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.
The Guardian somberly intones that the story isn't Edward Snowden (pay no attention to that little man behind the new Iron Curtain!) but the "real story" is "the Internet" (that thing Evgeny Morozov claims doesn't really exist, and some days, one could believe him when they see the Internet described like this, as a fragile thing shrinking from rumour and innuendo).
John Naughton's hysteria:
In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What
matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.
Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA)
had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of
citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone
records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has
been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.
But the NSA hasn't accessed the meaningful content of citizens' digital content across the world; it has at best scanned only metadata and at worst machine-scanned content of some flagged accounts for cause in order to make matches. This "secret court" that has Naughton and others so outraged is already known (and wasn't revealed by Snowden) and is a court that has oversight by Congress -- and has to perform the function of countering terrorism. What's your plan for combating terrorism if you publicize everything you know about their plots with open data on suspects? Did you have one?
Snowden
hasn't committed any public service or whistleblowing (he was
deliberately misleading about the "direct access" issue to sow panic);
with this Kremlin-inspired agitprop, he has helped unleash mass hysteria
and anti-American hate campaigns to the advantage of Russia and China,
um, those friends of Internet freedom.
But it's mainly the
Guardian stoking this moral panic about privacy that no one has yet to
prove is really violated by blind machines scanning metadata for matches
to terrorist groups -- you know, even less intrusive than the way
G-mail scans the content of your email to serve you ads. No one has
produced a single case of actual civil rights violations except a vague
invocation by Snowden of "a hacker suspect's girlfriend" having her cell
phone bugged. Tell us who that is, and maybe we can assess the bona
fides of this entire caper better, you know?
I expect that
companies will respond with a bit tightening of opt-in or opt-out
privacy issues usually described as access to data for marketing
purposes, and life will go on. Capitalism usually does trump communism.
The
longer Snowden stays in Russia and the less we hear from him, the
harder it will be for the Guardian to make this entire narrative stick.
I personally have always thought "the cloud" was an iffy proposition due to hackers, intramural rivaly among the Big IT corporations fighting over it, and bad actors like Russian and Chinese government sponsored hackers.
The cloud, put simply, is other people's computers, not your own. When you put your data on other people's computers to save money or time or have virtualized machines or whatever, you lose the ability to protect it on your own private property. It's a very simple proposition that has literally been clouded over by the fantasy elements afforded by imagining that the Internet is heaven.
The piece which appears in both German and English portrays the US as a decrepit data addict reduced to sucking up data for a living, something like the meth addict Wendy in Breaking Bad.
It might be funny even if weren't for the horrible, vicious barb -- NSA did all this slurping, but it couldn't even stop two brothers who had big social media profiles and bombed Boston.
IT'S NOT FBI FAILURE TO GATHER DATA BUT FSB FAILURE TO GIVE DATA
Of course, there are two real reasons why the Tsarnaev brothers could succeed at their deadly plan:
a) Evgeny's beloved Mother Russia did not help the FBI as he and others duplicitiously claim but in fact witheld crucial information. While ostensibly warning the FBI about the behaviour of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Moscow Central failed to deliver the most important news they had about him -- which they revealed only much later -- that he was in the company of a jihadist that they assassinated, and that two other jihadists they assassinated were also believed to have been in contact with him. Hey, that's pretty important metadata, you know? And the FSB held it close.
b) When the FBI did get the tip at look at the terrorist brothers' Youtubes, with its celebration of 9/11's losses, its extremist Islamic preaching, it's Russian-language jihad trainers, it's hate-fulled arguments in the comments, it decided it had no grounds for arrest. That's because a general hatred of America or even incitement of terrorism in a general kind of way are protected activities under the First Amendment. In fact, the FBI didn't violate the Tsarnaevs rights, even after getting the tip to look at their media, which is something that anti-American antagonists like Evgeny can never concede. The FBI didn't try to get a wiretap, or install one illegally or put an illegal GPS on the car, where they might have found Tamerlan going to buy explosives from a firecracker warehouse in New Hampshire, or might have found Dzhokhar testing them. No, they did none of these things they are forbidden to do by law and court cases without probable cause.
Russia could have given them that probably cause; it didn't. Evgeny is silent about that glaring factor, as so many "progressives" are, starting with Glenn Greenwald.
So while Evgeny might want to portray America as an old crack hag with meth mouth to boot, in fact her toothlessness, if we're going to call it that, is actually a function of exactly the kind of activism that Greenwald represents, civil rights crusades that ultimately stick in law and affect police practice.
EDWARD'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE OR HOW MOROZOV AND SHAMIR SAY THE SAME THING
With his trademark dry humour, Morozov mildly reprimands Snowden for having "poor trip planning skills." Of course, that's to pretend that he is tacitly conceding that going to Moscow makes no sense for freedom-lovers, but it's also to distract us from really asking why the lad never went to Venezuela in the first place, or didn't stay in Hong Kong after he kindly leaked helpful information about America's response to Chinese hacking to the Chinese government. The whole Moscow thing seems to be WikiLeaks/Assange's idea, and given how Assange has his own TV show on Kremlin-supported RTV and relies on a notorious Russian agent provocateur to do some of the circus-acting around this entire big-top performance, it seems like Moscow was the plan all along. I suspect it was for Edward, too, as I think the ideology he embodies -- technocommunism -- and its Bolshevik methods like hacking states to make a point -- inevitably wind up in the home of those ideologies, which has only shorn their outward form and continue to make heavy use of their methods.
And Morozov calls Snowden's felonies -- which he admits to -- and his defection a "noble mission" -- so you really can't have any doubt about his agenda -- to defeat America in its present form and turn it into something else. And of course that was his mission back when he began whacking away at Clinton's Internet freedom program in the most unseemly way -- given his purported at least Internet freedom seeking credentials. Yeah, Morozov was all about debunking Silicon Valley utopian hucksterism and gloatingly telling us that the authoritarians of the world were the real ones making use of all this social media and all this free data, but he was supposed to be for freedom, too, right?
Well, no, because he starts barking this nonsense, straight out of the Moscow agitprop handbook with its eternal lament of the Unipolar World ruled by evil Amerika:
Fourth, the idea that digitization has ushered in a new world, where the good old rules of realpolitik no longer apply, has proved to be bunk. There’s no separate realm that gives rise to a new brand of “digital” power; it’s one world, one power, with America at the helm.
MOROZOV'S LONG CAMPAIGN AGAINST AMERICA'S INTERNET FREEDOM PROGRAMS
So of course Morozov belongs there because as I've said a 100 times before in numerous posts, Morozov is always doing the regimes' work for them, cynically demolishing any hopeful plan for cyber-freedom by "helpfully" pointing out that some regime will exploit it so it's not worth trying (that's always his message and this piece is no exception with it's call to "forget Internet freedom"). That, when he's not busy trying to convince skittish liberals that they are harming the very people they want to help -- the Secret Policeman's Ruse (yes, you need to go back to 2010 when Morozov first began viciously attacking Clinton's Internet program in the strangest way).
This part of the typical active-measures manual is one that both Morozov and Sami Ben Gharabi used to ill end when they hystericallycampaignedagainst Haystack (a circumvention program devised for deployment in Iran by an outside coder that the State Department in fact didn't use) and the prospect of trying to do circumvention work in Iran. At the same time, WikiLeaks' Jacob Appelbaum joined the chorus on the Mighty Accordian by dumping on the Chinese dissidents who used VPNs that were not his Tor to try to discredit them in the community and with the State Department, their funders. All of this highly concerted effort led not only to disarray and loss of funding for some; it led to a planned hearing about help to cyberdissidents being cancelled -- and this was before the Arab Spring.
Google the term "Haystack" and see the enormous deluge of tech media that piled on here -- joining the frenzied hate of the State Department and its programs ostensibly because this experimental software was going to harm people. The reality is that it wasn't accepted by the State Department, wasn't used, and no one was harmed. But you would never know this from the hysteria wall that prevented rational discussion. What this was really about was the gang of thugs like Appelbaum demanding that people who had proprietary software projects they didn't want to reveal "share" (be collectivized) in the open source movement because this was "better". That the thousands of eyes working on the bugs include secret police and Appelbaum didn't trouble Morozov and others screeching about this. It was one of Morozov's most successful active measures.
See, there was a very strenuous effort by some Arab bloggers and Jillian York and others around the Berkman Center to try to derail the US from helping opposition forces -- and some of these people were either coopted by regimes or simply of anti-American and anti-Israeli political persuasion. In the end, they couldn't stop US involvement in the Arab Spring, which has been a wild tiger to try to ride in any event, with the US damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. The main take-home here is that the kinds of programs and connections and lessons learned that might have taken place got dented at least in part by this vicious campaign against Clinton's program -- one that the Russians also waged on their end by blocking passage of an Internet freedom resolution in the OSCE and hysterically launching a "foreign agents" witch hunt among NGOs, starting with one that they said was "sponsored by Hillary" which monitored elections -- and found them to be fraudulent in Putin's controled space.
All of this strenuous tactical work Morozov and co. were waging in bureaucratic battles in Washington and intelligentsia magazine blog posts and such seemed to fly under the radar of his "larger" intellectual work debunking the sillier concepts coming out of Silicon Valley. There were so many people eager to see some of these inflated egos punctured like Jeff Jarvis or Clay Shirky that they seemed oblivious to how much damage the ultimate message was causing: don't really try to win the Internets because the very process of doing so enables tyrants -- hey, your companies that make stuff only wind up having it accidently sold to the bad guys, boo, hiss. America could never do right.
People in the State Department would laugh when I would point out this was going on. Are they laughing now? But then, some of these people were the same ones funding Jacob Appelbaum well past the sell-by date -- until finally those WikiLeaks grand jury subpoenas on his email and such forced them to realize that they had to let it go.
I think RevMagdalen got it right in the comments to one of Morozov's many Haystack blogs in which among many dubious points he claimed Haystack had attracted politics around itself but Tor had not (false):
Many readers have noticed that this blog seems to be entirely about
Haystack these days, and it didn't take them long to Google and discover
that you, Mr. Morozov, have been a longtime and very vocal proponent of
the idea that the internet cannot and should not be used to promote
freedom. With that background, I'm sure it would be hard to resist
crowing over Haystack's demise. Some authors would consider it
unethical to fail to disclose that history to readers who might be
unfamiliar with your past, but hey, it's their lookout if they can't be
bothered to research people's motives on their own, right?
CYBERSPACE EXISTS LIKE ALL HUMAN MENTAL CONSTRUCTS
Finally how Evgeny so fussily obssesses with scholarly punctiliousness abuot the existence or non-existence of the Internet or "the Internet" or "cyberspace". Of course these things exist; he's soaking in it. What is not cyberspace if it is not his endless afternoons indulging in his net addiction while he refrains from locking up the Internet in a box and throwing in the screwdriver (which he actually claims to do to get work down)? His tweets are a case study in virtuality: the Sage of Soligorsk as witty salonista and flâneur dropping mot after mot, some of them no doubt written by interns.
From two hours ago: "Advice to budding theorists: When in doubt about the originality of
concepts you've just coined, just capitalize them. Or use Latin." From three hours ago: "Now we know why the Mayans died out: They ran out of hackers." Or another from three hours ago: "Evgeny Morozov
@evgenymorozov3h
Excellent essay title in search of excellent content: "Luther Was a Hacktivist."
I think you could probably string these all together at some point and make a book like "Shit My Dad Says".
A MISREADING OF MICROSOFT?
And do we chalk it up to non-native English or just ill will when Morozov takes a statement like this -- which could just as well mean that Microsoft realizes it will have to offer customers more protection because of the enhanced government interest in tracking people -- and pulls this out of it?
Buried in Microsoft’s non-denial is a very peculiar line. Justifying the
need to make its digital products compatible with the needs of security
agencies, Microsoft’s general counsel wrote that “looking forward, as
Internet-based voice and video communications increase, it is clear that
governments will have an interest in using (or establishing) legal
powers to secure access to this kind of content to investigate crimes or
tackle terrorism. We therefore assume that all calls, whether over
the Internet or by fixed line or mobile phone, will offer similar levels
of privacy and security.” Read this again: here’s a senior
Microsoft executive arguing that making new forms of communication less
secure is inevitable – and probably a good thing.
If we have less security and privacy on the Internet than imagined, let's not forget why: the inherent flaws welded into it by one of its chief architects, Tim Berners-Lee, who wanted the Internet deliberately to be open, free, copiable, nonprivate and non-commercial. The very same piracy and copying functions that undermine intellectual property rights are what make it impossible to create a world of privacy, too; the technolibertarians and the technocommunists both failed to realize this.
I do have to say I chuckled when reading today how Cory Doctorow, a vicious copyleftist nerd who has campaigned aggressively against any kind of cybersecurity or anti-piracy regulations, has now come around on DRM in a funny way, as we learn from libtech; finally gets that the same features that protect easy copying of content might come in handy to protect grabbing of data and invasion of privacy, too.
SECRET POLICEMAN'S RUSE REDUX
Now comes the Secret Policeman's Ruse again -- making Americans feel guilty for their sins not because they might hurt themselves -- oh no (because they might have trouble believing because, you know, there's no case; WikiLeaks has no case). No, it's about their troubles harming someone else. You know, getting that dissident in trouble if you visit him or contact him.
The secret policeman wants to grab hold of your liberal guilt and gullibility and convince you that if you help a dissident hack out of a dictatorship, why, you might harm him. Better not to. Better to wait. Better not to help. Mission accomplished!
So, we want to catch all the terrorists before they are born? Fine, Big
Data – and big bugs in our software and hardware – are here to help.
But, lest we forget, they would also help the governments of China and
Iran to predict and catch future dissidents. We can’t be building
insecure communication infrastructure and expect that only Western
governments would profit from it.
Except -- that thinking is circular and ridiculous. We never said, "Because the Soviets had tank superiority in Europe, let's not have tanks, and let's not even have Cruise missiles". Just because they can use the same infrastructure for ill doesn't mean we abandon it -- it's a fight. And wait, who said Microsoft is building deliberately insecure infrastructure to let governments in the back door to fight terrorism? Evgeny has frankly pulled that out of his ass. I really want a third and tenth opinion on this because the paragraph he's cited out of context reads like in fact it may say the opposite. Does anybody else dare say this? Does everybody just swallow this shit whole?
Evgeny couldn't be more delighted about "information sovereignty" -- in fact he practically wets himself welcoming Iran's foreward-thinking policies that ensured it could control, dissidents, sure, but more importantly, be protected from that awful evil NSA that Snowden has brought ill tidings about. Hmm, and maybe that was the idea all along with this defector and his Kremlin-friendly hacker pals -- to enable Russia and China and Iran and other autorcrats to tell their people that in order to protect their social privacy from the Man -- GosDep! -- they have to have sovereign Internets filtering out everything that could harm healthy living and right thinking. Yes, that means snaring some dissidents along the way, but privacy is so important, it's worth it.
It's like one old peacenik recently told me on Facebook -- she'd be happy to have 9/11 repeat every 20 years (!) if only our privacy could be ensured. Imagine! 3,000 people are to die every generation just so that her email with her addle-headed ditherings about evil American capitalism and imperialism can be hidden from, um, Big Brother.
But, you say, if Morozov is explaining how people will suffer from information sovereignty, how can you claim that he is welcoming it? Because he's making it seem inevitable. Because he's not explainIng how in fact people fight it, at home and abroad. Because he is deadly cynical -- and his description of everything in this deadly cynical tint is then invoked as diktat. You see, now, we should just go along with what they want at the WCIT.
LIVE JOURNAL WASN'T DOWN
Morozov makes it seem like he's savvy -- and concerned -- about maintenance issues on Live Journal seeming to crop up at strategically important times.
But...it's not true. I was on LiveJournal all night for two nights running in the days before Navalny's verdict; in fact I was reading his LJ; in fact I was translating his LJ and a few others and refreshing the pages and reading comments. There was no maintenance problem. I didn't hear anybody else claiming there were. Sure, there are at times, not only because it's big and slow but because the Russian government probably really doesn't interfere. But it hasn't in fact gotten in the way of a huge outpouring of expression around the Navalny trial. Therefore, how are we to understand Morozov's strange claim: as a threat?
See, that's the sort of thing that must be asked about this man, so I ask it.
THE SECRET POLICEMAN'S RUSE FOR REAL
Now here come the nut graphs -- and Morozov could have saved us the other 3500 words that are rehashes of his dyspeptic views already spun for years now:
This is the real tragedy of America’s “Internet freedom agenda”: it’s
going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the
hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning. America has managed to
advance its communications-related interests by claiming high moral
ground and using ambiguous terms like “Internet freedom” to hide many
profound contradictions in its own policies. On matters of “Internet
freedom” – democracy promotion rebranded under a sexier name – America
enjoyed some legitimacy as it claimed that it didn’t engage in the kinds
of surveillance that it itself condemned in China or Iran. Likewise, on
matters of cyberattacks, it could go after China’s cyber-espionage or
Iran’s cyber-attacks because it assured the world that it engaged in
neither.
Both statements were demonstrably false but lack of
specific evidence has allowed America to buy some time and influence.
These days are gone. Today, the rhetoric of “Internet freedom agenda”
looks as trustworthy as George Bush’s “freedom agenda” after Abu Ghraib.
Washington will have to rebuild its policies from scratch. But, instead
of blaming Snowden, Washington must thank him. He only exposed the
shaky foundations of already unsustainable policies. These policies,
built around vaporous and ambiguous terms like “Internet freedom” and
“cyberwar” would have never survived the complexities of global politics
anyway.
But nothing about these paragraphs is true. The Internet freedom agenda of America stands. The job of protesting when anti-corruption bloggers like Navalny go on trial remains -- along with other bloggers in Russian and elsewhere who have been silenced, beaten, jailed or even killed. These are very, very basic human rights causes that America will continue to take up and continue to be appreciated for when it does.
US officials will have hard explanations to make, especially due to the riotious uproar of agitprop that Snowden himself has concocted and perfected with Assange's and Poitras' assistance -- and amplification courtesy of the Kremlin. It takes awhile to explain to people that no one has actually read their mail and that their real problem is their governments that in fact do -- and published them in the paper as Evgeny's homeland does.
But I doubt any dissident getting a grant or equipment to help with Internet freedom is suddenly going to reject the financing due to Snowden. Oh, there may be a few who will be whipped up by Jillian Yorke or something, but not really. Abu Ghraib definitely tarnished America's reputation and undermined its ability to advocate for human rights. Yet it did press on in world fora, and among those people it helped and those rights it advocated were Egyptian and other Arab NGOs, despite whatever objection Morozov and Sami had. And Morozov and his likeminded nihilists never have a good explanation about terrorism -- the terrorism that continues in Iraq after we leave and will continue in Afghanistan after we leave; the terrorism that led to 50 people killed in marketplaces and schools and mosques again and again and again in Iraq to the point that most of the 100,000 people killed there were killed by terrorists, some backed by state, not US troops. And the same is true of Afghanistan. The anti-anti-tyranny club Morozov gleefully commands never has a way of coping with these realities -- they are de-rendered.
HOW THEY DO IT IN BELARUS AND RUSSIA
One of the most irritating features of this whole NSA hysteria deliberately unlished by Edward Snowden and his hacker pals at WikiLeaks is that Americans and West Europeans discussing this don't seem to realize what real surveillance of a real totalitarian state with real consequences is. And so as always -- with SOPA, with CISPA, with CFAA, with a host of other Internet legislative issues -- they take the hysterical hyperthetical and the breatheless edge-case over the actual sense and meaning of real practice.
In Belarus, the government simply jumps in -- actually, with the help of an Austrian telecom as it happenS -- and exploits features of Skype -- that were present even before Microsoft, actually -- or just makes use of Firefox's handy feature to save passwords -- and grabs everybody's email and chat and online footprint -- just because they can.
They allow some websites to thrive just to capture everybody going to them. As a Belarusian trade union leader told me even 25 years ago before the Internet, "Glasnost is a cowbell around our necks they use to find us." That's how it works.
So they get everybody's yammerings, then they just dump it into the main newspaper, still called Sovietskaya Belarus, just like the secret police are still called the KGB, and the materials are not only used to embarass and tendentiously frame opposition leaders, it is used to prosecute them. They actually go to jail because their government has a huge surveillance component; they don't just spout hysterically on Twitter about how someone is seeing their cat pictures; they really go to jail.
In Russia, an opposition leader like Boris Nemtsov or Alexei Navalny will find the transcripts of their cell phones and their emails spilled out in the press -- by a murky process that no one every seems to investigate too closely -- and the whole world gloats at their petty squabbles or nasty characterizations of each other -- or in the case of Navalny, is actually surprised not to find much of a scandal.
WHAT'S THE BIG DATA SCRAPE REALLY ALL ABOUT?
This sort of thing is all too common in these countries -- and people in the West don't seem to get it.
That is, they get the process when it happens to somebody like Anthony Weiner, a mayor candidate exposed once again as sexting on the Internet with young women despite already supposedly apologizing for this electronic ego-pumping addiction and vowing to reform. The government didn't get in Weiner's mail, but perhaps some right-wing group did and then they become suspect.
But the public can't seem to grasp that when there's something like the last phone call Trayvon Martin made to his friend, the reason why we can't really pin it down today, and have to rely on the words of a flustered teenager changing her story, is precisely because the government doesn't store and retain and make accessible the content of your phone calls. Hello! If they did, we'd know much more about what happened that night.
As I've always explained on this blog, the big IT companies scraping data not only for marketing but for political campaigns (as we discovered with Obama's successful campaign) are the source of the problem, and blaming one of the end-users, the NSA, is merely to succumb to the grand distraction these very cunning WikiLeaks hacksters have created in a kind of open-source active measure along with the Russian and Chinese governments -- and anyone else who wants to pile on.
The slurping up of metadata by Verizon is meaningless because it doesn't scrape the content of your call; they don't have your call's sense and meaning, it's content. Duh, we get it that the various proximity data points and social network and location data points might yield some sort of profile about you, but so do your Four-Square check-ins and tweets.
When Google scans your g-mail to pick out keywords and sell you ads for Geico, you don't complain even though every word of your communication had to be stored and analyzed for that to happen; when the government peels off the top layer of this data packet to match it to known information about terrorist groups or other criminal activities, you whine that your privacy is invaded. How childish.
Given how much hysterical hype there is on this now, I'm simply not going to yield to all the facile talk about FISA courts and such and will keep demanding findings and cases. We haven't had a single case of anyone claiming their rights were violated by this big NSA dragnet, and meanwhile the constant whining that we can't know because the FISA courts are secret doesn't cut it -- when there are clients whose lawyers are concerned they've been nabbed only on the basis of a secret FISA court review of such electronic information, they complain. Maybe they don't keep complaining becuase they know the government has a case. Or maybe they have another strategy. If there were a person who really could point to a false arrest on the basis of invasion of his metadata, we would hear about it in the country that has produced Glenn Greenwald, lawyer, journalist, friend to hackers, threat-conveyor, and who knows, possible defendant in some future case hinging on the decision of a judge that journalists who know about crimes committed and refuse to testify about them cannot expect immunity from prosecution. Whether that judicial decision is right or wrong actually depends on whether there really was ever any good will or sincerity on Greenwald's part -- and I remain unconvinced to date.
INTERNET OF THINGS DRIVES MOROZOV TO THE STATE FARM
Morozov plays his hand here more clearly as a statist in the end -- despite his endless derision of weak Western states faced with cunning Eastern tyrants -- because he lauds European regulation of the Internet and thinks it was a mistake to "go into the cloud". Here we will learn anew the difference between sovkhoz and kolkhoz.
He converts this old-fashioned bureaucratic centralist statism of his, that went out with Brezhnev and Tito, into a faux anarchy fighting the machine -- fighting the capitalist bourgeois Internte of things with a revolutionary plan to turn it into a state arm.
Yes, why, just like me, (although I've been writing about IOT for years before he did) he begins to warn of the Internet of Things and how dangerous this is. But here's the difference: for me, every threat that comes from the Internet in the form of people or companies or governments has a remedy: a free market in levels of service -- in our case, First Amendment levels and Fourth Amendment levels, if you will. The Internet is merely another human artifact and the laws of humanity apply to it; maybe Morozov's problem is that he isn't a technophobe but a misanthrope. What has made the Internet -- and yes, it's a real thing, very real, and will bite Zhenya in the ass some day -- is that it is diverse and pluralistic -- made of individuals, companies, nonprofits, governments, and multilaterals. These represent competing interests and that's ok. It isn't the end of the world if some companies demand that you show your real identity and use a phone to sign you up and end your unaccountable anonymity but also sell your data to make a living; if someone wants unaccountable anonymity, or no data sales, great, they can live on a darknet but then they can't then expect to organize 20,000 people on Facebook, they'll have to make do with Twitter. And so on.
GOVERNMENT FIRST
For Morozov, like others in his jetset, only blanket police changes will do -- he implies that the entire Internet has to be run from Geneva by UN bureaucrats who have read Zizek (although he's sly enough never to really come out with a detailed positive vision, you have to etch it in like a batik). Even so, he gives away the store at times: He pictures the smartness of yours shoes or your umbrella or your toothbrush as somehow *first* being available to the government.
But that's arrant nonsense. The government is the last in line for the dregs. Like the dystopia envisioned in the sci-fi novel Snowcrash, which prefigured the Internet and virtual worlds, we're in the world of Mr. Lee's Hong Kong (already visited by Snowden!) and the US as a kind of diminished postal services island. So the real people who first have this data are corporations and mafias and of course hackers. They already control us and already find us and know where we live. Gen. Alexander explained the threats to the Internet are hostile governments and hackers like Anonymous, and that tells you who already really controls the Internet.
The hackers that Morozov seldom chastises (because they're thrilling! because he's still hoping to harness their revolutionary fervour to create the state farm!) are the ones that already thrive in this and can plan to hack into your pace-maker and shut if off if they don't like your blog -- unless of course they die first testing zappers on themselves or snorting heroin, because that's what hackers often do.
The government in fact is what you will want to have to keep you from being persecuted by these other entities; they will be the protectors of civil rights, not a bunch of drugged out Silicon Valley start-up freaks or the goofball script kiddies and sinister and seasoned anarcho-communists trailing behind them.
And there he goes again -- glibly claiming that because Google scrapes our g-mail to pitch ads -- which troubles him not one whit, though it should -- that the NSA has access to our content. It doesn't. It has access to metadata that no one has yet proven was misused to violate a real individual's real civil rights.
LEGAL NIHILISM
Oh, and here it comes, Bazarov-style legal nihilism!
Laws Won't Be Much Help
As our gadgets and previously
analog objects become “smart,” this Gmail model will spread everywhere.
One set of business models will supply us with gadgets and objects that
will either be free or be priced at a fraction of their real cost. In
other words, you get your smart toothbrush for free – but, in exchange,
you allow it to collect data on how you use the toothbrush. It’s this
data that will eventually finance the cost of the toothbrush. Or, for
objects with screens or speakers, you might see or hear a personalized
ad based on your use of the device – and it’s the ad that will
underwrite the cost. This, for example, is the model that Amazon is
already pursuing with its Kindle ereaders: if you want a cheaper model,
you simply accept to see advertising on their screens. Amazon’s ultimate
Faustian bargain would be to offer us a free ereader along with free
and instantaneous access to all of the world’s books on one condition:
we will agree to let it analyze everything we read and serve us ads
accordingly.
But...the world already works that way. And if anything, in the wake of the Snowden-induced hysteria, Verizon is now sending out emails asking customers if they want to opt out from data sales.
And laws will be of help -- and hey, that's what CISPA was before you all hacked it to death, remember? It regulated relations between the government and private Internet companies so that privacy could be protected while crime could be fought -- but you didn't like that. You wanted Obama to be able to issue edicts instead -- and get James Rosen's emails for real.
THE BIG DATA BAZAAR
Like Jaron Lanier and Eric Schdmit and Jaren Cohen, Morozov climbs on this crazy bandwagon of predicting the sale of services like medical care based on big data in some actual marketplace. They don't seem to realize that human services are really still not replaceable by bots (especially in hospitals, in fact) and that the data is terribly devalued and is only kept artificially inflated by the fiction of the social contract of "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" that social media now gives us -- we provide content they can copy and scrape and sell and they give us a crappy platform.
This is going to be changing as increasingly the idea that content has to be sold catches on -- in fact already some of these pioneers are speaking of this now even as they scorned it in the era of Farmville or Groupon when they thought they could just keep getting time-suck in exchange for ad-clicks -- ad-clicks that never gave any ROI, as finally they found out. Morozov must not have noticed the revelation at TechCrunch from one of the Facebook execs that click ads just don't work for anybody to pay anything seriously -- especially on mobile. The model -- and the world will change as a result.
That is, the marketplace that Morozov hysterically invokes as a violator of rights -- big sales of big data by evil exploiting capitalists -- isn't going to happen that way -- and where it does exist it is waning, but instead, individuals and small and medium business will at least find its place as the bigger Internet monopolies like Google are forced to break up. A facebook will be something your local phone company puts on for you.
Fumes Morozov, however, behind the times, "Market logic has replaced morality" -- as if commerce and capitalism is by definition immoral. Who says? Sour post-Soviet socialists? But market logic -- a willing buyer and a willing seller -- is what freedom is all about. Why is that so distasteful to this post-communist East European scold? As he admits, people willingly turn over data and time to these gadgets and aren't horrified by either corporate or government intrusion as much as the tech set thinks as they are scared by their own shadow on Twitter.
When Morozov invokes the notion of "political latency" (what a term! worthy of Zizek!) i.e. that if the environmental cause is making progress -- lights now go off when no one is in the room -- then the efficiency of "scientific" notions of "betterworldism" deciding what is "best" for us now works to collectivize ourselves and our property. He must not have looked out the window in any big city. Loads of people never turning off lights; many of the lights are the little screens of gadgets. The reality is, the gadget revolution that made so many millions spend millions and put further stress on the electrical grid as a result completely undid whatever advantage you might have gotten from conservation in the pre-Internet days.
Then Morozov winds up as dishonestly as any of his targets of derision like Shirky or Jarvis. He completely manufactures a model -- that "we're all" going to make this Faustian bargain where in exchange for having "smart gadgets" we will sell the data they scrape to either the highest commercial bidder or the government or both. But who said we were going to do that? Who said anyone values our data beyond a one dollar one-time sale -- when they already got most of it for free?! It would be great if it goes as I'm hoping-- with more access to a more diversified market for content and services on the Internet. I'm more hopeful than Morozov and I think it will. Humans usually correct the monsters they make.
ALL POWER TO THE CODERS
But...The power is in the hands of the coders, not yet in the digital commodity which has been devalued -- and in fact, what the Internet of Things does is not commodify data but collectivize everything and put it all in the hands of the technocommunists -- not the user with his scraped data. In fact, it may be too late to imagine yourself as an economic actor on this scene. We'll have to see what cartels and what hacker attacks occur, in fact, and then there's this: all these wired gadgets will work like ass. Tech stuff always breaks down.
The people who will above all possess the data -- completely left out of Morozov's equation and no accident, comrade -- are the coders. They're a ruling class that Morozov hopes to work along side (like Joshua Foust does) because he will understand them and understand them so well that he will like them and imagine they are some bulwark against the depradations of the exploiters. But it is this New Class that will be the problem for us all, not "commercialization".
So Morozov's solution is actually to demarketize -- to get rid of markets -- because markets are horrors:
As long as we have no good explanation as to why a piece of data
shouldn’t be on the market, we should forget about protecting it from
the NSA, for, even with tighter regulation, intelligence agencies would
simply buy – on the open market – what today they secretly get from
programs like Prism.
But in fact, a free market of Internet services, including data protection, including making the stuff work, including user-generated content, is what will enable freedom, not destroy it. That's because of the plurality of actors and the free determination of value. Like so many Soviets, Morozov fears commerce -- hates it. That blinds him from seeing that markets, like the one that enables his books and lectures to sell, are good things. Right now, in fact our information isn't very useful, and it is being scraped to feed a threadbare and dying model --the click ad. In the future, the other models of individual users assigning value and marketers emerging to aggregate and harvest this will change things.
PIRATE PARTY IS 'NONSENSE' -- EXCEPT, NOT REALLY
Morozov pretends that he advocates not leaving everything to those young coders, and even the sectarianism of the Pirate Party. But listen to how diabolical he is with this:
What we need is the mainstreaming of “digital” topics – not their
ghettoization in the hands and agendas of the Pirate Parties or whoever
will come to succeed them. We can no longer treat the “Internet” as just
another domain – like, say, “the economy” or the “environment” – and
hope that we can develop a set of competencies around it. Rather, we
need more topical domains - “privacy” or “subjectivity” to overtake the
domain of the network. Forget an ambiguous goal like “Internet freedom” –
it’s an illusion and it’s not worth pursuing. What we must focus on is
creating environments where actual freedom can still be nurtured and
preserved.
Note the message here really is this: forget Internet freedom, it's an illusion. Sublimal it's not! Before he would hammer this message subliminally, by constantly having water wear away the stone, telling us the tyrants were really winning the Internet, so we should give up. Now, he's saying airily that the Pirates are has-beens and he envisions a world of topicality like "privacy" to be above the mechanics of the Internet and the corporations that run it. How? By taking them over with a network of elites and/or an agency in Washington that regulates them? In one of his essays for the New Republic in fact Morozov advocates just that to deal with the problem of uneven Apple "innovation".
But aren't we saying the same thing, if I'm saying we need to enable free markets in goods and services and Morozov says he is for "creating environments where actual freedom can still be nurtured and preserved"? Not at all. For Morozov, that environment is a state farm, at the end of the day, run by the smart people, like him. (So, the coders want a collective farm; Evgeny wants a state farm. You know the difference.)
Morozov is right that the Pirate Party's utopian vision of remaking governance by Internetizing it is bunkum -- but I would say it's because they follow the same rules of the Benevolent Dictatorships of Open Source which are antithetical to liberal democracy.
And what he would do is spout incoherent nonsense himself, after saying the Pirate Party's notion of running parliament like Wikipedia (the horror!) was nonsense:
But the good thing that did come out of the Pirates was the nudge to get
everyone else thinking about digital matters and their impact on the
future of democracy. This is the content – rather than the process –
part. That project must continue but, perhaps, be reoriented from
pursuing the faux goal of “Internet freedom” to thinking about
preserving real freedoms instead.
Er, just having a "national conversation" are we -- and "thinking about digital matters"? what the hell is the content behind that? That's not concent, that is in fact content-free process waiting to be filled with some prefabbed ideology just like the technocommunism that always seems to be lurking behind Morozov's door. Faux Internet freedom? Is that like Marxist "false consciousness"? Real freedoms are preserved by law -- but Morozov gave that up many paragraphs ago when he said it would do no good against the Internet's tide of anarchy. Oh, we'll see about that.
And finally, the Grand Insight:
Information consumerism, like its older sibling energy consumerism, is a much more dangerous threat to democracy than the NSA.
But by that, Morozov means that anybody wanted to make money from the Internet and data and content anyway, when it should have been all a selfless subbotnik. Pretty soon we will be told not to consume because that is so bourgeois. He's forgetting that there are consumers and buyers -- but also prosumers, and that the buyers cannot harm their consumers or they don't have customers anymore.
SNOWDEN UBER ALLES
And finally, there's this: why in Germany, why now? I'd love to know who and how this piece was commissioned, eh? All of a sudden? In Germany? Now? Where Jacob Appelbaum has decided to remain indefinitely, after publishing his sensational interview, along with Laura Poitras, of Snowden in Hong Kong? After Snowden was awarded a whistleblower's award? When Snowden has become an item of domestic warfare for the SDP against Merkel?
In the end, Morozov has said nothing more original than "information wants to be free". But it doesn't. As any consultant or writer like Morozov will tell you, "your information wants to be free; mine is available for a fee."
Annual Wikimania conference, held in Haifa, Israel in 2011. No one knows who most of the editors are, but they are generally found to be white males. Photo by Sebastian Wallroth.
So here's one of those PandoDaily posts that help sell the gadgets better. So Nathaniel Mott is using that "iconoclastic" trick of bloggers purporting to go against the status quo (the hatred of fanboyz of something stupid tech companies are doing) to in fact support the establishment.
I can't help thinking of that deliciously awful put-down by Nick Danton, the Valleywag entrepreneur:
Oh @sarahcuda, you matter. As scraping courtier to the tech princes, flatterer-in-chief at Pander Daily, you are a gift of a subject.
Somebody aptly calls the overpriced $1300 new Google-manufactured Chromebook a glorified browser with a keyboard attached to it, that oh, yeah, you can swipe on, and Mott turns it into an epiphany about Luddites Who Stop Progress.
I remember it was one of the pioneers in virtual reality in Second Life at Stanford who bragged on Facebook that his little two-year-old daughter automatically tried to swipe the TV set because she was used to swiping the i-pad, and found that it was "b'oken" because it didn't behave as she, an obviously evolved creature, expected it to.
I remember my father, an engineer, coming home from work at Xerox Corporation one day some 45 years ago and telling me that "the boys in the string ties" as he used to call the people in California making up different wild gadgets were making them try screens with "light pens" as he called them. In other words, if you held this "light pen," a pen made to be able to interact with the pixels on a TV screen, you could make the screen "do things". It was among those early tests with interactive screens -- the pen would make the screen "do stuff". But this was an annoyance because you'd have to take your hands off the keyboard, then pick up that pen, which would get lost, so they had it corded to the computer like a phone. This was before the mouse.
In any event, here we all are, and we're supposed to swipe stuff. All well and good, soon everything -- bathroom mirrors, kitchen tables, bedside stands, etc. will have screens or be screen-enabled and be swipable.
But here's the problem with ubiqituous computing or the semantic web or the Internet of Things or whatever they will call it, and it's not that awkward gap between keyboard and hand-swipe: the knowledge base.
You're supposed to be able to touch anything or call to anything and get answers from those "smart" things -- smart phones, smart tablets, even smart bathroom mirrors or tables in the future.
And where will this smartness come from?
Well, it will only come from Wikipedia, which is highly flawed and written by a bunch of anonymous and unaccountable geeks nearly impervious to the rest of the Internet because there really aren't valid votes on their work or even the ability to share the pages for discussion (and recently I was told by a well-informed Wiki-geek that this was due to fears of privacy concerns, that they'd have to hook their pages up to Facebook's servers to process the "likes". Sigh.)
To be sure, there are a few competitors, like the drama-ridden and sectarian-hobbled Quora, which I don't play, because nobody pays me to write smart essays on my areas of expertise there -- they don't even pay me in Quorabux to enable me to buy a t-shirt or a free Coke or something. There's also Qwiki, that was an attempt to make an encyclopedia pulling in your social web and Wikipedia both, with sometimes hilarious results, which is now morphing into yet another "innovation" of the tired three elements of social/video/pictures only this time as video/pictures/social.
So that does leave Wikipedia far out ahead.
As you know, I have at least 21 theses against Wikipedia -- and more. I could add "and this awfulness is used as the tainted basis now for the 'smartness' of all smart-phones etc."
Imagine I'm at a party and everyone whispers into their Apple Watch or their Google Glass, "Who is Catherine A. Fitzpatrick?" And they get my vandalized and ridiculous Wikipedia entry partly taken from Enclopedia Dramatica. So while they are all whispering to each other that my entire career seems to have been obsessed with taking down a Soviet-themed commuter college digital arts department named Woodbury in suburban California, or fattening up my children adopted in Soviet Russia in order to eat them, or that I am "the biggest asshole of the Internet" (if the vandalism happens to not yet have been removed at that particular hour), what am I to do?
Well, fortunately by that time, someone will have created the Right of Reply ap or some other kind of Propaganda Layar (which is how it will be seen) to counteract that, um, "voice of the people," Wikipedia. So Wicked Impediment would have harmed yet another social transaction, but who cares? The nerd in New Jersey who lives to spite middle-aged WikiLeaks critics he loathes lives to fight another day in anonymity.
That's just a tiny thing -- what if the Olympics managers asks the smartthing for the national anthem of Kazakhstan, and gets not the real national anthem, but Borat's Song? (That actually happened in real life).
Or what if the President of the United States summons on his aging Blackberry or Google Glass, if he wears one, the facts about some country he is about to order invaded, and the Wikipedia entry is skewed with over-hype from that country's defense ministry about its defense capacity that in fact is wildly exaggerated?
And so on.
I used to think the only solution to fix the awfulness of Wikipedia that would actually happen (because disbanding it or making all the editors unmask themselves and be accountable) would be having Google buy it out. They might fix up some of its obvious stupidities and make it work better. After all, it's Wikipedia that provides the fig leaf to Google, the Ad Agency, by turning up search results with actually non-commercial "knowledge" or the appearance of same, on every search, before you see the SEO-skewed results or the paid ads. Google Glass needs Wikipedia even more voraciously than regular online search sitting at your computer or i-phone.
Will the new scrutiny and burden on Wikipedia finally make this open-source cult bastion crack and crumble like the old Soviet Union and finally be forced to reform? Will that reform perpetuate it and/or make it worse?
That same well-informed geek told me that no one in Wikipedia would ever countenance the idea that Google would buy out Wikipedia because a) it's not for sale and is nonprofit and b) they knew that Google had failed at this task only a few years ago with its Knoll thing. Nolls. Whatever they were called. "Units of knowledge". Yes, it failed and closed. So what? Google is better, maybe, at buying out start-ups that already had some user testing.
And yes, there's a price that likely Jimmy Wales could be bought at. Well, as I said to the Wiki-geek, get rid of that creepy leader of yours with the creepy eyes and then maybe they'll talk.
Forbes has an article about how 7 millions phones have been jailbroken. It's got a video with the typical freaky long-haired geek whose handle is @Saurik explaining how to jailbreak your phone and justifying it by showing all the neat little thingies you can do with it, like jumble your icons.
Seven million. Or maybe it's already 10 million by now! But some people have multiple phones.
But let's call it seven million for jailbreaks and anti-SOPA today. That's the operative number for the active geek population today in America.
So is this number stabilizing now? Or is this population a growing threat to society and the rule of law with its ethics-free hacking or the justification of same by power users?
Is it, as one man says in the comments, that "we are all" becoming a little bit geeky and more people jailbreak their phones even if not geeks. Or is it really mainly the core of the geek population?
Given the deplorable state of education in this country and the lagging behind of other industrial nations in STEM, I think likely that number is stabilizing, and only increased through immigration, which is indeed a good reason to encourage entrepreneurial visas and the rest in immigration reform.
What effect will this have on the stability of society in general?
In theory, if there was good will and ethics (there aren't), what Tim Berners-Lee prescribes (no angel he) would work to mitigate the Internet of Things:
“The right to have root on your machine is the right to store things which operate on your behalf,” Tim Berners-Lee told the audience at a Linux conference in Australia
last month. Without that right, the creator of the world wide web
contends, users are subject to agendas they can neither control or, in
many cases, even be aware of. He acknowledges the need to devise better
security protocols to make sure that users with such access do not
inadvertantly instal malicious code, but it is clear that he sees this
as a smaller threat than that of the ubiquitous opacity. Linux is the
language of Android, so clearly his remarks were addressed to Apple. Why couldn’t root access be an expert setting for iOS? Only the geeks will use it anyway.
In other words, if you, instead of a proprietary company can completely control your gadget, they can't control/watch/modify you etc.
But, even so, it means being under the control of code and coders and their lack of ethics, amply demonstrated everywhere. That is, if to jailbreak your phone you need to go get something like RedSn0w, or then install Cydia aps, or get hooked up to other websites and services you are still in the hands of coders and code-as-law.
Where will it stop?
Oh, as you can see from this screenshot I found on Flickr, what this is all about is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Surprise, surprise! They're happy to stick it to the man and harass Apple by inciting jailbreaking, which people endlessly argue about being legal or illegal.
Cydia was a bit secretive in this interview. Scoble asked three times for a website address. They wouldn't give one. Why? Well, because it doesn't really describe much about jailbreaking or this company, says Saurik. He has just hired a community manager, which makes it sound like a company! But he admits the company really just consists of him and her, and, as he says, a vague network of "other people working on other things".
Why, so secret, Saurik? Both he and his community manager (who stays humbly in the background while Saurik pontificates although Scoble does his damnedest to try to include her as a woman in the conversation) claim that jailbreaking causes no harm and doesn't de-stabilize your phone. Oh, watch out when you upgrade the OS as you could lose all those cool aps.
The website is indeed ultra-spare. I guess what you have to do is hit up Saurik on Twitter, where as an ancient oldbie (like me on @Prokofy lol), he has 330,000 plus followers (I only have like 2000 lol, but then, I don't jailbreak phones or code cool aps!).
Or...maybe not. Saurik says he gets so many replies that he physically can't even scroll through them! Well there's (finally, as he says) his website.
But mainly his work and customer support for his aps has been on Twitter.
So...jailbreaking and the aps you can then add with it is...one of those things where you have to hunt around a little and find a guy who knows a guy or go in the IRC channel or Google around links to you get it eventually.
Would you rather have your phone under control by a company that has customer service, stores with customer service agents in real life, a board of trustees, fiscal responsibility, financial reports, stock, etc. etc. Or would you rather have your phone jailbroken and entrusted to nested variants of various shadowy aps made by people with nicknames that might or might not see your tweet? And do whatever with your information?
That really is the question. The geeks NEVER put it that way. They just assume that *as* geeks, they will jailbreak, control the actions of other geeks through peer-to-peer pressure, and that's it.
But the rest of us who don't want to bother to fish around in roots and whatnot will be at their mercy. And then it really is a question of trusting them or Apple. They don't trust Apple. We do. That's why they have two people in their company, and Apple has thousands.
h/t Robert Scoble who did the interview featured on the Forbes article and whose Facebook feed is where I picked up the Forbes story -- and all of this is actually stuck on something called Newsle which is tracking every article and share...
It was bad enough when it was "The Internet of Things" -- wiring up
things like your home or car to run them via your smartphone on the
Internet. I've written about the horrors awaiting underneath the upbeat claims of tekkies of this Brave New World.
But now they are trying to make it even more palatable and saleable
by calling it "The Internet of My Things" the way everything
collectivized online is called "My" to make the user have the illusion
he is in some actually personal private space. So some media that is
drilling you and making you sign up for their forced social media scrape merely to share stuff creates things called "My Slate" which
aren't really so much "my" anymore -- but theirs. And on some of these
services, every time your friends go read an article, they see you
"liked it," and they might even wonder why, and you might even wish you
could get rid of some of that. In fact some of the services showed you
when you merely read an article, and started posting it to all your
social media automatically -- people hated this and those services began
to die out. They'll be back. The drive to make "what is yours mine" is
big.
I saw the Internet of Things prototyped in Second Life about 7-8 years ago by Babbage Linden (Jim Purbrick, a very creative fellow who probably doesn't think of himself as an IOT founder). I wrote about it enthusiastically initially as well as did Mark Wallace, thinking only in the context of the community of that little virtual world, not the wider Internet, and focusing more on the rating than the tagging functions. (Purbrick went on to conceive and prototype IOT as helping, for example, people use Second Life as a 3d data base to keep track of their real-life carbon-emitting objects to assess their carbon footprint; today he is doing things like making 3D printing from personal web information.)
But even then I had some misgivings about all this tagging and the inflation of the reputational system instantly welded into it back then, and watched as Grid Shepherd, as the scraper avatar was known, by the development company Electric Sheep, scraped the entire grid and took everyone's objects and put them into search -- and abuse-reported it back in 2007. This scrape including things accidently left for sale, sometimes merely to be moved from one person to another, which then became vulnerable to theft. People did not like having their property advertised in this way -- and it was all devised basically as a prototype of how to make an Internet of Things to increase shopping on the oneline marketplace. I called it "Greed Shepherd's Big Fleece." The geeks then -- as they always do now -- snarked that people's items were in search "anyway" and were fare game and that the dbase "needed to be populated" to be "useful" and therefore they couldn't have "opt-in" or even "opt-out".
Well, but nobody thought some powerful force, funded by old media (CBS), would come in and scrape all their simulators and put everything they owned into search so, among other things, people could pry into their private lives and ridicule or even blackmail them, i.e. if they were gay online but in real life had not come out of the closet. It was awful.
For a while, there was a program that picked up everything on every sim, threw it into search, and then when you arrived on that sim, you could easily search it again to find the product or item you were searching for. This made scavenger hunts, a popular activity, immediately deprecated, and so people had to devise ways of naming things with fake names or hiding them in other things to play such a game. While it seemed convenient for a store, people hated the erosion of privacy, even in a virtual world where privacy is only a theory, really, easily defeated with cams and chat loggers and such. Eventually, this feature in the browser was removed -- probably it was too big a strain on the data base and servers anyway. It was replaced with a function you could toggle for each item -- to place it in search or not. Merchants defeated this by checking the object to be in search forever by closing the "mod" perms. And so on. Online life is filled with pernicious features with destructive social impacts as we constantly see in the prototype of Web 3.0 (or 3.D as it was known for a time) in Second Life.
Few people of influence take Second Life seriously, and don't realize it is a prototyper, consciously or not. And it doesn't matter, in a way, because real life gadgetry is soon overtaking even the fantastic prototyping functions of Second Life 7 years ago.
As usual, the way this technology is sold is not by thinking of its larger implications and negative impacts -- obviously -- but how it might be useful -- and make fortunes for people:
As usual my friend Phil Windley, whose distributed event technology I wrote about in the second installment of this series, isn’t just imagining this future. He’s helping to invent it:
“Kynetx is getting ready to introduce a product called SquareTag.
SquareTag is a simple way to use personal clouds to keep track of things
you own and imbue them with functionality they might not otherwise
have.” – Introducing SquareTag
So far these are mostly just passive tags with QR codes, but the system
is technology-agnostic and will happily embrace RFID, NFC, you name it.
What matters isn’t the tag, it’s the connection you forge between a
tagged item and your personal cloud.
And as useful, it's about how it would be useful to a nerd -- most people don't take their smartphones with them to change a filter and take elaborate notes on its date, make, place of purchase, etc. If they do have their smartphone with them, it's to text their girlfriend or watch "Waking Dead," not write about filter details. But of course, the "Internet of My Things" is rapidly developing and "the Internet of Your Things" is coming out to meet you, with the manufacturers taking the work out of note-taking by putting all this information into *their* tags. And so on.
My daughter recently asked what "the cloud" was. I had gone to TechCrunch two years ago and asked a number of the ardent evangelists for various cloud services to explain their technology to me. I went around and listened to their pitches, read some articles, and concluded:
The cloud is other people's computers, not yours.
In that sense, it is like the MMORPG game developers' fearful mantra about their games:
The client is in the hands of the enemy.
That is, their game has to be viewed through a browser that enables the user to hack them and bother other people. The cloud is merely you taking things you used to keep on your own personal hard drive under at least password protection, and under at least the theoretical obfuscation of being one of a zillion and not searchable unless you turned on filesharing programs -- and then putting them on to other people's computers. Putting them on to other people's computers so that you can "access them anywhere" and protect against data loss if your device is wrecked, but it's still about other people's computers, not yours, and your stuff becoming theirs, not yours. Really, that's all it is!
Hence, my intervention below. And I can't stress enough: it's not about the hypotheticals and edge-cases that your vacuum cleaner in the cloud is going to be hacked and start running on its own and wake you up in the middle of the night or all your doors will lock to keep you out of your own home, although we will see that happen. It's about how property becomes collectivized by coders when it becomes electronic and connected. Its inherency is broken up -- which is of course is that process Comrade Lawrence Lessig zealously began when he began to smash the inherency of copyright of digital art and induce people to "share" without paying the author.
* * *
Each
item that you put on the Internet of Things becomes partly not yours --
in fact, at any moment, it could become entirely not yours. Each thing
with its unique UUID uploaded and connected to the Internet becomes
collectivized by coders and then available to hackers.
What matters isn't the connections *you* forge among your things and
the Cloud, which only has the thin membrane of a likely poorly-devised
password.
What matters is that each connection strips away the inherency of the
property as yours, and makes it at least a little bit -- and then
maybe a lot -- someone else's.
If a heating pad or a television or a coffee maker requires a remote
control commander or switch to operate, and you automate that via the
Internet to make it work, at any moment, whether because "technology
just doesn't work sometimes" or because its hacked or because the coders
and operators of the Internet -- oh, don't like your blog or your
political views -- those items may stop working. When they stop working,
they lose their main property -- use to you. Your property with a lot
of electronics in it that doesn't work anymore isn't much use now, is
it?
Now imagine if it is your pacemaker?
Now, technologists interested in the Bright Future skip over these
problems and call them minor or rare or fixable with encryption or
whatever. But the problem isn't just the *misuse* of the cloud and your
own personal Internet of Things.
The problem comes in your collectivization of your things. As you put
it, "I’m not the only one who can use it. I can authorize other parties
to use it as well."
That means you've stripped away some of its essence as your property
and for the sake of "smartness," collectivized it. You may find this
useful now, say, to somebody changing the car in your oil. But surely
it's not too hard even for you to imagine when this "smartness" might
get "dumb" pretty fast.
You say: "These won’t be “free” services that we get by trading away
privacy for convenience. We’ll pay for them. In return they will not
only store our data. They’ll also run code."
But everything that is coded and uploaded to the Internet related to
me and my personal property is now a coder's and "the Internet's," not
mine. Have you ever seen how the thuggish hackers' movement Anonymous
operates? Is *that* what you want done with your toaster or your car?
The privacy inherent in disconnected private property is stripped
away by the act up uploading and connection through the UUID or RFID,
and you can never get it back -- you won't be able to reset an objects
unique identifier but will be forced to buy a new one. It isn't just
that your collectivized property is vunerable; try to see it. It is
collectivized and you are now in a commune. You may never get your
private life back again. This is why I call it technocommunism, and I
warn about the way in which we will continue to get this awful system
online that was discredited on earth: the Internet of Things.
* * *
Go from "Internet of My Things" to "Internet of My Social Relations" to see the further collectivization potential for manipulation.
P.S. I'm trying to find my screenshots from back then of the parcel in the Linden sims around Derwent showing all those flowers and pots and things with taggability and rateability, and then the HUD to use to track them. Anybody else have any?
Here's a creepy new ad by Cisco, the connection people, about the Internet of Things -- or as they call it The Internet of Everything which of course they stand to make a lot of money off because they sell routers and such. Of course they want everything connected.
What's extra creepy about this ad isn't just the "it's coming sooner than you think" stuff, or the "everything" stuff but the "wake up America" or "it's morning in America" stuff.
In other words, we don't just get connected, the toaster and the coffee pot and our i-phones and such. We wake up, and get to a higher level of being and consciousness ... Wonder if they consulted Deepak Chopra on this one, or whether, like Google, they have their own inhouse Zen master...
So...that hack that turned Cisco phones into remote listening devices (see below); that's never, never, ever going to happen on the Internet of Things, right?
We will completely control that wake-up call, right?
Good! This was the unworkable web of the technocommunists still hanging on from Web 1.0 and it's good that history is moving them along now and they can stop their slow-walk to socialism with their tools. Well, not completely, because they all worked assiduously to get Obama elected -- they were born for nothing else, really -- but still, there's enough struggle left that it's not over until it's over.
Mourns Dash:
The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale
social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win
for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom
talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find
that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.
Well, in other words, his fellow tekkies, maybe a little more cynical and calculating but as a result, a little more attuned to what customers really want, have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and left the Better Worlding ideologues in the dust.
He recalls with keen nostalgia a site that has absolutely no relevance to anyone, even tekkies anymore, Technorati:
[Y]ou could, in theory, write software to examine the source code of a
few hundred thousand weblogs, and create a database of the links between
these weblogs. If your software was clever enough, it could refresh its
information every few hours, adding new links to the database nearly in
real time.
This is, in fact, exactly what Dave Sifry has created with his amazing
Technorati. At this writing, Technorati is watching over 375,000
weblogs, and has tracked over 38 million links. If you haven’t played
with Technorati, you’re missing out.
I was first introduced to Technorati by Second Life geeks. I went there and linked my blog and blogged directly occasionally. In fact, I rapidly acquired a high score. In its heyday, my Second Thoughts blog devoted to critical discussion about Second Life had high traffic and was among the top blogs (all blogs about SL have crashed in their traffic now because there isn't the usage and concurrency there once was in this virtual world seemingly abandoned by its makers, who have gone on to new products for the tablets.)
It was interesting to me to see that I even got this high score on this Technorati site for nerds, but part of the reason was because this very blogging platform automatically enabled you to insert Technorati key words, and linked to Technorati. So I did.
Then what happened was very interesting. I criticized Joi Ito, who rules the Internet and was a founder of Technorati. I was even more critical of his "spimes," which were the early versions of the RFIDs and QR codes that today are going to make up the ominous "Internet of Things". I said this geeky intrusion into the world to scrape data, including personal and proximity data in the name of "tracking pollution" or "health" or whatever Better-World fakery they coated on top of it, was insipient totalitarianism.
Joi Ito reacted with incredible spleen. He simply blocked my blog from showing up on search. He didn't delete it or cancel my account. He just made sure I didn't show up at all on search. It was astounding. It was one of my early exposures to the nastiness of thin-skinned geeks. I kept protesting this vigorously and openly on Twitter. After weeks and weeks, finally it went away.
But then some time later, Technorati went through various reforms. They wanted to figure out how to reformat search and display of blogs, and along the way, make sure that blogs that didn't ideologically "fit" would get very much lowered in their scores. So naturally mine did. But it still climbed up again anyway because I have a lot of readers, even if they don't like me. But eventually, it just wasn't worth it. Why bother with a site where no reader will discover you, and where you can't play the game? I stopped playing because it was gamed; I stopped playing because I couldn't see anybody anywhere even referencing Technorati anymore -- I think it's irrelevant now in a world where people go to TechMeme, TechCrunch, PandoDaily, etc. I think none of the oldbie geeks will admit this; I think it's probably fairly easy to establish.
Well this and a thousand other stories of the horrors of the open source cult led me to my positions today. Here they are in a nutshell on Anil's comments page below.
But when you read the stuff he's pining for, you realize the problem:
When you see interesting data mash-ups today, they are often still using
Flickr photos because Instagram's meager metadata sucks, and the app is
only reluctantly on the web at all. We get excuses about why we can't
search for old tweets or our own relevant Facebook content, though we
got more comprehensive results from a Technorati search that was cobbled
together on the feeble software platforms of its era. We get bullshit
turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or
Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of
giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way
that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs
encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these
because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more
wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new
opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.
Anil, nobody but the geek squad CARES that they can't see Instagram on Twitter. Truly. They don't use Twitter! They use Facebook or Tumblr! If they do (like me), they don't care. Instagram lost all my photos when its app stopped working on my, um, perfect Android phone *snort* and I downloaded and reinstalled the app. Thanks, guys! That's the only thing consumers care about, whether you lose the stuff, not whether you have the only apps for it or possess it. Copyright is inherent and I claim it. No, you don't need me or my pictures to monetarize your Twitter.
Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state Too
bad, so sad. The socialist utopia that you guys dreamed up with Web
2.0, which grew directly out of your frenzied hatred of walled gardens
in Web 1.0, was a failure. Nobody needed to take part in collectives
with liberated property except those who already got paid somewhere
else, like
Too
bad, so sad. The socialist utopia that you guys dreamed up with Web
2.0, which grew directly out of your frenzied hatred of walled gardens
in Web 1.0, was a failure. Nobody needed to take part in collectives
with liberated property except those who already got paid somewhere
else, like Big IT, or Big University, or government, or their geek
consulting, or Mom's Basement. You were in a narrow, finite class of
people and you served yourself, not the rest of us. You invented and
nurted and Internet that suited your cult of open source software, but
it had three main flaws in it: a) everything was copyable and nothing
was protected by engineering in good faith b) privacy was eliminated and
sharing coerced; c) commerce was scorned and Creative Communism was
promulgated.
But as always happens when the Internet does something agai
nst
living human beings, people routed around. First there was Amazon and
ebay flying in the face of your hatred of commerce and your turning of
everything into a big freebie colony. Then there was Apple's i-tunes and
DRM which still persists, imagine that, only now in the form of Google
Play (hah!) or Spotify. Then, to make it most humiliating for you, three
really huge walled gardens were created with proprietary software which
was not opened to the public, for communities that were managed with
data protection: Facebook, Twitter, and even G+ (there might be "data
liberation," but you can't so easily download your pictures and posts
swiftly). To be sure, these services were opened to engineers to make
apps, but they couldn't just slurp everything they wanted to monetarize
only for themselves.
So all this nostalgia for Dave Winer's RSS
feed and all the other technocommunism is getting very dated, Anil. The
rest of the world want to move on from the share-bear and the
collective hugs with group-think geeks. We don't care if Instagram
doesn't show on Twitter; we care that we can't sell our Instagram photos
easily or tip others or buy their photos for our blogs easily with one
click of the mouse and a micropayments system with microcurrency. All of
this is eminently able to be engineered these days. But none of you are
doing this because you're still clinging to you Better World myths and
ideologies that always come back to socialism and selective
libertarianism.
Give it up, Anil! People flocked to these big
commercial companies like Facebook because they had easy features
instead of wonky geeky ideology. Because they could have some kind of
management of governance, something that the geeks often leave out and
even these companies don't do very well.
Now you simply have to
get out of the way while the world moves to Web 3.0 that pays people
livelihoods because we are all moving online. That means you have to
give up your communist ideology about deliberately enabling copying as a
business model enriching a few at the expense of the many; that means
you have to give up your data-mining and ad solutions as a ubiquitous
substitute for viable and secure payment systems for paid content on
line; that means you have to give up all this Better World bunk and let
people create what they want with these tools without you hovering over
their shoulder with your obvious political agenda you keep trying to
weld into the tools.
And
yes it is a stupid polemic about "those stupid walled gardens". You
lack a fundamental grasp of non-geek reality here: nobody cares whether
you "can't find your Facebook or Twitter friends on Tumbl". Good Lord,
the overwhelmingly huge use case for Tumblr are teenagers trying
precisely to ESCAPE their Facebook or Twitter friends (they use Twitter
left). The user complexity isn't as great as you imagine -- what you are
trying to say once again is the greedy geek's lament: why can't I get
my hooks into these services and slurp out all their lists of names and
gestures attached to those names so I can personally market to them or
purvey my political theories for more power. That's all. And the world
remains unimpressed by your naked ambitions.
I
think missing from the commentary is the push/pull of business vs.
openness. While an open web is great, from a democratic (the concept,
not the party) standpoint, businesses tend to prefer more closed out
system. Let's be honest, even Flickr was a closed system as it
aggregated all content on the Flickr site.
By contrast, the openness of the web, with domains, blogs, and RSS is inherently open and distributed, and thus more unruly.
I guess from a different lens, the old web is New York City and the new
social world is Disney world: one is messy, a little crazy, and a
little scary while being totally free, while the other is bound by
certain rules that ensures most people have a good experience.
But
it's not unruly or free or really open, Tristan because the ideology
constantly mitigates against privacy and commerce. That's why real
openness and commerce are what are produced by your hated walled gardens
of Facebook and Twitter and even Anil's home platform, Typepad, which
makes it easy to put in Ad Sense and PayPal tip jars.
Um, no,
the commercial web with openness for normal people isn't Disney World or
Wal-mart. It's just not your cramped geeky cult. You're the one who is a
little scared that normal people use the Web freely the way they want
without your control.
I've written a fair amount on this topic, and I see it's getting worse.
My long-time Second Life pal Roland Legrand, the tech journalist, has written enthusiastically as he always does about all things innovative and tech about a new labelling of things in the makerbot Thingiverse and the creation of a "social network of things". Gosh, just what you need, eh? Your toaster friending your refrigerator and your loaf of bread. They may live their lives without you if you don't watch out!
Naturally there's the creepy Bruce Sterling to enter the picture and speak of it this way -- as "almost" a social network (only a geek would call networked inanimate objects "a social network" lol) -- naturally the word "affordances" is used. Wait for the next installment, where they will say, "emergent behaviour" lol.
My comment:
Well, it’s the Internet of Things, in app form.
I’ve always really resented this and despised it. Because it means
that hordes of techies who got there first because they made the tools
will do all the annotating of reality. They will make the notes on
things they like, in the way consistent with their culture. This will be
awful in every respect. We will all be stuck with their annotations
from their culture, just like we’re stuck with their crappy code that
doesn’t work, just like we’re stuck with their Yelp reviews or Rate my
Prof reviews that they get to first. This will take a long time to iron
out, and in that time, they will do a lot of damage!
All you have to do is to look at Wikipedia to see the results of a
world where all the things are labelled by first-adopter geeks.
Horrendous.
I discovered there's now a mini-explosion of discussion of the Internet of Things as the geek power struggle for it heats up, and fortunately, that also means some more critical discussion.
The IOT (will there be an ID IOT?) has had all kinds of ominous developments that I've missed because I've been focusing on virtual worlds, social media, and occasionally augmented reality, all of which may be incorporated into IOT, of course.
When I first saw the IOT prototype put up by Babbage Linden in 2006 or 2007, it was virtualizing virtuality further by tagging all the objects so you could instantly find them on the sim, then track them, add more content to them, etc. Semantic web, I guess. So you could find "petunia" and write some message on "petunia". Remember how Babbage wanted to play petanque with pianos? I hated that, because I found it so casual and destructive. And really that was indicative of the commodification of everything. All property just becomes somebody's plaything and absurd.
Craggs notes that something called CALO has emerged at the forefront of the IOT:
The CALO project overview from Stanford informs us that, “CALO as an adaptive agent, is incredibly complex…At CALO's heart is the ability to take autonomous control…As
CALO…adapts its behaviour over time, there is an underlying assumption
that there will be a user in the loop whom CALO is serving”. And this document
from the ‘Internet of Things’ European Research Cluster, states (p.84)
that “The IoT needs to handle virtually all modes of operation by itself without relying on human control.”
Gosh, that sounds just lovely, doesn't it? It sounds like that Linden dream -- the "emergent behaviour" and "ambient intelligence."
Remember, what Philip Rosedale and the other Lindens wanted with Second Life was to make *that* the Brain -- the entire thing would be the emergent and ambient Brain. So all of us who had "invested our consciousness in a toy" as Will Wright once so stunningly explained it regarding the sim (avatar) in The Sims would be executing perfect right-angle walks around objects and having out chat logged and mined for God-knows-what and would be accommodating ourselves to the "affordances" of virtuality like flying which of course had their "deficits" like...sitting on your ass in the real world for hours at a time...
So picture the whole world like that, and your friends able to "map" you. We haven't begun to see anything like the massive debate there will be over "mapping your friends". We had it first in The Sims, where they enabled you to turn it off, but where your presence marker in the "friendship balloons" would then become a trail showing where you had been. So you went to that strip club or that other girl's house, it's in your balloons! Like spore.
Then we saw in Second Life with the mapping which people like FlipperPAY who couldn't figure out how to tell their friends to stop IMing them, or defriending annoying people, and demanded the ability to be online, but not show as online. OK, fair enough, except there is a difference between *mapping* and "seeing online". Remember when I said the problem with point-to-point teleporting is that people would TP on your head? And the first hour they implemented it we used Philip's friendship card to TP on to his head so he "got it". Then they put in the granularity -- friendship with or without mapping (I think that was the sequence).
Right now, unlike Second Life, in real life I can't geolocate my "friends" whose telephone numbers I have in my i-phone. But soon I will, and the argument will start up. "The government" will know where you are. "The corporations" will market-data-strip you. OK, but the real problem is governance -- the freedom from *each other*. That will be much harder to deal with -- that boss who can't understand why you don't want to be mapped all day during work hours...
But what I want to say about COLA -- about which of course I have to read a lot more know -- is that I don't believe in the "autonumous nature" of the thing. Again, as I always insist, code is concretized will of human beings. It is not magic. It is not separate. It is not "other". It is not autonomous. It's just irresponsible. It's just not accountable. And getting more so. Every "emergent behaviour" is at some level planned and thought about *and enabled* and not enough thought and care put into making sure bad behaviours are *disabled*. You know, like making the default "damages" instead of "safe"?
Again, my mistake (and it came from the geeks themselves) in thinking about the risks of the IOT was that it would be done with sensors or RFIDs. Remember when I criticized David Orban and Joi Ito going around putting RFIDS on things to make the "spimes" of science fiction come to life faster? I said if I found them I'd grind them up with my shoe and drown them in cans of Coke? And Joi Ito then deliberately blocked my blog on Technorati, which he controlled, it was incredible. I had a good rating, and then suddenly my posts couldn't even be searched. After complaining and publicizing this problem, it changed, but now years later after their various "revisions" I'm completely gone from there now, I don't know why I even bother to post key words there from Typepad.
But RFIDs aren't the main thing, or at least, not know. It's that the things already wired now connect to your smart phone, and it's in your hand, not "out there"? So the IOT and the spimes are now much more intimate but also paradoxically much more individually controlled. There is less of "the geeks putting things everywhere and listening" and "me deciding I want this thing connected". Except, the push by geekland to wire things up so they can listen, too, will be enormous. Need to get those databases populated!
Craggs conceives of this problem in the classic geek fashion -- and the fashion many savvy Internet users have adopted -- as one of "the government" having its Big Brother eye on you:
Just as government agencies can monitorandfilter e-mails people send, context-aware machinelistening
could possibly be used to listen for certain spoken words and
phrases, which would indicate that an individual or group of
individuals, communicating by speech, are likely to be a threat to other
people and/or property and/or the state. A simplistic way to explain
how this might work is that the personal details and other info of the
7billion+ people on earth would be on a database. Whenever an individual
says what is considered by government to be an inappropriate word or
phrase, the individual is given a negative mark. Every so often CALO (or
another adaptive system) queries the database to ascertain how many
negative marks each individual has. The number of negative marks that
each individual has accumulated could then be used to help identify,
potential criminals, activists, troublemakers, ringleaders and so-forth,
based on the kind of subject matter each individual prefers to discuss.
But I have to say, that's NOT the way it will work, at least not ubiquitously, and not the way it's ALREADY working.
What REALLY happens is that coders control platforms and silence you. THEY silence you, not "the government". The community leaders (ugh) put in place to manage discussions on Facebook; the "thought leaders" who command huge followings whether a Robert Scoble or Jeff Jarvis -- they are the ones who mute, control, delete, ban. Not the government. They do. They are identifying the "troublemakers" who dissent against their IOT or whatever other gadget they are hawking, and they stifle dissent. In fact, the government is something you may come to appeal to in order to secure the secular and free space for debate and dissent under the First Amendment, because these platforms won't protect it. The problem is all the social media nerds in Gov 2.0 have those same clutchy censorious instincts as they come from the same clan, and they silence debate as well.
Craggs is imaging the government running the reputation system. You wish! They could run it under the rule of law, with standards, and it would be justiciable and subject to checks and balances.
The problem is that the systems are ALREADY run by geeks -- Klout, Facebook likes, G+ -- whatever. Those systems already have tremendous sway. The reputation system we saw in Second Life was a classic example of something gamed and misused for griefing and harassing and silencing dissent, not rewarding innovation. The government is not the problem. Facebook, which already automatically blocks posts now if they are "too long" or have key words they don't like in them like "breast" is the problem.
The Wired State, which I have constantly warned about isn't the state as we know it now -- you wish. You may come to long for the day when you'd have more or less an assurance that a neighbourhood precinct cop might come and save your from assault or harassment or enforce a judge-issued order of protection. Instead, in the Smart World, you will have Community Leaders siccing people on you -- the pizzas delivered by Anonymous to their enemies are only the tip of the iceberg.
Again, the security isn't merely about privacy, but about governance and the ability to be free from other non-state actors, not just the state or corporations.
And as per usual with this discussion, there is little awareness that private property and privacy have to remain linked, that privacy with the erosion of private property will not be possible. To the extent that we are in fact saved now from legions of greedy ap engineers and only the plaything of contracted market data scrapers on Facebook, it's due to the walled-garden nature of Facebook. Good! I'd much rather have an ad I don't like in the margins of my social network than become the "girl near me" unasked on somebody else's rapacious ap, you know? That's the reality of the IOT.
The part I find least persuasive in Cragg's useful piece is the bit about the nano-things that can "read your brain". Hmm. Really, guys? And I can't put tinfoil on my head and prevent that lol?
What's more easy to do is read intentions based on searches -- Google can predict what you will think about, search for, do, etc. just by looking at all your searches.
The problem isn't that the government is going to put a nano-device into me and monitor it and even switch it off and make me a non-citizen -- which is of course, a possibility and to be guarded against.
The real problem is that people like a Linden I once debated on this subject thought it was backward and reactionary of me to fear nanobots because it was just like medicine particles that had various chemical effects in the body. Um, right. So people like that guilty trip others to take nanobots to "improve" their alertness, get rid of oxidants, become more thin, whatever -- and then they can control them via those little critters. The government in fact will be what you turn to, in order to regulate this menace.
The nightmare that Craggs describes with the nano-implant -- cut off from food, housing, etc. by a totalitarian state -- is exactly what the Soviets implemented with their propiska or resident permit and domestic passport system, still in effect today throughout the former Soviet Union, and explaining why Tajik migrat workers can starve or be killed with impunity. And the problem isn't just the state, but all the people who then accept bribes to help you around this state which become another kind of problem.
Recent Comments