Wired State

The Strange Story of the Capital One Hacker

News stories about hackers stealing personal data are legion.

Some of the threatening email which my spam filter blocks are from supposed hackers demanding ransoms in bitcoin. If you go to the bitcoin account they claim you must pay in order to avoid having your "pornographic" files exposed, you find that it has been suspended. Since I don't have any such files, I realized the whole thing was fake, then learned that the same blackmail has been sent to friends and relatives. They don't even have to be the original hackers -- they can just take advantage of the ubiquitous nature of hacks now, so that anyone can vaguely sense at any minute that maybe it applies to them.

A Woman Hacker?

Since I was once a Capital One customer, I paid more than a minute of attention than usual to this story about Paige Adele Thompson,  but I thought it was curious that it was a woman hacker. Usually, hackers are not women, even if there are plenty of women coders around today (and I know some who go back decades). She had reportedly stolen 120,000 bank account numbers and 77,000 Social Security numbers. Capital One didn't do any mass mailing to customers, although they put a notice on their web page.

Based on our analysis to date, this event affected approximately 100 million individuals in the United States and approximately 6 million in Canada.

Importantly, no credit card account numbers or log-in credentials were compromised and less than one percent of Social Security numbers were compromised. Based on our analysis to date, we believe it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual.

The largest category of information accessed was information on consumers and small businesses as of the time they applied for one of our credit card products from 2005 through early 2019. This information included personal information Capital One routinely collects at the time it receives credit card applications, including names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and self-reported income.

Beyond the credit card application data, the individual obtained portions of credit card customer data, including:

• Customer status data, e.g., credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, contact information.
• Fragments of transaction data from a total of 23 days during 2016, 2017 and 2018.

This information has been shared on Capital One’s website, servicing portal, press release and 8K filing.

The individual also obtained the following data:

• About 140,000 Social Security numbers of our credit card customers.

• About 80,000 linked bank account numbers of our secured credit card customers.

  We will directly notify these customers through the mail.

  For our Canadian credit card customers, approximately 1 million Social Insurance Numbers were compromised in this incident. We will directly notify all Canadian customers affected.

Someone can perhaps explain to me how 106 million people in the US and Canada are "affected," but "only" 140,000 SS numbers, 1 million Social Insurance Numbers, and 80,000 bank accounts are "obtained".  What does this mean? That people's home addresses and salaries were stolen?

Victory-Dance Leads to Capture

How was this Seattle-based hacker caught?

Strangely, this hacker -- whose handle was appropriately "erratic" -- was not secretive, but bragged about her hack on various social media and GitHub, which enabled someone to send a tip (maybe she herself?) to Capital One to show them the admission, and offer to help. 

 

Writes Heavy:

The FBI listed in the criminal complaint all of the online platforms investigators uncovered that appeared to lead to Paige Adele Thompson. The original GitHub profile linked to a GitLab page, which included Thompson’s resume.

Investigators further uncovered a Meetup group, a Slack channel and a Twitter account all affiliated with Thompson. The user “erratic” posted on the Slack channel on June 26, 2019, a list of files they possessed.

The complaint states that Thompson appeared to brag about the information she had accessed related to Capital One. The FBI agent wrote that Thompson had “made statements on social media fora evidencing the fact that she has information of Capital One, and that she recognizes that she has acted illegally.”

Why would Paige want to distribute those Social Security and Social Insurance numbers first? To what end? To whom? Random thieves? Are we quite sure that in fact while she was openly discussing this, others didn't obtain these files?

Swat Team

Quite a display of force was used to arrest her  -- although it's not clear how the authorities knew about the weapons in the apartment before the raid. This elicited a great deal of ridicule of the police for overkill and poor tactics,  snarky comments about Capital One, haiku about hacking, and almost no condemnation of the hacker (although there were still a few, which was something):

Managed to get video of the raid in Seattle that lead to the arrest of Paige Thompson, 33yo software engineer accused of hacking databases and stealing info on 100 million credit card applications for #CapitalOne in a major breach. Housemates share details @ Noon @KIRO7Seattle pic.twitter.com/NXsjfAOInn

— Ranji Sinha (@RanjiKIRO7) July 30, 2019

It was said that Paige Adele Thompson, a software engineer for various companies according to an online resume, had "threatened to shoot up a California social media company". Twitter? (Her account there was suspended). There are 30 top companies and zillions of others.

Then, it developed that Thompson was found not only top have breached Capital One, but "30 other organizations". That sounded like one of those crime stories common to Russia, but not only Russia, where the police pin a bunch of other crimes they haven't solved on the one culprit they've caught. Furthermore, the data wasn't only of the personal type, supposedly:

"The servers seized from Thompson's bedroom during the search of Thompson's residence, include not only data stolen from Capital One, but also multiple terabytes of data stolen by Thompson from more than 30 other companies, educational institutions, and other entities."

US prosecutors said the "data varies significantly in both type and amount," but, based on currently available information, "much of the data appears not to be data containing personal identifying information."

Then it said that while the hacker had stolen these millions of accounts, she hadn't exploited them, i.e. used the credit cards to steal money or buy things online. Then the news stories said the hacker was mentally ill because they not only didn't exploit the data, they admitted it freely. Reports had begun to emerge from friends that she "struggled" with mental illness. All that seemed strange. You're depressed to you hack a zillion files and risk arrest?

A Trans Woman Safe House

Now, the latest stories say that the hacker in question is a trans woman who has demanded that she not be kept in a regular jail facility with males (that seems perfectly reasonable as she would indeed be in danger). Some redditors got mad over the lag between the first reports about a "woman" hacker and the later reports of the "transwoman" report -- because, so they reasoned, this artificially inflated crime statistics regarding women.

Then, we learn about her room mate, Park Hang Quo, who was arrested for illegal fire arms, who in the past had done jail time for illegal weapons' possession and attempted assassination (a Silk Road user?) and had been released after cooperating with authorities. He, too, admitted his crime and admitted his room mates (there three others besides Paige) could have access to the arms, and that the original hacker wanted to commit "suicide by cop".

The other room mates -- who included a woman Navy veteran and two other military veterans -- said they knew there were guns in the house in this media report, but that they didn't know Park Hang Quo was a felon with a past conviction on arms.

How is it that these five people, four of whom are military veterans, (at least) one of whom is a programmer, meet each other and become room mates in a home where there is not only such a firearms arsenal but an Airstream RV and large box truck -- a home where it turns out a hacker stole millions of personal files?

We don't know if there are others behind Thompson involved in the hack, if Park is related to it, or the role of the other three room mates, although the hacker is said to have "acted alone". How did she hook up with a room mate who possessed illegal firearms and had a history of a jail sentence for involvement in an assassination isn't explained, as well as three other veterans? There doesn't seem to be much curiosity about any of this from the media. Who are these people? 

There is one explanation buried in the Seattle Times story for how they all ended up together:

The roommates, who like Thompson are transgender women, said she used to be a systems engineer at Amazon but lost her job in 2016 after she began drinking at work to deal with harassment from a co-worker. She hasn’t worked since, the roommates said, and was living at the house rent-free.

So this was a kind of safe house for transgender women in tech and the military, who faced harassment and difficulties in their lives -- like Chelsea Manning.

Has this story gotten thoroughly weird yet? It has. I don't know what to make of it. 

Flight Risk

The judge has not released the suspect on bail because of the problem of flight. Petition to have her stay at a half-way house was denied because as a person without a job or a home (her room mate said was not welcome back at her previous home), she was a flight risk. An indication that in the past, she was addicted to drugs also came up -- although defense said this was "over".

But the threat of harm to herself and others and the "suicide by cop" wishes mentioned in news reports are a reason as well to deny bail, said Judge Michelle Peterson:

“You are highly talented,” Peterson told Thompson, “and have the means and ability to create havoc in our banking system.”

Why would someone who was smart enough to break into those accounts get caught? Why would they break into them if they weren't going to use the stolen data? Why would they hoard millions of these files in their home? Fox news quotes a local tech who explains this as "accidental"?

But on Friday, Thompson’s long-time friend Tim Carstens, from the tech community, showed up to court in support of Thompson.

Carstens said Thompson is not the tech mastermind the government is making her out to be.

He says she breached the data by most likely snooping around randomly. He says she didn't even know what to do with all the stolen information.

(The surfacing of Carstens is yet another odd detail in this story. Tim Carstens said he knew Thompson since she was "a teenager" [in Arkansas? where she lived with a now-estranged mother and dad MIA]. Tim is said to have written "the" white paper on Bitcoin [a joke?] and once worked for "Uncle Sam". ?) 

Hacker "Altruism"

The answer suggested to me, from following past hacker exploits, is that this hacker believed she could prove a point -- "it can be done" -- and expose the flaws of big corporations -- which can be loathed by these anarchist types. And -- a variation on this "altruism" --  that discovery of this hack would force these companies to have better security. That hackers actually "help them" -- when they don't bring capitalism to its knees. It's all pretty jumbled, ideologically -- but to say it is "accidental" is to defy reason. You would have to be intended to breach the system to find such vulnerability.

And sure enough, this "hacker altruism" seemed to be part of the story, according to the Seattle Times. She was said to have made warnings to Capital One and been ignored, and then in a fit stole all the files. 

“Paige is very, very skilled. If she wanted to, she could hack foreign governments,” said another of the roommates, who like the other two asked not to be named to protect their privacy and because they’re still shaken from Monday’s raid. “I didn’t know exactly what she had done … We never heard anything about it. She probably didn’t think it was a big deal.”

She described Thompson, who is also know by the online handle “erratic,” as a “white hat hacker” who tried to warn Capital One about vulnerabilities in their firewall but was blown off. Thompson posted links to the company’s data “to teach them a lesson,” she said.

So black hat felons are merely white hats yearning for recognition?

When hackers smash big companies supposedly in the name of altruism, why don't think care about the little guy, the people harmed by hacks with identity theft and further disruption of their lives?

So far, the mental illness of this hacker has not been established by a court of law, and it is only a supposition.

Sometimes when I read news stories of massive hacks or mass shootings, I wonder if foreign states who are enemies of the US -- Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and others -- go trawling around for these disturbed and vulnerable individuals online -- they're easy enough to spot on social media -- and then incite them, and guide them, and "hands free," let nature take its course. That's because there are so many of them, sometimes one right after another, that they seem planned. 

But there are plenty of factors within our own society to set up the tragic chain of events that set off these mass crimes, without any foreign actors or need for conspiracy theories. 

Disgruntled Former Amazon Employee

We talk a lot about our tech overlords but perhaps we have less awareness of how their own employees want to rebel against them, too:

Capital One is a major customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Seattle commerce giant’s cloud computing business which provides companies the ability to rent computing and storage power on Amazon servers. AWS’ website touts Capital One’s choice of its cloud computing services, quoting its chief information officer saying, “We believe we can operate more securely in their cloud than in our own data centers.”

While the federal complaint against Thompson does not name AWS, it does say that Thompson worked at the cloud hosting provider Capital One uses. Thompson’s resume, posted on multiple online platforms, indicates she was a level 4 systems engineer at Amazon from May 2015 to September 2016, where she worked on the “build-out and deployment of new load balancing capacity for S3” — AWS’s Simple Storage Service, which allows AWS customers to store and access data from anywhere online.

Amazon had no comment. Funny how it's only a site like this that puts "former Amazon employee" in the headline -- mainstream media does not, and if it even includes that information, buries down in the story.

Yes, Amazon wanted to distance itself from this former employee:

A person familiar with the matter said there was no breach or malfunction in the underlying AWS infrastructure, and the fact that the accused perpetrator had worked for AWS was not relevant to the hack. Instead, the hacker apparently exploited Capital One’s faulty firewall. Capital One said it was informed of the vulnerability July 17 and discovered the hack exposed personal information of as many as 106 million individuals in the U.S. and Canada.

Yet, there may have been a breach of Amazon, after all:

Thompson’s posts on Twitter suggest she may have accessed other data stored on AWS. Computer security researcher and reporter Brian Krebs reviewed posts on a Slack channel attributed to “erratic.” One post, on June 27, lists “various databases she found by hacking into improperly secured Amazon cloud instances,” Krebs wrote on his KrebsonSecurity blog, adding that a screenshot she posted suggests “she may also have located tens of gigabytes of data belonging to other major corporations.”

That said, Krebs saw no postings suggesting Thompson “sought to profit from selling the data taken from various Amazon cloud instances she was able to access.” Capital One, in its statement, said it was “unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual,” but it continues to investigate.

Even so, it doesn't seem like the discovery of the "improperly-secured Amazon cloud instances" was accidental, like you just clicked something on Pastebin heedlessly.

Mental Illness

Thomson's defense -- like Manning's -- as possibly "my transgender made me do it" is already being outlined by a friend -- and if it isn't a "suicide by cop" attempt, it's a "obtain mandatory inpatient mental health treatment" (which can be hard to get) by cop:

Aife Dunne, an online friend of Thompson’s, told The New York Times Thompson struggled with her transition to a woman, discussed suicidal thoughts, and would sink into dark phases with little support outside her online communities.

According to her online resumes, Thompson studied software engineering at Bellevue College and moved through nine Seattle-area IT jobs over the last 14 years. In recent weeks, Thompson posted photographs of the Viaduct demolition, her various technology projects and of her cat Millie, who died last week.

She also wrote about having a therapist appointment and made reference to something momentous that was going to result in her losing her freedom.

“After this is over I’m going to go check into the mental hospital for an indefinite amount of time,” she wrote on Twitter. “I have a whole list of things that will ensure my involuntary confinement from the world. The kind that they can’t ignore or brush off onto the crisis clinic. I’m never coming back.”

 

That explains the references to the dead cat -- which supposedly enabled the FBI to track down Thompson -- she had been forced to put down her beloved pet, and posted a notice about this that contained her address. (Other news stories say it was a resume attached to her GitHub account that outed her.)

All's well that ends well?

Well, Paige faces only up to 5 years of jail and a $250,000 fine because of the lack of evidence for use of the cards -- and she may not be found unfit to stand trial and get the psychiatric care she wants and needs.

I'm all for hackers serving their sentences to the full extent of the law and I don't think "hacking while transgender" should be permissible as a defense as it does a grave disservice to all the transgender computer people who do not hack company servers. Mandatory psychiatric treatment might be the most humane thing in this case, however, especially as friends who got her into short stints of mental treatment multiple times were unsuccessful -- and Thompson only harassed them, geolocated them and harassed them more, to the point they were forced to move and get a protective order (!). She did, after all, knowingly live with a person with firearms she could access in theory.

Russian Propaganda Response

As I learned from a conservative blog, RT went beyond its usual glee at US misfortune with this story -- making a point of mentioning Amazon as the hacker's former employer and the "cloud computing company" not mentioned in earlier reports. At 2:56, the anchor even jokes for his audience that he believes "doesn't watch" CNN or ABC, that likely those networks are already blaming this hack -- whose damage is assessed at $100 million -- "on the Kremlin". (In fact, no US media report did that).  He also drills down on the hacker's possible motives -- somebody who is actually greedy? Or who wants to expose the greed and carelessness of corporations? His colleague doesn't answer.

 

He then returns to the topic of the hacker's nature a third time:

Do we know how often it is a person, a group of persons, versus an institution, a nation-state, a group...how...what...have you looked into the whole hacking thing that seems to be in the news now?

Of course this doesn't mean Russia is behind Thompson's hack -- but it is Russian state propaganda trying to distract from its own state-sponsored hacking, to make it seem like America and its big corporations are to blame?

His fellow anchor makes the point that this is just days after the settlement of the Equifax breach that affected 170 million people.

Maybe it's about cloud computing or about single actors getting more attention? she wonders. Say, does the Kremlin want to get into the cloud-computing business in a bigger way?

The two anchors have a thinky philosophical discussion that might have been lifted from a Soviet class on Marxism about the motives of capitalism and how security your data cannot get in the way of their profits. The male anchor asks if we should be worried that Capital One can just write off the cost of $100 million to "make this right" and it isn't much of a dent. This plays very well in the hundreds of comments -- and is a good example of how often Russian propaganda is anti-capitalist, although supposedly the Kremlin "dropped" the communist ideology:

Maybe this means this particular model we're using is suspect?

I think this is a great point? It's always the case in a profit-based system that you will make decisions based on profit. If securing your data falls lower on the list of priorities than making money for you, then that's the way it goes.

Evil American corporations and their disgruntled former problems, not the Kremlin! BTW, I see various hacker sites have already published the details of how Thompson did this hack, provided step-by-step instructions of how to implement it elsewhere, and congratulated Google for removing a vulnerability that apparently Amazon had not.

Update: So, not surprisingly, this hacker was released, and the trial is still ongoing.

How to Fix Silicon Valley -- And It's Not How You Think

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

There's a flurry of solutions offered for how to fix the real or perceived evils and woes of Silicon Valley's takeover of our lives, from breaking up monopolies to more training in the humanities (or not), to conservative legislation to remove reported bias in news offerings to libertarian protection of the controversial Section 230, supposedly the "26 words that gave us" this Internet. And while some or parts of all these solutions may actually be implemented, I never see one obvious one, that might seem counter-intuitive:

Make social media platforms charge for their services.

Carpet Bazaar, Cairo, 1887 by Charles Robertson

This idea flies against the core belief of technologists that you "can't" charge for social media, whether chat systems or blogs or picture sharing, because people won't pay it and you'll never make enough to sustain the platform anyway. Everyone knows that subscriptions don't support media -- investors and ads do. More and more, you find the awareness that if you are not paying for social media, you are the product -- and the customers are really the ad buyers, or even more, the VCs.

Ads Without Subscriptions, Content without Conscience

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden Artist Thomas Cole 1828 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston -Wikimedia

This partial borrowing by Silicon Valley of the news media's profit formulas -- investors (venture capitalists) and ads -- (partial because generally there are no subscriptions at all) is really at the root of its evil, though few conceive of it that way. Subscribers have kept mainstream media honest -- when they lose them, they know they are doing something wrong. This conscience was lobotomized with new media.

The Internet became more than an exchange device for scientists or a bulletin board for counterculturists when it liberated paid newspapers -- and later music files -- as the loss leader to get engagement and to disguise the costs of coders and engineers, not to mention servers and their infrastructure. But also when it sneered a subscriptions - which is public accountability, like it or not.

The scorn for privacy and one's private data is rooted in the scorn for private property involved in copyright, which more than the "26 words" is what gave us the Internet.  Craigslist could undermine the classifieds that formed a pillar of media support by ads for amateur sex and prostitutes - its founder was simply less scrupulous than newspapers of record that see themselves as pillars of society, not playing on the customers' basest culture. And the stakes grew higher for social media, requiring more and more extreme content to keep interest.

Having ceded privacy along with artists' private property and allowing non-transparent ads to undermine democracy, it's hard to turn back. Voluntary moves like "making ads more transparent" don't take into consideration that even the CEO of a major Internet sales company like Overstock can fall for Russian blandishments and a sizable chunk of people will keep claiming Butina isn't really a spy, but merely a pro-state interest group.

Diagnoses Without Solutions

I've noticed lately that certain articles that seem to promise solutions only make more sophisticated diagnoses -- like Prof. Paul Musgrave's How Not to Fix Silicon Valley - "the problem isn't whether tech entrepreneurs read the humanities, it's how they think. Or Ramesh Srinivasan's "Yes, Google is Disrupting Our Democracy But Not in the Way Trump Thinks". Musgrave is right that having tech leaders read Plato -- or I would say something like Martin Buber's "I and Thou" -- isn't going to fix their essentially nihilist thinking. He doesn't use that word -- I do -- because I think it captures that self-interested, cut-throat, bullying take on the world that has no humility before anything greater than himself -- God or beauty or country. They got that way for all sorts of reasons involving the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and decline of parenting and education but most of all, I think, they got that way because they trained themselves to become more like machines in order to communicate with them and make computers work.

This is about literalness but also about an ardent, religious belief (in non-religious people) that the Internet has no value or evil or good -- the way a hammer or a nail do not. They are just tools, "able to be used for good or bad". I'm hardly the only one who has come to see this as riotously false -- an atomic bomb that was supposed to be used "surgically" and killed hundreds of thousands of people and altered the course of history and politics and civilization forever isn't just a "tool".  If social media's propensity for falsity even undermines elections, the tool is way out in front of the wielder. Yes, people are the ones who wield such tools, but the unanticipated outcomes in part engineered heedlessly into the tools due to technologists' hubris are increasingly revealing the agency of non-agency evil. No one thought sharing pictures of your cat would create a tool which could be used to bring a lout and liar like Trump to power.

Let me get right to my solutions then.

1. Silicon Valley should charge subscription fees for social media.

These fees could be $2.99 or $29.99 and based on number of uploads or posts or special features but they need to be in place. They will still have free accounts on the freemium model, that free gives you X features but for Y more, you incrementally add them. Let's say with a free account on Facebook, you can upload photos, but not videos. Or the follower cap on Twitter (currently 2,000 until others follow you, an insidious system) can be broken not by illegally buying batches of followers, but simply paying a subscription fee that mechanically lets you follow more people.  Even likes could be capped with fees, as they have inflated beyond all bounds! There is a deep-set belief that you "can't" charge subscriptions and that it is "fatal" for media.

But look at the New York Times, and how it has literally added subscriptions by creating more and more diverse and niched content. Washington Post and New Yorker as well. Miraculously, it can be done. TechCrunch grudgingly admits that the old media dinosaurs are making money now -- much more than TC itself, which won't move to a subscription model although their core reader base -- programmers and other tech -- have some of the highest salaries in the country and could pay for their news. I should note that it is not merely compelling content that achieved this. The first thing that the Times, Post, New Yorker and others did was make it impossible to put a link into Google search, and pull up a story past a paywall by doing this. The Google trick was broken about two years ago, I think. I've never seen any reporting on this, but it was vital. I don't know whether the Snowden helpers that the Times brought in to do tech, or whether some treaty with Google achieved this, but it is now impossible to read past a paywall by using the Google cache trick. It simply doesn't work anymore. And that forced people to pay. Mechanical blocks like to force payment are as vital as fresh and compelling content, and this was achieved, despite legions of techs always saying it "can't" be done because of the Internet's copyable nature. Sure it can, when you set your mind to it.

The book by Jill Abramson Merchants of Truth also explains this phenomenon of new media like Vice or Buzzfeed failing and having to lay off journalists who formerly swaggered over the demise of old print media. To be sure, this reality still hasn't encroached on the deep-set belief against subscriptions, not only for new media but social media But it must. And it will. Something has to be done to wean these companies away from ads which they sell next to your free content by exploiting your privacy and your emotions. And undermining civil society in the process.

When you're a paying customer, the attitude changes. Newspapers change their tenor when they reflect on what subscribers' responses might be. Even razor companies trying to rely on "viral social media" can only indulge in their ideological follies for so long before the bottom line corrects them.

After all, Apple, HBO, Netflix and so on charge subscriptions for streaming content. Spotify has the free and the premium version. Why shouldn't social media, that serves us up the most content of all, daily, hourly, even by the minute?! Think of how much people look at their phones -- and what percentage of that content is free! CHARGE for some of it!

Wallets and Customer Commerce

Such a subscription system should also have "wallets" so that people can go around and award pennies or dollars to friends for posts they list or journalists for articles they like. Technologists could feasibly put in such a system, but defiantly don't, as they know it will undermine their own control and power over the ability to milk the Internet for revenue.

Once you could sell your photos on Instagram, Instagram can't make money from them in any way. If a payments system is installed by a third party like PayPal or Venmo, whereby the platform provider is bypassed and there are peer-to-peer transactions easily using the interface of the platform, money isn't flowing into the hands of those who provide the service -- UNLESS they decide to work it that way.

In fairness, platforms that enable your commerce through social media should get reasonable compensation, and they could charge a fee -- but not only due to reluctance to enable customer commerce and take on the headaches of payments systems (which include fraud and hacking and security) they don't even start such a plan. They should. BTW, the online virtual world Second Life, which is mocked by techs, is a good example of how this works. Facebook, with its 3 billion users, only enables a tiny handful of engineers who create apps related to it to make money from it directly, and of course takes payment from individuals, groups, or companies for ads. This segment of its income is likely its largest, and why it would not move to a subscription plan only reluctantly.

But Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, itself makes a profit of $75 million, and enables $60 million or more a year to be made by its users who sell various virtual goods or server space or service to a relatively tiny population. I think can't be more than 500,000 or 600,000 these days, without about 30,000-50,000 concurrency (these figures used to be released, but when SL began doing poorly after its initial boom in 2007-2008, it stopped publishing them). The point is, if you give people a service they pay for as a subscription ($11.99 a month, less than some massive online games), while allowing free accounts as well, and allow people to use the platform to make money, get tokens for their creations or services, and then cash out those tokens in a carefully-managed exchange system, you have sustained yourself and the customer. That's what we need to be thinking about as jobs become automated -- how to enable people to make money online with creation as well as service.

I think likely the content companies rather than the platform will be the one to institute wallets, so they can control the rake of fees from them. Imagine if the NYT made a way for you to pay pennies to clip one article or tip one journalist -- they benefit, we benefit. They won't want to cut into their revenue stream from full-fledged subscriptions -- but I suspect they will hit a wall eventually and will have to buckle as the only way to grow.

There could be a war over this. But wallets/micropayment systems will go in eventually and they will be a way for both platforms and content providers to make money other than ads. I don't pretend this will be easy -- Facebook or Instagram would rather let game devs make money from fees collected for addictive farm games or letting influencers with high followers take brand endorsements than let the user decide with micro-currency payments what he or she "likes".

And the game devs and top influencers themselves would constitute a block against the democratization of making and receiving payments as they would see their income undermined. As more and more people get on social media, the opportunities for making money with it seem to increase, according to the gurus who make a living teaching you how to do this. But it's only possible to make a living for a few, and it has become harder as companies like ebay and Amazon (through which you sell real goods ) are taking more and more percentages and instituting more rules; YouTube only lets those with a defined number of higher followers sell ads, and Instagram has thresholds as well.

Real Identity Curbs Abuse

There are advantages to taking this controversial and even arduous path, however. If you have a subscription system, you have to have a form of payment, which generally means a real identity, a credit card or a bank card. Real identities tend to lesson -- although not entirely remove -- bad behaviour online, people are conscious of their reputations (and sadly a part of this is job loss over social media indiscretion, which I think is wrong). But the bottom line is, if you put your real name on a Twitter account you paid even $5.00 a month for, the chemistry changes. When something is free you don't respect it, nor do you respect the anonymous. It's always possible to make a pseudonymous account on top of an account in which a real name is provided. The screaming that usually accompanies the debate about "nicks" is that we "can't" have it because all kinds of vulnerable groups from battered women to Iranian freedom fighters will not be protected, given how hacks of personal data take place all the time. Yet that's something not just dissidents under oppressive systems but ordinary bank customers in Western democracies have to worry about, and that has to be fixed on a larger scale.

Social media companies will still have to sell ads. But they will sell ads to buyers who must reach people who not only gave real names and locations but to whom they now have an obligation as paying customers. They aren't just sheeple to be fleeced with addictive "freeness". The era of free is not sustainable and will change. So better to do this in a planned and staged manner than close down in bankruptcy.

On one of the Silicon Valley episodes, there is the regurgitation of the received wisdom you can't charge money for a service -- and then the telling comment from a tech titan that the value of a company isn't in its product but in the company's stock. Literally, in the shareholders' shares, not the actual thing that gives them revenue -- which seems remarkably shortsighted and even crazy. That's why the paydays of these ephemeral companies, whether unicorns or badgers mainly come from VCs trading them around to each other. You "take money off the table" not because the public is buying a product or service -- only another VC is. Facebook users were not offered shares of stock like employees -- although they should have been, since they made Facebook successful. When there are subscriptions and real customers, there is more focus on what the product is and how to sell it, and less on dark exploitation.

I don't pretend it's a total solution, but the job here is to tame evil as it cannot be eradicated. Still, there is more to be done:

2. Government regulation. Ironically, one of the very things that may have to be forced on social media is the demand that they charge money for subscriptions. That seems hilarious and counter-intuitive, but think about it. Since when can the government force a company in a free economy to charge money? They can't. Although if you think about it, there are laws regulating contests, sweepstakes, and lotteries -- giving away things for free -- why not accounts? But by taxation and tariffs, they bring this about, as the companies need to have a reliable revenue stream. 

If ads are regulated more heavily -- first and foremost by insisting on the same transparency that radio and TV elections ads must have -- subscriptions may look more attractive. 

I think Section 230 has to be revised to make platforms responsible for specific crimes, like the incitement of imminent violence -- not protected under the First Amendment.  Companies already have Terms of Service and sometimes also additional Community Rules that are not at the level of the First Amendment but which they only passively or irregularly enforce. Only legislative demand that redacts or even removes "the 26 words" will get them to enforce their own TOS. This cannot be decided by the companies and their lawyers only, although media is tending to give only them the voice, and castigate critics as Trumpians, which is foolish.

Already the anti-trafficking legislative effort was successful, and there will be more. Admission that it "didn't end the Internet" even if some liberals dislike it as law is the first step toward awareness that virtuality has to be regulated as much as reality because it is human and therefore flawed. The Internet as a substance is not perfectability always in motion, that "Better World". The current climate has helped bring this vital change about more than anything, ending the stale arguments' stalemate, as Lawfare explains:

At first, tech companies lined up in lockstep against the bill. But then the seemingly impossible happened: The platforms’ opposition receded. Perhaps because the climate on the Hill was increasingly inhospitable to the major social media companies given their role in L’Affaire Russe and perhaps because the writing was on the wall, the Internet Association (which represents Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other big tech companies) endorsed the legislation after Senate staff changed the bill to head off some of its excesses.

If platforms are faced with the need to become responsible for removing content in violation, they have more incentive to have subscriptions -- because payment information must be supplied. I think we will see this in the future. A lot of things in Silicon Valley started out for free, then had to charge or go out of business. Social media could be the next big thing -- because it's rational for companies to charge for a service and irrational to keep relying on damaging their very customers to make money from them. To ensure your privacy, you have to have some privacy to ensure -- that means identity.

Impact Litigation and Good Corporate Governance

Traditionally, capitalism has solved the problems of companies harming their own customers through fraud or environmental pollution or health damage by litigation. So tobacco companies are forced to put labels from the Surgeon General, or Big Pharma may finally face the music for its contribution to the opiod crisis with the town and county lawsuits. Boards of companies are an even greater force for reforming abusive companies -- Overstock's Patrick Byrne had to go when he got too loony, and Elon Musk got his wings clipped.  Of course, the experts and legislators will take a look at anti-trust law and see if any of it fits with big tech, especially things like Facebook's acquisition of Instagram. But I don't think the solution to Silicon Valley is to favor Elizabeth Warren's socialistic animosity to capitalism period in this popular form. It's to treat these companies like any companies and demand from them the board control, adherence to regulations and customer care that "meatworld" companies have to exercise whether they manufacturer car-seats or fast food. 

Here I'll mention the claims that Facebook and others unfairly favour liberals. Of course they do -- just as mainstream media is dominated by liberals. One obvious cure for this is never to look at the news feed Facebook provides you, and make your own news feed by going to sites directly or using Google news or other feeds you can set up and control yourself. Google famously hides behind users as the reason certain content surfaces instead of others. Yet this is a self-fulfilling prophecy -- if users surface antisemitic content, others then lazily click on it simply because it's there. Nothing to be gained by denying this bias, even if the solution for it is not so easy.

Try to Chomsky test -- type in "Noam Chomsky" and you will not find anything critical about this leftwing extremist hugely critical of the US and capitalism on the first page. You'll find pages from Truthout, a leftwing watchdog, Chomsky's own page, and Wikipedia -- which is the chief way all searches skew left, because it really is dominated by a few lefty and libertarian techs.

So it's a thing. Yes, it isn't fixed by Google skewing its algorithms. But it has the big old blank landing page, which unlike Yahoo, has no curated news on it, either of "real" or "paid" type. Why can't it start a curated news feed on its big old blank page? The solution to the discontents of search is outside of search, in curated content which yes, this company could provide, and yes be a publisher/editor responsible for its content under revised Section 230. It can be done!

Its Soviet Knowledge Society-style object lessons of obscure scientists and techs (the Google doodle which doesn't always show up), with way more representation of women and people of colour than in the actual RL Google itself -- can't carry that load alone. Let Google hire journalists to select news and you know, make the world a better place. It could be only real news, unlike Yahoo, which has a lot of paid and sensational junk on it. Then, when there's a search box next to their modest news feed (they could still leave a lot of blank space on that big old blank page so we can admire the inspirational lesson for the day and the primary colours against that blizzard white) so providing a good news feed will help their search, as people are inspired to look up things in the stories.

Also, they need to have subscriptions, too. Search is so heavily used for the Internet's very functioning to have Google subscriptions just for search (even just to go from one page to another -- I wonder if other people don't use bookmarks but use search to bring up pages like "Yahoo" or "Facebook" if they aren't landing pages). But they could charge subscriptions for those of us who use Google Ads. Why not? The people placing the ads have to pay, obviously. Why shouldn't those who provide free content and put those ads on their blogs or corporate pages not have to pay a subscription, too? And if we could pay a subscription, we could finally demand customer service from this most outrageously abusive product of Google's. Everyone knows how arbitrarily they remove accounts and how hard it is to get them back (I've had to do that, after people used fake complaints about ads as a way to shut down my criticism they didn't like). There are other Google services like this with zero customer service. Twitter is terrible that way, too. Charge subscription fees. And do the customer service -- use some of your billions to pay for jobs for people you are automating into poverty.

3. Moral Leadership. It's funny how this is a public demand of sorts -- many people think Silicon Valley titans don't give enough to charity, don't help communities enough, ship jobs abroad and avoid taxes by taking revenue abroad and it all has a corrosive effect. But yet despite several decades of Big IT, the evolution that took place with the Vanderbilts or the Rockfellers still hasn't occurred (and we should expect it to be speeded up like everything else in our time).

I don't really care for Bill Gates, but his corporation (which mainly sells hardware, so it is more rooted in the real world than Google or Facebook) provides jobs and he gives to charity causes from AIDs treatment to clean water. Sergey Brin is mainly known for giving to the research of the disease from which he is genetically predisposed. Does Jack of Twitter give to charity? I don't even know. Craig Newmark gives to trendy progressive causes he likes -- wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if he were forced to have some kind of subscription service for classified ads, which might widen his philanthropy beyond just his lefty favourites.

Robert Scoble

I think there also need to be tech leaders who present a more caring and concerned face to the public. When I think of the better face of tech, I think of Robert Scoble, who was once the "evangelist" (a top PR outreach guy) for Microsoft, and went on to represent a variety of companies including Seagate before morphing into an independent consultant who now specializes in "spatial computing," which basically means anything 3D -- virtual reality, augmented reality, panoramic photos and such.

He went through a trial in the wilderness, first admitting his alcoholism and going on the road to recovery, then apologizing for his abuse of some women in tech, and continuing to hone his devotion to his wife and children, working at home and doing childcare while his wife takes a demanding Silicon Valley job outside the home.

I've always admired Scoble's ability to explain tech and be excited about it and draw people in without scorn -- a rare talent in the tech world. Most of the people who follow him are techs themselves and I suppose he isn't super famous, but I always found him to provide an enormous amount of information and insight. He takes the time to answer ordinary people on Facebook (like me). He is upbeat and positive without being smarmy about the tech, and calls it out when it is less than great. To be sure, his endorsement of products is often paid (as it was for Google Glass, which ultimately was a failure and which cost him some ridicule - he famously showed himself taking a shower in the Google goggles).  But there is an organic quality to this endorsement which comes from enough commentary that is unpaid. And really "eating the dogfood" -- he has valiantly taken his family, which includes a son with special needs, on trips to Yellowstone in a driverless car. I will never get into one of those vehicles and I believe they are mainly about putting truck drivers out of work, but I do recognize that they likely are the wave of the future. If you have to have such a wave, you want it to be explained and guided by someone who has faced the worst of his own personal demons as well as those of technology. We need more people like this, and far less of the types satirized in Silicon Valley, the scourge of Twitter and politics, Anil Dash, who not only got a fellow tech who was politically incorrect fired from his job at Business Insider, he threatened him with blocking his funding in the world of start-ups forever (this denizen of the White House could do that). Despicable! 

The techs cannot be taught a moral code out of Plato or even C.S. Lewis but they can be humbled by losing customers and revenue, facing regulation and lawsuits and realizing that what is good for business and and should be what is good for Americans and the world.  There isn't anything like the ABA or AMA for technologists and should be, where their "Better Worlding" is not merely outwardly directed toward their own arrogant engineering of the world by their leftist/libertarian tastes, but where they pledge to do no harm themselves. This wouldn't just be them deciding what harm is, or their former execs now with "harm reduction" consulting gigs. It would have to be done by denouncing the DDoS and ceasing to characterize hacking as "cool"; where they cooperate with government and military in a liberal democracy instead of letting tiny factions of anarchists rule; where they draw the logical conclusion that protection of privacy and private property -- personal data and copyright -- should be their hallmarks instead of scorned in their "California business model." This can be done with a move to subscriptions, some regulation, and some selfless and real moral leadership.

 

Google Should Do Business with the US Military - and Reasonable Tech Leaders Explain Why

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Google server room. Photo by Brian Ussery

So there's a weepy story in Wired about the Googlers all aghast that their company was going to do business with the US military with their new AI tech. 

More than two years ago, Googlers pulled together as employees, using internal social media on the job to organize -- with management's encouragement -- to fight Trump's travel ban Of course it's  in their business interest to combat such unjustified restrictions, as Google relies on a lot of engineers from other countries who come here on H1 visas. It was an example of how the Google is like a state within a state -- like Google's help to the Obama team to win the presidency. Here's a company that in the US, only in the last year or so began to employ worldwide (98,000) something approaching the number of the people that General Motor employees (173,000) (all the big IT companies together don't equal the manufacturing industries in the US, even with a lot of jobs shipped abroad) The tech industry supplies jobs to highly-skilled engineers pretty much, and not a lot of jobs to ordinary people as traditional industries have -- they its left flank has an outsized influence on politics.

Obviously, Google needs to keep growing -- the cultic belief in growth is the foundation of all these big IT companies -- they try to get into China and fail and come back; they try to get into the Cloud even though Amazon and Oracle beat them to it -- they're even now instituting the social Darwinism of cutting pay and raising bonus percentages for sales of their Cloud services.

Google isn't a philanthropy or a democracy -- it's a business, even if (as I've often said) it's a business sort of modeled after the Soviet Knowledge Society seeing as its mission putting into effect the vision of H.G. Wells and Maxim Gorky to make a total encyclopedia of the world's knowledge accessible to ordinary people. Of course, they get to pick which knowledge is important and the People see first...

But like other tech companies maturing over the years and learning that they need to curb their misogynist and racist bro culture and need to do things like "make a profit" and "sell products" not at a loss, Google has had to grow up and talk to the Man. Much more lately, with all the concern about privacy and undermining of elections.

Google Should Accept US Military Contracts

I personally see absolutely nothing wrong with Google or any company accepting contracts with the US military or any part of government.  To be sure, that means dealing with the awful Trump administration, which I didn't (or 90% of Googlers) vote for, but these deals are longer term than any one president and in this case are about America's national security. America is a liberal democracy, even under Trump -- we still call ourselves that because of the massive media and civic response to the racism and misogyny of Trump that still curbs his excesses -- and brings us the hope of replacing him with a Democrat. Even if you think Trump has done such damage that no cooperation with the government is possible (what, farmers should cease taking subsidies? We should forego accepting Social Security? No more roads should be built and our nuclear weapons shouldn't be maintained?), you still might contemplate that there are worse things out there -- look at the leaders of Russia or China or Iran or North Korea.

There is nothing inherently wrong with Amazon or Google helping the government with AI or any capacity needed in the military. If they believe their tech is using the commit human rights abuses at home or abroad, they need to do due diligence and not just talk in rabid, hysterical generalities like the anti-ICE movement which Google employees now take part in. If you don't like the policies on immigration this administration has -- I don't -- trying to attack or disrupt or dismantle ICE won't change them -- would you like Trump merely to use the National Guard to perform the same services? ICE definitely commits abuses, like all government agencies, but in a democracy you campaign and litigate against them and change law and policy -- you don't destroy them like an anarchist. It's not a solution as you are left then only with totalitarian anarchists running things instead of a system of checks and balances.

Isn't Internal Social Media a Huge Time-Waster Costing the Company Money?!

Reading this piece, I can't help thinking that the real problem here is the tolerance for internal social media in the company. My God, what a boondoggle! Do other companies have such nonsense? I can't imagine IBM or Wendy's allowing this madness. Slack is bad enough, if they use them. Letting employees post all day about all kinds of topics unrelated to their work is supposed to be part of this genius theory, whereby you give individuals total intellectual freedom and they produce tech better and innovate more often and productively. Even the Soviets understood this with their sharashkas in the Gulag or the closed cities like Arzamas-16 where Dr. Andrei Sakharov helped build the Soviet hydrogen bomb. We get that.

But social media isn't about creative geniuses doing the hard work of thinking alone at their desks and writing or coding on their computers, wrestling with the material. It's about gabbing with others. Much of the social media madness at Google is about forming various affinity groups based on politics or sexual preferences or lifestyle or hobbies and then expressing on internal boards about them. Madness. Time-wasting. Crazy collectivist boosterism.

Google Should End Internal Social Media

Google should just end all this sillyness. Not only does it fuel animosity and division and lose worker time, it creates reams of data that become a liability once published outside the company. End it!

Imagine, G+, which they had to retire in shame because nobody but a few big photographers who needed free photo storage and free advertising used it. Ordinary people like me who tried it in good faith found that we were in the company of the worst of the worst of Silicon Valley tech culture which isn't only about bros, but about "benevolent dictators" and their "fork or GTFO" mindset. If you criticized anything about Google, or criticized specific Google public figures, they would come after you and threaten you with expulsion from G+ -- and with all their products integrated you wondered if you could get banned from Google Drive or Gmail as well. It was among the harshest climates I've seen on social media, with horrid geeky assholes coming on and harassing people like me who criticized Silicon Valley before its time (now its more fashionable and tolerated) or whose politics didn't jive with the extreme left or libertarian "cosmic engineers".

Google could really put all of this tangled mess out of its misery by just closing all internal social media and encouraging staff to use regular outside social media, with or without their own real names, with a pledge that no one would be fired for what they said on social media with a few very tightly-defined and realistic exceptions, like "exposure of proprietary information" or "incitement of imminent violence."

And this will help put an end to the insubordination that lets a few thousand vocal extremists seize the mindshare with a few lefty journalists and guilt-trip the company into getting out of AI with the military.

One Tech Leader Advocates Cooperation with the Military

I could go on about this, but to my surprise, someone in the industry already has, and compellingly so. While looking  up the real person on whom the Silicon Valley character Keenan Feldspar played by Haley Joel Osment, that weird but loveable round-faced robot boy in the movie AI, I discovered it was Palmer Luckey, inventory of the Oculus Rift, the famous rig to view Virtual Reality, which is a "space" that has springs and winters periodically in the venture-capital world and which is now in a downturn. Even so, millions are still being made and it's not going away.

Palmer Luckey and co-author Trey Stevens has said a very real thing about tech giants and their bowing to their minority of extremists among their employees: "Silicon Valley Should Stop Ostracizing the Military."

Indeed.  The Internet itself grew out of the US military (DARPA) and is a big customer for all the big tech companies -- why all the hand-wringing?

The United States can no longer take this technology leadership for granted. Its adversaries worldwide are marshaling their tech capabilities, often compelling their best scientists to unify behind the goal of achieving preeminence. Putin in September 2017 said that AI leadership was a means to become “the ruler of the world.” China has vowed to achieve AI dominance by 2030. Moscow and Beijing are aggressively pursuing full-scale tech collaborations between the public and private sectors. Meanwhile, much of the top AI talent in the United States is working on things such as ad optimization. That might contribute to the U.S. economy, but it does nothing to protect against competitors who are using their best and brightest to bolster their militaries.

By all means, let’s debate the ethics surrounding any new technologies with military applications. In one of the knottier dilemmas involving AI and the use of force, we agree with many others that the decision to take a human life should not be made without human direction. But an essential part of ensuring that technologies are used ethically is ensuring that the terms are not dictated by authoritarian regimes. For the United States to set ethical norms and assert a moral high ground, it must first hold the technological high ground.

 

Exactly. I couldn't have said it more succinctly or compellingly.  Why should Google engage in leftist political extremism at the behest of a small faction of only 4,000 employees out of some 100,000 worldwide? Even if there 10 times as many, Google management has to do what is good for business -- and customers -- and if they polled their customers, most would agree that they should do business with the US government rather than ceding the ground to Russia or China or worse. Why is this even a debate?

It's not a debate because rational voices like Luckey's aren't heard -- I didn't even notice this piece until a year later -- and because too many journalists fear being uncool with the tech bros or their own colleagues and won't look around outside the noisy faction causing Google leadership heartburn. But why, indeed, despite their failures in China, can Google still work on a Chinese search engine -- that would have to be censored -- and scorn the US military?! And if you don't want to hear that point from me, here it from Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Google will have only itself to blame for canceling the contract and losing out to Russia and China in the AI race but we all need to care because it harms our country's security. This can't be a question left to only Trump to ask.

Biased Media

And frankly the tech reporters of major media like the Post are also to blame, but not seeking out alternative industry opinion to the faction within Google! Like the VR guy who published later on their pages -- but they could have gone within Google itself, quite frankly. 

At least Wired admitted that plenty of tech companies still want US military contracts -- sure they do! They just haven't spoken out as much and neither their leaders or employees have gotten the ear of the liberal media.

Let me show you how Microsoft does it, which actually sells a useful product and doesn't harvest your data in large quantities to sell ads:

Just last month, Microsoft workers wrote to CEO Satya Nadella and company president Brad Smith, asking them to cancel a $479 million Army contract that would let soldiers use Microsoft’s augmented-reality technology, HoloLens, to train for battle. “We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used,” the letter read.

Nadella rejected their demands in an interviewwith CNN, saying, “We're not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy.” The response drew scrutiny from Nadella’s fellow technologists and even prompted a New York Times columnist to compare tech military contracts to Dow Chemical’s development of napalm during the Vietnam War.

I have to go see if this same NYT columnist cared as much about Russia's invasion of Ukraine or bombing of Syrians or China's arrest and killing of the Uighurs as they do about US use of napalm in Vietnam.

I also wonder as an aside whether Microsoft's use of Yammer as an internal social media has reached the epic proportions of Google's madness.

Workplace Organizing

I do want to say that while Google management should be free to make their business calls as to whether to work with the US military or China for that matter, and that issues of national politics should be kept from disrupting daily work life, and not encouraged on internal social media to the point that management cannot govern, the issues of labour conditions are different. These are rights. Spouting off about what you think of the Man and the Bomb are not in a private company. That's where freedom of association comes in -- for the company.

I would solve the problem of Google working with China by not working there; as for the US military if that's your belief, then don't work their either. See how that goes. But when it comes to Google's tolerance of sexual harassment in the workplace, and its insistence on internal arbitration before seeking outside legal intervention, employees should organize all they want. They don't need the internal company social media for that -- why would you entrust your adversarial organizing, your workers' rights struggles, to a corporate chat program or board?! 

Women at Google -- who are in a distinct minority -- organized and battled management over the internal arbitration issue and won. That's a valid example of employee solidarity and action that's reasonable. Using the means of internal communications to rally about all sorts of outside political issues or the company's decisions perceived as unethical is not. Too much of that struggle is coopted and diluted anyway, regardless of what you think about it. If you think Google shouldn't help the US military, then you would think no tech company should and you should be organizing more substantively by lobbying legislators or trying to get elected or writing or demonstrating in public, not in your Google cubicle (or padded room with nerf balls and organic herbal tea and healthy snacks).

The organizers succeeded, but then three quit and claimed they had suffered retaliation for their protesting. Google denied this, of course. It's hard to know what the real story is but we all know employers don't like whistleblowers even if they make changes due to them.

Nitasha Tiku, author of the Wired piece, seems to imply at the end of the article that the internal social media and routines like structured dialogues between employees with grievances and top leadership were not in use by the extremists anyway. 

Over the past three years, the structures that once allowed executives and internal activists to hash out tensions had badly eroded. In their place was a new machinery that the company's activists on the left had built up, one that skillfully leveraged media attention and drew on traditional organizing tactics. Dissent was no longer a family affair. And on the right, meanwhile, the pipeline of leaks running through Google's walls was still going as strong as ever.

Late this June, Project Veritas, a right-wing outlet specializing in stings and exposés, published a slew of leaked documents and snippets of hidden-camera footage from inside Google. One of the items it posted, as if evidence of Google's supposed bias, was a “Beginner's Guide to Protesting” that Google employees had drawn up around the time of the travel ban walkout back in 2017. Next to the document was a message and a link. “Do you work in Big Tech?” it said. “Project Veritas would love to hear from you.

Well, welcome to the real world.

 

GamerGate is Only Part of the Story of Extreme Nihilism Online

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Screenshot by Whirly Fizzle of a 4chan "particle attack" in the virtual world of Second Life.

 

Five Years Since GamerGate

So apparently it's the five-year anniversary of GamerGate, as we learn from a shiny retrospective article in the New York Times, with distracting, annoying arrow graphics that I guess are supposed to feel like "a game."

 

The events that started Gamergate began 5 years ago today. We put together a package with a series of pieces from @sarahjeong @BriannaWu @BostonJoan and myself that trace its influence on the internet and politics today. I hope you'll give it a look. https://t.co/oMghdN9Qss

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) August 15, 2019

I read through the pieces and they're all fine, but I should explain why I never got involved on either side of GamerGate.

The immediate reason was that GamerGate more or less started in August 2014, but I was terribly busy then, covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a war that had become more graphically tied to Russia in that summer when Russian soldiers' ID had been recently found in the Donbass and the Battle of Ilovaysk was fought with thousands lost -- which ended with Putin promising a safe retreat but then Russian soldiers and Russian-backed combatants shooting at fleeing Ukrainian soldiers.

So social media skirmishes didn't feel that important to me.

And I felt that while I generally took the side of the feminists, those complaining about the culture of political correctness had a point, as well. I think the writer Cathy Young has done an excellent job of covering GamerGate critically in this vein (and Google her other pieces to understand how some of the protagonist "Social Justice Warriors" fueled this fire). I felt I couldn't add to it without a lot of careful work -- and some times in life you need to let issues pass.

But there was more. When I saw the first few rounds of this, I felt like it was deja vu all over again. I had already been blogging about virtually the same issues for years before that in my Second-Life related blog. Because all those hateful, misogynist, racist, vicious assholes that became known to the world in GamerGate were already long since known in the gamers' world, and specifically Second Life, a virtual world that is an open platform and not a game, but which comes out of the culture of Silicon Valley geeks that spawned the GamerGate nihilism.

And I felt that I simply couldn't wade in and try to explain to people that the harassment of feminists and gays by these extremists was not the only story -- nor was it even about the obnoxious political correctness of the SWJ zealots. The extremism was only the most visible part of a story that meant a culture threatening all of us. So much of the press coverage and comment on online harassment takes the form of featuring vulnerable groups who have suffered, and that's fine, but I feel it misses the larger story of how this can engulf any of us or all of us. That realization shouldn't detract from the victims and their vocal struggles but encourage more human solidarity. Sadly, it generally has the opposite effect, and the nihilists have been able to play on that, as I shall explain.

Virtual "Griefing"

I experienced horrific harrassment, known as "griefing" in SL, just like these women, but not because I was a female game developer or a prominent feminist. I'm only a very moderately prominent translator and human rights activist.  I actually had a male avatar in SL, although many knew my real identity as a woman because I was a critical blogger and spoke to mainstream media. One of the ways my identity was outed 15 years ago was because I was critical of just this very awful culture -- and doxing was the way people like me were intimidated from continuing to criticize geek culture -- which is the seedbed of GamerGate and much else.

I say "people," because I think this isn't only about feminists or women -- although I'm all for women's rights. I think it goes much farther, and it's frustrating to see GamerGate and other similar topics like Steubenville treated as they are only about feminism -- women shamed or harassed or even raped in real life. When the 8chan and related mass shooters who have been affiliated with this awful culture go out and massacre people in real life, they don't only kill women -- they kill men and children. too. Yes, there have been some useful articles pointing out that misogyny and domestic abuse of partners or family members are often part of the mass shooter's profile. But that's not all of it, and I get tired trying to make this point.

They kill everybody, and their ideology isn't just against women, or racial minorities, or LGBT, but really anybody who gets in their way who is for a civil society or just happens to be a random bystander and not part of them.

Jump, Tor Will Save You

And some of the most sophisticated channers play on the very keen interest in women and gays as victims to lie about their harassment of people for other reasons. I vividly recall the story of the female Tor developer (about whom I wrote in my samizdat book because she was once on staff of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life). There was a man who used a pseudonym on Twitter who was critical of the extremist geeks around Tor who were soft on hackers like Manning and Snowden, indifferent to copyright, and fierce about using DDoS attacks or doxing to harass or out critics of their way of life. He was among the few vocal skeptics about Tor's exaggerated claims for privacy or social change to be achieved by this software that was curiously first incubated and still funded today by the US military.

So this man who was just a blogger made a sarcastic crack to this Tor dev -- the kind they might make themselves.  When she posted something about going up in the Washington Monument, he wrote something like that she "should jump off and open Tor, it would break her fall". Everybody who had watched him criticize Tor -- the program and the elitist hacker culture around it -- and her angry responses knew that this was just a sarcastic joke. It wasn't urging her to really jump off a real building. It was an attack against her Tor evangelism, not her womanhood. You know, it was virtual, the way hackers always say everything online is? 

But seeing an opportunity to exploit Twitter sentiment, this Tor queen relentlessly tracked him down, and used various hacker tricks to delve into his photos posted, which is one way to geolocate a person or find more about them. Eventually she discovered his real identity -- he was a pharmacist in New Jersey, not "one of them" -- not in the world of corporate- or government-funded coding and even hacking for fun or profit to "make a better world".  So she contacted his employer and claimed falsely he had written a sexist, violent thing on line. She rallied all the feminists to gang up on him. It cost him his job. 

Tor's Jacob Appelbaum

I know what that was like because the way I first found out about Jacob Appelbaum, the aggressive and popular Tor evangelist for many years, was when I simply questioned his claim on Twitter that the infamous Apache video, which supposedly portrayed callous American soldiers gleefully killing people and even deliberately shooting and wounding children in a van in Iraq. I said -- actually, much as the New Yorker implied only it was more cool for them to do so -- that the video presentation was tendentious and misleading -- and in fact the soldiers mistook the journalists for combatants because they travelled with armed men, and they had no idea there were children in a van (later helped by a US soldier as it happened) because they could not see into it. (Look at the video. You cannot see into it. If soldiers later said it was a terrible idea to bring your children to a battlefield (it was) and pick up wounded combatants (it was), that doesn't mean they could see into the van -- they commented after the fact.)

For my sins, I was deluged with 20,000 hate posts on Twitter that came in incredibly fast, from real people in Jake's posse and botnets that he wrangled. My blog site was bombarded and I began to get all those nuisance phone calls in RL. I was amazed at the deluge. This is how they did it. They used force to drive people offline who disagreed with them. This was very familiar to me from SL.  Now it was in RL.

Ultimately, years later, it came as no surprise to me that the board of Tor fired Jake after multiple #MeToo stories involving his sexual harassment, shaming and even rape of women and men. There were dozens of cases. The Tor dev on Twitter who had ruined the life of the young pharmacist over his "misogyny" wasn't among those who called out Jake. That's the irony.

To me, it made sense that someone who used force, and massive harassment and shaming online in a debate could carry this into real life into bullying work colleagues and even sexually harassing them. Why is this so hard to understand? No, it doesn't mean everybody who crashes your blog server is a rapist, but some are and it goes together. It's the culture. Pay attention. And when I tried to get this across -- that Jacob Appelbaum, helper of the felon and fugitive Snowden, as not only a misogynist but a threat to anyone and to civil society as well, it didn't fit. #MeToo is how this can be understood now, and only that way.

Why the Griefers Went After Me

In the virtual world, I became a target not for feminism, although as I said, I support women's rights. The reason they decided to go after me is because first, I expressed enormous revulsion at what some of them had built in Second Life on their sim -- or simulator, a representation of an island or contiguous mainland where you can put buildings or trees or furniture or animated objects like cats or moving vehicles. They made a replica of the World Trade Center on 9/11 with people falling and dying and put slogans like "I'm falling for you" which outraged and saddened many people on the SL forums. The developers of SL did not remove this objectionable content -- they felt there should be free expression -- like Twitter or Facebook -- and they didn't think even if it offended families who lost their loved ones or just any caring person it didn't matter. 

When I said Linden Lab shouldn't allow the incitement of violence -- which in my view for a private company need not hew to a strict First Amendment jurisprudence but include the glorification of terrorism and nihilism about violence -- I was singled out for attacks.

So some 14 years ago, when I made a 4th of July picnic open to the public on a sim where I had a "Coney Island" style build with a boardwalk and picnic tables, these griefers - day-old alt accounts with names like "Mohammed" who were hardly Muslim --  flew airplanes around the site and then hurled bombs on the location with scattered a lot of fire prims, i.e. objects looking like fire which then crashed the sim. 

And then they never let up for years and years -- about seven, I reckon -- where they harassed me, put giant caricatures of my RL self on sims and feigned obscene acts -- even showing dead versions of my RL self with broken glasses nearby, like Piggy in Lord of the Flies. 

They bombarded the sims where I had built a community with people who shared the cost of the sim by paying rent, spewing particles with pictures of sadistic acts, anti-semitic slogans and memes, racist images, abortions, and so on.  They mocked Bill Cosby and his Jello ads (long before his own sexual abuse was prosecuted); they mocked Jews by the Wailing Wall; they claimed AIDS was spreading. Early on, I was the first to make a community where LGBT were welcome, and where people with organizations opposing violence against women and helping victims could have free storefronts. These areas were deluged with "grief prims" -- objects on physics that scattered all around and crashed the sim, forcing people to move out.

So they attacked not just those in certain readily-identifiable vulnerable groups, but those who abuse-reported such acts, or who criticized them and demanded action to stop them.

The Enemy of Society

Because I was vocal about publicizing these attacks -- which had little reaction from Linden Lab at the time (and later I found out even involved some of their staff and friends of their staff in those early days), other victims of attacks told me they experienced the same thing but they feared talking about it. There were designers with dress stores who were bombarded with fire prims and had their items copied ("copybotted" as the expression went); there were Christians in Bible studies; there were people who happened to make a Middle American style house with a white picket fence. They didn't know what hit them. I found some people who were middle-aged and were experiencing the "wonders" of online gamer culture for the very first time and were outraged and bewildered about how to stop it.

Soon I realized that likely I had come to their attention even before the 9/11 incident.  Once when I had seen a bunch of people goofing around on some land for sale by Anshe Chung, one of SL's "land barons," putting up giant penises and the usual litter and slogans ranging from obnoxious to racist or anti-gay, I abuse-reported it. Anshe would leave "autoreturn" turned off on her land because she wanted to enable prospective customers to measure their houses before buying. But this amenity only lead to griefers -- who are always looking for holes in the system like this to abuse - to put out junk. 

These griefers drove customers away -- although the amounts of loss were measured in dimes and half dollars. But they also drove away friends and blogging colleagues who disagreed that publicizing this was the right way to go. And they drove away people who used to come to a regular discussion group I ran every Friday, both people I knew and members of the public who just responded to a notice.

So while they were the ones who should have become the outcasts for cynically making falling 9/11 buildings or harassing a wide range of people from born-again Christians to gays to fashion merchants, they made me the outcast because I "didn't know how to have fun" and "took myself too seriously".

Why?

The New Totalitarians

Because they want to run the Internet their way, and discourage even violently anyone who views the uses of it differently.  So those truly advocating free speech and free association for any purpose, whether religious or commercial or sexual (i.e. not just for "sandboxing" and "creativity" and extremist hate speech), were enemies of the people. This is why I call them totalitarians. They are ruthless.

That is, people who tried to create and sell items, or engage in commerce even at this small level, or who had public discussions increasing knowledge and participation were all anethema to the worldview of these creeps. They thought everything on the Internet should be free and never sold and happily stole copyrighted items (which is often the only way they ever got expelled from the world, only to re-spawn again on alts and get banned again). They zealously believed that people who tried to do serious things in this virtual world -- "srius biznez" they sneered -- anything from Bible Study or self-help groups for the disabled or political discussions -- should be stopped so they wouldn't take themselves seriously. The Internet should only be for anarchic, riotous fun, and if the servers got crashed or an artist's livelihood was stolen -- so what? The Internet had to be made free...BY FORCE.

I got this insight from a long-time writer about SL whose avatar name was Urizenus Sklar --  in real life a linguistics philosopher named Peter Ludlow who is now disgraced with a campus sexual abuse case which bore many signs of a witch hunt with the usual lack of due process. He was not a friend, and I used to argue vehemently about various virtuality issues -- he tended to be forgiving of the griefers and even provide them haven under the theory that they were "innovative" and "interesting to study". But he did grasp that they were about Bolshevik-like control -- achieved by blocking others from a whole range of activity they didn't like, through force.

The Enablers

And that attitude among scholars -- I would call them "the griefer professors" was all too common. They would fawn over these vandals -- the company should have really pursued prosecution of them for all the real income they lost -- and call them "transgressive" or berate their critics who wouldn't let them "poke fun" and "took themselves too seriously". A hallmark of these goons was what Uri called "word salad," i.e. gabbling distractive nonsense or outright lying about their real deeds. They would insist that they were only poor minority students in a commuter college who were engaged in "study" and accuse people who abuse-reported them of being "racist" -- but they were all white boys, the children of wealthy parents in many cases, some even wealthy themselves. Some went on to get high-paying tech jobs in places like Intel.

It wasn't about scholarship -- although they dragged the Higher Chronicle of Education into their insane false narrative and many other blogs by sociologists or articles in mainstream news by journalists who should know better.

That's why when I see a video like this coming from CNN today, I wonder where CNN was 15 years ago, when they thought this was merely funny. This shouting Nazi slogans and spewing anti-women and anti-gay slogans and memes wasn't really "srius" -- it was just meta. So meta that it wasn't real. 

I felt that as with human rights work, the best thing to do in these cases was to investigate and document the actions, abuse report them and get other victims to AR them, and then ignore them. Logging off when they descend on you is the best way to break their attention. But I also think -- unlike others who mouth the slogan "don't feed the trolls" -- that documenting and publicizing to keep the record is valuable just as with human rights violations or acts of terrorism. Because that prevents them from lying about what they do.

Steubenville

That's really important because they do lie strenuously about what they do -- just as with Steubenville, Anonymous claimed they were there to champion the rights of a victim of rape by football team members. In reality, they prevented a just prosecution, ended up outing the victim's name, and ruined the lives of people like the coach or town officials with false accusations. I and a few other bloggers  tried to point out that the denizens of 4chan in Anonymous, who spent time on horribly misogynist forums trading dreadful pictures, were hardly the folks to be championing rape victims' rights. (Yes, Lee Stranahan in that era of 2013 while at Breitbart did a good job on this story, although nowadays his conspiracy shtick is a horror and he even works for Sputnik). Yes, people love to tell you how random Anonymous is -- and then how precisely different Anonymous is from 4chan or lulsec or whatever. Unimpressed -- too many virtual and real experiences where I see they are the same people.

I saw instantly this was about disrupting the justice system -- just because. And the real effects just weren't acknowledged. As Frank Bruzzese, an assistant prosecutor for Jefferson County, Ohio who assisted in the early stage of the investigation, said:

“The internet lynch mob did damage to their own stated goal of helping the victim by putting her in an international spotlight that only served to humiliate her. Anonymous claimed to want justice but their threats had the opposite effect; by calling for the scalps of eyewitnesses and other completely innocent people, the result was a hampered prosecution where people were afraid to testify and where the judge was forced to grant three witnesses immunity.”

It was a scam -- taking a popular issue that got many people angry and running with it to produce chaos and disruption far beyond the supposed original cause of the girl. Twitter amplified and metastasized this insanity beyond belief. (Steubenville was an early example of how these online terrorists seized on the rampant interest and sensitivity about "bullying" to accuse anyone who criticized them of "being a bully".) Ultimately, one of the Anonymous actors around Steubenville was caught and jailed for two years for hacking and exposing private information (and later violated the terms of his release) - but as you can see from the Rolling Stone coverage of the story, he is still portrayed as a tragically-misunderstood hero who "got more time than the rapists". Yes, arguably the rapists should get "more time" and nothing exonerates them. But why is it ok to hack and crash web sites, hack into the coach's phone, or the web-master's site and accuse him of child molestation falsely and ruin his life? For the hacker, the entire town of Steubenville was guilty of creating football glory culture that lead to the drunken parties and the abuse of the young girl? But that's not justice. Threatening involved eyewitnesses so that they have to be granted immunity is not justice. Using Internet incitement to parachute in mobs of goons in masks from all over to a small town isn't "justice". At one point the Anonymous hacker (his real name was Deric Lostutter) tweeted, " “Hey I’m running your whole town from the comfort of my toilet,” he tweeted, “How’s that feel?”

Would you want that to be the way justice is always run in America? Well, then.

P.S. William Rhinaman, the IT director for the Steubenville schools, was sentenced for tampering with and destroying evidence in the case, so it's not as if this small town justice system, consumed with f0otball culture or no, is incapable of prosecuting those guilty of obstructing justice in a rape case, even in the face of outrage from his colleagues. They do not need hackers to help them do this.

It's nearly impossible to get across how wrong Anonymous and its spin-offs were throughout Steubenville because neither social media or mass media covered their real actions or thought about their implications, and if you were the slightest bit critical of their Bolshevik methods, you were seen as excusing rapists and bro culture.

Feminists praised Anonymous and still do to this day over Steubenville, although that is terribly misguided. Fake concern for the girl was only the hook for mayhem extremist attention-seeking -- and they bought into it and helped perpetuate it. I suffered some of the worst abuse of my life -- with Anonymous making one of those eerie videos on YouTube against me, and deluging me with hate posts on Twitter, some of which I noticed were coming from Russians (and this was in 2012, long before the presence of disruptive Russians in the 2016 elections was acknowledged). These were either live people or bots, as I saw the Russian mistakes they made in their English or actual words in Cyrillic. So a key reason I didn't get involved in GamerGate is that I really wore myself out trying to explain a nuanced point of view that both supported the victim and condemned the small-town football culture that enabled it but also objected to justice being served this way by Anonymous.

This is why the DNC hack felt like old hat to me -- remember the enormous hatred and skepticism that anyone who believed Russia was involved suffered in the early days? This came mainly from hackers who supported Snowden. With Steubenville, I had goons calling my mother-in-law and sending pizzas that weren't paid for and all the rest. Months and months of it -- yet I had no feminists standing up for me because they were too busy applauding what they thought were these wonderful crusading hackers saving a young girl terribly harmed by the football players for life (although several of them were sentenced to jail for a year and lost college opportunities). 

Steubenville keeps spawning tragedy - when justice is disrupted and vigilantism takes its place to the applause of feminists, it only causes feelings of unjustice to build and spawns more tragedy, which is arguably rooted in the historical injustice of racism long before the Internet. 

Women's organizations and the burgeoning use of social media could have fought the injustice of a football team rape fairly -- anonymous men in masks who caused mayhem and harm to numerous people in their supposed zeal to advocate for the victim were actually not needed and got in the way.

When I tried to explain even long before Steubenville that these Anonymous and 4chan griefers were "like" terrorists, I was ridiculed even by the journalist who interviewed me for a cover story in Wired about this phenomenon 11 years ago. I remember this journalist told me to get a much bigger and baggier blouse on -- I went and found a maternity smock, although my children were in grade school already. He then photographed many pictures with my son who happened to be there, but then snapped one where I was in the kitchen, with my back to the camera, as if I wanted to be anonymous. (Ridiculous, since I had agreed to give an interview with my own name.) This creep even photographed me looking through the chain of my locked door. He made all these photos with a kind of distractive patter so I didn't realize at first that I was merely being set up to look stupid -- like some middle-aged soccer mom online who was afraid of kids who said bad words. In the end, only the picture of me in a huge blouse with my back to the camera was used -- and that picture became a meme literally served up to me millions of times in hate posts, particle attacks, and griefer objects of every kind. I would log on to find giant versions of it; people would poke it in my face on a sign at meetings.

I was supposed to laugh this off, of course. But they would also text me photos of my real-life doorway, they called me at home and played the Soviet national anthem, they hounded me with social media posts that they could see me with an umbrella in the rain on an actual street where I lived when it was raining. (They picked up the Soviet theme because of my Russian work and because I compared them to Bolsheviks.)

Believe me, I know the difference between virtual characters online using terrorist-like methods, and the real terrorists who massacred my neighbours on 9/11, or the Bolsheviks who  tortured my children's grandfather and uncle to death in the Gulag. I don't need help on this, truly.

I said "like" because the dynamics are the same, the culture of nihilism is the same; the "end justifies the means" is the same; the defiance of the rule of law is the same; the glorification of violence and meaningless are the same. And so on. I wrote reams on this because I thought it had to be studied. I thought it would spread beyond the game and virtual world realms. I saw Second Life as a kind of incubator or petri dish of this awful phenomenon. And I worried about what would happen when it spread and go off-line.

And it did.

The Culture of Silicon Valley Geekdom

I don't mean that it spread from Second Life, which was an exoticism with perhaps only a million sign-ups and a 100,000 concurrency and returning users in its heyday. But some of the best tech minds in the Valley came through SL (many of them can now be found at Facebook or Google or Tor or any number of other geek berths) because the problem of streaming virtuality, compression, intellectual property, governance -- these were all available to work on and study -- and still are -- in this unique setting. The devs and their favoured friends tolerated and even coddled the griefers because they were only somewhat more extreme versions of themselves. When people talk of the awful culture of GamerGate or more broadly of gamers who turn violent, they seldom contemplate the culture of the devs - which is the same culture that produced social media and all its woes. So the patterns there are like what you can see elsewhere -- with precursors to many phenomena we saw later, such as the WikiLeaks and Snowden hacks, the issues of customer privacy, how to balance hate speech prosecution with allowing freedom of expression, and so on.

And whether people want to hear it or not, that culture comes from the people who make tech and engineered their culture into the tech, who first scorned copyright and browbeat those who wanted to protect it, then scorned privacy by tolerating doxing and careless maintenance and only claimed to be "doing something" when Congress and law-enforcement came calling, and who scorned the virtual violence of griefing or crashing servers or deluging users with bots and wrung their hands over 8chan saying they couldn't act because of Section 230 or the First Amendment.

I suppose the series Silicon Valley, which I've been watching (I rarely watch movies and don't have a TV) is helpful in conveying some of the violent, nihilist, misogynist, hateful culture of the bros and the VCs who fund them, committing fraud and felony along the way.

Online Goes Offline

I was very struck by a human rights training I once went to by a colleague from ADL who described how a certain percentage of the anti-Semites online go offline into real life and commit vandalism and even assaults of Jews. (Note to various insane Wikipedia editors and offshoots and the shady companies who put "real" background files on line: I have never worked for ADL -- I only attended one of their trainings while working at the International League for Human Rights, and I never worked as an IT specialist, although I often did network troubleshooting in our small office because we couldn't afford expensive IT help).

So it was no surprise to me at all that 4chan devolved into 8chan and some of these people actually committed mass shootings. Does that mean that everybody who steals content or hacks somebody's account or crashes their server "is" a terrorist or mass murderer? That mass shooters "start with" illegal music downloads and anonymous sexist harassment and graduate to terrorism? Of course not. But some of them do. And the cultural milieu is there, and causes a range of worrisome damages that stem from the same ideology of nihilism and extremist tech anarchy.

And here we all are. And that's why I don't want to be afraid to study violent games as a cause of this culture; or the tolerance for hate speech and violence on social media; or to demand that platforms lose their Section 230 safe haven as part of the complicated path to curbing this hateful culture. Curbing it, providing alternatives to it -- that's the best that can be done, as it is too late to stop it. It is in all tech; it is in the culture of all technologists, whether they manifest the extreme variants of it or not. This needs more critical study -- and not by griefer professors or feminist authors who defend the female devs of GamerGate but praise Anonymous in Steubenville -- it needs more than the lawyers for Facebook or the lobbyists for Google deciding what is permissible or not about it.

You see, people are still seeing the phenomenon of mass shootings as "white supremacism" or Nazism only, and blaming Trump (who does deserve blame in my view, especially for the massacre of the Jews in the Pittsburgh synagogue over the issue of refugees). But I believe this is wider and deeper and threatens us all because it is about technologists who made themselves like machines to get computers to work, and then make all of us machines to a small or larger extent. As the saying goes, the fear of the future isn't so much that robots will become humans and take over, but that humans will become robots and take over.

Human Solidarity

The best way of combating the violent culture of anarchic nihilism is human solidarity. Believing someone when they say they are wronged and standing by them, instead of telling them that they take themselves too seriously or should "get a life". (But also respecting that a victim's story is not always enough evidence to deny a confirmation or sentence a suspect; facts and corroboration are needed). The women in GamerGate sure had to "get a life" -- hiding in fear of serious death threats and having to completely alter their routines, living spaces, and even jobs. So many people in minority and transgender communities in particular have suffered terribly from these extremists. The Internet should remain free and not be ceded to these goons. They are the new totalitarians.

I can't say it enough although I don't have an audience to hear this -- GamerGate or 8chan or similar cultural manifestations you can find in Anonymous or groups like the Proud Boys are not just about white supremacy or misogyny or anti-gay harassment although those are very terrible and the most obvious manifestations of their being. They are against civil society under the rule of law, which means they hurt all of us. This isn't to dilute the very salient features of this awful phenomena related to very real fascism and Nazism that 10 years ago we were told was "meta". They are Nazis and it's more than fine to focus on this.

But if you think that if they're just white supremacists and you're white or straight and it doesn't concern you, you're wrong. Because they are against all of the humanness of humanity and the cure -- human solidarity and caring -- gives you a real idea of that terrible disease. They will come for you, and not only because you're in the target groups or you stand up for the target groups but because you're not a member of their posse. How to break up and stop the posses before they engulf us is the challenge of the Internet which is now thoroughly embedded in real life.

 

 

 

Moral Panic Over Moral Panic

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

This article/video by Clair Wardle in the New York Times seemed to me like something not to be praised.

She thinks that panic about deepfakes -- videos that distort real people or events through technology to misleadingly sway opinion -- is more of a threat to democracy than the deepfakes themselves because it spreads doubt and disbelief in general.

David Kaye, UN Rapporteur on Freedom of Speech praised it on Twitter and linked to it, but now I can't find his tweet. It doesn't matter. Why do I have problems with the "anti-moral-panic" of this piece?

Three reasons:

1. It's not clear there really is a moral panic  -- and that even if technology to create fakes is being "democraticized," technology to detect fakes is also being developed and will be used by platforms when content is uploaded.
2. The claim just doesn't hold up that panic about highly-realistic fake videos is worse than the fake videos because it undermines democracy by instilling doubt in institutions. That doubt has long existed and grows without fake videos.
3. The Pentagon is working on this -- which means it's not in the realm of Twitter vapours or mass media-generated panic but something more serious -- beyond moral panic.

The "moral panic" most notable lately seems to be about the slowed-down Nancy Pelosi video, and it's because of the very controversy of Nancy Pelosi herself, where some Democrats desperately hang on to her because they think she is the only one who can manage the floor of Congress, keep Democrats together, and get deals. And others oppose her either because they're to the left of her program (the "Squad") or because they simply think she's been in the job too long. I'm not a supporter of AOC, but I don't see what's wrong with pointing out that Pelosi at 79 is too old for this job -- and I say that at age 63. She can't last forever, so it's time for a new leader. If the Democratic hold on things is that fragile that it depends on an old lady -- even a very tough and experienced old lady -- it's in more trouble than we thought.

I don't see people making the obvious point about this video -- that the satire succeeds because it's quite close to the truth. Nancy's speech is ALREADY slurred even if she is stone, cold sober because a) apparently she has dentures; b) she has one of those lock-jawed accents and rapid speech where she doesn't finish sentences and isn't always distinct. Look at videos from years ago (2012)

So when you go to watch the "doctored" video, especially the real one right after the fake one, you see how in fact her speech has grown more indistinct over the years, due to age, or dentures or lockjaw (people even joke about her dentures in the comments on the videos) and you wonder what the big deal is -- the satire is telling a truth of sorts. And how has this really changed the story of Pelosi and the controversy around her, i.e. that some want her to go and some think the world will end without her? It hasn't, it has only become another skirmish in the same battle.

But despite the obvious truths here -- that a slightly-slowed-down video could work as satire because it was very close to the real Nancy, and that it played on the misgivings that cause the divide in the Democratic Party -- no one would mention it. It could not be articulated by a pious Ian Bogost in his thumb-sucking piece about media and truth for the Atlantic. Nancy sounds slurred anyway, fake or no. Facebook can say it has no policy to ensure things are true before allowing them to be published because it's not a publisher -- but imagine if your description of your fabulous life on FB had to be subjected to the truth test?! Of course it can't have a truth test. What is truth? 

Bogost writes:

When Facebook says it’s not a news company, it doesn’t just mean that it doesn’t want to fall under the legal and moral responsibilities of a news publisher. It also means that it doesn’t care about journalism in the way that newsmakers (and hopefully citizens) do, and that it doesn’t carry out its activities with the same goals in mind. And yet rather than understanding and responding to those truths, public discourse instead beats its head against a wall trying to persuade Facebook that it “can’t do” what it’s been doing with impunity. It would be much simpler and more productive to take the company at its word, since reforming it into a responsible actor concerned first with its responsibility to truth or citizenship is likely impossible.

Well, no. And journalism isn't that fabulous thing, either, given the way Covington was covered and many other subjects. The cure is to remove the safe haven of Section 230. Facebook doesn't have to like or do "real" journalism. But it is a publisher, the way tabloids are publishers and should have responsibility for the content on its platform. Bogost sidesteps this issue so I don't know what he believes about Section 230, but it is likely he wouldn't want to change it, given the Silicon Valley culture he has long resided in.

I disagree with David Kaye about a number of things (like his support of Snowden in his UN report as a "whistleblower" (he is a felon who fled to Russia) or his idea that Trump is the "worst" disinformer, when Putin is far worse), but he posed the right question here (although notice he doesn't answer it). It may not be politically correct, flying in the face of Pelosi supporters' outrage, but the reality is, Facebook shouldn't remove this video, because it's satire of a public figure, and that is allowed under the First Amendment.

homework assignment: draft the rule that prohibits doctored pelosi video but protects satire, political speech, dissent, humor etc. not so easy is it? https://t.co/zaA7kQf83i

— David Kaye (@davidakaye) May 25, 2019

I don't know if his praise of the NYT video is about the tendency of all such commentators to act as if the masses panic but the talking heads know better.

I personally don't think fake videos will undermine faith in democracy and its institutions as the author says -- for one, it already is undermined, but undermined notably on Twitter, which doesn't represent even the Democratic Party, let alone all of America, as multiple studies have shown.  After all, we had democracy before the age of TV and radio and the Internet. To be sure, media has impacted democracy in good and bad ways, but I think we will find that if fake videos are used more extensively, to the point where they affect elections,  reporters will get more savvy about getting real interviews face-to-face instead of looking up Twitter accounts and web sites and cutting and pasting. And that will be a good thing.

And even before the Internet gave legs to deepfakes, there was negative advertising on TV -- I'm thinking of those fake claims that Mitt Romney caused a fired worker's wife to die of cancer because Bain Capital, where he was an investor, had taken over the plant, then later laid off workers so that they loss their health insurance. Snopes didn't take this on, but Factcheck did, and has a very extensive entry explaining that the claim is misleading and a matter of debate. The plant Bain took over might have closed anyway. The man's wife died five years after the closing, and for one of those years she did have her own job's insurance. There are a lot of "whatifs" in this story -- too many to pin the blame on Romney certainly, and even Bain. American steel companies can't compete in a worldwide market. That's the underlying truth to the whole story. Leftists have a visceral hate of this sort of leveraged buyout but it doesn't always fail and it's not clear what alternatives they can offer to save a plant. 

This anti-Romney video isn't called a "deepfake" but it is misleading. You don't need to have neural networks learning algorithms to re-make faces on a video to create a misleading video that can be argued as true, depending on the set of premises you start with -- hatred or appreciation of capitalism; belief that plants can be saved by Bain-style buyouts or not; even belief that people will go to the doctors if they have insurance -- after all, their insurance might not have been enough to deal with cancer anyway.

You know what I'm worried more about? Neural networks being taught by geeks to do things automatically. There's a scene in one of the episodes on "Silicon Valley" where Richard, the CEO of the start-up Pied Piper, bursts into a focus group where ordinary people are criticizing his app to explain that in fact it's very cool and neural networks are being trained to do things with people's content. One woman named Bernice expresses concern about what is being done with her uploaded content by the company running the app. One man then says worriedly, "Terminator" -- the neural networks will become so smart they will take over and destroy humans (the Singularity cult idea). Richard dissuades them and continues to insist on its coolness. Of course, those neural networks can only learn what they are being taught - garbage in, garbage out.  And they only "keep learning" on their own -- and doing -- if coders don't stop them. Shouldn't we be more worried about ethics-free coders manipulating neural networks  and not conceiving of breaks on their "learning" -- without any input from ordinary people in a democracy? 

Even so, while one set of geeks are doing something undermining democracy, according to this Times essayist, another set are undoing it for mundane business reasons. Facebook doesn't want to be regulated. So some engineers are working on detecting such deepfakes at the stage they are uploaded to a platform.

Wardle suggests that platforms "think hard" about this (huh?) and "reduce prominence" to videos like the Pelosi slur or "give context". Facebook did that, but others didn't.  But wait a minute. If Facebook does that much with content, aren't they editors? If they label things or start providing context on their own which inevitably will be politicized, aren't they media?

I'm all for Section 230 to be revised so that platforms no longer are exonerated from responsibility for user content. I want them to have this responsibility, whether it is for letting shooter's videos stay up or the morgue photos made by the despicable pro-Kremlin Graham Phillips of the children killed in the mortar attack of their soccer field in the Donbass (which and others tried to get removed -- and failed -- although ultimately other things Graham did caused his account to get moved).

There's a moral panic about Section 230 being removed from the libertarians and leftists, in the belief that this is the Internet's First Amendment. Baloney. Private companies do not  have to -- and don't currently -- maintain First-Amendment level freedoms on their platforms. Therefore they cannot "lose" their First Amendment. They have terms of service and rules which they already enforce -- but badly. So let them  have the responsibility that goes with that, and use some of their billions on hiring staff to deal with customer content and complaints.

Everyone remembers the panic spread by Orson Welle's War of the Worlds radio show in 1938. The potential for someone to use YouTube and Twitter or Facebook for some modern version of this -- say a fake Trump declaring war on North Korea or something like that -- is there and not all reporters these days seem to have the cold-call and foot-pad skills to go into reality and find out what is happening (as they did ultimately but not before they Internet got their first -- when nuclear war seemed to be launched in Hawaii). So the moral is to start now to do more reality. There's plenty out there waiting to be covered in person and on foot.

I Don't Think Robot Pets Can Replace Real Pets

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Sam Byford/The Verge

So I read in this shopper Manhattan Express that Lorraine Cortes-Vazquez, commissioner of the New York City Department for the Agining in the de Blasio administration, former AARP executive wants to "battle social isolation" which she feels is a problem for 1.6 million older adults in NYC. She has a point -- for example in my large housing complex of some 4,000 people, a woman died alone in her apartment and no one knew for days. Some seniors revived a senior group to have socials and outings to try to combat this. (The problem is that the outings often involve at least $30 in expenses and climbing stairs or walking some distances, which puts it out of reach for some).

So the solution the commissioner thinks will tackle this problem is not just a visiting program with real, live people - such as my church has and which the city itself has with something she launched called ThriveNYC Friendly Visiting Program. There are some senior centers but if they are anything like the one in my neighbourhood, they consist of a TV and outdated paperbacks and bad coffee. The private sector is better at this, especially with public funding, as some Jewish organizations have done for seniors in Brighton Beach, giving Soviet emigres like my mother-in-law the time of their lives -- companionship in their native language, meals, gifts, musical performances, poetry and book readings, art classes -- even ballroom dancing, which our babushka does at the age of 93 and says it keeps her alive.

But what Ms. Cortes-Vazquez is touting in this piece is a robotic dog given to a senior, aged 64, suffering from an immune disease. That sounds like me. There are some days I can't go out, I get opportunistic infections from a rare disease whereby the immune system attacks your own mucous membranes causing pain and suffering. Really, the medicines with their side effects are worse than the disease. 

This woman likely has a much worse disease because I think with gloves and plastic garbage bags, you could minimize the remote risk of toxoplasmosis from cleaning out a pet's litter box (which may have been the argument in favour of the robo-dog).

"The dog has sensors, responds to touch, barks and nuzzles and provides comfort," says the commissioner.

Well, the price tag for these dogs, if it is like the Sony dogs (and the picture doesn't look like one) is $2,899.

The picture is from Ageless Innovation which also makes these automatic pets. Their version is only $99, for example like this orange tabby.

One old lady in the video says, "They make you feel you're not alone. They make you feel soothed." It's the purring sound that does it. 

Obviously, this $2,899 Sony robo-dog does a lot more, although he doesn't look cuddly at all without fur and without strange robot eyes. But he can pick up a bone or fetch a ball or recognize people or respond to petting in different ways because he's just more sophisticated -- hence the price tag.

It would be good before spending city funds on all this if anybody got the idea to have the $2,899 version to see what people really respond to. Maybe they don't need a thing like this to fetch as much as they need it to purr and cuddle.

I do have to wonder, given the city's over-population of pets (I hear about the stray cat population from my daughter, who helps out a friend who is a "street veterinarian"), why we have to spend anything more than fees to spay and vaccinate the pets. 

What a real animal gives you is something that robots try to learn with algorithms and "machine learning" but can't replicate -- randomness but also familiarity. A real pet has a favourite toy or food that I should think a robot wouldn't develop. It also does random things. Sometimes it sits and stares out the window; sometime it chases around the house. I suppose you could program a robot cat to have a wild run through the house every night at 8:30 like real cats do. Would it be the same? The robots obviously are still clunky, they freeze up, they can't align themselves with that bone as the video shows.

 

Of course, there is the one great down side of real animals -- they get sick and die. But this is part of the natural life cycle and maybe it makes you appreciate them more . (I had to put down my children's cats last year when at 18 years of age, they both got very ill.)

At this point, I'd rather have a real cat. The advantage they are pushing with robots is that they require no feeding, clean-up or vet bills. But the feeding and bonding routine is part of the attraction of real cats.

I have artificially-intelligent breedable cats in Second Life, an online virtual world (not a game, because it's an open-ended platform and you can put anything in it). The cats come with pre-programmed chat they say, like "Let's go for a walk" or "How did you get so big?" or "Did you know I like fish and milk?" You can program them to say other things. But that's just it. Then they are no longer random. They may move randomly, but the repetitive chat gets to you. The only thing random is the names of the new kittens, which are often odd, and a surprise, and to which some ascribe superstitious meaning (and it can get eerie!). You can change the names. But that's just it -- the randomness isn't there.

Here actual two KittyCats brand cats are being held in Second Life to help them to breed.

Here two of the cats -- a special birthday brand for the 16th anniversary of Second Life itself -- have gotten sick and "gone under the blanket" because the owner forgot to feed them or didn't "set to group" (a way to feed multiple cats with different owners). They stay in that condition for 7 days -- then go and eat more food to make up for lost time.

To be sure, the creator of these cats, Callie Kline, has programmed a lot of fun things into them -- they bat butterflies, they have fake fights with each other, they sleep on little pillows, they race around and you can pick them up and even ride the Megapuss giant version.

Still, they are nothing like real pets! You feel guilty deleting them, but they get expensive as they require a few dollars food every month -- or you can "permapet" them for about $5 to stop feeding them but keep them still moving and responding as pets.

I'm looking forward to the time when I can get a real kitty again.

How to Clean Up Your Monster E-mail Box - With Especially One Great Trick

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu. 

Do you have a completely wild, untamed e-mail box like me? I had 250,000+ emails going back at least until 2009. When I clicked on the "unread," I saw that half of the e-mails were unread.

I know some people who just abandon an e-mail box like this and start a new one. And I've done that, too, because Yahoo e-mail is so unreliable. I've kept it not only out of habit but because I like the interface better than Google, and since this address has been on all my business cards and translator sites and such, I need to keep it. I forget to go to gmail for entire days at a time. 

I have no idea if it is the sheer mass of emails that makes the account perform poorly -- loading slowly or not at all with multiple error messages; not delivering emails directly sent from frequent contacts; repeatedly putting into spam things marked as "not spam"; losing attachments. It's pretty awful, and Google's mail is seemingly better, but not error-free, either (and then there's those hugely annoying threads which geeks love but which make it impossible to tell if you have a new e-mail).

In any event, it can't hurt to clean an email box, and surely it can be done, but there's a huge hobble: they do not make it easy for you, because you can't compartmentalize the search to only the inbox. So when you file a lot of email into other folders, they keep showing up in search as if they need to be filed again.

So here's my trick -- but keep your wits about you.

SORT E-MAILS INTO TRASH

First, empty the trash bin to prevent confusion. Second, search on one email contact or news list you want to sort, and trash it. This is slow because it starts with a batch of 25, then only gets you batches of 50, but put in a little time every day, or do it while you are on conference calls or watching a movie or something.

Once you have the desired email to segregate all in trash, you can now move it all. Why put it in trash? Because trash IS segregated and does NOT show up in search. So while you are searching, you don't keep seeing the same already-filed stuff. You could even go through this process with multiple contacts. It makes it SO MUCH EASIER.

Now that you have all the email in trash -- being careful not to select DELETE and ignore the "do you really..." warnings! -- you can now move it into the desired file folder. Now, Yahoo shows its muscle. It actually can move 100 at a time (not just 25 or 50) when it is moved out of trash. Funny, that.

I don't know why they make it so hard. The "archive" function is stupid because it merely puts it all somewhere else, but not filed. It's pretty useless. Subject or Name files are what you need, so make them.

UNSUBSCRIBE FROM UNREAD LISTS

Now, select UNREAD and look at the unread and decide on entire listservers especially that you need to unsubscribe from. You don't read them. Here is the proof. Bite the bullet and delete them. You can always go and browse the site in question if you really need it, or use Google with search terms.

GET RID OF FUND-RAISERS

The politicians of all stripes are particularly useless. I sign up for them left to right, but with few exceptions, like Stand Up, the conservative alternatives, they don't have hard news in them. They are just fund-raising pitches, constantly. Bernie Sanders is especially pathetic and awful, asking you to "chip in" a dollar all the time. I get Daily Kos and Daily Signal (left and right) which are generally free of the fund-raising, although Daily Kos is also pathetic, constantly telling you how many journalists have been fired as if they aren't bloggers, but journalists, and need you to fund them. I don't. They do fine. I don't care for their ideology nor Daily Signal's for that matter, but I read everything to get some breadth.

MAKE FILTERS

Another thing to do is to set up filters to make some news lists or even people go into folders so you don't have them in the inbox. That may make you feel guilty because you never read them, but at least they are there to read. I did this with Google news terms I have set up like "Snowden". I recently got rid of a lot of those Google news searches because they delivery daily so you are never going to read them.

BTW, perhaps like other people, even though I made filters, they didn't seem to work, and that's because I failed to fill them out completely.  Go to "Settings" on the right, then "More" (they don't make this easy!), then fill out every box -- not just "to" and "from" and "body" etc. Then make sure to specify the folder it goes into.

Doing all this, I found a few very important overlooked e-mails -- so it was worth it -- and I got rid of about 100,000 emails. The "put in trash" method is especially useful and fast. I'm now trying to file as I go, and deleting more. If something is in last week's email and you didn't read it, especially not real, live email from real people, but just lists, delete it.

I now have 160,000 I think still to go, but I did succeed in cleaning out completely a smaller email I have and it's a great thing.

E-mail has not evolved. It is incredibly hard to port (the mbx files can't be opened except by that email program often); it's hard to sort; it's hard to manage. The "innovations" Google has brought like template answers (which many people, including me, hate) or the sorts into "promotion" or "social" aren't really what it's about. That creepy program Google launched some years ago and then removed which enabled you to rewrite or delete e-mails from other people in real-time threads just isn't workable.

It would be better if e-mail were on the desk top in a graphical form you could push around. Like the files on the Second Life interface, for example (and I think most online games or worlds). So you push in front what you want and push to the side what you don't need at that moment. You can also open two inventories so you can see the file folders better to file into. Ideally, you could use your own graphics, like a fire to show what is really important, or a treasure chest for gems, etc.

This won't be coming likely in my lifetime, but meanwhile, perhaps you, too, can benefit from these tips.