Wired State

ChatGPT Stole My Jobs -- Just Like That. And They'll Steal Yours, Too

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

So, like everyone, I first fooled around with DALL-E and Midjourney (on the sample version) and didn't do very well myself, and saw that what it really was all about was: a) the prompts -- what flowery and detailed directions you give them and b) your ability to edit it afterwards. Both a) and b) are functions of actual artists; that would not be me. So I tabled it as an issue, although I was more than willing to hear my artist friends complain about it. I didn't especially like the AI art that some of them began doing, which I felt was kind of in the "fractal art" category.

Full of Fakes and Errors

When I first tested ChatGPT, it couldn't generate either my RL or SL biographies because I'm not famous or important enough. When I got it to generate a review of a musician friend, it attributed to her a song she had in fact never written. Where did it get the idea?! It sort of sounded like something she could have written -- and here's where the mobius strip of reflexivity enters in -- now she's going to actually write a song with that title, and even sampled a bit of it at one of her shows. 

I got it to write the history of the Battle of Ilovaisk -- it was credible, accurate, but rather dull and didn't really center the most important point: that Putin offered a "green corridor" for Ukrainians in a kettle but then, of course, was lying from the start, and they were picked off like sitting ducks the minute they lay down their arms and attempted to use the corridor. 

I had it write a review of Second Life -- it was adequate, not going to win any essay prizes.

I tried it again a few times on my own biographies -- finally it ginned them up, likely because there is actually a "mechanical Turk" behind the machine, real people goosing it when it sees Chat stuck. It then rendered a biography of me that simply made up some of the works I had translated, claiming I had translated authors I in fact had never even read much, let alone translated, in one case, and in another, had actually translated, but Chat had no way of knowing that because the information was not public.

My sense of Chatty is that it is scraping not from the wide world of Google, but only from Twitter. Or only from set of stock data bases somebody made up that aren't updated or corrected in real time. Nothing much is ever said about its sources (I have seen articles saying it doesn't access all of Google), but clearly it doesn't have the wide world to scrape that Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have. How long before Google itself puts in the equivalent of robots.txt to stop other companies from poaching on its turf?

Yeah, I get it about the "training" -- which also, to me, gives the lie to any notion of "artificial" intelligence. It's scientists and engineers, using tech themselves to get power over people, then claiming that tech is neutral. It isn't.

So here is how I lost two gigs to the damn thing.

Web Site Copy

The first few gigs with this company involved writing happy copy for the client's web site, and also in one staggering session, writing a humongous marketing document that also had tasks and equipment specs in it. It was in a field with which I was not THAT familiar, so that I had to look up a lot of stuff or ask what it meant. Hours were spent with the client while he tried to explain his ideas. He wasn't a very good writer; he, like a lot of millennials, he never learned to write in school or anywhere else, and mainly texted or chatted on his cell phone.

He had trouble organizing his thoughts and getting them down in a coherent way. He would sometimes be able to get a good outline started, but couldn't seem to work it or it would take forever. So the way he found that what worked best with me was to get me on the phone, talk about the thing, and then I would jot it down in real time on a screen in front of him in Google docs, and then we would both edit it. I would then work it some more on my own, and turn it into him for tweaking. Needless to say, this was time-consuming. At first I charged my regular rates; I ended up not doing this because of the time involved.

I churned out a number of these pieces over some time; some of them brought in more business as clients were very happy; some of them didn't seem to do anything; but since none of them had any negative impact, we kept going.

The client then mentioned to me one day recently that he had heard of ChatGPT, he tried it out with a task he had involving writing descriptions of both a company and various activities -- and was very pleased with the result -- and used it. Oops, there went one of the jobs I would do for him -- just like that.

I cautioned him that the problem with ChatGPT is that it can spout nonsense; it can make up stuff. It puts falsehoods into biographies, reviews, scientific papers as I had witnessed myself or seen others describe. Especially if you had paying clients, they would expect your copy about them to be factually correct and not bring them lawsuits. You had to be really, really careful! Maybe not use it?

How About a Lesser, Low-Paying Job?

Whereupon my client asked me if I now wanted the lesser job -- a much lower-paying job -- of vetting ChatGPT's rendering of a web site. I started looking at it -- and then said "No." It was a painstaking and boring job -- worse than fact-checking a news article others have written, which I have done numerous times, or copy-editing someone's news article, which I have also done endlessly.

That's because you know you are dealing with someone who doesn't care about the facts, feels no sense of liability, and will just say what they need to say. You have to become super vigilant, and also do a lot of your own research, if you knew nothing about the client or subject. It's almost like you'd have to research and write an article or write web site copy yourself, in order to vet ChatGPT's work. No thank you.

I suggested the client could ship this chore to Nigeria -- where he once had had a very competent copy writer for web sites, or Greece, where he has a good marketing guru generating ideas. Argentina, Venezuela, and Vietnam are the countries he sends photo and film editing -- people are desperate for work, and you can find very talented people willing to turn over jobs quickly for less. This is the global economy, and there's nothing you can do about it, really.

What I think may have happened is that no job got shipped. That's because nobody really sits and reads reams of web site copy. Like a lot of things in life, it's there to provide the "look" of something professional; it's filler; it's there to serve SEO in Google searches mainly, and get people to the page to see the offer as such -- everything arrayed around it is really fluff. That's why ChatGPT is perfect for this job. If some error crops up -- eh, you'll correct it.

My client could let it go, and not worry if something fake was in it, because basically, the job of providing fluff was accomplished, with superb SEO to boot.

YouTube Translation

The second gig was translation of a video for a YouTube training session. Translating videos is something that I have made into a certain specialty because I have had to do a lot of it. It can take twice as long to translate a video as it does to watch it, because you often have to go back and replay something. I don't mind the chore.  You often had to make the translation fit as sub-titles on the relevant screen -- something that is always hard to do with Russian, because it is about 75% shorter than the English translation needed to render it. The Russian language has no definite articles and other parts of speech as we know them, and instead are simply attached to a verb or participle or inflection in the voice.

I got into practice doing that shoe-horning of translation copy working with a caption-maker program for TV where we had to take Russian TV and squeeze it into American TV, dropping stuff along the way. Occasionally a grandma in New Jersey might call and complain about it, but it was, as our boss often said when we pressed "send" on the broadcast, it was "good enough for government work" (in this case, city public TV).

But this client's gig, oddly enough, was a task to go from English to Russian, which isn't the norm for me; usually the source language is your non-native language, and the target language is your native language. I can do it adequately, but don't like doing it and it takes longer. The reason for this was that it was a real estate video with the agent providing training to others and describing the meaning of English terms for the real estate business, some of which simply don't have a ready equivalent in Russian. That's because of the years of Soviet state control of land -- although today you find some English terms are now incorporated into the Russian language "as is". So this had the added annoyance of having to decide whether you used the Brighton Beach Angrussky for this purpose, or the actual formal term, i.e. in Russian, "real estate" is literally "non-moveable thing".

Done and Done -- And You're Fired

So I was starting to fuss with this silly thing, when all of a sudden the client came back and said it was finished. He had fed the English into ChatGPT, and it instantly created a very credible Russian text. This text I was willing to take the time to vet at least for a few rounds -- all the terms were correct. I didn't volunteer to check the rest of it because, as Loren Feldman's tag line in his podcast explains, "It doesn't matter."

No one will care. Russian emigres attempting to get real estate licenses need to learn the terms in English, and if they have only a vague idea of the Russian equivalent, well, "good enough."

ChatGPT is just the ticket for the generation that grew up reading "nothing bigger than their hand."

But imagine! I was screwed out of two jobs by ChatGPT, just like that. I didn't even know it could translate. Did you? When did it learn to translate??? It was better than Google Translate -- I checked. 

In this case, the loss was palpable, but not devastating -- this client is the kind of person who, if I am starving, will buy me some groceries or loan me $100 on PayPal, unlike most other cruel employers. 

Why???

This situation came about because children who were never taught to write didn't like writing, and made a thing to do their writing for them. They also were never taught foreign languages, and added that, too.

Why? No one valued it -- or gave up, in the face of the first TV-saturated and then Internet-saturated generation, and here we all are. I can see this not only in general; I watched it up close and personal with my own children, despite my best efforts, and their friends, and I have to say that the difference in ability really has to do with how long a child was able to stay in Catholic school, with its old-fashioned methods, and how good their public school was -- and that decides everything. 

There is absolutely nothing that can be done about this because it's too late; you can't isolate children from the culture they are saturated in, or remove the mobile phones from their hands.

Jesus, Mary, Joseph

Fifty-six years ago, I sat in Sister Sylvester's fifth grade class with my marbleized collegiate notebook, pen in hand, poised for yet another composition lesson.

As this was Catholic school, we always had to start by writing "JMJ" on the top of the page. This stood for "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph". Apparently the Holy Family, versus the Holy Trinity -- preserved for higher functions -- was good enough to get grade-schoolers to focus on the task at hand. They were to provide the inspiration for the job and make sure it got done. Even Catholic schools today have dispensed with this quaint practice, but it never hurts to think of some inspirational or higher power, no? 

Next, came the title of the essay -- this would set the scope and tone and really complete the job for you, if you got it right (which is why editors always change journalists' article titles because they never do the job right). 

So you might put: "The Foundation of Bolivia's Economy: Manila Hemp". Or you might write "Manila Hemp: Powerhouse of the Bolivian Economy" or whatever you managed to devise, as a 10-year-old, with a nun's pointer at the ready to rap your knuckles.

Next, came a big capital Roman number I. This was your main thesis -- this was the "say what you're going to say" out of that magic trio "say what you're going to say, say it, and say what you've said".

So here you might say: "I. Manila Hemp:  40% of Bolivia's Domestic Revenue".

Then there would be A, B, C, where you would explain that Bolivia had the perfect climate conditions for manila hemp and through innovative irrigation practices and ample population for menial labour had caused the crop to flourish (let's say -- I'm making all this up and if it was ever faintly true 50 years ago, today, in fact it's not true, just as a fellow classmate once made up an entire fake essay on Ceylon's main export -- manganese -- and got a "D" on the paper. His outlining technique was excellent, however).

You might describe how the hard-working people of Bolivia adapted to adverse climate conditions (we didn't know about "climate change" in those days) and persisted.

In II, you might describe the actual facts of the crop's component in the economy, citing sources, elaborating, etc. What are the uses of manila hemp? Well, rope-making is one of them. 

In III, you would summarize what you've said and analyze it in some way -- Bolivia was now poised to move into foreign exports; the crop, while not expanding rapidly, appeared to be a stable source of income; migration to big cities by young people might create labour problems. OK, this wouldn't be the scope of Fifth Grade, but you get the idea. And frankly, I believe we took on more in Fifth Grade  back then, than what children tackle today.

I will never forget walking into my son's Fifth Grade public school classroom and seeing a sign that showed all the ways you could spell "dolphin". They were all equal. They were all good. We shouldn't judge any of them. Children generated them out of their little brains; they got "A" for effort. With that brand confusion around the word with an "ph" -- in the absence of any phonics teaching whatsoever -- I wonder if the kids ever did learn to spell dolphin. Probably not.

Like diagraming sentences -- another Catholic school forte still taught today -- these lost arts weren't really valued or needed, so they atrophied.

Google Translate Didn't Take My Jobs - Why ChatGPT?

Google Translate did not put me out of a job as such, because I translate lots of different kinds of things -- books, catalogues, articles, memoirs, historic letters, legal documents, and generally I'm always going to be better -- and clients and publishers and editors know that.

But at one time, bread-and-butter translation work would involve simply writing letters for people or translating the letters they received back, in business and in personal matters like bride-buying abroad (after doing a few of those gigs, I quit because they were so horrible and exploitative -- often by both parties). Today, that sort of thing is accomplished more or less with Google Translate or Yandex (which is a lot better). I myself will pop a text in Google I need to write, translate it roughly, then take it to Yandex to type in what I know to be accurate. I will never help Google because I don't believe in doing unpaid work for tech behemoths.

A most despicable practice of Google is to go to a place like Kyrgyzstan, and recruit a lot of eager young people looking for high-paying tech jobs who have learned English, and get them to help fix up Google translation of their language into English for no pay. The tech world often treats translation as a subbotnik and won't accept that it should be paid like their programming is paid.

But ChatGPT instantly took me out of a job by having a better interface; by being willing to take longer texts in its box; by having different AI functions at work, I guess. I don't know the mechanics, but clearly it's a genius. Sure, we should see how it does with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but few people are going to pay you to retranslate them; the bulk of the jobs today are in news, technical, and legal translation. I get the feeling ChatGPT isn't so much fetching and carrying as "translate" literally means, but is manifesting the inherent English in a Russian text -- if that makes sense. Different.

Goat Herds

I have a vivid image before me of Elon Musk's demo of a robot recently, that was put to work on a Tesla assembly line. It lumbered out to the shop floor and went to work picking parts out of crates, then setting them up and assembling them on a conveyor belt.

But nearby was a man with a big hook like a goat herd. The robot would sometimes wander out of its designated path or get stuck or even start to fall over -- it's top heavy. So the robot herd would prod it back into place with the big stick.

And that's the kind of job that will be available to us with ChatGPT, which is yet another kind of robot, a robot in the hands of humans who want to take power over other humans and cloak it with the terms "fun" and "science" and "enterprise". You'll get to poke and prod the machines, being careful not to get stepped on yourself.

One of the jobs I saw go by on Upwork (which is an atrocious, low-paid slave labour place) or some other job ads service involved literally going over AI-translated texts and fixing them up. And not even with the full, coherent text in front of you; you would work with a huge stream of CAPCHA like nonsense texts.

Foxes in the Hen House

There is a tsunami of articles generated by tech journos who are totally craven to the industries -- they amount to payola. They assure you that ChatGPT (probably) isn't going to take your job. That's not how to cover this subject. It's like having foxes assess how secure the hen house is, and how well the hens are going to do in their presence.

Rather, send out queries about people who already lost their jobs, full-time or contract gigs. Fact-check the self-reporting with their employers. Ask people how they used GPT and see if it took away a job. Of course it did, and there will be more.

Right now the free version is over capacity and cannot be used. So I tried one of its competitors, Character.ai which has a persona to ask your questions from. The results are terrible and don't reflect the nature of the historical characters at all.

I can't see any mitigating factors here. That the free ChatGPT is "down" and can't be used is meaningless, as people will pay for it. That these Characters are silly and stupid is meaningless as people might even pay for that entertainment, too, and it will get better. 

Meanwhile, I assure you I will go on writing my blog posts myself, without robots, and you will go on not reading them.

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.

 

Oh, So @Wikileaks Reveals Name of Fifth Country Afghanistan to Smear @JaredCohen

From the beginning, when WikiLeaks started this attention-getting tantrum of revealing the name of the fifth country not named by Glenn Greenwald at Intercept, I thought to myself, "This isn't about the country, but about some smaller entity or preson they want to get."

Why did I think that?

Because as I pointed out on Twitter, Greenwald slipped up and said "company" at one point, and not "country" when discussing this. A very common mistake I've made myself.

But what if he did mean "company," i.e. some telecom, perhaps even some Afghan-based company that the purist revolutionaries wanted to expose as a sympathizer or enabler? I was thinking that there was an American telecom company, or perhaps some kind of consulting firm funded by USAID or something.

And sure enough, it turns out to be worse than I thought.

It's not just that they've now named the country -- which many people guessed anyway and was accidently leaked by a slide anyway.

It's that they want to screw over Jared Cohen.

Why would that be?

Because Assange didn't like the way the interview Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen did with Assange turned out, because it made Assange look bad. Schmidt put it in his book.

It could be that simple. We are dealing with petty, childish, and deranged people here at WikiLeaks.

Just in case people had trouble putting together all the dots, WikiLeaks spells it out in a series of tweets:

Google Idea's director Jared Cohen was tasked with getting Afghan telcos to move towers to US bases when at DoS https://t.co/bwVvyXuMU4

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 23, 2014

More on #Google Idea's director Jared Cohen: http://t.co/ZxoVSQSmhG (and much more: http://t.co/YSAZxFokd6) #afghanistan

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 23, 2014

WikiLeaks cannot be complicit in the censorship of victim state X. The country in question is #Afghanistan. https://t.co/vWwU4DJw0I #afpak

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 23, 2014

The WikiLeaks cable, which may only be released now, I don't know (does anybody) or maybe was there and nobody focused on it before, identifies Jared Cohen as the State Department staffer who enthusiastically worked to get cell phone towers put in US army bases in Afghanistan to help mobile communications in general, particularly for Afghan entrepreneurs.

WikiLeaks sees this as evil, because they see it as tacitly or even complicitly helping the NSA hack into cell communications for their "nefarious purposes".

I disagree because, as much as I don't  like Jared Cohen -- and I don't -- the cult of connectivity is at best commercial hype for Google's business interests and at worst an undermining of our civil liberties, Jared Cohen is:

o an official appointed in a liberal democratic government -- Obama is a democratically-elected president and the most liberal we'll ever have (I didn't vote for him the second time but he is the president, and I'd rather have him than Assange run the world);

o assigned to the job of promoting modernization, innovation, i-phones and Twitter and such -- he famously asked the devs at Twitter to move their maintenance down time so that the Iranian revolution could proceed;

o trying to do good in his various incarnations and programs -- which I disagree with, but concede to him;

o now at Google, which is a legitimate public company, in a program I don't like and whose goals I disagree with, but which also has some merit and is about doing good (peace, justice, human rights, etc);

and

o the NSA tapping into communications in Afghanistan is a legitimate measure for national security, i.e. our soldiers fighting the Taliban there.

By contrast, Assange does evil. Life is about choices.

What is it about that interview that got to Assange? Well, it makes him look extreme and deranged, in the end, not rational. I'll have to go over it again, but my hunch is that this is what it's all about.

Oh, and exposing the evil of America in Afghanistan, too. Right. But of course, I don't think it's really about that. For one, anyone with sense knows that the Taliban kill most of the people in Afghanistan, and fighting them is a good thing. You can disagree about how that fight has gone but that they need exposing and fighting rather than the US needing exposing and undermining shouldn't be a question.

WikiLeaks has really lost the plot with this one, but then, they were never about transparency and accountability, least of all for themselves, but about anarchist mayhem.

So why did Greenwald hold it back and talk about "deaths"? There are deaths anyway in Afghanistan, it's still a war zone.

Likely, as much as he likely doesn't care for Cohen's more centrist brand of liberal politics and the Clintons he represents, and doesn't care for Google (although he doesn't ever criticize them), he holds back at the idea of singling out one man, one name, and putting a target right on his back, so that he can't go to these countries (he travels all over the world) where he might be in danger.

It's really sick.

Appelbaum, of course, likely had personal dealings with Jared Cohen while Cohen was at State doing "innovation," because Tor Project, funded by the State Department's Deptartment of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and the Department of Defense (yes, go look at their web site), would have been thrilled with Tor as a "circumvention" salvation that leads to that cult of connectivity I mentioned above. Jared was probably one of those people at State that Appelbaum bragged was his friend even as others wanted him to be investigated by the Department of Justice over WikiLeaks (as well he should be).

So there may be a personal vendetta going on here from Appelbaum, it requires more research.

Related articles

WikiLeaks Reveals Afghanistan is Second Country Having All Phone Calls Monitored by NSA

When is the WikiLeaks Grand Jury Going to Indict? And Did You Know Assange Once Had an NSA Grant?

Assange threatens to release Snowden info that Greenwald says could endanger lives

Snowden's Lies or Code-as-Lie

The Snowdenistas have a really hard time accepting that their Snowden lies.

Verax, that Truth-Teller, that TrueHOOHAH, could hardly be accused of lying, could he? 

Why, he has told the ultimate truth, by stripped the Mass Surveillance State, that Turn-Key Tyranny, of its layers of secrecy lies, right? Hasn't he?

Except, Snowden appears to show signs of being an inveterate liar, and those of us who have watched the hackers' movements for years or simply paid close attention to the Snowden story knows how deep it is in the Big Lie.

I've often found hackers to create an alternative world, a utopia, some state of affairs they want to believe in. This could be summed up with statements like "information wants to be free" or "all property is theft," and they could take it from there. By sheer force of repetition, by sheer brute banging, they try to make this reality come into being. They will use coercion and lies to make code-as-law work, even though increasingly -- disturbingly -- it works on its own. This was the essence of the Bolsheviks, too, that coercion and perversion of language.

It's sort of like Vaclav Havel's notion of living "as if," only in a malignant sort of way. Havel wanted people in unfree societies like the old Czechoslovakia to start living "as if" they were free, and make it come into being by behaving so as to overcome their fear.  Poles in Solidarity did this. They even made their own postal system and stamps outside the state. Solzhenitsyn said simply, "Live not by the lie."

But what geeks are doing with their anarchist's Autonomous Realm idea in trying to wrench it into being is different -- it is creepy and coercive and so demonstrably other, and false. It's as if they reverse Solzhenitsyn and say, "Live by the lie." Believe in everything from code-as-law to Bitcoin. I guess ultimately, I think that code-as-law is code-as-lie because it is such an incomplete story about the human condition.

Snowden announces that Congress and the court didn't do their job, so now he, a 29-year-old contractor named Ed, is going to do their job for them, in a supra-democratic way, in a transcendent ecstasy of sheer righteousness. Like deux ex machina.

And along with this is the culture jamming, where the geeks say outrageous things, like "mathematics says the state is doomed" or Weev, the hacker, says in a state of agitated bipolar mania on the courtoom steps, "all I did was fucking math, all I did was add some 0s and 1s" -- as if brute force, and repetition thousands and thousands of times using cunningly extracted gadget IDs on a web site to force it to spit up email lists and people's identity is really just "math."

It's that "math" shorn of any accountability to other human beings and the harm done to them that makes these people such Nazis, such Bolsheviks. Awful.

Once could do a whole graduate student's paper on the new notion of "math" that techies have scarily brought to public discourse of their own righteousness.

But Snowden does lie, and we catch him in lies.

There's the obvious story of how he broke into a system and stole an exam, then took the exam and naturally aced it, having the answers, then said, here I am, I'm a genius, you should hire me, I got 100 on the test.

Sigh.

That even worked to persuade Luke Harding he was a genius.

But...That *is* lying. It's fraud.

Or there is the claim Snowden made that he did not use a social hack to get people's passwords, or "steal" their passwords. Remember? In his Q&A for The Verge, Snowden even took a Reuters correspondent to task for believing what an anonymous NSA official had said about this.

Then three people are fired whose passwords were purloined by Snowden -- civilian and military both. Awful. And Congress finally gets a briefing about this and releases it. Good!

So then you realize that he is, well, prevaricating. He set up some kind of glue trap and scraped the people's PWs. So he didn't  use a social hack or steal them through actual breaking and entering into their desks or something but just by the oldest trick in the book.

BTW, one common thing that hackers do in systems is collect log-ons in general. What people often do is make a mistake and use their bank or Facebook log-in by accident on some other log-in like a work computer. So the hacker collects those "false tries" and uses them to see if they lead elsewhere and they often do, and he then harvests that.

Using any device, script, method, anything to strip a person's password as they enter it and use it to make unauthorized entries to a system IS stealing. Again, it's only in that contorted alternate universe I have often talked about, i.e. with Appelbaum, that it wouldn't be.

So let's come then to Snowden's lies about the NSA documents. Hackers have a terribly hard time accepting that there could be lies there, as, example, a percent (and typical) heckler on my timeline with anonymity and low-follower numbers (their names are Legion -- I love Tom Nichols expression for these people -- the Flying Monkeys).

But Snowden's very first document got reported wrong -- very wrong -- and had to be walked back.

This was reported amply everywhere in the tech press, and Flying Monkeys who can't seem to Google this and find this on their own just are lazy or dissembling.

Here's a reprint of the relevant part of my book:

I continue to maintain that savvy coders and encryption experts themselves, even those critical of the NSA, represent a good avenue for debunking some of the most destructive and extremist claims of Greenwald, Poitras, Appelbaum, and Gellman – and not because their community is beholden to the government for contracts, but because of their more careful scientific method and greater good will so notably absent from the extremists.

 After all, the good reporting on the errors and unsupported claims in Greenwald’s early work have come from the tech community press itself like The Verge, which asked “When will we see the rest of his evidence? Or GIGAOM that said “somebody’s lying” about the claims of the NSA’s “direct access” into Internet companies like Google. Or CNET which said there was “no evidence of direct access” from the NSA. Meanwhile, the Washington Post had to print retractions. It’s just a question of time – and with new and shiny revelations barreling out every week, it’s easy to distract tech readers and fuel a climate of suspicion that is retarding more sober analysis.

Indeed, Greenwald was able to put out the Tor fire at least temporarily by appearing on reddit  – and then moved on to the next sensation, together with co-author Jeremy Scahill, on the NSA’s involvement in assassinations overseas.

 

There are a half dozen more like that I didn't even include, use your Google.

It does no good claiming it's "the journalists" who made this mistake -- Greenwald (who yes, did report on that story; it was not only Gellman) relied on Snowden to interpret this document and its importance.

Gellman didn't have Ashkan for that first story -- he got them precisely because of his mess-up. Greenwald didn't have Appelbaum or James Ball or Bruce Schneier yet -- he put them in later because also he was shakey on tech stuff and felt he needed techies to shore him up.

But on those swan songs June 5 and June 6, both Gellman and Greenwald messed up and claimed there was "direct action" because that's how they understood it and Snowden guided them to it.

There are two possibilities here, and they may be separate or merged.

1) Snowden didn't know about relations with the big IT companies and how they did this. It was not his area. He wasn't in that department. Not My Department, so to speak. He followed other issues like how the Chinese hack us. This is my theory; we don't know exactly what he did because US authorities haven't told us a lot (to minimize damage -- to talk about these specifics is to add to the damage).

So he winged it. He said what he thought it wsa, ideologically, or what the diagrams seemed to say. He didn't know the political setting of the Transparency Report with Google, etc. He was just a lowly sysadmin out in the boondocks, not some top manager. In fact, the entire narcissistic construct that he has that he can "tap the president or the federal judge from my desk in an afternoon" is just sheer macho bullshit.

2) Snowden hated the relationship the big IT companies had and thought it was direct; he thought the tap was either without their knowledge or they were complicit, likely the latter. He thought this because he had adopted the standard geek libertarian adversarial stance toward all things goverment, including his own employer. So he just believed it out of ideological reasons -- that banging of the virtual down over the actual I talked about above -- and just articulated that "reality" as he "saw" it.

The blog Please Cut the Crap has an excellent parsing of the changes to the Washington Post story on PRISM -- and also a takedown of Greenwald's lawyerly...shall we say "exaggeration" -- about the supposed "unlimited acces" given when that was not what was in the FISA ruling.

And here's another excellent highbrow blog called Skating on Stilts that parses very carefully the whole dubious concoction that Gellman has handed us, with his, er, "High Journalism," as Skating on Stilts wonderfully and accurately dubs it; his failure to give us the true story on the NSA's minimizatoin procedures; and then his slippage from journalism into advocacy.

It's especially an acute problem I'd say because Gellman first piously tells his Skating "what journalism is supposed to do" as if he is neutral and clinical -- but then becomes adversarial on the privacy issue. It is classic, classic, and I commend Skating for capturing all this brilliantly.

Let me offer my own modest contribution to this effort in my own interchange with Gellman on the "direct access" issue he was claiming in a later piece.

The Washington Post was also guilty of stealth edits, said Breitbart which you might discount, but they were only citing ZDnet which is a respectable tech site.

Ed Bot's story there is really the definitive story breaking it down for you.

And this is on Edward Snowden because he surely had to have discussed this. It isn't the case that Snowden met Greenwald and Poitras in Hong Kong and just handed them USBs with all the hundreds of thousands of docs on them.

He sent them samples and proofs of concept, so to speak, which they describe reading on the plane -- and the had some earlier.

They HAD to have discussed this with him.

But  here's another hypothesis: he took what they asked him to get, which was of interest to them from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's litigation (failed) where they didn't get this document they needed to prove their claims about metadata (like Edward, who has likely absorbed this slogan from them, as they've been at this longer and are lawyers, unlike him -- collection *is* espionage and metadata *is already* a violation of privacy, i.e. that doesn't occur later, when some conscious human drills into it with sense and meaning on a legitimate case.

And Snowden, without a deep understanding of these issues or this document, just started framing it to his Alternate Reality in step with the Movement. This happens.

In this case, he would be lying as well -- dissembling, trying to make square pegs fit into round holes. Either way, it's not looking at the facts - it's not admitting he doesn't know, or admitting that it could be read differently. That *is* lying.

 

 

 

Are You Confused? Here, I Will Explain Everything to You About Politics!

Are you confused about who's on first?

Do you find it hard to understand what left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and libertarian mean any more?

Is Glenn Greenwald on the left or right? Libertarian (he used to consult for Cato) or communist (he has spoken before the Socialist Workers' Party annual meeting)?

How can it be that if Greenwald debates Ruth Marcus, a liberal Democrat and columnist in the liberal Washington Post, denounced by conservatives, he and his Twitter sock-puppets/cronies can accuse her of supporting the Bush Administration's torture? But wait, she agrees that James Clapper "lied" and "he should be ashamed of it" and "it's totally intolerable" -- so what's the difference between her anti-NSA statement and Greenwald's?! (well, he will settle for nothing less than a trial and punishment of this "lying" official, and Marcus points out to this lawfaring lawyer that perjury law is complicated and getting a judge to actually do this against an official merely doing his job as he saw fit would be quite hard to do).

Do you wonder how it is that Paul Carr, Mark Ames formerly of the Exile and Yasha Levine, all funded by Silicon Valley (they were bought out by Pando Daily) and technolibertarians of sorts (or are they?) can print trash about Snowden, and suddenly decide to bash Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen, the NYU professor, for joining on to the new media enterprise First Look -- funded by the ebay millionaire Pierre Omidyar, who himself loves Greenwald...who speaks to the socialists? They're all about Big IT and Silicon Valley and technocommunism in the end -- why don't they get along?

How is it that Jacob Appelbaum, who still apparently gets Department of Defense funding and never really seems to scream about Obama the way Glenn Greenwald does, can be doing even more radical work revealing documents that aren't even from Snowden, but could even be -- who knows! -- from some GRU mole in the NSA merely using the Snowden flurries as a cover?

Well, if you look at this handy-dandy infographic chart I've made (sorry, I suck at Photoshopping), you will start to see how it all comes together -- or falls apart (and this chart helps explain why Omidyar and Greenwald will not last.)

Think of the four corners of our Metaverse as the extremes of thinking 1) Obama is a devil; 2) Obama is an angel; 3) Snowden is a traitor, or 4) Snowden is a hero. That's one level (think of the first horizontal X-axis in Second Life).

Then, think of people's attitudes towards capitalism and communism which really infuse everything (that's the Y-axis then, or a second horizontal layer). Everyone likes to pretend these categories and these ideologies don't exist anymore, but of course they do. Look, do you like Occupy Wall Street and want to shut down the stock market and jail the banksters? Then you're a communist. Do you think it's okay for Goldman Sachs and wealthy law firms to fund Obama's campaign along with Google, even though you're for that crazy unworkable socialist ObamaCare of his? Then you're a capitalist. Understood. Don't pretend these categories don't exist.

But there's more -- there's your attitude toward government -- think of this as yet another axis (like the vertical Z in Second Life if this were a 3D object which of course we could make in Second Life but I can't draw here).

There you might be an anarchist (no government), or a minarchist (for minimal government, but at least some); you might be for democracy, which means elected officials and separation of powers and the rule of law, or corporatocracy, which might be rule-by-law and emphasis on both private corporations and governments agencies.

Above the "democracy" line you will find those who like Obama -- he's president, after all -- and tend to think Snowden has done something wrong -- he's broken the law and gone against the democratc consensus that yes, we do need state secrets and agencies to keep them -- and find intelligence to keep us safe.

Or below the "democracy" line, you still might be in the Obama tank and loving Snowden, but you might be for oligarchy, which is where there is a state nominally affirming capitalism, or engaging in "state capitalism" as the Trotskyists called it -- but just as likely embracing many aspects of communism. This state still accords power to certain wealthy boyars -- as long as they support the state. You may even want to transform this state so that it is better for your business.

If you're under the anarchy line, you're for destroying government and running everything from the Internet and the IRC channel with your friends, maybe with a Drupal site and some Liquid Democracy Pirate Party "voting" scheme -- but fuck America, militaries, even roads.

Well, you get the idea. It's a grid -- and you can slide in any direction up or down or across or diagonally.

Naturally, I've put myself in the most perfect, centrist, democratic and good position, as any author would : )

But note what else is going on -- the attitiudes towards technology and how it will be used to pursue one's other values of anarchy or statism, communism or corporativism or statism.

Technocommunist as readers of this blog know is a belief that you can collectivize people online and use technology to redistribute wealth; the state withers away, as it is supposed to under communism and "every cook can rule the state". Of course, there's an avant-garde of the workers who know best (coders).

Technolibertarian can amount to "communism for thee but not for me" or a belief in social Darwinism, Randianism, meritocracy on steroids -- and no illusions that you will teach the homeless to code or even most kids in high school to do anything. Fuck 'em, you are going to have California secede from the United States.

Technoliberal means that you embrace technological innovation but you expect democratic government to maintain oversight over technology so that it does not harm liberal democracy itself.

Technoprogressive means that you believe in the transformative power of technology to change human nature and "make a better world" and you will make money in order to spend it on establishing socialism -- which will work better because of technology and distributive...stuff.

Technosocialist means that you would establish more limits on corporations in establishing your equitable society, except for the Big IT ones and those that provide you a paycheck. Distribution will be coerced. You're welcome.

Technostalinist means that you are for using technology to settle scores with your political enemies, and establishing some kind of state that can crush evil greedy oligarchs and capitalists.

And that's how we get the different boxes in this grid.

You could find Snowden a hero and think Obama is a devil -- and be a technolibertarian like Rand Paul for minimal government.

Or you could find Snowden a hero and not think much of Obama but not really pay attention to him, and be for anarchism and communism -- which you think you and your friends will implement just fine.

OR you could find Obama an angel and Snowden a traitor -- that would put you on the top of the box, with the majority of Americans, quite frankly.

Somebody like me who did not vote for Obama a second time is still in that box because Obama is,after all, the president, the result of a democratic election and therefore a figure of legitimate authority.  Looking at this box, you could additionally pin little pictures of Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz into the boxes fairly easily -- I'd be on the Hillary side of the line.

Supportive readers of this blog will likely have no trouble finding MarkAmesExiled in the Technostalinist box. That's because he hates capitalism -- he loathes Obama as a sell-out to Wall Street -- and he is for hanging capitalists he hates from the lamp posts. He admires Eduard Limonov, the National Bolshevik, and he finds Snowden a traitor - but a traitor to...what, exactly? A powerful state that he imagines can be made a utopian state by ridding it of evil, corrupt capitalists? He's no anarchist, in fact, and he's no libertarian, because he imagines some mighty force that will be capable of punishing these big, evil oligarchs. There isn't any such force except Stalin.

Paul Carr, on the other hand, might slide more toward the technolibertarian box because he's more of a softy, but at the end of the day, his paycheck is still signed by the titans of Silicon Valley and he appreciates that.

Up in the love-Obama box is of course Jeff Gauvin, 18,000 followers, unfollower of me because I said something he didn't like once, hater of Greenwald, lover of Obama (his Twitter name is Jefferson Obama).  Jeff is actually Canadian, for all his American hero handles, and therefore tends toward the socialist as a national trait -- Canada is a country where a large percentage of the working population has jobs with the government or funded by the government.

Jeff is typical of a lot of tweeters who loathe Greenwald because he threatens their Obama and their progressivism with his...libertarian/communism or whatever it is. Note that I have Greenwald straddle the two categories because I think Greenwald just does what's best for Greenwald in the end, a powerful force that perhaps someday, may lead to contrition or at least turncoating.

John Schindler is more liberal than I am -- he's for reforming the NSA and I'm for leaving it absolutely untouched until other more profound issues are solved (more on that later) and until Obama is out of office, since I believe as a stealth-socialist, Obama is merely trying to destroy the capitalist state.

We may or may not get lucky and get Hillary back, in which case I will vote for her and so will John Schindler. If we get only Elizabeth Warren as a candidate because of powerful hate-Hillary forces gathering in quite a few of those boxes, I will definitely NOT vote for her; Schindler, I don't know.

Poor General Alexander I've put in the corporatocracy box merely as a kind of symbol. I have no idea what his personal views are. He may be a closet libertarian, for all I know. He may be a liberal Democrat struggling to reform this monster -- who knows.  I'm assuming that he's mad as hell at Snowden and I'm putting him very close to the "Snowden=traitor" box. I'm putting him in the same column with the "Obama as devil" because I have to figure Gen. Alexander feels like Obama threw him under the bus. I put him in the corporate box merely because the symbiosis between the military and the private corporate contractors makes up a state-within-a-state in some ways, although I am not a conspiracy monger and actually don't think there is something inherently wrong with military contracting in a free and capitalist society. It's just a tendency you want to watch and regulate and I'm for doing less contracting and having more paid, benefitted staff -- Manning and Snowden were contractors.

I actually think the most important thing Gen. Alexander could do is to form a think tank to fight for national security after he retires, responding to all the outrageous things that people are likely to do to the NSA.

Why don't I put myself up smack against the traitor box?

Well, I don't think that's a useful category to discuss Snowden, really; usually I'll call him "that little felon." To be a traitor, you would have had to show loyalty to you country first, and then betray it; I think for Snowden, the Internet is his country, he has absolutely no loyalty to anything like "homeland" or "government" and leans toward technocommunism or technolibertarianism if not technostalinism -- after all, he ran to first China, then Russia to help him in his struggle to smash the American state.

I think the issue is this: there are warring factions in government, and Snowden represents in fact a faction within the state -- the Wired State in the making, if you will, which is part old state, part oligarchs, part anarchists or Stalinists.

That's why I worry. Cory Ondreijka, formerly of the Navy and the NSA, represents just such a faction, too (more on him soon). While I'm generally supportive of the NSA as an institution, and I find it legitimate and necessary; I'm not supportive of some of the geek factions in government, including in the NSA, which I view as the enemy of liberal democracy (and they exist out of government, too, and are in a revolving door between government and Silicon Valley).

It used to be that people in government in the civil service and foreign service had their little factions, but they kept them to themselves, engaging only in minor skirmishes and minor sabotage; they more or less served the elected president.

They don't do that any more, since the wikification of government and social media gave them a lever and a voice to destroy government leadership they don't like.

So now people who are for friending Iran, despite the will of the Congress or the pragmatism of a compromising president, will deliberately leak, sabotage, undermine and present people with fait accomplis.

They'll make anonymous Twitter accounts and so damage there.

People who think the smart, hip thing to do is to dump on Israel as the problem for why America doesn't have good street cred in the world also leak, sabotage, undermine and create facts on the ground (like the botching of Syria and capitulation in Iran negotiations).

Well, you get the idea! See what you think and suggest ideas and changes. If anybody is better at Photoshop than I am, you're welcome to make this look better, just credit me for the idea!

Germany, Brazil, and the Hypocrisy and One-Sidedness of UN Privacy Resolutions

Colum Lynch -- a respected columnist and one of the few journalists to cover the UN and make it interesting -- has a scare headline posted today at Foreign Policy in The Cable:

Exclusive Inside America's Plan to Kill Online Privacy Rights Everywhere

Oh, my.

My response:

I keep thinking how Brazil and Germany were never motivated to mount a resolution like this when the Russian opposition's cell phone conversations or the Belarusian opposition's cell phone and Internet conversations were put online by the secret police and a hundred other things like that even inluding the open Russian plan to capture all metadata during the Olympics to oppose terrorism but also any anti-Kremlin protest. None of that moved these diplomats before because they know the UN, and didn't want to go up against Russia or China.

The US is a softer target.

So hence this resolution, really opposing the US and nothing else.  By invoking it as a backlash against Snowden, they can get even Russia and China to tacitly agree because those authoritarians know that like all UN rights agreements, they have absolutely no intention of implementing them. And few countries -- least of all Germany or Brazil -- will ever have the guts to hold them to account around it, even though their privacy disruption is far worse.

Then there's the fact that the claims Snowden has made about the NSA have never been validated with actual cases and court decisions.

What I've been saying about the "Snowden revelations" and in particular the case of the alleged bugging of the Brazilian president's telephone conversations is that Rouseff should bring her case to the Human Rights Committee, the treaty body of the UN that actually already has plenty of privacy language to work with in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

She doesn't need a new resolution. Let her bring an actual case -- something that has been non-existent throughout the Snowden saga anywhere, in any venue (there is already one failed court case against the NSA run by the ACLU, which is having another run at it). And see if it could even be adjudicated! Merkel, too. Or, if they are concerned about never having had interstate complaints on the ICCPR (although there's no reason not to try one), let individual citizens of Germany or Brazil brings cases where they prove their privacy was eroded.

I wonder even with the tendentious review this might get in the HRC, if they could make their cases, given that...the content of their talks has never been revealed nor has it been confirmed that their calls were eavesdropped on in real time. No one has ever come up with a single case of an individual who can show his personal privacy was deliberately violated such as to harm his rights.

I'd love to be there when the HRC examines a case involving an indignant complaint that somebody listened in on...a Brazilian oil company -- the kind of oil company that NGOs usually scream about as a terrible violator of indigenous rights and environmental rights. Imagine, the HRC, at the UN, admitting that oil companies, of all things, have privacy rights. Go ahead, I'll wait, as they say...

As for the "global privacy right" -- I am hoping this isn't going to turn into a "global blasphemy law" which it could all too well become in the hands of certain UN members. As I wrote, be careful what you wish for, Germany...when you re-open freedom of expression language for negotiation at the UN.

No one would want extra-territorial *anything* nor making the US compelled to uphold it if it weren't for this anti-US campaign triggered by WikiLeaks and Snowden's hacker and activist-journalist friends. As we know, if they made an extra-territorial push for an end to reprisals for human rights advocates, as states at the Human Rights Council attempted to do yesterday, that would be killed by South Africa -- yes, South Africa! -- because they were mad at the ICC's "excessive attention" to Africa's mass murderers -- the ICC has tended to prosecute African tyrants rather than tyrants from elsewhere around the world. Maybe the others are harder to reach, i.e. like, oh, Russia, over its mass murder of Chechens and Dagestanis -- Russia, where Germany has vested business interests and a friendly foreign policy, or Iran, where a decided international lobby antagonistic to Israel wants to friend up this tyrant on the basis of promises, not performance.

(No, those countries haven't ratified the ICC statute, but then neither did some of the African states -- they got Security Council referrals that would be impossible on other regions of the world given the Russian and Chinese vetoes.)

Look, if you think this resolution is really in good faith, and really about privacy, you don't know how the UN works.

Germany has many other more effective ways of displaying its wrath, if it thinks its complaints about the encroachment by its long-time partner, the NSA, are founded. For example, yesterday we learned of the billions Germany has harvested in  Internet business - they had a banner year in sales. A good chunk of their revenue comes from amazon.de -- hey, an American company, with servers located in America, whose innovation and cost reductions due to scale they can utilize to make profits. You don't notice Germany shutting down amazon.de or demanding that Amazon suddenly place all servers with German data on German territory under German control -- or it may come to that, and even Jeff Bezos' ownership of the Washington Post and considerable lobbying clout may not stop it.

But nary a word, because that's business, and that's money, and Germany and the US are heavily intertwined there.

Instead, what we get is this ding at the UN, which "doesn't matter" in a sense that it is just rhetoric," even though people like Dianna PoKempner, who has decided to make Human Right Watch's crusade against the NSA an aggressive personal project, think this is "soft power" that NGOs can manipulate via international fora to get their way. That's because they might fail at more more mundane work through democratic institutions at home with factions that oppose their anti-Western positions and leniency  with tyrants like Russia and China.

BTW, I'm one of the human rights advocates who learned about these private negotiations before Lynch's article, but it didn't seem appropriate to leak the negotiating position of the US. Nowadays, there's a determined lobbying clique of NGOs starting with Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access, and other radical Internet activists who don't believe in private negotiations by states -- in fact, they don't much believe in states, period. They whined and whined about the secret negotiations of the TPP -- even after hackers got ahold of the secret documents somehow, we're not told -- either a bad-minded state party or leftist political party faction in a state leaked it, or it was actually hacked, we don't know.

But negotiations should be secret because that's how states can reach accommodations and compromises. The time to get your country to have a position you can support is before the international conference, at home, through the democratic process.

International negotiations, particularly those involving undemocratic states or states with very different positions, have to be done in secret to reach agreement. That's an axiom of international diplomacy that works -- and it works on the Disability Rights Treaty as much as the TPP.

It's ok to have secret negotiations in a hostile world where there are numerous enemies to basic universal human rights and values. The animus driving this issue about "secrecy" isn't really based on any value of transparency because it's more about anarchy -- these radicals do not accept that elected, legitimate liberal states like the US and Germany or even for that matter Brazil, whose record as a demoracy is not as good, should be able to negotiate in good faith on behalf of their citizens -- because they are elected.

The elected part bothers the anarchists because it goes against their brutal, nihilist grab for power themselves (anarchists who always oppose governments and try to make you think they are against big government and just for lovely little local collectives always forget to tell you the PS to the memo -- that in overthrowing others, they get in power, and are far less accountable or transparent themselves because they don't believe in voting or due process or democratic procedure -- they are all about coercive, collectivizing takeovers and pretend "consensus".)

At the UN, the leftist forces in Germany and Brazil in particular  -- where parliamentarians wear Snowden masks and Glenn Greenwald has safe haven -- have succeed in pushing the Snowden backlash into the complicated and dull procedures of UN committees.

This is actually a process that long preceded Snowden, as this same concerted claque that pushes the extreme "Internet freedom" agenda at the UN -- against copyright, against intellectual property, against trade, against sovereignty of states, against any criminal oversight of the Internet to oppose terrorism and crime -- has been very busy already trying to undermine what they see as an "unacceptable' historical US control over the Internet and force through various measures.

When Elaine Donahoe, the ebay president's wife, an Obama campaigner and fund-raiser, was rewarded with an ambassadorship to the UN Human Rights Council, these radical NGOs leveraged the obvious interest in Silicon Valley in defeating pro-copyright and anti-piracy legislation (SOPA and PIPA) and under the guise of "Internt Freedom," got various measures put in -- here's the background on the "Internet Freedom" resolution. This let in dangerous wording that in fact brings in more state control under the invocation of the concept of "development" (i.e. in the technocommunist model, by states, or in the technolibertarian model, also by states they capture).

If this wife-turned-ambassador was getting her appointment in the Bush era, as a Bush fund-raiser, and her husband was the head of some less beloved Silicon Valley corporation, imagine the furor of the NGOs that business was using international fora to get its way in the marketplace. Not so when it's ebay -- as we're seeing about ebay founder Pierre Omidyar's support of Greenwald and others in a new radical media project.

There's a lot more boring background to this at the UN that few people have been paying attention to, which basically involves this same gang, with mainly Soros and other "progressive" funding, going to the UN to get language favourable to their ideological positions into various resolutions and mandates -- mainly because no one else bothers to show up and give some pushback to their blatantly sectarian maneuvers.

They have been particularly active at the international bodies that have aspirations to control the Internet -- the International Telecommunications Organization and the Internet Governance Forum. Brazil has pushed the latter heavily, just hosting the meeting, to get its own brand of socialist control over Internet affairs -- gathering all the usual anti-American fans in the process.

The IGF feigns support of what they call the "multi-stakeholder approach" -- as long as the stakeholder are things they like and control -- and it's important to note that ALL these NGOs are UTTER HYPOCRITES because FOR YEARS they've been in the Global Network Initiative with the likes of Google and even Facebook claiming to promote Internet rights. They were never, ever bothered by Google's massive data-vacuuming and Facebook's privacy-busting all those years. Instead, they sat by quietly while the GNI secretariat was mainly silent about things like the Internet being entirely shut down in whole countries or Internet journalists being jailed -- real freedom issues. Instead, they pushed for things like the right to keep a Youtube of a disabled boy being humiliated and bullied online in Italy despite a court action -- in the name of "freedom of expression" -- which was really a business issue for Google to keep their California Business Model intact (let everyon upload freely, chase over copyright or legal issues later, after the ad revenue is scoopd up). You don't hear so much about GNI anymore... in fact, EFF dramatically left it, funny...

This gang has promoted Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, through various Soros-funded evenings like this one at NYU, and its his decidedly anti-American antagonism which has driven the Internet resolutions at the UN seeking a) absolute encryption for non-state actors, regardless of whether they commit crimes  b) rejection of law-enforcement access to the Internet in the legitimate pursuit of crimes c) blessing of non-governmental human rights groups forever as never being involved in crime and worthy of such power -- a position that comes out of Frank's understandable but not universal experience of being a leftist activist lawyer in oppressive Guatemala in the 1980s.

Which brings us to Germany -- where Merkel, as I've said acidly a number of times, still hasn't gotten over the fact that the NSA didn't disclose the content of phone conversations that we have not verified they monitored.

Yes, it's hard to believe -- although CNN did ask the questions of the leftist German journalists who broke this story in the first place -- that this is not verified. We don't have any sample conversations. We don't know what she thought or what her position was internally on the even of important events like NATO summits. We haven't learned of any fact other than that her number was in a list of numbers held by the NSA which they may have scanned for meta data.

BTW, few noticed part two of the story of Norway, yesterday, where first Snowden's adversarial journalist-activist supporters Laura Poitras an Glenn Greenwald claimed there was a purported NSA scanning of millions of Norwegian phone calls (or phone transactions -- we never are told accurately if these "millions" in fact contain the thousands of back-and-forth "calls" that a person typically engages in during a week of texting, liking, sending links, etc. on his cell phone).  But...Come to find out even later in the day that it was Norway itself scanning its own conversations, then sharing them. Even the Kremlin's RT.com had to correct this. (Or, especially RT.com given that the anti-Norway campaign by Russia has gone on for awhile unrelated to Snowden, as part of a hate-on-the-West strategy).

But why wasn't the story *reported* from the get-go by journalists being skeptical of the usual Snowden Team active measure, and asking questions directly about it?! Is Richard Orange going to run a correction?

Norway -- let alone Germany -- were never moved to launch privacy resolutions at the UN over their own activity, all these years, including sharing with the NSA.

So here we all are. A tendentious portrayal of the US as some "killer" of privacy that Russia and even Germany and even Norway killed long ago, without a whimper from the NGO gotcha-gang all this time -- but suddenly, when WikiLeaks and their Russian supporters have an opportunity to exploit Snowden backlash even further in pursuit of their anti-American goals, they obviously seize it.

 

Eric Schmidt's Virtual World

Land in Second Life. You can rent this waterfront for L$1600/wk. i.e. about US $6.00.

This was a very interesting piece in the National Interest, although they got it wrong about any real "anger" from Google over the NSA. (They're probably mainly angry that the NSA got hacked in the first place, really, and brought all this on them.)

But are Schmidt and his customers really surprised that the NSA looked for such a hole in Google's infrastructure and asked its foreign allies to exploit it? While Schmidt and many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs likely share the civil liberties concerns of many of their fellow citizens, the last several months of Snowden disclosures may be more troubling to leading internet firms for another less obvious reason: what they say about the role of technology on the world stage.

Indeed.

It's a tale that Schmidt and his coauthor Jared Cohen—a former advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and now head of Google's internal think tank—retell at length in the book they released earlier this year, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. Schmidt and Cohen are careful, as they gaze into their crystal ball, not to see a utopia. New technology, they acknowledge, can be used by authoritarians and terrorists just as easily as democrats and human-rights campaigners. Still, they are clear that the arrival of the internet age signals no less than a new epoch of history—in which a virtual world must simultaneously exist as a new testament alongside the old one. As they write, their vision is "a tale of two civilizations: One is physical and has developed over thousands of years, and the other is virtual and is still very much in formation."

I've been reading The New Digital Age by Schmidt and Cohen very fitfully -- I hate it, and periodically have to throw it across the room, which makes it hard to find then the next time I tackle it.

But speaking of virtual worlds, one of the appalling things about their ideology is the ardent belief that a mammoth virtual world -- the Internetization of things and everything -- is being built on top of this one, that we will all "have" to live in. And that real life will be "mapped" to this monstrous entity that will of course be run by coders (and PS not the NSA) and that such mapping/integration will make things "better" instead of being a God Awful Mess.

I begin to see why Schmidt is so fascinated with shall we say "distressed" states like North Korea or Somalia or Iraq. It's like the way doctors used to learn about the brain if there was, say, a train conductor who lost part of his brain and then lived in the eternal present.

By studying these dislocated war-torn or authoritarian societies that aren't the norm, he gets a better idea of how to destroy real countries and then put them back together on the Internet.

Hence, his discussion about post-war Iraq:

A parallel authority was set up to resolve disputes. These were important steps in the reconstruction of Iraq, serving as a moderating factor to the exploitation of post-conflict intsability and instances of claiming property by force. But despite their good intentions (more than 160,000 claims were received by 2011), these commissions were hampered by certain bureaucratic restrictions that trapped many claims in complicated litigation. In the future, states will learn from this Iraqi model that a more transparent and secure form of prtoection for property rights can forestall such hassles in the event of conflict. By creating online cadastral systems (i.e., online records systems of land values and boundaries) with mobile-enabled mapping software, governments will make it possible for citizens to visualize all public and private land and even submit minor disputes, likea fence boundary, to a sanctioned online arbiter.

I feel like Schmidt should have spent even a week in Second Life, let alone Iraq, or some place like Belarus, to get the sheer folly of all this.

For one, I think he has no idea that when all land is virtualized, and all value starts to shift to its virtualization, it will start to lose value.  There will be the Anshe Chung problem as the wealthy can just open up Google maps and bid on any parcel on the map all over the world that is shown in yellow "for sale" as on the map of Second Life. There will be the flipping problem. The abandoning problem. The griefing problem. The 16 m ad lot problem. The Impeach Bush sign problem. Ok, I'm going to run screaming from the room soon at this thought... I think probably only about two readers will understand what I'm talking about.

For two, I think Schmidt knows perfectly well that the Internetization of Everything will erode national boundaries and put him and his company in charge -- but he pretends that's not so.

BTW, Google had a short-lived virtual world experiment called Lively which died.

Schmidt never mentions that or Second Life or any existing experience of virtuality on line, but in a way, his entire book is about how the Internet will penetrate and virtualize everything.

Schmidt loves the idea of exile communities -- the Tibetans -- rebuilding virtual countries online that are poised to come back some day. Except they don't. The Chinese move in Han settlers, wipe out monasteries, control education, jail monks and nuns and dissenters, force more refugees, and Tibet as an actuality grows more dim. He doesn't put that bit in.

In Belaus, Lukashenka just turns off the electricity. No electricity, no computers. Or turns off the cell towers. No mobile phone, no demonstrations organized. You could have exquisite exile governments -- and they have them -- but then they founder on the rocks of the reality of dictatorships that Schmidt seems to leave beyond the frame of his thinking. He just barrels ahead planning how all these good exiles (secessionist SiliconValley, anyone?) will build wonderful virtual governments online and impose them on reality -- uh, easily. No one will object, surely.

Well, and then there's the virtualization of everything, really.

I really must try to write my book about how Second Life predicts the awfulness of the Internet of Things, including your home and even your government.

Try to think of your home as a server in Second Life, and all the delights that will come with it:

o bans and ejects

o autoreturn

o group membership -- open and closed groups

o stripping of IP addresses to out alts

o griefing with particles

o mapping and stalking.

And that's just the beginning. Wait until they take away the vote completely!

Land records were among the first things the Lindens jettisoned when they moved from making the world the product to, well, just making the product the product, in about 2008-2009 after the big boom in interest and membership.

There used to be records of every land auction (simulator, or server or part of a server), with those who participated, what they bid, and who won. Then this was blacked out -- in fact, when, of all things, they moved to using ebay auction software instead of their own custom solution (Pierre Omidyar was an early investor in SL).

They did this because land began to devalue, the more there was mapping, information, and records of it globally -- and of course, there constant printing of new land.

Then they finally got rid of the auctions pretty much completely -- now only used odd lots on the mainland are auctioned.

I will have to explain all this another day...

 

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The Wired State: Nerd Nodes, Here They Come

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, at the BBC. Photo by Documentally.

This is a topic that needs A LOT more commentary, but before it gets lost in my growing, enormous queue of important articles and books to comment on (I need staff! I need fellow bloggers to do this with me!), let me note this.

People worry about the NSA and Snowden's revelations. As you know, I don't think much of them; I don't think they are established, they don't have a case, they are about an anarchist agenda used as a cat's paw by the Kremlin, and ultimately I don't think there's a there there.

The problem with the Panopticon begins with Google and other platforms and that secessionist Silicon Valley, not the NSA, which plays catch-up trying to do the job it was hired to do. We have oversight, checks and balances, remedies, means of reform for the NSA.

We don't have ANY of those things for Google. That's why the NSA is never my primary concern.

I also have a long-term worry about the gnomes of the Internet who are steadily taking over pieces of it, and have really been galvanized now that the Snowden Affair has given them an excuse to kick the US government out of standards bodies and to oppose it in international fora and so on.

So this sort of thing -- nodes around the world run by collectivist nerds with budgets -- becomes of great concern, it's like the problems of ICANN and IETF which I have long written about (undemocratic, unaccountable).

Food Web.

They're eating

• Cold poached salmon with dill & hollandaise dressing
• Butternut squash, red onion & spinach tart

...while you're fretting about Snowden, who is also likely eating well either on the Russian dime or from money John Perry Barlow is raising from the glitterati for him.

Of course readers of this blog and my Second Thoughts blog about Second Life will recognize Beth Noveck.

I really should spend more time on dissecting her faux-democracy theories that are really about bureaucratic "democratic centralism" and collectivism.

Some day I will win the lottery and create my Institute for the Study of Internet Ideologies as an alternative and antidote to things like this.

Then I might be able to keep up with the nerd-nodes, but alone, I can't.

Still waiting for at least one other person to join me in the New England Society for the Pluralarity, which combats the Singularity.

So what could possibly go wrong if a bunch of high-class nerds who like to pay for expensive conferences get together and plan stuff? Why worry?

Well, look at the Open Data Institute's new global network, reported enthusiastcally by the Guardian (of course).

I bet few people gave this a second thought:

Just one year after its foundation in London, an organisation created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt to stimulate economic, environmental and social innovation through a system of open data sharing and analysis, has announced rapid global expansion of its ambitions.

The Open Data Institute has announced the launch of 13 international centres, known as "nodes", each of which will bring together companies, universities, and NGOs that support open data projects and communities. The nodes will be based in the US, Canada, France, Dubai, Italy, Russia, Sweden and Argentina, with two extra US nodes Chicago and North Carolina. Three further UK nodes are to open in Manchester, Leeds and Brighton.

The new ODI nodes will variously operate at local and national levels. Each one has agreed to adopt the ODI Charter, which is a open source codification of the ODI itself, and embodies principles of open data business, publishing, communication, and collaboration.

But they should, because of its budgets:

The ODI is a non-for-profit organisation that has so far helped set up more than a dozen open data-based startup companies in the UK, generating income, research and training. It has also created a certificate for open data allowing all users to access information on many areas such as healthcare, transport, peer-to-peer lending, and energy efficiency. The UK ODI secured £10m funding over five years from the UK innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, $750,000 from global philanthropic investor Omidyar Network created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. It aims for long-term sustainability through match funding and direct revenue through memberships and supporters.

Note the role of Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald's new angel for this new media thing that GG has left the Guardian for.

The other people in the speakers' list will tell you of more budgets, i.e. the CTO for New York City, which has a healthy budget for open this and open that -- which has never given us an app telling us where the toilets of New York City are. (I'm going to have to code one myself, which tells me how long you may be shifting from one foot to the other.)

"Open Data" covers a multitude of sins -- I will come back another day to dissect it. These are the bureaucratic "democratic centralists" of the Wired State. They are the ones who will control your health, education, welfare -- life -- data. Not the NSA.

 

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What's Wrong with Google's Functioning?

That is all? Really? What does 502 even mean?

TechCrunch has an article up Dear Google, What's Wrong With You? not about policies or ideologies, but about the actual functioning -- or not functioning -- of the products. Most of the geeks are concerned with Android and its apps not working, which I don't care about, because I long ago abandoned two buggy Android phones and switched to iPhone.

But I do ask about the poorly-functioning or badly-designed other products, because as must as I malign Google for sabotaging liberal democracy in its ideologies and corporate actions, I've usually found the free products to work. They've stopped working, even though Google had its most successful quarter ever, with billions of dollars in revenue for new sales of gadgets like tablets and phones.

My comment on TechCrunch:

Yesterday I got a "502" error while posting on G+ again and again. It has a picture of a broken robot. I didn't even know G+ has a fail-whale, but it does!

Google Docs is so frustrating. Not only are there the saving issues. When you scan and send a document to Google docs and it is not right-side up, there is no way to fix the angle within Google Docs itself. Sure, you can then download the PDF and then fix it in Adobe, but that's no permanent solution. Why is it that previously (not sure why latest version doesn't have this), on Firefox, I could access Google docs and fix their angle in the browser, but I can't do this on Chrome?

Come on, guys, you made billions this quarter, can't you make it so we can turn a damn document 90 degrees in Gdocs? Is it really that hard? I mean, you make driverless cars. You can't get a document to turn on its own?

Really, the problem of Google is its profound indifference to customer service. Customer service and customer requirements are utterly alien to this company. It got spoiled, inducing search dependence.

And then there's this:

Come on, invest some of those billions in the United States and help create jobs and move the economy by making real customer service. How about opening stores that don't just hawk your gadgets but have live people to actually fix all the many frustrating problems -- arbitrary removal of Google AdSense, that annoying Chrome bug that seems to save all your tabs in perpetuity that not everyone experiences, the ridiculous forcing of people to back space and refresh the browser to save their searches. 

 Think of the people, Google!

In Which I Confront Bart Gellman at WashPo on the Snowden Claim of NSA Tap Into Google

Washington Post comments: In this slide from a National Security Agency presentation on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” a sketch shows where the “Public Internet” meets the internal “Google Cloud” where user data resides. Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing.

1. ashkan soltani ‏@ashk4n 31 Oct

   My Halloween costume… #google #backdoors #too_soon pic.twitter.com/zwxaL8ahOQ

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2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @ashk4n @bartongellman Did you actually prove there are these back doors or is the sketch just aspirational, i.e. a pitch from a consultant?

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Barton GellmanVerified account ‏@bartongellman

@catfitz Respectively suggest you read the story more closely.

8:19 PM - 31 Oct 13

1. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman I did read the story very carefully, multiple times. Can't you answer yes or no, regarding possibility this is a wish sketch

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2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman your point amounts to claiming that once again that mere collection of metadata is intrusive. I disagree. No new news here.

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3. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman It's not like Google holds files in clear text in the cloud, NSA can just tap into *content* at will. Surely you don't say.

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4. Barton Gellman ‏@bartongellman 31 Oct

   @catfitz No, it’s not a possibility. Stay tuned.

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5. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman The lede says "secretly taps into" as fact; but the graphic says "may have," "may have" - there's the hole in your story.

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6. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman I've been tuned. And I see that a) you don't have any individual cases b) no geeks external to your brotherhood confirming

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7. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman Oh, so now you're saying the problem isn't "reading comprehension" but that you haven't told us yet, it's in next episode.

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8. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 31 Oct

   @bartongellman Well, aren't you the Tom Terrific!

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So as I pointed out, I've been unimpressed with the coverage of the "anger" that supposedly Google and other platform providers like Facebook are reputedly displaying over the NSA allegedly tapping into their servers without their consent. I'm not seeing it.

Remember Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman got this story all wrong when they first began talking about PRISM, claiming there was a direct tap when there wasn't -- there were merely servers made available to sequester data and hand it over to law enforcement when they had already made legitimate requests. It's not like the NSA tapped into Google or Facebook, oh, you know, the way Aaron Swartz tapped directly into MIT's servers through jacking right into their LAN network in the server closet with a laptop. You know, that kind of thing.

Except, now the story is that no, they did have access.

This funny little drawing above supposedly shows the NSA grinning and winking and sneaking in to strip away the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) of communications behind Google's back (I'm copying it here because it began as a government document which was not supposed to be in the public domain, but now is, i.e. it's not proprietary to the Washington Post).

I really had to wonder about this. I am not a techie but I do know a little bit about servers. Google has stuff encrypted. What are they saying, that in between servers when the data is piped around, in the cloud, Google is vulnerable, or that in the cloud, Google keeps things in clear text? That's ridiculous.

What this sketch looked to me was a lot like the slides in the PRISM stories -- or for that matter, the slides contemplated for the HPGary work that never came to pass.

Snowden was a contractor at Booz, Allen Hamilton. Could these slides be merely contractors' pitches to the NSA? Aspirational? Trying to find ways to serve their customer? Would that be all that Snowden really had here?

Er, wouldn't the real NSA -- the heart of the NSA -- be a little bit more sophisticated in how they work up sketches for such a dramatic thing as tapping surreptiously into the Google line? My God, this looks like the back of a paper napkin at cocktail hour -- even if it is is on a slide titled "Current Efforts."

There's something that just doesn't add up here.

And here's the thing I noticed. In the sketches accompanying the article, the lede says "The NSA, working with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), secretly taps into the internal networks of Yahoo and Google." But in the text to the sketch, the phrase is "may have" several times: 

The NSA may have figured out ways to tap directly into Google's privately owned and managed Internet links.

The NSA's British counterpart, the CGHQ, may have induced or compelled a third party -- such as the operator of a cable landing station, a major Internet exchange or a data center that Google shares with other companies -- to install surveillance equipment on Google's private cables.

So in fact it's just not definitive.

So I asked Bart Gellman directly, as you can see.

In a total putdown (with that faux politeness always implied when people say "respectively"), he told me I hadn't read the article. Of course I read the article, multiple times. Why do these adversarial journalists always think reading comprehension is an issue and they can merely insult the reader instead of answering the question? Could that be because Gellman himself said he didn't understand "half the documents" when he first got them?

Sure, they're complicated, and for technical insiders to decipher. But it doesn't add up. So I ask questions about it.

I asked multiple questions. I asked him to answer yes or no, whether this was a sketch that was only a consulting company's aspirations of what they could offer their client or think their client wanted, and not the actual practice. Could he answer that without calling names and implying I was illiterate?

So he finally replied "no" i.e. it is not a wish sketch but an actuality (despite the "may" in the diagrams) and said "stay tuned."

Well, as I said, this sounded like another episode of Tom Terrific.

I can't imagine why they'd drib and drab a thing like that out, and if they had proof, why it wouldn't have gone not only in this month's story, but the very first one in June. I bet they don't have anything to back this up.

As we can see in recent weeks, with much flourish, Bart added a geek to his byline -- Ashkan Soltani. Soltani is an activist with an agenda, not merely some technologist. He is author of KnowPrivacy and has a demand to strip away all the web bugs or make them visible at least in the name of privacy. BTW, Bob Cesca is the guy who really popularized web bugs by outing them on the Guardian every time they do a Snowden story demanding privacy -- LOL.

But lost in Ashkan's indignation and zeal to encrypt absolutely is a recognition that commerce is required for people's livelihoods on the Internet and commerce is a good thing and that ads are a good thing. If my local drug store web page puts bugs or cookies and follows me around to see what I'm interested in to pitch me, oh, cold medicine or a flu shot -- who cares? I like coupons. Who doesn't?  (BTW, cookies and bugs are different, and they've deliberately made the bugs more scary by calling them "bugs" instead of trackers -- they aren't actual malware or malfunctions in code, just code these socialist Puritans don't like).

In other words, before there is a transition to that "getting another business model" that people like this always haughtily demand of Silicon Valley businesses, they are for stripping away the modes of making money. I'm simply not for doing that. If you are so private and can't bear the world to know something about you, stay off the Internet. 

I sometimes pause to think that the half dozen or so people closest to me, with whom I talk every day and visit and spend time with every week are the ones least on the Internet, or barely on it at all, and who are face-to-face people, not people I "share" things with on Facebook or Twitter. While Twitter or Facebook "friends" might get a minute or five minutes of exchange a day, and a Second Life friend might get a 10 or even 20 minute conversation, the real friends of real life are for those conversations that go on for hours, usuall over a meal or on the telephone. Funny, isn't it? Because private life is private. It can be done. And what Snowden says at his Sam Adams awards ceremony is a lie:

People all over the world are realizing that these programs don’t make us more safe, they hurt our economy, they hurt our country, they limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships, to associate freely.

Baloney. I haven't felt the slightest constraint on my ability to speak and think and associate freely since Snowden violated our country's privacy by hacking its intelligence files. It's just not true. I've had more exposure of privacy from Anonymous doxing me than anything the government ever does, even if Snowden's claims are true.  And I think most people, if they are sincere with themselves, would have to concede this. If anything, his hacking has limited the ability of the US to associate freely because it has undermined the trust of allies like Germany.

Bart Gellman said that he didn't understand half of the documents he got from Snowden because they contained so many complexities and technical jargon only an insider could understand. Eventually he recruited Solani to work with him to avoid the kind of mistakes made in the initial reports.

But these people are now dependent on the Brotherhood just like clueless parents who can't program their blinking VCR used to become dependent on the nine-year-old boy in the family to fix it for them.

I was struck again by this VCR-type phenomenon when Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian referenced his ignorance in the way of technology in his piece in The New York Review of Books of just how dependent these adversarial journalists have become on the tech Brotherhood around Snowden:

A recent Economist editorial also saw the alarming significance of NSA policies weakening the integrity of the Internet itself:

Any deliberate subversion of cryptographic systems by the NSA is simply a bad idea, and should stop. That would make life harder for the [official government] spooks, true, but there are plenty of other more targeted techniques they can use that do not reduce the security of the internet for all of its users, damage the reputation of America’s technology industry and leave its government looking untrustworthy and hypocritical.

I have a confession to make: I did not myself spot that story—of how law enforcement agencies are trying to undermine private encryption capacities—that was nested in the GCHQ/NSA documents; and even when it was explained to me by the young specialist technology reporters who did grasp its significance, I did not immediately understand it. Embarrassingly, I had to sketch a childlike drawing to confirm what I thought Jeff Larson, a Web developer and reporter at ProPublica, and James Ball, our own twenty-seven-year-old reporter and technical whiz kid, were telling me.

Leave aside the fact that Wired and other tech publications have questioned whether these standards are really undermined -- again, we don't have proof and we only have Greenwald's name-calling. But more to the point, the technicians supposedly impartially helping these adversarial journalists are themselves even more biased!

James Ball was a former staff person at WikiLeaks -- a consummate "hacktivist" if not anarchist. Jeff Larson formerly ran the Red diaper-baby Nation's online work during the 2008 campaign (Obama) and now is at Propublica. He  is obviously a "progressive" -- he wouldn't work there if he weren't. Now mind you, ProPublica does solid work, but it definitely tilts to the left. And even when it appears to be unbiased -- as Larson's story about Democrats re-districting in California -- there's an even deeper agenda at work. The story exposes "powerful interests" that "draw you out of a vote" -- but what's the moral? Better not to have districting. Better not to have redrawing by anybody -- by established parties. Let radical hackers make "a Better World" for you beyond parties (remember, that's what Google's Sergei Brin openly calls for.) Better not to have the organic nature of politics and instead, turn it into a machine that expertly culls opinion and drills down demographics like Obama for America did.

Ultimately, this is how democracy gets undermined -- when technicians who expose the foibles of human nature think they can do a better mechanical job of it. If the authors had focused on Republican gerrymandering, people would go on thinking that just fairness would fix it. By focusing on more beloved Democratic gerrymandering, the authorts do one of those Cass Sunstein "nudges" and force you to the conclusion that it is better not to have this kind of democracy at all. Well, no thank you, the geeks are the problem. 

This is one area where I agree with Evgeny Morozov, who has written about the need to have things less than perfect, or they are not free.

Even if Gellman comes up with the goods and demonstrates that in fact the NSA really did find a way to jack into Google somehow unknown to the best Internet engineers in the world, it doesn't matter, as Loren Feldman would say. There are remedies for this, and the FISC and Congress can address it. Meanwhile, the problem remains that Google has scraped up all the data in the first place so as to become, so to speak, an attractive nuisance. And it did that largely in the name of the click-ad model. Fixing the failure to enable secure commodifying of digital items is vital to the entire prospect of a secure Internet with privacy of communications with law-enforcement still able to access for legitimate purposes.