. Today, there is no more democracy/voting/commentary in Second Life, although it once flourished until killed off by a few "democratic centralists". All there is left is a kind of small closed discussion list for the cleared cognescenti.

Facebook has a billion people to Second Life's million, and has even bigger claims about how "democracy can't scale". Their argument about ability to make comments incentivizing quantity over quality is merely what bureaucratic technocrats say who can't or won't pay staff for governance or who don't want customer democracy as they think it will hurt their ability to market as they see fit. What they fail to realize is that in our modern era, social media has replaced the town hall and the local newspaper and the civics club; it *is* the civil society for better or worse. And yet it is run by draconian, arbitrary managers who not only want more control over users; they want to make argumentations that they think are persuasive to their fellow geeks and technocratic engineers -- "it can't scale" or "it incentivizes quantity".

If you think this doesn't matter because "it's only a game" or "only a social network," or "companies get to do that" you are losing sight of how this argumentation is increasingly being made about real life. About elections .and voting not about a silly feature set or privacy online for your cat photos, but candidates you vote for who really affect your life in serious ways Sergei Brin, CEO of Google, thinks we should not have political parties at all. Many of the "thought leaders" of Silicon Valley think we should merely "like" on social media platforms and dispense with the caucuses, the electoral college, the ballot boxes in the physical world. Why don't we all just move on line? "We must fix this," said Obama about long lines to vote.

Lots of geeks would like to fix this by moving all voting to the Inter. After all, Estonia, with a million people, has online voting now; so do other countries. They have theories about how voting itself should be changed -- Liquid Democracy, the program of the Pirate Party, is a typical example of how likeminded cadres set up votes and get loyal tribes to vote on pre-prepared propositions or paired candidates -- but they don't have a "no" vote; they don't have a system for protecting dissent and minorities; they don't care, really, about governance as it has to be done in a diverse society with conflicting views. They want tools to manage consensus-building only with "civil" discourse -- they will mute, block, or ban anyone who gets in the way. Harper Reed, the coder for Obama's Get out the Vote software, wants to solve problems by removing people from a task force who don't get with the program, don't agree with the others, and aren't "positive". Once they have weeded out these dissenters, they want the alpha males who remain to butt heads in a "truthquisition" until those with "falsehoods" are defeated. They think this is a great way to run a software project -- I think it's a horrible way to run software. They will bleed this into real life; just you watch, they already do, everywhere they can. Yesterday they ran games online; today they gamify voting platforms for getting out the vote; tomorrow you will not be able to vote no on a proposition they select, and your negative comment will be deleted.

Young people who are growing up on the Internet and smart phones are thrilled that pot was legalized on the ballot in Colorado. Perhaps they don't even smoke pot, but they love the idea of lifestyle issues coming up to a vote and people who want them being able to win. Gay marriage got voted "yes" on the Maryland ballot. Young people increasingly feel -- and talk about avidly on Libertarian forums in particular -- that the smart people should just code up platforms for propositions that we should all just vote on or "like" in a positive, and run things that way. Scientific! Why spend money on attack ads?!

So beware the move online for voting. With the move online for voting "to avoid long lines," as Obama said, come the various geek philosophies that are antithetical to true democracy.

 Very, very soon, faster than anyone could have ever imagined, we will lose our ability to debate freely; to mount proposals freely; and to even vote "no". We will left with only the "like" click, on proposals made by anonymous geeks for us. If you don't believe me, as the anonymous Angel Fluffy, the BDSM furry fox with the rape "game" who weeded out all the proposals that he didn't like, for which the devs, who didn't like them either, were eternally grateful.You know, like "let's have a 'no' vote". If you don't believe me, as Oz Linden, who threatened people with banning if they commente too much about "yes" vote flash mobs they felt were not reflecting the public mind or continued to dissent when the devs said "can't do". He presided over the removal of first the voting feature, then even the view of proposals at all. These are people who don't just have this theory for a game or a virtual world; they're practicing for how to do this in real life, just as Anonyous practiced in Second Life and Habbo Hotel and other online worlds and games before taking their show on the real road of hacking the Pentagon and even Gawker.

Lofgren Tries to Sic 'The Internet' on Congress #Fail

Photo by Carolin Hinz, 2012.

There she goes again as she did with SOPA/PIPA, Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), congress person for Silicon Valley, is trying to sic "the Internet" on Congress to get Big IT's way.

And interestingly enough, even the New Republic, bought out by Silicon Valley tycoon Chris Hughes to use for the US elections and help Obama win, has called out her shameless pandering to the "front page of the Internet" as -- not so much. 

As TNR's Molly Redden reports, for all the agitation the Redditors do among themselves and their churn of traffic on their own site, this doesn't "convert" as the Silicon Valley adsters describe ads versus sales, into actual constituent action. You know, getting away from your Anonymoose mask and actually calling up your congress person's office or physicially visiting your representive.

Getting "Internet People" to make that cold call needs more hand-holding. Maybe she can hire Harper Reed to coder her a Narwhal-like "Dashboard" to  make it absolutely simplified -- and write the script. There are robo-calls, and then there are whale-calls.

And who stampedes Zoe Lofgren? Well, Techdirt does, for one -- from their mouth, to her ears.  I watched her quote their blog posts word for word during the SOPA debates. I always marvel at how one little sectarian copyleftist can whiplash so many networks, but Mike Masnick has a ready audience of affluent geeks who hate it that they can't rip their DVDs to go jogging -- snort.

And so it's time to reprint my piece that really blows the sole Techdirt "use case" -- a hip-hop site called dajaz1 -- out of the water -- although of course, the evidence may have been tampered with by now.

In the absence of a law -- see, this is why you need a law -- the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has the handy James Bond-type acronym of ICE so that geekies can have more fun with it -- seized 700 websites for copyright infringement. Good!

Oh, I realize that copyleftist lawfarers find this a horrid overreach and abuse of civil rights, and um, maybe it is. I'd like just one real journalist to research this, the way TNR at least had the guts to publish research indicating that the Redditors weren't all that when it came to legislative action (and perhaps that article will make them butt-hurt enough to do something, as they all read TNR *snicker*).

Sure, it's unconscionable to take down a site for an entire year when perhaps there was only "probable cause" -- and then drop it (although that may not mean there wasn't evidence).

Except...there probably was good probable cause, and probable cause is a good thing. As always, the literalist nerds don't understand the context of law enforcement and the need of officers to make their case to a judge.

"Lofgren said she is concerned that some of the domain-name seizures caused the removal -- without notice or a hearing for their owners -- of websites containing lawful content." Okay, well, how many? And could we see them? And could we see the evidence? Transparency and all that.

I suspect that A LOT of these cases would NOT collapse on contact with reality -- a reality that Mike Masnick studiously shuns by letting assholes in his comments merely flashmob with hate comments anyone who objects.  Frets Lofgren, in a paragraph scripted right out of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Such seizures amount to “prior restraint of free expression” and “impair legitimate businesses that are unfairly targeted and discourage online entrepreneurship,” she said. Lofgren said she is seeking a way to require the government to provide notice and an opportunity for website owners to defend themselves in advance of domain-name seizure.

Well, yeah. The horror! But, really, guys? Let's hear what these websites *are*. Let's *see them*. You know, the way Redditt always does with suspected wrong-doing -- how they out it and flashmob it? Well?

Even if it turns out the feds didn't have a case for this or that case, so what? I want to hear about every single one of the 700 cases. And I want to hear just what kind of extra-judicial industry-defined procedure Lofrgren has in mind instead of impartial courts of law. What, a G+ hangout with Kim Dotcom?

Here's my old article from Second Thoughts.

HOW TECHDIRT IS TRYING TO MANUFACTURE A PITY PARTY FOR A POSTER-BOY OF ICE ABUSE TO TRY TO SINK SOPA

Readers may be interested to go see this thread on TechDirt, which is Copyleftist Central, with one of the most tendentious pieces I've seen in a long time on this topic -- not since Eric Rice tried to convince me that ICE was seizing somebody's blog have I seen such a fake hysteria. " "Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details," shrieks the headline -- and you couldn't possibly go against it. What, you're not for due process? What, you're not for the rule of law?! How dare you, can call yourself a human rights activist!

Dajaz1.com, a blog about hip hop and jazz was taken down by ICE -- evil ICE whose name is so chilly! This is now described as if it was like being, oh, gunned down by the military on Tahrir Square in Egypt or arrested by one of Putin's goons and hustled off to the armed forces like a fellow in Syktyvkar.

What happened is that the feds impounded this site, i.e. closed it down and put up a big old Homeland Security shield on it. Then they went on to hold it for a year -- then they gave it back.

Oh, the horror. An entire year! Why, the outrage!

Yeah, we get all that. And there are plenty of people screaming about it. But I just find something fishy about these huge weeping pity parties about evil feds and terribly injured and suffered bloggers.Something doesn't add up.

Yeah, again, derr, we get that taking an entire year to adjudicate a case, gosh, that's a horrible violation of due process. And then to get your site back anyway -- gosh, that shows maybe the government didn't have a case.

Except...we don't know that. The court records aren't even shown here. And I'm not buying the story. Such a thing may have been an abusive aberration -- sure. Then...why aren't the lawyers suing for damages? That's what you do in America if you are wronged by the law. Maybe the nature of this site was so patently obvious as a pirate site that the police didn't think it necessary to make their case (although in a society under the rule of law they should anyway, of course). And maybe they gave it back not because the site wasn't guilty, but because it was too big a hassle to prosecute. And maybe those aggressive lawyers making much of this now aren't suing for damages because they are *afraid of what would come out at trial, which is the true nature of their client's site -- a pirate site.*

There's just too many things not adding up here. It really, really feels like a hustle to me -- and worst of all, a race hustle.

Because the claim is that poor black folk were uploading or sending their tunes for free to be played or shown on this site, they WANTED stuff to be copied and heard because they were trying to get noticed, and evil feds and evil record companies and evil 1 percenters on Wall Street want to stifle their innovation.

Naturally, if these people didn't make money from this site (and there isn't a claim that they did), you wonder why they didn't start another one to discuss jazz and hip hop (and they may have).

But...Don't you DARE saying anything against this site or exonerate the feds, or you will be guilty of advocating that black people not have freedom of expression, see.

So it occurred to me that the way to see what this site was all about was to plug it into the Wayback machine. So I did. Go back more than a year to the last few years and you see -- oh. It has all youtubes on it. Not of unknowns or poor black kids or emerging hip hop artists or even those artists who want their stuff given away for free, because they have some kind of 360 deal.

You see people who likely do NOT want their content copied as they are established artists. You see people even writing that they hope the youtube they are embedding for view on that site, or linking to, will not be removed. Of course, click, and you'll see by now it is IS removed. Because, der, it's infringing. And by "upload" I mean, embed code so as to display (derr, that's not hard to understand) OR link. Because the links aren't innocent either and the users even write, "I hope this isn't taken down."

Why is this so hard to admit?

Well, because they need to find a victim, and they've cunningly, deliberately, maliciuosly tried to make this site be the victim -- the posterboy. The problem is that it doesn't exemplify the case, because it isn't innocent. Oh, sure, holding it for a year is wrong. But ranting about that distracts from the obvious facts: that there evidently was very good reason to hold it in the first place, judging from views of the site we can see in the Wayback Machine.

Now, one also suspects some deal was made. Or some case was dropped for fear of race-baiting because of some kind of race hustle. And that's awful all on it's own. Just because sometimes your site sometimes puts up emerging artists or those hoping to get noticed or uses "fair use" for critical purposes in a review doesn't mean everybody gets to upload all the other copyrighted stuff on there, which looks to be more the point of the website than all those unknowns. Again, we can't know, because they are hiding the nature of the site for us, and making it seem as if the problem of lack of due process should trump their actual nature, or making it seem like the release of the site is "proof" that it is an innocent victim.

Not buying it.

Of course, all those geeky Reddit sort of freaks show up to rant and rage against property as an institution, hate on copyright as a concept and as law, urge the abolition of elected representative government, and even completely turn on its ear the concept of theft. It's all the usual suspects. I answer them all.

If anything, the abuse that appears to have occurred in this case is evidence of in fact why we need SOPA. We need the rule of law, not one-off cases like this every time -- the government had 300 of them, and obviously couldn't prosecute them all, so let some go.

We need rules, we need precedent, we need practices to emerge with a universal law like this, instead of people in different states cobbling this or that case together from this or that bunch of regulations.

SOPA would make it less likely that a case had to languish or would be mistakenly seized because the rules would be clear and the practices would instantly emerge.

Sadly, the Google and Electronic Frontier Foundation lobby against SOPA has so battered Congress that now the law is being "rewritten" and "tech people are now being consulted" -- which is abundantly fake as they were consulted already and it's not about tech.

It's sad to see that the regime of copyleftism and the open source ethics-free "liberation" of content that we fought so many years in SL (and a battle now being lost as my previous posts indicate) is now being waged and likely lost in RL, too. It will take years of people losing even more livelihoods and more outrageous destruction of various sectors of the economy to understand this.

A few more articles I have on this topic:

Copyleftist Law-Farer Opposes SOPA

First Amendment Lawyer Supports SOPA

Geeks Screaming About Internet Censors Ooght to be Ashamed of Themselves and Out to Actually Read the Bill

No, Joggers Don't Need to Rip DVDs, They Have Spotify, And In Any Event You're Edge-casing

Gadget craziness. Photo by XuRxO 2010.

Two years ago, I met with Fred Wilson, the famous venture capitalist of Union Square in "Silicon Alley" as the tech world in New York City is called.

The reason Fred wanted to meet with me was to "clear the air" because I criticized him on his blog as a latter-day Bolshevik. I said, like the venture communist Joi Ito, he was introducing communistic ideals even as he funded them as a capitalist, and then serving as something like the German industrialists or American tycoons of Wall Street who funded the Bolsheviks, thinking it would lead to a better world for people. What I meant was the technocommunism of things like Twitter and other platforms and apps he invested in that had this model: a) get people to sign-up for free; b) scrape their data for marketing c) stand back as they uploaded content usually not their own; d) sell ads by the content and get them to click; e) make the IP holder chase you with DMCA notices and play catch-me-if-you-can; f) lather, rinse, repeat. The California Business model, in New York, for the FourSquare generation.

I kept writing and writing my critiques. Naturally he could have dismissed or blocked me, but he thought perhaps by sitting down in a coffee shop in our neighbourhood -- I live a 10 blocks from his office in Union, where the hipsters hang out -- perhaps we could come to some agreement.

I got there early and posted myself at the doorway but didn't see him. I looked at everyone who came in the door and just didn't recognize him. Maybe it was because I was looking for someone out of an Impressionist painting, but about 20 minutes after the hour, I went in to sit down myself, and suddenly saw there patiently sitting and reading his phone texts.

I explained to him that I felt the heart of the problem with the copyleftist in people like him was that they owned multiple gadgets, they were wealthy, and they felt an imperious, impatient, arrogant irritation with not being able to copy tunes or other digital content from one gadget to another. They resented this ENORMOUSLY and never stopped whining about it on tech forums. They felt it was their God-given right and drove their entire perception of the copyright/commodity issue through this lens. The idea that they should pay twice for the same song to put it on two different gadgets would enrage them -- I had seen it 100 times on forums and Fred himself would be particularly voluble on what felt like terrible unreasonableness.

But most of us don't have that many gadgets, I explained. I didn't have an iphone at that time. I had only a desktop. My son had a laptop. My daughter had an i-pod. While many people had cell phones, they had SMS text, not i-phone capacity -- and they might not even have a computer at home. We ourselves took turns on the computers.  There wasn't this felt need to make sure that the song downloaded on the computer could also go on the ipod or the laptop. Most people didn't have that burning desire to have their song collection with the everywhere all the time and copy it to every other device. Most people didn't have all those devices. They aren't rich. They don't have a car and a country home where all the digital content has to be uploaded. And in fact, there was a demographic that didn't even need to listen to music all the time in this way like a soundtrack in the movie of their life.

Naturally, Fred disagreed. He was surrounded by others like himself -- male techs with gadgets -- and the irritation was enormous among them that they were expected not to jailbreak or hack or simply circumvent the rules to put copies of content they owned on other gadgets. He also said the world was changing, the gadgets would get cheaper, and soon everybody would have the i-phones and netbooks for $50 or $100.

I didn't think the cost would come down any time soon. And this just never irritated me in the same way, as I thought the analogy was virus software. You pay $50 to have three copies on three machines. I don't know if the companies can hash-ban you by the configurations of the different machines if you try to put a 4th, but that's the rule of the license. More desks is more money. Why can't it work that way with songs?

I tried to get across to Fred the experience of Second Life, the selling of digital commodities, the permissions system, the way it worked, the ability to copy for yourself, but not transfer elsewhere, and the need to digitally engineer that same concept. But Fred stuck to the copyleftist mantra of "I paid for it, therefore I should use it" -- and I could only point out that this was not a really persuasive argument, because it seemed like a self-righteous excuse really to copy period. To send to your friends. To share. To swipe and spread further. That's what really happened with this excuse.

As it happened, there were more tech developments -- one was "the cloud," where services like Spotify or Pandora began to put all your music in the cloud so that you could access them from any gadget and you'd pay a small subscription fee of $3 or $5 or $9 or whatever -- and people did pay to get rid of the ads or get more choice and search capacity.

So that seemed to solve the problem in a way, but we weren't done yet.

Then at TechCrunchDisrupt in New York City last year, Fred was ecstatic with a new service, Open Garden, that enabled people to create tethered networks without the charges. As I wrote then:

Open Garden -- as you can tell from the name -- breaks down walled gardens intentionally and creates more Internet connection for all the apps and gadgets of Silicon Valley to be used on the lines provided by the older, crippled telecom companies.

It might be better to call it Open Theft of Services, and I believe it didn't win TechCrunch because the  judges on stage (except for one obvious vote) thought it was too great a challenge to the uneasy truce holding now between Big IT and Big Telecom.

Well, Fred was in love with it because it was disruptive and fought telecoms and was Pirate Party sort of stuff -- understood.

He expressed irritation again with the services on flights -- if he wanted to use his phone, he had to pay a lot of money for these wireless services on planes, then not be able to jack in his family members -- they would have to separately get their account accounts. So he talked about how great it would be to jack in his whole family -- wife and kids -- using this Open Garden. So then it would be the daughter's boyfriend or the wife's co-worker -- where would it end? How is a network going to know it's only the "fair use" of his family?

And that's why I greet Daryl Issa's meddling on behalf of Silicon Valley copyleftists again as something that should get a pushback. You shouldn't be able to rip your DVD -- of course people will do anyway, but it's good to keep the policies and laws against it in place to prevent larger-scale piracy for profit -- and by needlessly undermining digital property as a commodity for joggers' conveniences, you harm the livelihood of content makers. There is no need for this, even for the jogger.

Issa is invoking the anger articulated by Fred Wilson to me a few years ago, speaking for all geeky guys with lots of gadgets wanting to copy things around them -- and calling that act "fair use".

I think that's a promiscuous use of the term, it isn't "fair use," and this a gambit to undermine inherency of copyright and try to get that California business model camel-nose further under the tent.

But I think you have to decide whether you are going to give up perceiving digital content as a commodity, or merely see it as license to access content, or as a service.

We had these endless debates in Second Life ages ago, of course, because it really is predictive as a model of the Internet, and I predicted then that soon we would see content as a commodity disappear, and that it would only appear as a kind of entertainment service, that you wouldn't pay for each dress or each car or each house in the virtual world of Second Life, but this or that big company would either give this to you for free in exchange for data-mining or ad-clicks or brand recognition, or it would create subscriptions to clubs by theme, or as a coupons, or whatever. That never really happened inside Second Life, although it did in Facebook, but the "license to access content" concept is more where the concept sits today, especially as the model of the inworld store with the commodity sold in it disappears, and the web store with the copy sold from the web takes over, i.e. reiterating in the virtual world the trajectory the world took from real life to the web.

Even so, I now think there isn't any call to have it be so stark. Some things will remain as digital commodities -- i-tunes still works for individual songs, even as Spotify works with subscriptions for streams. You still buy a discrete copy of a pdf file book, or pay some fee to join a discussion website and post there (rare, but it does occur) or more frequently, a newspaper subscription or magazine subscription that enables you to post -- i.e. the draw isn't just about content but the ability to post your own content in response to that content.

In any event, I see no need to "update" or "modernize"  the law. Companies already issue licenses with stipulations, like Will Wright released Spore with the stipulation that you could copy five copies of the game to five computers, like an anti-virus license. Geeks and gamers still bitched because there'd be that edge-caser with the 6th computer, but honestly, most people do not need even one copy of Spore.

If "fair use" is understood to mean "I copy it as I please to my gadgets," then it will instantly start to merge to "my circles that I should get to share it with" -- my relatives and friends. The same angry indignation and sense of entitlement geeks who drive this issue feel about their own personal gadgets will seque into "my circles" that it seems crazy to draw barriers and walled gardens around. Why shouldn't the song go to a co-worker? Why shouldn't the academic journal article go to a fellow researcher? And so on.

Indeed, people who make copies for jogging ARE the problem. They are the problem because they refuse to accept that software is a commodity. They are a class of people who see it as a license to access content or a service, and they want to view it differently.

The problem is that content creators don't have a way to make a living if they open up the doors for the joggers, and then the joggers' friends -- because the jogger will feel as if he "has a right" to share it with his friends and "it doesn't hurt anyone". (The main argument that such Internet  lawyers use about all this is that the content remains in the hand of the IP holder -- he doesn't lose his original like the creator of an original chair in the real world loses his original. But that's silly, of course, because what he does lose his ability to commodify and sell the digital item.)

I'm not for Daryl Issa or the Techdirtiers to get their paws on this. Leave it alone. In the world of the cloud and streaming, for one, the concept of "fair use" isn't tied to the digital commodity -- the file -- anymore. It's more about service -- and compensating companies for their payments for licenses to provide the content.

I realize that under some crazed libertarian extreme notion of copyright law, the Republicans might find themselves -- eager to get the youth vote -- championing the erosion of property rights in this realm. That would be awful.

The purpose of copyright is indeed to benefit creators who need compensation to make a living and go on creating -- and the undermining of this with constantly copyleftist yammering doesn't make it any less true. The public is not served by having creators unable to gain compensation in the marketplace.

The technocommunist Masnick engages in a particularly insidious sleight-of-hand here pretending that "government-maintained monopoly" of a private person's private intellectual property is somehow "against" laissez-faire communism and somehow rewards statism. That's absurd, as only technocommunists and libertarians can be absurd, because of course the government's use of the force of law and the law of force to back up property is legitimate in a liberal democratic state under the rule of law. Capitalism isn't about taking your time, talent, and treasure and handing it over to a rival in some notion of "laissez faire" that belongs to socialism, not capitalism.

There aren't some plethora of fake copyright claims. Google got 5 million takedown notices last year; it satisfied most of them. Let's put to bed that particular copyleftist myth.

The technocommunists jerked the chains of their allies the libertarians in Congress and got the attention of the California congress people who serve Silicon Valley and its ecosphere, but that doesn't mean we must all lose our minds about private property, protection of property rights, and the viability of intellectual property rights online.

There are all ways to engineer and drive policy to defend copyright through individual DRM on discrete commodities; through the stream subscription  where the streamer pays for licenses; and for licensed access to content. None of these models require any enlargement of fair use.  A radio station didn't have to change the law on "fair use" because it had one copy of a record and played it to hundreds of thousands of people in single discrete instances because those frictions were built in of time and having to wait for the song to come again or go out and buy it. Spotify or Pandora get you to pay so you can find your song again on demand. A one-time annual feel will get you the content on a news site, and so on.

You don't need a new or broader definition of fair use when the regime for accessing the content has changed -- the jogger who is manually copying his purchased or purloined tune or Youtube track from his desktop or laptop to his ipod must not have heard of Spotify -- and that's hard to believe if he's the quintessential urban hipster who jogs in the first place.

If the geek answer to this point is that now that there is streaming and licensing, the copies to other gadgets manually doesn't matter anymore is merely edge-casing again, because of course it is a blank check for copying anywhere, not just to one's own gadgets -- no one is suggesting tying copies to IP addresses or hardware registration (although that might work).

In the end, the whole "rip my DVD" gambit is contrived -- it is expanding one use case to an entire field of practice that rapidly jumps to sharing anywhere and of course even using peer-to-peer services with anybody.  Complaining that it harms "fair use" of one's own property removes the context of what "fair use" doctrine originally dealt with -- use *for the public* -- for other people -- in printed matter.

 

The Kremlin's Big Grab at the Internet

International Telecommunication Union, the UN body that handles standards on the Internet.

Some months ago I was sitting in my grandfather's armchair reading The Atlantic Times, a German newspaper in English that is hard on America and soft on Russia and pious about Europe -- which is why I take this subscription, to broaden my perspective.

There was a huge special fold-out cybersecurity edition with tons of full-page articles about the new threat in cyberspace and I began to make my way through it -- I'm still not done. As usual, America was to blame -- Stuxnet, etc.

But one thing that stood out for me was the feting of Evgeny Kaspersky, the Russian software magnate famous for his anti-virus programs and I peered closer and realized that I had to understand more what a problem Kaspersky was.

Like a lot of people, I signed up for Kaspersky services in the Yeltsin era in the 1990s with this reasoning: I wanted to support Russian enterprise; so many of the bugs and viruses and malware emanate from Russia; and the Russian company will be good at getting rid of them. I have to visit many Eurasian sites in my jobs, and so many of them instantly try to put malware or spyware on my computer -- Norton and McAfee would have a wan reaction to such problems, but whenever I ran my computer through Kaspersky, I would get the satisfying pop-up graphic of the little bug and the squashing and removal sound (they don't have that any more, sadly).

Somehow I fell out with Kaspersky some years ago when they didn't answer my trouble tickets very fast or effectively, and I put on AVG, a Czech-made anti-virus guard because I figured that the Czechs would know Russian bugs better, but be more motivated to fighting them more honestly and less coopted by the Kremlin. And I should have stayed with them. Later, when I put Kaspersky back on and paid $50 plus for the license, eventually I developed a terrible key-logger and other destroyer that I couldn't get rid of with any virus killer, including their own, and eventually it intercepted the Internet connection, as the browser hijackers do. I wrote a trouble ticket and of course, there answer was to send them files and notes from all of this -- but that was impossible, given that the machine couldn't connect to the Internet anymore. I'd have to fiddle with flashdrives and then risk infecting another computer -- I gave up. But I'm moving back to AVG.

And I have greater reasons, since discovering the Wired story about just how much Kaspersky is now in the Putin tank:  Russia's Top Cyber Sleuth Foils US Spies, Helps Kremlin Pals

And that stands to reason, as no big business can succeed in Russia without cooperating with the Kremlin.

It isn't just that he's personally close to some old friends in the military; it's that the entire Internet industry in Russia is in the hands of military and other intelligence agencies. Here's what Wired explained, describing how a firm like Kaspersky works, and finds things like Stuxnet:

They’ll characterize the code by function: password stealer, bogus web page server, downloader of more malicious programs. Then they’ll suggest a “signature” that can be used to spot and filter out the malware in the future. In just minutes, a software update that incorporates these new signatures can be pushed out to Kaspersky’s tens of millions of users.

This is the core of the $600-million-a-year business that grew out of Kaspersky’s virus hobby. It’s really not all that different from the way US security companies like Symantec or McAfee operate globally. Except for the fact that in Russia, high tech firms like Kaspersky Lab have to cooperate with the siloviki, the network of military, security, law enforcement, and KGB veterans at the core of the Putin regime.

The FSB, a successor to the KGB, is now in charge of Russia’s information security, among many other things. It is the country’s top fighter of cybercrime and also operates the government’s massive electronic surveillance network. According to federal law number 40-FZ (.pdf), the FSB can not only compel any telecommunications business to install “extra hardware and software” to assist it in its operations, the agency can assign its own officers to work at a business. “Rule number one of successful companies here is good relations with the siloviki,” says one prominent member of Russia’s technology sector.

All of this would be bad enough -- having the siloviki (strongmen) and the KGB's successors able to access all your files under colour of virus protection that they turned on and off like a faucet -- but there's more.

Now, just as Russia is trying to hamper the work of the OSCE or the UN treaty bodies or any other international institution where they might face independent scrutiny, Moscow is trying to get the ITU to take over the Internet: read, trying to take over the Internet for itself, period, with perhaps nothing but China as a pushback. And because that gambit is likely to fail -- the US and others will push back -- the Russians and their third-world allies will propose making a new organization. Kaspersky is the Trojan horse on this; in The Atlantic Times, he makes this proposal:

The world needs a new cyber watchdog. International cooperation is the only way to deter online warfare.

I was actually going around myself like a naive little NGO bunny, contemplating and discussing the notion of a new world organization that would establish norms of warfare in cyberspace and work to deter warfare but keep the Internet free. A Helsinki Accords for Cyberspace! How grand!

Now I'm pretty certain I want no such thing -- it is utterly now tainted by Kremlin maneuvering and active measures. No, now what I advocate is that if cybersecurity issues must be raised internationally, they can be done at the same existing bodies like the UN or OSCE or ITU. And that those bodies themselves should not take over the Internet under the guise that they are more neutral or "progressive" but that Western and other liberal and democratic sovereign states should insist on curbs against authoritarians as they always do at all bodies.

So far, Obama's redistributionist at the FCC, Julius Genachowski -- "Chairman Genachowski" as the geeks always seem to call him -- is holding the fort against the ITU. Sometimes socialism is what there is to withstand communism. As Broadcasting & Cable explains:

Genachowski and Kramer's concerns, shared by a bipartisan -- for once -- Congress are that adding cybersecurity to the ITU to-do list is part of an effort to expand current  treaties on ITRS (International Telecommunications Regulations) into the Internet space, and give governments like China, Russia and some Arab states an avenue for control of content and its free flow.

Genachowski also praised the House resolution condemning the ITU's effort to control the Internet. All good, but he bears watching, because he makes common cause with Russia on other things, like "net neutrality" and inaction on piracy, and in the international setting, accidents can happen and compromises can get made. Again, my concern is this: as the international jet-set around the Internet like Joi Ito, and the "Internet Freedom" gang -- who simply advocate controlling the Internet by other non-government and elitist means  -- whisk off on their all-expense-paid trips to Dubai next month to oppose the ITU, we have to be careful we don't end up instead with them in charge and with something little better.

In a discussion on A Streetwise Professor's blog about the horror of Russia taking over the ITU with "a congerie of civil rights lovelies" like China (I love that phrase!), I noted that the other threat to the Internet was the "progressive" NGOs taking over, like Rebecca McKinnon and company in the Global Network Initiative which is a Google stalking horse, or the "progressive engineers" or the others who just met in Baku. And I said that I fully suspect I'll see the KGB figuring out how to rattle the networks and get the NGOs at the end of the information food chains to suddenly start ranting about child pornography when they didn't before. And sure enough, independently, just now, I received a Facebook call to join a Cause.org petition against child pornography on Facebook from a human rights activist who had never worked on this issue in his life and had never cared about it before. I don't know if this is really the problem indicated, but maybe it is. The point is, we'll see more of this, and Russia will cynically invoke the genuine concern people have to whipsaw them into Internet control.

I actually think it is possible to control piracy, child pornography, and illegal drug sales AND ensure Internet freedom because I don't think there is anything magical about the Internet or extra-hard about law-enforcement in the digital realm -- the hysteria whipped up about every cybersecurity or anti-piracy law is unfounded. And what I predict is that those dead-set against any regulation or any rule of law will be the ones who set the stage for Russia's takeover bid, in fact. Whether it will be arguments about how we need broadband for the poor and "development," or arguments about global warming causing floods requiring telecom control, or even arguments about child pornography, I don't doubt for a minute the NGOs will cave -- they always do when it comes to Russia and its machinations at multilateral institutions.

It was Kaspersky who discovered Stuxnet. No accident, comrades! Iran is a solid ally of Russia and its allies and always has been; if Medvedev was able to back and fill on supposedly putting pressure on Iran during the "reset" at American behest, it was all fake and all collapsed. Russia will not be stopping Iran.  Russia sponsors islam.ru and does a hundred other things to tolerate Iran's role in the region.

I don't endorse disabling other country's infrastructures. I do point out that there is a lack of precise parallel here. Russia and China and the hordes of Anonymous kids who wittingly or unwittingly do their bidding against the same hated Western targets are attacking websites and causing them to be disabled for days, destroying privacy, deleting files or tables or databases and doing millions of dollars of damage. They haven't gotten to actual real-life utilities yet, despite a story that at first seemed to involve Russian sabotage and then was disproved, although I continue to ask a lot of questions about it.

Meanwhile, Iran wrecks havoc in the world and threatens to wipe Israel from the map and sabre-rattles with its nuclear potential and goes relentlessly forward -- the centrifuges keep spinning, as Romney aptly put it in the election debate. What can the US do about this? It isn't going to bomb Iran, as the lefties claim, and Israel isn't likely to do so either. But it has to reduce this threat, and UN pressure doesn't work -- not enough countries step up who should. So it cooks up this "cleaner" more "surgical" method of Stuxnet. Except, it gets found out. By the Kremlin's friend, Kaspersky. Oh, and then it leaks into the wild.Now, how did that happen, comrades?

 

Socialism By the Numbers

For a long time, I've been bothered by a teaching that my children's high school teachers and then college professors have been hawking.

You can see this theory in Eric Foner's revisionist history of America and various other modern revisionist history books.

And that theory is this: that if only you had blacks, women, and LGBT present at the drafting of the Constitution, or even earlier in the Constituent Assembly, it would be a different constitution. It would be better, more fair, more inclusive. And therefore -- pushes this reasoning -- we need a new Constitution and a new Constituent Assembly to be better and more fair.

I've always marveled at the bald, naked Marxist identity politics involved in that premise. Leave aside the ahistorical nature of this thinking -- often in peddling this theory the teacher will make the point that just like software, the Constitution should be "updated" -- why, we don't still go around on horses, now we have jet planes. Why not completely different laws? This technocommunist thinking of course leaves out that the "software" has been updating itself with the Supreme Court all this time.

But what I always ask is this: What inherent property in these demographic blocs of blacks, women, or gays would you think would be sufficiently different to actually change the Constitution?

You know, that thing with the separation of powers and checks and balances.

What *different* thing would these homogenous and perhaps even hegemonic groups change?

I rejected it as identity politics clap-trap -- because they never admit what it is they think would be different about the liberal American system if it had been more fair and inclusive, i.e. not fair and inclusive because it's the right thing to include everybody, but fair and inclusive AND therefore getting an ideological package that goes with these demographic markets that will be different than the system we already have.

I suspect what they mean to say is that if they could get all these identities together in the Constituent Assembly, they'd have a better chance at installing socialism. That really is where most of these revisionists are going -- and you get it from the entire tenor of their books, how they portray historical events, the animosity and venom they have to the rich and the over-celebration of the poor -- again, as a monolith (see Foner).

I always point out in trying to debate this topic that it really is ultimately racist and sexist and bigoted -- and adhering to an entire corporativist fascist-like ideology (or communistic class ideology) -- to assume that entire races or groups in society like LGBT all have one point of view and will inject some certain monolithic perspective into the Constitutional text.

I challenge them to come up with what they mean. Especially because using this system created by the founders, with its separation of powers and checks and balances, eventually rights for blacks, women and even LGBT have been added. Not sufficiently. More has to be done. But the system itself with the power to litigate and legislation has been the path to equality. Not injection of blocs.

I would have thought this revisionist perspective is actually a minority in academic thinking -- just part of that bubble that the left lives in within universities, and that people don't really believe in these monoliths and they are capable, Sesame Street style, of seeing people as unique individuals with their own ideas who may be capable of different thinking.

Of course, my faith in that notion of pluralism and a kind of colour-blindness to demographic imperatives -- where we pretend, as on Sesame Street, that everybody is really equal and diverse but part of the same civic project -- has been shaken by the elections. 96% of blacks voted for Obama, and we know all the other demographics you can find on Google -- more single women, more Hispanics, and so on. What does that mean for the 4% of blacks who didn't vote for Obama? And there are some, I see them on Twitter and Youtube. How will they add to their numbers if we are all supposed to be in these rigid demographic blocks? For all its talk about "no red states or blue states but United States," the Obama ideologues haven't really explained how they are going to get out of this identity trap.

Yesterday in the New York Times, Thomas Edsahl mused whether Rush Limbaugh's country was gone, now that Pew's demographic drilling on the issue of socialism and capitalism has found more and more people embrace socialism.

So I'm going to ask again what kind of politics we have, and what kind of country we have, if demographics become a marker for thought, and if people are judged not by "the content of their character" but by their beliefs that adhere to their demographics. And yes, this is in a world where there is no more Sesame Street, no more pretending everyone is agnostic and nobody knows.

Here's the Pew list:

All the people who angrily denounced me and posted hate messages and deluged my blog with hate-hits didn't like that I reported on this new demographic/political views marker and drew conclusions from it. They continue to live in a world where they can pretend to be above distinctions and utterly unaware of bloc voting.

They substitute contrived and fake blindness bolstered by group-think and rabid peer pressure for authentic tolerance and the guarantee of pluralism and equality for all.

What's fascinating to me with that chart is that despite all the hoopla the White House has put out about supporting the middle class, the middle class -- the people who have $75,000 or above or even much less, $30,000-74,999 have sky-rocketed in their negativity to socialism.

Maybe that's because they're the ones being forcibly redistributed, and they have no cushion for it the way the much wealthier do? Maybe they feel they will be unfairly taxed more?

The huge jump in black appreciation for socialism and white negativity for socialism, creating a marker for controversial political views bound to race -- are sure to go on being felt in areas not just seen in the recent elections.

In any event, having seen so many socialisms fail in my lifetime, and even the British Labour Party fail ultimately to get re-elected because they ran things so poorly, I guess I take a longer view on this, and figure in 4 or 8 or 12 more years, these demographics rooting for socialism are going to have more of a reality check. They will change. The sharpness of that "Marxist contradiction" may have to occur first, but ultimately people will understand that socialism isn't working for their aspirations.

We can also see from the comrades' secret plans for Occupy Wall Street that they succeeded perfectly in their Leninist mission to sharpen those contradictions that Marx always wrote about and set the seeds for class warfare: of those 36% of people who oppose Occupy Wall Street -- a shocking minority) -- a whopping jump occurs in the number opposing socialism -- to 76%. So OWS -- far from attracting or representing "the 99%" -- split people further. That was deliberate.

And those who agree with the Tea Party -- a smaller minority -- made an even bigger jump to hate socialism.

What is to be done? I tend to think the answer is to wait until nature takes its course, but I do think that just as the Democrats in the wilderness for several terms, and leftists in the wilderness since forever, decided to go into education and get to the next generation, so the Republicans have to attend to the same thing.

Hispanics are split nearly in half as to whether they are negative or positive on socialism; 30 somethings; while opposition to (and I bet, even understanding of) socialism has dropped in the 18-20s cohort, the 30-somethings still have a healthy negativity to socialism of 58%. So that's the demographic that has to be reached and probably Rubio is good for that.

 

Cyber Threat "Most Serious" We Face, But Don't Let Congress Near It!

President Obama with Mark Zuckerbrg and other technologists in Silicon Valley, February 2011. Is that Eric Schmidt of Google in the foreground? The captions could say, "We'll help you win the election if you dump SOPA and CISPA."

Back in April I said, "Let's Hope This Time the Grown-ups and Not the Script Kiddies Will Win.

I hoped that CISPA would pass, and it really seemed as if when the House passed it without all the hysteria that Google engineered around SOPA, that it would be ok.

But my hopes were in vain. The script-kiddies prevailed. Of course, read all these screaming tech blogs and Forbes, too, and you'll see why.

CISPA was sunk -- without anyone really noticing because the GOP was preoccupied with Benghazi and the Democrats were preoccupied with Gaza and nobody really realized that the cyberwarfare had really already long since begun.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the bill was dead; in a test vote it fell short of the 9 votes needed to past.

The technocommies called it the defeat of the "US online spying bill" and didn't mention the hostile states and terrorism problem which doesn't exist for them, some of them are part of it. Russia's propaganda station RT campaigned on this incessantly, bringing on Center for Democracy and Technology speakers and fulminating constantly on it -- because of course, with the Kremlin being behind many of the world's cyber-attacks, any attempt to combat them would hurt its interests.

Red State's always snappy Tech at Night turned in a headline summarizing the problem: Cybersecurity act fails again, not that Obama cares how a bill becomes a law. There was some question when Alec Ross was out promising this gift to technies as to what Obama would do if it were passed -- would he in fact veto it if passed? Then the House passed it, and it was left to the Senate to decide. As he might do on the Magnitsky Act, Obama just waited for his friends in the Senate to stall and sow doubt before there was any vote, then announced his pre-emptive veto.

The Cyber Brief from the Center for National Security at Fordham Law pointed out that this news followed the revelation that Obama had already signed a secret directive  to help thwart cyberattacks, Policy Directive 20.

The new directive is the most extensive White House effort to date to wrestle with what constitutes an “offensive” and a “defensive” action in the rapidly evolving world of cyberwar and cyberterrorism, where an attack can be launched in milliseconds by unknown assailants utilizing a circuitous route. For the first time, the directive explicitly makes a distinction between network defense and cyber-operations to guide officials charged with making often-rapid decisions when confronted with threats.

When you read through this article it might not jump out at you at once what's happening -- making cybersecurity consistent with the Obama policy on terrorism, i.e. to treat it as a police matter rather than a military matter. The article talks about how the Pentagon defines cyberspace, as a military domain like land or sea. Yet defense is part of an "integrated tool" that includes diplomacy and economic measures.

The new policy makes clear that the government will turn first to law enforcement or traditional network defense techniques before asking military cyberwarfare units for help or pursuing other alternatives, senior administration officials said.

“We always want to be taking the least action necessary to mitigate the threat,” said one of the senior administration officials. “We don’t want to have more consequences than we intend.”

Sometimes it takes blogs or newsletters to tease out the point that a news article isn't quite making but is -- which is why they are useful.  Says the Center:

The White House also says that the directive empowers law enforcement and traditional network defense, rather than military cyberwarfare, as the government’s first option in mitigating a cyberattack.

That's when I realized that this is of a piece of the "police versus warfare" theology that brought us Benghazi and other situations -- and it's why Ethan Zuckerman is fighting so hard to prevent anyone from calling Anonymous' actions "cyberwarfare" against Israel but to see it merely as a prank. He is one of the chief theologians of this theology.

I was hoping when I saw that some of the Big IT firms like Facebook and IBM seemed to be supporting CISPA at first, because they wanted to find a way to cooperate with the government to stop cyber-attacks from hostile foreign governments and their allies in Anonymous, that this wouldn't face the mayhem and mania that the "stop SOPA/PIPA" campaign unleashed. But then Mozilla (Mitch Kapor) came out of the silent backrooms and began to squawk and whiplash their networks. Then the meme posters began to appear naming and shaming Zuckerberg as not doing the right thing.

So, it was not to be.

Especially because early on, Obama said (and Alec Ross kept re-confirming) that he would veto it.

So what we got was another pre-emptive presidential edict before it could even come to a vote, which is very destructive. And there are a lot of these, and it won't take me to notice this and complain about it, those on the hard left like Glen Greenwald will complain.

So now instead of having the rule of law -- legislation that can be adjudicated and build up precedent through court decisions and practice -- we have a presidential decree, an executive order that is supposed to decide anything -- which means it will get interpreted -- however.