Wired State

The Razorblades in Morozov's Apple of Knowledge

The train station in Soligorsk, Belarus, Morozov's home town. Photo by El Bingle.

I'm reading Evgeny Morozov's book To Save Everything, Click Here -- and it's both boring and fascinating because it's like deja-vu all over again -- I've written on exactly the same topics myself for nearly ten years, usually as a dissident surrounded by geeks who relentlessly hated and bullied me.

It's filled with the hypothetical hystericals that he castigates geeks for -- he's adopted this as a literary style worthy of Jeff Jarvis or Seth Godin. For example, he tells us the horror of something called BinCam that can document our garbage and put it up on social media so that -- in theory -- our neighbours or the vigilant state could examine our detritus and tell whether in fact we were recycling sufficiently or perhaps not even eating correctly.

The problem with these stories is that they are anecdotes. Nobody has BinCam. BinCam isn't anywhere installed in such sufficient quantities as to cause anything like the ruckus Morozov imagines. That's because nobody wanted it -- maybe a few "quantified life" geeks experimenting did. Or if it did get installed, it was not with the privacy-busting social-media-shaming factor, but with more of the mundane city planning capacity to tell where the garbage pick-ups could be deployed, to save energy and time and money.

It's filled with name-dropping and citation-dropping that most people won't recognize. Couldn't we ask whether in fact the theory of "flow" comes from Plotinus and not Heraclitus? Oh, and let's not forget my favourite quote from Heraclitus (I think): "Although reason is common to all men, most men behave as if they have their own private understanding".

When you have intimidating stuff like the invocation of Plotinus and Pliny, nobody might dare to say the obvious: but Evgeny, there isn't any software that has a message TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE. It doesn't exist. It's a sort of fable you've made, like your other fables.

Real software -- the ubiquitous Windows of the proprietary and much-hated Microsoft, on which everything is based -- simply says SAVE -- SAVE "as is", so to speak. Or you get the choice: "SAVE AS" -- and you *chose* then. Silicon Valley may not be as world-changing in its aspirations as you wish, at least without giving some agency to users!  I can't think of a single application that actually says "TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE". Can you? Is this on a Mac or something? If it doesn't really exist anywhere, isn't that telling? It *might* -- it almost sounds as if it does! But it doesn't! (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

So yeah, I've been writing about the issue of the Silicon Valley hustlers for years and years on this blog and at Second Thoughts. But it's not like I'm vindicated with the appearance of the Sage of Soligorsk on the scene -- because it's like looking at the same landscape through a kaleidoscope, where everything is shifted 25% and skewed.

Each time Morozov is criticizing the same thing I've already criticized, and where he could point out their collectivism and -- dare I say it, technocommunism -- he shifts, and starts calling them some other name. Randians. Schumpeter-trumpeters. Or crypto-followers of some crazy Polish guy. Who in fact is no different in his scientism and socialism than H.G. Wells or Maxim Gorky, or for that matter, at the end of the day, Evgeny Morozov.

So, Morozov beams and tweets triumphantly that he has found that exact place in a video about Mark Zuckerberg, where in fact he revealed long ago his plans for world domination that are now being examined today in his call for some kind of Silicon Valley sort of PAC that would work on issues like start-up visas and immigration. Well, I found that exact spot on that video more than four years ago in 2008, with "We Are Not 69 Million of Anything" -- back when the threat that Zuckerberg could harness all of us in creepy ways was limited to only 69 million, not one billion. I examine the connectivity cult (the same one Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen of Google have) in ways I think Morozov doesn't -- but now he's covering it in his book and will forever be credited for "discovering" this particular critique of Zuckerberg.

Oh, well, I get how it works, instead of working as a low-wage OSI worker for years on end, I should have been born in Eastern Europe and become a Soros fellow!

Still, for the record I'll note that I covered this topic back in 2008 when Morozov was still playing at being a Soros fellow or something, waiting for Lenny Benardo to give him research tips. (It's perhaps telling that Lenny Benardo absolutely refuses to speak about Belarus with me, because I might keep pointedly asking about the Soros mess-ups and question the priorities of grant-giving, whereas Lenny probably never has to talk to Morozov about Belarus, ever, because Morozov doesn't "do" Belarus, his homeland.)

Except to write his book at his parent's dacha there. Oh, the hissing samovar! The buzzing bees! The jam made by babushka from wild raspberries! And the skewering of Silicon Valley between sips of barely-diluted zavarka.

The kind of skewering I did without the summer house for years -- for example, confronting Jeff Jarvis both on his blog and in person about his "bill of rights" favouring collectivist ideas. Or having a long drawn-out battles about "gamification" back in 2008, when Jane McGonigal first appeared with this awful idea that "reality was broken" and that we had to gamify it to fix it, or the creepy TED talk about Jesse Schell sparked this debate in 2010.

Is Morozov going to mention that McGonigal worked for the Chinese government during their Olympics?

I had to sit through the vilification of being told even by a friend, Raph Koster, that my non-gamer culture and the culture of gamers (ostensibly superior) was the source of my problem with gamification -- and shunned because I dared to say that the deified Richard Bartle had social engineering-socialism in his games. I had to sit through legions of fanboyz villifying me because I dared to question the wackiness of McGonigal.  Read it, it's truly extraordinary, in light especially of how much safer it has become now to criticize Jane.

Or take even the (formerly) obscure essay by Coase. Why, our own Philip Rosedale was reading it (not just O'Reilly) long before Shirky, back in 2005, because Mitch Kapor gave it to him, and touting it as a way to run a company today -- even the ultimate company without employees!

With SL, Rosedale took the idea of reduced "coordination costs" to come up with this idyllic notion -- never put in practice:

By putting up a page where thousands of people can cast a fixed number of votes to prioritize (or modify) a fairly specific work list of features and changes for upcoming versions of Second Life, we are further blurring the boundaries between the ‘company’ of Linden Lab and the residents of Second Life. We are asking for help (and I suspect comitting ourselves substantially to what we hear) in what is generally a very private and hallowed process – the setting of development priorities.

Ultimately, Philip and his successors shut down the voting tool because people either asked for priorities the company, mindful of their competitors in the gaming industry, didn't think should be coded; or they didn't like some of the things asked for because they went against their geek religion; or they would prohibit the compay from being sold to marketers (i.e. IP masking).  And this is how the whole Internet will go, as Second Life has often been used as a prototyper, deliberately or simply using its virtuality as an affordance for petri-dish work.

Back then, I asked whether a theory from efficient firms from 1937 was exactly the time period to be mining for ideas...In fact, the Taylorism that migrated into Stakhanovitism and later the Kaizen method in Japan was what we had to worry about -- was collectivizing everyone with open source software merely a way to reduce transaction costs for firms and ensure oligarchy for them, communism for the rest of us? You know, "We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us." So I had critiques like this one about the Leninism of the Linden Tao.

Now Morozov has produced a 16,000 word piece for The Baffler -- you wondered who they were going to get to write on tech after their co-editor Aaron Swartz killed himself. It's too long for a magazine piece and too short for a book, so it's a pamphlet of the sort socialists and the Catholic Church still specialize in -- where the author is erudite, wordy, didactic, and exasperated with the unbeliever.

And here, too, two years ago, I was criticizing O'Reilly very specifically, as I had for years in SL before that to his fanboyz. Morozov of course has produced the state-of-the-art critique in 16,000 words, complete with his intellectual antecedents, but yet, he never mentions O'Reilly's outrageous speaking fees and the scandals around them. He alludes to, but never really quite explains how open source is a racket that Big IT benefits most from in its California business model.

Here's the nutshell of my critique of O'Reilly and his invasion of the State Department and government in general with his "gov 2.0" and even "civ soc 2.0":

Civil society is something I do know about, having studied it and lived it for 30 years. And open source and web 2.0 is something I know about, having studied it and lived it for the last 6 years. And I see something very destructive and corrosive that could occur by the arrogant imposition of the open source mystique and "business model" on to the more fragile and complex organic human systems of civil society that aren't mechanical like machines and the Internet.

It means monetarizing things for a few consultants -- like one man and his team that maybe shouldn't be monetarized (and don't pretend that the non-profit work of the O'Reilly empire is somehow unrelated to the expensive workbooks and conferences and the high human cost of open source in general).

It means low or no wages as a way of life and aspiration and necessity to keep work tools free for people that have high sources of compensation elsewhere.

But worse than all that, making everything into a stack and an ap means less freedom and less participation in decision-making, not more, *because the very decision about mechanization in the first place was ripped out of people's hands before they could think about it*.

Indeed, despite his enormous study of the subject, Morozov hasn't really touched on the corrosive effect of the "Code for America" stuff invading cities all over the place, a debate I took on in 2010 here.

And Morozov barely discusses the pernicious evangelist role of Alex Howard, who insists, against all common sense and logic and reason, that he is a journalist, and not a propagandist or public relations agent -- as I did here, after a lot of discussion on Whimsley, where Tom Slee confronted Howard on the entire "gov 2.0" racket which is exploited by conservative governments (and leftist governments, too, I might add, as Obama has abused it) to hand out consulting contracts to cronies and pretend to innovate and avoid hard topics.

(Of course, I haven't read the book all the way to the end yet, so maybe that's to come).

I'll come back to do a more thorough book review when I can, in which I explain that funny twist that happens with every single critique -- where Morozov misses the moment to recognize something as in fact "Soviet," shall we say, or collectivist, or socialist -- and then declares it something else. For example, you have to wonder -- how did he get through his critique of Clay Shirky, whom he skewers, without ever mentioning his seminal "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" -- which might really be re-titled, as I've written repeatedly for years, "The Group Members Are Our Own Worst Enemy". And to miss Shirky's one big forray into foreign policy on the webzine of the same name, from his areas of expertise in Internet culture, where essentially, he tells people to forego their Twitter revolutions until the advance guard tells them it's okay, because they've become sufficiently mature for democracy -- an ideology Nazarbayev would be proud of, and in fact invokes (and maybe that's how he was able to win over Jimmy Wales).

For now, let's just look at the things hidden in the 16,000 word piece about O'Reilly.

Morozov decides O'Reilly is a Randian, because he's for entrepreneurs forging their businesses in the face of conservative big, ostensibly backward, proprietary-software companies. I guess Morozov never studied the role of the peredovik in Soviet culture and the winners of socialist competitions.

Ayn Rand, of course, is as Bolshevist as the Bolsheviks she countered, and she got that way having to counter them fiercely, but she's a product of her time and copies their revolutionary methods. The rigidity of her ideology; her hatred of religion; her relentless ideological struggle with other sectarians or the slightly-politically-incorrect within her own circles -- these are all products of the Bolshevik age we still live with. If someone worked harder in the collective farm of open software and also figured out how to make money with the $39.95 manuals to actually work this "free" stuff and also charged big speaking fees, they merit a spot in the Soviet Union of Constructors, not a blast as a Randian or hypothetically an exaggerated capitalist.

O'Reilly's earlier nods to Microsoft or to a hypothetical "choice" between open and proprietary software, even defending it as an intellectual freedom, was only tactical and only present 10 years ago. Today, Code for America culture adherents deride as "vendorocracy" any proprietary software that a municipality runs, and as we see from Cyrus Farivar's uneven critical examination of Code for America on Ars Technica, somebody making a zippy little startup with open source software and getting the city contract ahead of others is the "good guy" whereas those other contenders are evil (or companies that *should* be contending if you still kept a free-market competition system and competitive bids at city hall instead of ecstatic free software cronyism).

O'Reilly peddled that line only tactically for a time, like the pro-abortion crusaders used "choice" for a time until they could change their causes' title to "women's health" and beat any critic as wishing the illness of women and waging a war on women. So O'Reillyites at State today would describe as backward and fearful of technology and consumed with FUD anybody who suggests that an older vendor with proprietary software not as caught up in the giddyness of 2.0 might be better for security or privacy.

But here's the thing about Evgeny -- he loves open source software. He himself is not for the intellectual proposition of choice between types of software, even tactically until the Better Day comes. In this Baffler essay that many will read and write about as "a critique of the open source software culture" that is invading everything (and thinking it can even use the sectarian principles of agile software production on governance of people in general), in fact, Morozov roots most vigorously for just that -- in a more pure form unalloyed with any capitalism

Morozov is more of a Stallmanite that Stallman. He pretends to admit that Stallman is obviated by being preoccupied with licensing schemes at a time when "the cloud" has obviated them.

Of course, "the cloud" has done no such thing, as proprietary cloud software can exist; private firms deploy their cloud magic even with open source in ways they don't publish; and big companies still fiercely fight over what the standards of cloudness will be. At the end of the day, the cloud is just other people's computers, not your own. There should be a new study of server farms and server farm politics underneath the cloud, that Morozov hasn't gotten to yet.

Stallman isn't about license schemes, really -- he's more of a cultural coder than O'Reilly precisely because he hasn't converted his empire, still very active (with the friends of Bradley Manning, for example) into a cash cow in the same way and therefore has more street cred. The Stallmanite ideals -- that everything has to be free, that bugs are shallow to the thousands of eyes let in to see that software, in fact is something Morozov exhuberantly proclaims, with this telling paragraph:

Underpinning Stallman’s project was a profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity. Perhaps inadvertently, Stallman also made a prescient argument for treating code, and technological infrastructure more broadly, as something that ought to be subject to public scrutiny. He sought to open up the very technological black boxes that corporations conspired to keep shut. Had his efforts succeeded, we might already be living in a world where the intricacies of software used for high-frequency trading or biometric identification presented no major mysteries

Now that's just sectarian clap-trap of the sort we thought Morozov was supposed to be critiquing, not embracing. See what I mean? There's a strange technno-determinism of the sort Morozov is supposed to be denouncing if he believes that "if only" we could see the magic code that enables traders to use the speed and amplification properties of the Internet to move markets perilously (to their own profit and sometimes to the detriment of countries), why, we could somehow cure the faults of capitalism. But the Internet is merely (sometimes) a capitalist tool, and the real problem for Morozov which he most decidedly disdains is capitalism and free enterprise and free markets themselves. Sure, capitalism should be regulated even in a free society with free enterprise -- and it is, and the debate about "how much" is what politics is about. Here, I suspect Morozov thinks that "transparency" on the kind of software some capitalists have made good use of will somehow enable a naming and shaming (or industrial sabotage?) effort or an "equalling of the playing field"...or some other socialist fantasy.

But in a free world, you have to ask why traders can't have proprietary software that gives them an edge in trading fast, and if your real problem is capitalism itself, this particular facet of it really isn't the issue; and if your real problem is that you just want to regulate some of the fiercest aspects of capitalism that can be destructive, you've never explained why you couldn't do this with organic law instead of transparency of the code to those putative million eyes.

As for biometrics, something that states from South Korea to Turkmenistan are using now -- while gas-rich Turkmenistan may not be able to supply clean water and jobs and even gas to all of its people, especially in remote areas, it has seen fit to rush to apply the latest scientific methods to create a biometric passport of the future -- and control its citizenry.

Knowing the software code that probably the Chinese wrote for the Turkmens or knowing the code of what might be implemented in the US won't change anything -- what's at stake here is the will of the government, its undemocratic nature, and its resorting to organic methods of control as well as electronic.

Morozov's critique of Silicon Valley-orchestrated collectivism -- yes, he does come up with an actual critique of collectivism now in rather a cunning way -- is that it is soulless. It's not "true" collectivism. That's because all it is, really, is a zillion individual actions -- clicks on likes, or retweeting of messages or copying of memes or whatever the individual act is -- without any sense of camraderie or joint purpose.Says Morozov:

This is a very limited vision of participation. It amounts to no more than a simple feedback session with whoever is running the system. You are not participating in the design of that system, nor are you asked to comment on its future. There is nothing “collective” about such distributed intelligence; it’s just a bunch of individual users acting on their own and never experiencing any sense of solidarity or group belonging. Such “participation” has no political dimension; no power changes hands.

If you hold up a mirror to this paragraph to see what, then, Morozov might find ideal, not only might he himself disappear, but you see the yearning for collectivism nevertheless straining through as an ideal: It would be great if we did have collectives, just better, more meaningful collectives! It would be great if they actually democratically participated! It would be cause if they had a sense of solidarity and group belonging! It would be even better if they had a "political dimension" and actually took power! Hey, let's Occupy Wall Street with that!

I'm not talking about libertarian survivalism here and the lone individual on the range -- I'm just criticizing bureaucratic socialism. Really, how does Morozov's "better" group with solidarity differ from, oh, the Leninist notion of "democratic centralism" (the Politburo can debate, but nobody else) or Central Asian notion of the kuraltai (very free group debates with even the powerless included until the power-possessors decide after sifting out what they see as "the voice of the people" and then ruthlessly silencing all further debate) -- or Chinese "self-criticism" circles? 

Morozov is still celebrating the group and its dynamics; he doesn't have a vision of the protection of individual rights or the protection of minorities, or how to change the group afterward, when it becomes "its own worst enemy", i.e. strays from the rigid ideal that may have been once "collectively" decided. What is the theory of change that really constitutes democracy, not just a glorification of "participation" that leads us to "participatory democracy" where the cadres end up deciding everything? Because not everybody participates. Because not everybody can or should have a stake. Why should a bunch of jobless students get to overthrow the stock market?

So I'd make a sharper critique of this Silicon Valley "collective intelligence" stuff than Morozov by pointing out --again -- the pernicious thinking of Clay Shirky in "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" which is really about how straying group members who revolt against non-democratically decided goals should be controlled -- or Beth Noveck, who thinks you can't have "here comes everybody" (which Shirky himself disavowed later) because you get people who aren't appropriate or are off-topic or are too stupid -- which is why a network of self-selecting experts under her guidance and filtration is the best kind of collective. You know, "the cadres decide everything," as Stalin put it so well. And he should know; despite being called "rude" by Lenin, he was eventually able to take over everything just by performing the simple task of keeping the minutes for meetings (and shaping them subtly) -- sort of writing the code for the group, if you will...

Of course, there's plenty of sense of joint purpose to go around among the Internet socialists on their campaigns, but I've generally found that the groups like Moveon or Daily Kos or Organizing for America are cadre-run, with the masses seldom having any real choice but to enthusiastically "like" and retweet what is peddled to them by a few cunning intellectuals at the top of the pyramid.

Morozov should be troubled by the bureaucratic socialism of Moveon or Center for American Progress, too, but never is.

And for him, the ideal of the collective still shines goldenly on the yawning heights:

As a result, once-lively debates about the content and meaning of specific reforms and institutions are replaced by governments calling on their citizens to help find spelling mistakes in patent applications or use their phones to report potholes. If Participation 1.0 was about the use of public reason to push for political reforms, with groups of concerned citizens coalescing around some vague notion of the shared public good, Participation 2.0 is about atomized individuals finding or contributing the right data to solve some problem without creating any disturbances in the system itself. (These citizens do come together at “hackathons”—to help Silicon Valley liberate government data at no cost—only to return to their bedrooms shortly thereafter.) Following the open source model, citizens are invited to find bugs in the system, not to ask whether the system’s goals are right to begin with. That politics can aspire to something more ambitious than bug-management is not an insight that occurs after politics has been reimagined through the prism of open source software.

Again holding up the mirror and thinking about the shining heights, you see the recipe for the real Better World:

o challenge the entire system of capitalism -- it's time, comrades!

o have the code contributions disturb the system -- how about apps to name and shame every contributor to the mayor's campaign and dox them?

o take on issues much bigger than potholes -- why not march and demonstrate right in front of Jamie Dimon's house?

o don't go home to your bedrooms after your hackathon, camp in a tent on the square

And so on. In other words, Morozov is merely annoyed that O'Reilly, like the 1970s head shop owners, capitalizing on the zeitgeist of the SDS 1960s, began to profit from the sale of bong pipes and posters and black lights, is derailing the Revolution by selling open source software as something grafted on to capitalism -- at least, capitalism for some people in Sillicon Valley.

He castigates O'Reilly for seeming to "hate" protests -- by which he means, again, O'Reilly's actual cooptation of the antagonistic group dyanmics so often available online into "patch or GTFO" coder culture operations. He then picks anodyne things to work on -- a park -- rather than anything that might substantively challenge either politics as usual (which Morozov seems to believe is "bought out by corporate interests) or the socialist theories of the 1960s and 1970s (Ilyich) that rule the unions and the schools and are profoundly challenged by schemes like school vouchers.

Interestingly, O'Reilly mentions the Moldova Twitter protests in that piece positively -- up to a point:

The internet provides new vehicles for collective action. A lot of people pay attention when social media is used to organize a protest (as with the recent twitter-fueled protests in Moldova.) But we need to remember that we can organize to do work, as well as to protest!

He might as well be Lukashenka (never challenged by Morozov) telling the intellectuals to stop babbling in the cafes in the city and help bring in the potato harvest. Time to stop complaining and work, comrades! Patch or GTFO! In fact, the Twitter protests didn't lead to solutions of protracted problems caused by the Russians, like Transdniester.

Morozov's critique of O'Reilly, if he weren't burdened by his own idealistic vision of collectivism, could involve calling out the cadres who decide everything in gov 2.0, whether the Sunlight Foundation or the latest Google staff or collectivist academics  installed in various White House agencies. That's what I do. Morozov doesn't, because his target is conservative Western governments that get in the way of old-time socialism, and to some extent, the Kremlin's agenda -- like the Cameron government in Londongrad. Hence gripey paragraphs like this:

At the same time that he celebrated the ability of “armchair auditors” to pore through government databases, he also criticized freedom of information laws, alleging that FOI requests are “furring up the arteries of government” and even threatening to start charging for them. Francis Maude, the Tory politician who Cameron put in charge of liberating government data, is on the record stating that open government is “what modern deregulation looks like” and that he’d “like to make FOI redundant.” In 2011, Cameron’s government released a white paper on “Open Public Services” that uses the word “open” in a peculiar way: it argues that, save for national security and the judiciary, all public services must become open to competition from the market.

Market competition might be a good thing -- say, in competing for software contracts. I've often wondered if that enormously expensive boondoggle on the time-clock software for the City of New York was open or proprietary software, and what that story was really all about -- even if it turns out that the software is proprietary, the notion of the endless chain of experts required to keep it working because people can't be empowered to run it themselves normally seems to be at the heart of the problem. And the problem with New York City is in fact that it has outsourced to nonprofits and religious groups too much of the work of managing difficult populations that it needs to keep under one roof and monitored and kept transparent to the public far, far more than it does.

If you can get through the 16,000 words, you will be left with this: unadulterated worship of Stallman -- indeed, a fresh appreciation of Stallmanism with all the zeal of a new convert:

Once the corporate world began expressing interest in free software, many nonpolitical geeks sensed a lucrative business opportunity. As technology entrepreneur Michael Tiemann put it in 1999, while Stallman’s manifesto “read like a socialist polemic . . . I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise.” Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types. Stallman didn’t care about offending the suits, as his goal was to convince ordinary users to choose free software on ethical grounds, not to sell it to business types as a cheaper or more efficient alternative to proprietary software. After all, he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association.

But...go back to that socialism part. That was what was wrong with it in the first place.

 

 

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The Robots' Original Sin or The Impossibility of Ultimate Encryption

 

Is this old illustration from Isaac Asimov's I, Robot? I see it everywhere unattributed.

Liberationtech, the Stanford discussion list about circumvention software, encryption and other forms of "liberating" the Internet, has a little fight going now.

It used to be that while open, these discussions were not published. I started publishing a few when I'd be blocked from them, and calling on the list owners to stop coyly claiming they were an "open" list when they a) threatened people with expulsion all the time for their critical speech b) didn't publish their list. I complained about this "open source=closed society" approach in a few blogs, then I noticed someone else, I don't know who, simply started publishing all their lists outside of Stanford. Then eventually that got them to begin publishing their list archives themselves -- hoisted by their own petard, as it were, albeit with a cautionary note that now there were people "watching" their open posts and they should be careful.

I fail to see why circumventionists, encrypters, hackers, liberators, anarchists, etc. etc. get to have a special privileged position on the Internet or in society at large, which is increasingly lived through the Internet. They are unelected, self-appointed, and not even put in their positions of power by acclaim -- most people do not like hacking or hackers and despite the assiduous efforts of hackers to whitewash the very term for themselves and their acts, they've failed.

The list has been discussing the story of a purported new "supersekrit" encryption thing that will be "uncrackable". We've seen this claim so many times that it has become laughable. Everyone remembers the story of Haystack. The Cryptocat effort has been criticized by the hacker community itself. Tor is constantly critiqued. Both circumvention and encryption softwares are endlessly debated, and often the debate centers on whether these codes are "open source," i.e. available to others to scrutinize but then also the secret police or "proprietary," i.e. kept closed by companies who want to sell them -- but who also don't want to do the secret police's job for them and hand it over to them.

In the real world, it's good that there is a competition between both open and closed variants but that doesn't stop particularly the open source zealots from demanding that everything be "liberated" and open sourced -- and they will help force it open if they have to. They are never content with their technocommunism until they've forced everyone else to kneel to it. You will get me to accept the idea that supervision/scrutiny of circumvention software "has" to come from random other cultists in the "movement" and that proprietary software "has" to be peer reviewed. It actually isn't a proposition for an open society.

The New York Times covered the story of the Next Big Thing:

Phil Zimmermann, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy, is widely considered the godfather of encryption software. After making his software available for download in the 1990s, he was the subject of a criminal investigation that was eventually dropped in 1996. Today, his P.G.P. software is the most widely used e-mail encryption software in the world.

But these days, Mr. Zimmermann is busy with his new venture, Silent Circle, which provides encryption for smartphone users.

Once again we find that same connection to the military that we saw with TOR and which turns up in other settings involving circumvention and encryption:

Mr. Zimmermann’s business partners include Jon Callas, who co-founded the PGP  Corporation, which now belongs to Symantec, and two former Navy SEALs, Mike Janke and Vic Hyder.

“I tell them go ahead and use Skype — I don’t even want to talk to you. This is for serious people interested in serious cryptography,” he said. “We are not Facebook. We are the opposite of Facebook.”

The Daily Mail also covered the story:

Silent Circle’s kind of customers, Mr Zimmermann says, ‘see the hacking that’s going on internationally, they know that a lot of services they use collect information and use it to target ads’.

‘People say I’m being watched all the time now. It’s not a Big Brother thing, it’s a little brother thing; it’s all these little things that are eroding our basic privacy.’

I was struck by the philosophy of Zimmerman that was identitcal to the philosophy of the Navy's geeks who created Tor -- they realized criminals might use it, like copybotters and child pornographers, but they figured that would be somebody else's problem to prosecute -- they only cared about populating the system with lots and lots of users so they themselves could hide better. Highly unethical -- indeed, legal nihilism. He says:

Comparing digital encryption to locks on front doors, Mr Zimmerman said Silent Circle see themselves as the locksmiths of the digital age.

'Society is better off with everybody having locks on their doors. Everybody having locks including the criminals,' he said.

That's actually not a very sound philosophy. In the era after 9/11, both Penn Station in New York City and Grand Central Station, as well as Union Station in Washington, DC and likely other train stations, ceased to provide self-service lockers. This was a huge annoyance to commuters because it meant that if you were on business for the day or overnight, you couldn't drop your luggage or laptop in the locker while you went to meetings and then pick it up later. Today, you have to go to a very expensive luggage department staffed by a live human being and spend $20 an hour or so for this privilege -- it's a deterrence to casual use. And the reason for this is that ultimately, police and municipal managers came to the conclusion that giving criminals the opportunity to have locked up bombs wasn't effective counter-terrorism.

So the list is now arguing about this software, and trashing it because it's commercial; Zimmerman's business plan is to sell it to government and business who can afford it. Business travelers in China need a way to talk without the government snooping.

Nadim Kobeissi, a Lebanese hacker and encryption expert who invented Cryptocat, is among the most vocal critics. He would have more credibility if he didn't try to silence others who critiqued him. Kobeissi, who goes by the name @kaepora on Twitter has been charged by some critics as facilitating child pornography. He has successfully been able to silence this criticism, getting it removed from sites as "harassment".

Some say that "Kaepora" means "kiddie porn," i.e. using the initials of that term. But his name might well come from the owl Kaepora Gaebora  from the Ocarina of Time in the Legend of Zelda, a game my son used to play years ago and whose melodies were the soundtrack of our lives for a time.

@Kaepora has bitched about Kim Dotcom in fact being crackable and not all that he's cracked up to be.

Chris Soghosian, the privacy guru who now works for the ACLU comes on to debate this, and he is hounded by others who find him hypocritical for demanding open source and transparency and accountability but being willing to endorse some proprietary encryption programs.

I have no use for Chris, as I've been critical of his arrogant and high-handed approach to this issue a number of times on this blog, after hearing him first speak at an OSI panel.

The darknet kiddies are just not going to get their way. If they themselves hack something together to hide themselves and their criminality, whether copyright violations or worse, the government will then physically infiltrate their ranks if it can't crack into them. Meanwhile, government and corporations will make their own proprietary programs to keep out hackers, and they will play cat and mouse, and many will think they deserve each other.

The same people who howl about the TSA are now yelping in horror about the news that Homeland Security now finds it fair game to examine any laptops or computers or electronic devices crossing the border. Actually, authoritiaran countries have had this sort of thing in place for years. Does this mean our country is becoming more authoritarian? Well, you're welcome to make the case to me, but I think that when the concept of "unreasonable search and seizure" and the 4th amendment and such were conceived, they had no idea that somebody might conceive of having not only a computerized device they carried as "an extension of themselves" but having those devices attached to "the cloud" which means they carry the world. Really, can't there be reasonable limits? Why should you get to carry into the country from a foreign country gadzillion numbers of files, perhaps some of them malicious that will harm our own systems? You can't bring in a sausage from Germany -- it will be confiscated because of FDA rules about not bringing in meats and fruits that could be carrying diseases. The government is going to use the same logic on laptops.

So let's think this through. The reason why hacks become possible is because of human error. People make mistakes in code. Or social hacks become possible -- they say 75% of hacks are possible because people have passwords like "1234" or "password" or in the case of the Steubenville football team "Big Red" or something like that. So human error and fallability is a big thing, unintended consequences.

Just about any code then has a flaw, a human-created opening, and there's also the spoofing problem of "if you can see it you can copy it and can't protect it" analog hole problem. So emulating certificates becomes a problem and that's what these companies or projects spend lots of time trying to get rid of.

Fast-forward to the day when robots write all the code and more and more perfection and be put into the system. You always read about robots putting people out of jobs -- this is very visible nowadays in the self-scan checkouts that first were run by clerks with wands or a scanner, and now is a separate scanning station without any clerk. But at what point will coders themselvse be put out of their jealousy-guarded jobs writing boring lines of repetitive code?

Robots made by humans are supposed to follow the three rules of robots devised by science fiction robot Asimov, but increasingly they are lethal in the world of drones -- that's why drones have excited such opposition. It's not just that they are sent by humans remotely -- the decisions about targeting, even if rooted in some sort of ground intelligence, can wind up being made through electronic communications and information and the targets, while precise, can have lots of collateral damage. Robots are getting more and more sophisticated and there are plenty of articles like this one, 10 More Reasons to Be Terrified of Robots.

You can just see Anonymous picking over how to interpret Asimov's laws -- what is "human"? What is "kill"? What is "an order"? Fisking and Haskelling forever. And then looping around to Turing, who creepily insisted that if a robot was successful in passing his famous Turing test, why, we should accord it the status of "human," otherwise, we were Nazis. Pretty diabolical reasoning of the sort Anonymous gives you, and then you will see how they take something Less Than Human, and use that as the arbiter to decide if they feel like it.

I'm getting off topic, but what I mean to say is that if more and more computerized systems and robots take over, you would think in theory that the human corruption would be eventually coded out. That is of course the Better Worlders vain hope.

But I suspect that the robots even built by robots will continue to be vexed by the original sin of human error. They will never get it stamped out. There will always be a glitch. There will always be something you can spoof again. There will always be man in the middle attacks. There will always be social hacks, even for robots. Won't there?

I don't believe in the possibility of perfect encryption nor do I think it is required or advisable. There should be a balance. The main thing is to try to get the existing organic institutions to decide this before it is decided for us by unaccountable and greedy technologists. Code is only a concretization of human will.

Why Alex Stamos is Completely Wrong About Aaron Swartz

Alex Stamos' piece describing the defense he would have given for Aaron Swartz at trial is being widely linked by all the copyleftists and coders mourning the suicide of Aaron Swartz and attempting to turn him into an "Internet freedom" cult hero.

I really hate it when people pretend that they are not really supporting hackers and that they are in fact "white hats" and working for Internet security  -- when in fact they claim the "black hats" aren't doing wrong and thereby deliberately and falsely minimize the real damages of hacking. It  undermines the truth.

And I really hate it even more when they pull this "knowier than thou" bullshit invoking their supposed superior technical knowledge in a case and imply they have a withering put-down to anyone doubting the received wisdom -- when in fact they manifestly do not have that at all.

If Alex Stamos was an expert witness on this case, we have to ask the question whether he knew there was a 6-month plea in the works, and if so, why he was purveying the falsehood and spreading the Internet hysteria about the "30 years" or "50 years". Shame on him, he knew better -- even if he wasn't in the loop.

Sure, technically the prosecutor included this statement in his press release originally: "“If convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million.” But that is a mere formality and everyone knows that an indictment is not a sentence and the defense in this case was extremely vigorous. As a commenter pointed out -- something anyone following any legal case ever, even only on television could say, "your inability to distinguish between the maximum for an offense and the likely sentence he’d have received IF found guilty is a little galling when you call yourself an expert witness — someone who’s allegedly done this frequently". Amen!

It's truly an outrage, knowing of the Guerilla Manifesto, all of Swartz's past speeches and writings, to pretend that this heinous act is merely an "inconsiderate" deed like holding up the library checkout line with checking out "too many books".

That's arrant bullshit. Aaron Swartz made a guerilla -- terrorist -- attack on the servers of MIT to make a point. This is what is known in the business as "the propaganda of the deed". He deliberately, methodically, powerfully made this point by circumventing the system's intended use and downloading *4 million files*.

That's not "inconsiderate". That's not just "trespassing". That's a crime. That's wrong. Stamos deliberately and propagandistically avoids mentioning that HUGE number of files because he knows the number itself undermines his fake tap-dance.

To look through the self-serving geek keyhole on this case and consider only the temporary delay for users in the system cause is to completely overlook Swartz's obvious, self-stated intent (and intent at least since 2008 and his Guerilla Manifesto).

It also overlooks the very nature of the deed itself that Swartz wanted done in order to accomplish his purpose.

Have the decency to respect at least the anarchic views and acts of this self-proclaimed Internet freedom fighter, and don't try to dumb him down into somebody who forgot to stamp out his library book and put it into his backpack carelessly. Please. Have the decency to do that, you asshole!

Invoking Lessig on prosecutorial discretion?! What the fuck! How about invoking Lessig on professorial discretion and not sending young people to their doom, letting them live out your youthful fantasies of anarchy while you hide behind your Harvard privileges?!

Let's refute each and every one of these points from Alex Stamos

o It doesn't matter if MIT's network is open; perhaps that's even the reason it was chosen as the victim, the way with WikiLeaks, Julian Assange chose the most liberal, democratic open society in the world, under the most liberal and "progressive" president it had likely ever known in history -- to make the point, to demonstrate that smash. Just because a network is open doesn't mean you get to circumvent its intended use. By this logic, the victim in the Steubenville rape case now being hysterically pumped by Anonymous to distract from Assange's rape charges and their own criminality "deserved it" because she was drunk. See what I mean? Your logic stinks.

o If MIT failed to put "controls" up to prevent *the downloading of 4 million fucking files, you moron* then...gosh...so what? That doesn't make it right

o Did you read the indictment? It doesn't matter if JSTOR's website allowed "unlimited downloads" by anybody on MIT's network. If that were true, and the system really "allowed" this, then Aaron could have just kept clicking.

But he didn't. He used hacking software -- scripts he wrote -- called "keepgrabbing.py". Keep grabbing! Why would he need a device to "keep grabbing" if in fact there were "unlimited downloads available"! Obviously because -- despite there being no CAPTCHAs -- he didn't want to sit there for hours -- days -- and get that huge, fat motherlode of files -- 4 million! -- THAT way, but wanted to acclerated it. SO HE HACKED THE SYSTEM. Hacking is coercive; hacking is wrong; hacking is using the system not as it was intended, in circumvention of its established norms, be they code or law.

o Of course using a system not as intended is hacking. This perennial desire to whitewash the word "hacking" and make it seem like computer fraud and tampering  isn't hacking is absurd. His python scripts weren't just "discovering" and "requesting" them, they were KEEP GRABBING THEM. Keep grabbing, even if it doesn't involve "breaking a CAPTCHA" is exactly what it says on the can:  A BIG GRAB. That Stamos slyly leaves out the name of this script is very, very telling -- you know that naming it, the way the indictment does, weakens his case, eh?

No, KEEP GRABBING is not "right clicking and choosing save as". Because "right clicking and choosing save as" is when you are using the system legitimately and normally. It's when you are really researching a topic and using a system as it was intended, and downloading small quantities -- or if large quantities -- taking them over time as you review the material.

That's not what KEEP GRABBING was all about: it was deliberately assaulting the system and making a huge grab *to make a point*; to have the anarchic "propaganda of the deed".

o I have to gasp at the breathtaking ballsiness of Stamos' saying "Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity" when he in fact a) broke into the cabinet b) made a fake account to download the material c) covered up his face with a bicycle helmut. Do you think we're stupid?! How can he *lie* so baldly! it doesn't matter if he "left a verbose .bash_history". The fact is, *he made a fake account*. If he was using the system normally and properly, he would have logged in with his name and university credentials, full stop. But he wasn't doing that; he was making an anarchist attack on the system as part of an ideological crusade that required the method of coercion and violence -- violence in overriding a system and forcing people to work long hours to recover its functioning.

o The government's indictment talks of the $5,000 damage required by MIT to fix their system; it talks about the down time and the paralyzing of the system and the denial of service -- essentially -- to users. Of course it shows negative effect. We don't have the word of MIT's actual system operator that turning off JSTOR access was "silly"; we also have nothing to show that this "Ghost" that was the fake account Swartz made was "a pretty easily identified user agent". That is Stamos' conjecture -- and it's clearly unfounded.

In short, Aaron Swartz *was* a super hacker: he stole 4 million documents to make a point by breaking and entering and using false credentials, and scripts to circumvent the system's normal use. He did this in service of a destructive anarchist ideology.

Prosecutors -- even zealous prosecutors as these are made out to be (although they, um, let him go before trial and offered him...um...six months) aren't in the business of prosecuting ideology, or belief systems like anarchy and copyleftism. In fact, they want to make a good case, they would actually stay away from making statements regarding the "heroic beliefs" of the defendant and making him into some sort of victim/hero. They never, in the history of this case, ever said anything about the nature of hacking nor did they publicly threaten him with any 50 years; this is all pure speculation by the hysterical tech media.

Yet when the hacking is of a very large scale like this to "liberate" an entire system and render it non-functional -- it is no longer a walled garden, and no longer has a paid content wall -- the law has to be upheld. The entire reason you prosecute crime is not merely to "stick it" to one person out of spleen (as the geeks seem to imagine); it is rather to cure a situation of harm -- this is a harmed system -- and make it whole by deterring further harm. It doesn't matter if Aaron Swartz wasn't going to sell the files -- nobody accuses him of this because they know he was a selfless, crusading ideologue. What matters is that he destroyed the sense of the system by stealing its commodifiable content and decoupling it from that capacity and putting it into his own alternative "liberated" system.

Oh, only "Inconsiderate" to "download files too quickly"? Sheer, unadulterated bullshit. It was a plan to make a huge attack on The Man and The System and change the nature of education and knowledge. It was a terrorist attack for the sake of a "better world".

But he was going to give them away, had an ideology consistent with that notion of "liberating" and "spreading" information this way, and he had acted on it in the past despite the criminality involved and acted on it with intent in this case. Trying to minimize his propagandistic ideological motivations and his "propagagnda of the deed" doesn't minimize the real serious crime he committed, and it doesn't do service to his cause, if you support it. But then, that's not what Stamos' cunning devilry here is all about. Stamos' purpose is to take a star turn and slyly support the copyleftist cause while pretending to be a "security professional".

Bullshit, from start to finish, and a discredit to his profession.

So much more honest is one of Swartz's fellow believers, who gets it not only about Swartz's cause, but how that cause has to work if it is sincere -- and yet never does with these hipsters who won't take accountability for their actions:

Joe Citizen says:

January 13, 2013 at 8:40 am

Thanks for posting this. It make it rather clear that Aaron intended to distribute the files freely – i.e. to go through with the crime.

It also makes clear that he saw this as civil disobedience. The most important factor in civil disobedience – that which gives the practice its moral force – is that one breaks an unjust law and willingly accepts the punishment demanded by the laws. That is the whole point – you take the suffering of the punishment upon yourself and then confront the society at large with the question – ” do all of you really believe that I deserve this”?

It makes no sense whatsoever to commit the crime and then to try to avoid the punishment. That is not civil disobedience. That is just common criminality.

Don’t get me wrong here please. I am not saying his suicide was an attempt to avoid punishment. I don’t know enough about the man to say that. But all his friends who are turning on the prosecutor are doing great disservice to Aaron if in fact he committed this crime as an act of civil disobedience. The prosecutor was simply playing his assigned role in the matter. In fact, if he did not prosecute, then there would be no real civil disobedience, and no opportunity to make the case to the society at large that the laws needed to be changed.

An excellent challenge to Stamos in this thread also comes from MD.

Aaron Swartz Committed a Crime But Would Not Do the Time

Aaron Swartz in May 2012 evangelizing in Washington, DC at a conference about his anti-SOPA crusade. It involved an outright lie in claiming that there would be "Internet censorship" merely because the government legitimately prosecuted large-scale piracy sites for commercial gain. This was typical of the entire hysterical anti-SOPA campaign.

Oh. So now we're learning that there was never any "50 years" or "30 years" or anything remotely similar; there was an offer of six months.

Six months.

And Aaron Swartz knew that before he killed himself; his family, lawyer, close friends and supporters all knew this. He just didn't want to do that time, and his doting and coddling family and lawyer felt he was emotionally too fragile to do that time and felt he should get an exemption as neurologically atypical.

Tragically, they were right, but he sentenced them all to something much worse: a lifetime of guilt and torment and grief.

So all this ridiculous posturing with the "50 years" that we got from the likes of Declan McCullough, the craven sell-out copyleftist scribe for CNET, was complete tripe. There were never any 50 years!

DEFENSE TURNS DOWN OFFER OF ONLY SIX MONTHS' PRISON

Here's what the Daily Call and Boston Globe reported:

Swartz’s lead defense attorney, Elliot Peters, said today that both he and Swartz rejected the plea deal offered by the office of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, and instead were pushing for a trial where federal prosecutors would have been forced to publicly justify their pursuit of Swartz.

But at the same time, Peters said, he was worried about Swartz’s emotional vulnerability and planned to try and bypass trial prosecutors, Stephen Heymann and Scott Garland, and use a letter-writing campaign from local academics to convince Ortiz to change the proposals.

“As eager as I was to try to win it, I didn’t want to expose Aaron to the risk,” said Peters.

Imagine the sheer gall of this well-paid attorney accusing the prosecutors Ortiz and Heymann of "overreach" when his client was offered only six months for these serious crimes!

And now we have the additional Internet spectacle of Andrew Good, Swartz's former lawyer (we don't learn why he's "former") saying that his client was suicidal and therefore could not serve jail time (!). We're to hate "The Man" more because the prosecutors replied that he'd be safer in prison. Actually, if we had mental illness internment in this country in any kind of humane and sane fashion, Swartz could have been put in residential treatment if that was the issue -- and likely should have been if he were that depressed -- and he might be alive today as a result.

PROFESSORIAL OVERREACH

Swartz's family said in anguish that their son's death is "the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." And I realize that they are grieving and sincere in their beliefs.

But I have to cry "nonsense" for everything that is sane and right and not about their own selfish interests and sectarian beliefs. Truly, instead, their son's death is the product of "professorial overreach" in trying to build by fiat and force an imaginary world where everything digital is collectivized and the coders come to power and do whatever they feel like. A world where we are forced to live with coder intimidation, and that if you refuse to go along with this totalitarian world, you will be hacked, your privacy will be exposed and you will be endlessly bullied and harassed -- see the online vigilantes demanding Carmen Ortiz' head merely because she did her job and prosecuted computer fraud and theft. My God, this is outrageous. It now has over 25,000 signatures which means we're likely to get some smarmy, self-serving sufficiently vague but dog-whistly response from the Obama Administraiton. Ugh.

Aaron Swartz committed a crime and admitted that he had committed these acts that were indeed rightfully deemed criminal. Evidently he and his defenders just thought he should get a doctor's excuse from the law.

GUERILLA MANIFESTO TO "LIBERATE" ALL DIGITAL CONTENT

His guerilla manifesto outlines the criminal intent to "liberate" all and also outlines his technocommunist beliefs -- corporations are greedy and evil (instead of legitimate entities in a free enterprise system that create value and provide jobs); everyone's property should be "liberated" because anarchists say so; politicans are merely "bought" and therefore we shouldn't have free speech, democracy, campaign contributions, elections, and instead have coders run things and "code as law". No thanks!

Indeed, he outlines his intent to steal and "liberate" -- the first sentence is not qualified by any notion of copyright and the subsequent reference is merely yet another item on the list:

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with  the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

COMPUTER FRAUD AND TAMPERING

Read the indictment and quit listening to the Anonymous gabbling on Twitter. The indictment establishes (and these acts are not denied by the defense or Swartz himself) that Swartz:

o broke into a closet to commit the hack

o diguised his identity

o used a false identity and also physically covered up his face from security camera view

o use circumvention software called "keepgrabbing" to grab millions of files rapidly in a way not intended for the system

o intended to distribute separately for free these files normally available only to universities at cost to the institution and for free for students

o disabled the MIT computer network for a time because of the enormity of the download

o caused damage to the computer system due to this hack and downloading that required the IT people to clean up and repair the hack

All this word salading about how he accessed "unrestricted files" is pure nonsense. If he needed to access what in fact were to him, as a Harvard student at the Ethics Center (!), unrestricted files, he didn't have to take a crowbar to the system, he could just log on and get the articles he needed for research.

BUT THAT WAS NOT HIS INTENT OR PURPOSE OR ACT. He accessed these unrestricted files in a way not intended by the managers of the system for the purpose of smashing the system. Duh!

This is just like Julian Assange's rational for WikiLeaks -- it's not really about whistleblowing and isn't whistleblowing and he himself explains this in his own writings and interviews; it is to smash the liberal state by making it clamp up and become unlike its open and democratic self, and therefore collapse. That this lovely notion isn't applied to the states that really need transparency and don't have it, like Russia, is only a function of the similarity of the anarchic hacker movement's goals and methods being similar to communist and post-communist authoritarian states -- they want to make sure that no one can use the Internet in any way except the way they, as hackers, decide -- or else.

This fast-talking tap-dancing that Anonymous does in lying about criminal acts like this is typical of everything they do. They wish to cover their criminality by trying to get the public to focus on some little piece of the event that might appear as "legitimate access". But they are lying about and obfuscating the purpose, which is to commit an anarchist act to smash the system.

Lessig, Doctorow, Barlow -- they're all for anarchy. They really want to smash this system. They work very hard at smashing it rhetorically and in various campaigns like "stop SOPA". They stop a little shy -- like Road Runner coming to a screeching halt right before the cliff -- of actually smashing. But they were happy to sic a young man like Swartz on the job or look the other way while he published his "guerilla manifesto" and swaggered around all the tech conferences bragging about how he would defeat the Man. As we know, Barlow dog-whistled to his followers in Anonymous and told them outright that they were the "foot soldiers in the war" and that they now knew what they had to do to defend WikiLeaks -- which they proceeded to do by hacking PayPal and Amazon. Barlow tried later to wriggle out of this and claim he meant they should just put up mirror sites and they "went too far" -- but his tap-dancing shuffle was not convincing.

Swartz did not access open files properly or legitimately -- he hacked into them by disguising his identity, making a fake account, and fraudulently downloading millions more files than were intended by the system, and through circumvention of the system.

YOU DON'T NEED A CROWBAR TO USE JSTOR

If you want to use JSTOR, it is open and free to use if you are a student of a university. Aaron Swartz was not merely needing to use JSTOR for research -- that was not his intent or his action.

JSTOR was in fact the wrong target if you were intending to go after "evil corporate greed" -- JSTOR is a nonprofit entity that gives away their content in large amounts for fees from universities that can afford it -- to cover their costs in digitalizing, maintaining, organizing, storing, providing, etc. the content. It's normal. The fees are not excessive. As this commenter closetothetruth Brian Bulkowski said under Lessig's post

I feel terribly bad for Aaron Swartz and his friends and family. As posted elsewhere here, I don't much agree with prosecutors throwing the books at him. But it is very hard for me to understand what principle or what freedom is represented by his actions, unless one believes that honest labor does not deserve honest pay. JSTOR made the materials it distributes (the digital copies of articles otherwise existing only in hard copy). It continues to add to the archive. It is a non-profit entity created by a consortium of universities and its purpose is to make materials available, and by any count those materials are much more available today than they were before JSTOR or would be without it.

It would be great if I could feel bad in the way that this Brian does -- then I'd fit in, then I'd be part of the commuuuunity. But I don't fit in and would never want to be any part of this immorality. I feel only a white-hot fury and intense revulsion at what I see Lessig, Doctorow, Barlow and all the others doing on two counts, as I wrote -- a) not having the courage of their convictions to really defend their cause (which I do not at all share) and defend this mascot for their cause who took it to their logical conclusion; b) having an immoral cause even in the first place that smashes civil society and human rights which I hold dear. It's wrong, wrong, wrong.

The "community" Aaron Swartz lived in and whom he was ostensibly "helping" had no need of this "liberation". Any one of them as a professor or student or member of a non-profit organization in many cases could access this material. The use case for "liberation" might be some one like me, not affiliated with any university, who still wants to study and learn. But I have no need of such "liberation" either -- I simply pay the fee. Or I go to a university library and explain my research and get help. What people often do is ask someone who is in a university to get them the PDF from JSTOR -- and JSTOR does not police this one-off sort of usage.

"THE PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED"

That's not what Aaron Swartz did. What he wanted to do was "make a point" and deliberately, defiantly downloaded *4 million* documents -- a huge trove, as he had criminally done with the PACER material and as Bradley Manning did with WikiLeaks. Like any anarchist or terrorist, he was out to make "the propaganda of the deed," that is, he wanted his deed not just for its own sake, but for the larger "message" it would send and viral resonance it would have.

It's exactly that sort of thing -- a deliberate and defiant and large-scale act of theft in criminal hacking -- that the authorities cannot play professor with and pretend we need linguistic lessons from Prof. Peter Ludlow. Because it's about upholding the rule of law, and as I keep pointing out, enabling all kinds of people to use the Internet freely, including by having walled gardens and pay walls if they desire to cover their costs and maintain their livelihoods!

Aaron Swartz only wanted to smash this capacity to privatize or commodify as "evil" -- as a technocommunist -- because he thought he was making "a better world". But it's not better when you don't have the freedom to have free enterprise, and you are coerced into collectivization by anarchists. That is totalitarianism, and that's what these people who support Swartz offer -- with themselves in charge.

A commenter in the New York Times named Michael Lissak summed up the problem as well -- that people who make moral crusades with stunts like this expect the prosecutor and judge to go along with their "civil disobedience" and concede that it was all just an interesting moral lesson:

I have just finished reading the entire court record (or at least the parts which are not under seal). It is clear that Aaron believed he had the right to do what he did and wanted the governments evidence that he did it struck from the record. It seems likely that his lawyers told him this approach was unlikely to succeed.

Aaron's mental health issues aside, there is a pattern of not being willing to take responsibility for one's own actions and then bearing the consequences. Like a professional athlete or a Hollywood star this young man seems to have been shielded from "reality: by well meaning friends who in sum were doing more harm than good.

Aaron's legal defense seems to be "but in my moral system this was a good thing." And it is exactly that defense strategy which demands a vigilant NO from the government. Having one's own moral code may play well to the Internet blog/twitter set, but if one is not prepared to accept responsibility for the consequences when that moral code conflicts with society's all that awaits is disaster.

The lesson from this is to stop coddling "genius, talent, or fame". These people are just that -- people -- and they too must learn to deal with the real world. Aaron Swartz should be a lesson to Lindsey Lohan and Charlie Sheen.

The government, MIT, and Carmen Ortiz have done NOTHING WRONG here. The tragedy is Aaron's. The loss is of Aaron. And the blame game needs to stop. Aaron did this to himself.

Yes, I agree Aaron has himself to blame, but he had clear-cut, established enablers -- Lessig, Doctorow, Barlow and others and the blame does have to be aportioned to them. The prosecutor is not to blame and must indeed act when there is a large-scale assault on the system like this. Not because there's some sort of corporate neoliberal blah-blah that "has' to be upheld -- that's how these posturing lefties paint it -- but because the rule of law has to serve the whole community and the Internet has to remain free for a variety of models of content to thrive on it. People need to get paid. It's okay to charge. Not everybody is a consultant to MIT on intellectual property (!) like Aaron Swartz's father, wealthy enough to send their wunderkind to Harvard.

"The Internet" set think that the system is corrupt and it's okay to smash it. I think they're corrupt because they smash, and the world they want to make with themselves in charge is a claustrophobic, unfree horror in any event.

As we saw, JSTOR eventually released 4 million documents. What ostensibly Aaron Swartz was fighting for (but wasn't really) might have been achieved non-coercively and non-violently without smashing systems -- with a letter campaign. Maybe just not as fast as the little tyrant wanted in his tantrum.

SUICIDE AS COERCION

I always view suicide as a tantrum, quite frankly -- or worse, a kind of coerciveness of everyone around -- not just friends and families and all those professors fretting and clucking who wouldn't go to the mat for him last year -- but all of society following this.

And all of Swartz's friends and family and supporters are playing along with this script now and trying to coerce us all into the mania. We're supposed to be guilt-tripped into accepting now that it's okay to hack computers and smash systems -- or else. We're supposed to be coerced into accepting the "liberation" of information online or else we are uncaring monsters. Sorry, not playing.

Suicides never impress me. I view them as cowards and manipulators; I view suicide as a sin, not victimhood. It's a deliberate act of torture of all those people who cared about you, sentencing them to a lifetime of torment and gnawing conscience and "what-ifs". How can you have any respect for anyone who does such a thing? I realize this runs contrary to all the modern psycho-babble; I don't care. An entire industry has sprung up of "helping profession" that want to "destigmatize" suicide and medicalize it and make it a disease as they do with so much else that represents a failure of will and morality in society, like drug addiction and alcoholism and pedophilia. I don't care how politically incorrect it is to point out that suicide is wrong; it hurts other people, and it is throwing an enormous tantrum to get your way. There is no humility in suicide; there is only self-aggrandizement.

 

 

 

Foreign Policy's Livefyre Commenting System Sucks -- and Maybe That's on Purpose

No doubt like other readers of ForeignPolicy.com, I've been frustrated for months with the really crappy comment management system used on the articles, called Livefyre.

Of course, Livefyre sucks wherever you find it because it enables anonymous comments, and that always makes for unaccountable idiocy and nastiness.

The gold standard these days is to have Facebook log-ins for comments, as that forces people to use their real-life identity, and therefore their remarks attach to their online reputation -- and that's a good thing.

I'm all for pseudonymous accounts and their rights, and it's possible to build up a good persistent identity online even with a pseudonym, but the worst thing is to be in a setting where you reveal your identity but the other commenters hide and snipe at you -- such is the atmosphere on many websites and we're all used to it.

Livefyre gets especially frustrating and stupid on ForeignPolicy.com, however, because of the mechanics of how it dysfunctions.

You've probably noticed that when you get a notification that someone has responded to your comment, if you click on the link in your email, it "goes nowhere" -- you get to a page with an error message. Perhaps you conclude that the comment -- which might seem nasty more often than not -- was removed by moderators -- but actually, it isn't most of the time.

If you are curious, you might try logging into the site, or noting that you are logged in already and try again -- maybe that's the issue?

But you'll discover that in fact that makes no difference -- you can't reach that story by that link no matter what, even logged in.

So if you are like most people, you give up at this point (or you did even before) because comments under The Cable or Passport or Shadow Government -- where all kinds of trolls hang out and harass those who disagree with them -- aren't worth answering.

So maybe Foreign Policy likes it this way -- by keeping this built-in, engineered dysfunction, they probably cut their comments in half or less. 

Of course, that failure to keep reader stickiness hurts their ad clicks and their overall bottom line, so some grown-up should try to explain to them that they need to swallow their nerdy "progressive" pride and let people talk as much as they want on their comments, given that they're open and not moderated -- or at least, not pre-moderated.

But in order to get at this problem, you'll have to be very persistent -- and penetrate the wall of geek assholery that perpetrated this situation in the first place -- and will make it hard to fix. Namely:

o The geeky editors -- Blake Hounsell and company -- don't care what happens in the comments. They chose a system that they vaguely thought would enable more comments and more free speech -- and maybe they suffered from the usual geeky hatred of Facebook as a "walled garden" -- but in fact they didn't do due diligence to see if it actually works. Why? Well, they don't really want comments. The authors never answer them. They never appear even to have read them. They are for the masses -- especially those "low information voters" so loathed by the Twitterati -- to entertain each other, not for real reader engagement.

o The geeks at Livefyre itself refuse to care about what they view as Foreign Policy's problem. It's not their business to try to make the FP customer's experience better; we're not their customer -- FP is their customer. They view their job as only the narrow patch between their servers and the commenter, and whether that fully integrates smoothly with foreignpolicy.com itself is really not something they can be arsed to worry about. Not my server, not my problem. It's just an API or whatever it is, they handle it, and if half the people are lost using it, too bad. Let FP figure it out.

The combination of the arrogant foreign policy nerds (see their admissions policy if you want to learn how snotty they are) and the arrogant Livefyre nerds means that the readership of Foreign Policy can go fish. That's how they like it. In fact, it ensures that only the most dedicated and determinated (or the most obsessive with the ability to hang out online all day) will go to the trouble to search in the huge cluttery clusterfuck that is the front page and side bars of FP for articles they once commented on and find their comments manually to be able to answer the other fucktards that cranked at them below some hipster's blog post about Syrian rebels or Chuck Hagel.

So hence this correspondence below with Lifefyre. The language, the attitude, the assumptions  will be familiar to those long-suffering denizens of the JIRA or bug-tracker in Second Life, so I include it here for your enlightenment. Maybe -- as I said -- some grown-up at the switchboard over there at FP will wake up and figure out that they need to create dynamically-updating URLs for their articles so that they don't go out of date even within a few hours and prevent commenting and trackbacks from working and therefore cutting out gadzillion return visits to the site and ruining traffic and CPM.

What We Lost with the Social Web -- Good!

Danil flogging the Goatse. Photo by ptufts, 2006.

My New York City neighbour Anil Dash -- who was the entrepreneur who founded this very site Typepad I'm blogging on, in fact, and who went on to greater glory to wear his Goatse t-shirt at a White House gig -- has a weepy post up about "The Web We Lost".

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.

Reply · Like · Unfollow Post · 33 minutes ago

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state

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.

 Tristan Louis · Subscribe · CEO and Founder at Keepskor

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.

Reply · 7 · Like · Follow Post · 15 hours ago

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state

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.

Will Anybody Stop or Even Criticize Beth Noveck's "Wiki Government" Collectivism?

Today I'm going to run between two interesting conferences on my two favourite topics, Central Asia and Internet freedom, one at Carnegie and the other organized by [email protected] called "Wiki Government" as part of the "Wikimania" conference (oh dear) -- a movement by some US government cadres to overthrow the institutions of government that they find don't suit their "progressive" agenda -- which I've been quite critical of.

Imagine, a two-day conference on "Wiki Government" (shudder) which is likely to get absolutely no critical coverage whatsoever, because likely only the craven tech press and evangelists like @digiphile will show up to cover it in great adulation.

"Wiki government' is not something anyone got to discuss democratically with some impartial facts in Congressional hearings or briefings from what I can tell (usually someone finds something that counters this sort of claim of mine of non-democracy around the wikitarians, so bring it, but I don't see it -- trying to criticize the wikinistas is like talking to a hair-dryer, as Scoble once said of me lol -- here are my 21 Theses Against Wikipedia).

No, it's just something that the enthusiasts hope to "ram through" with the network of officials in office, NGO groupies, lobbyists and think-tanks funded by Silicon Valley corporations (or Soros and other "progressives).

Even the New Republic, which has always been my preferred liberal publication, doesn't ever seem to have given all this wiki gov 2.0 nonsense a thrash-through. It still awaits its New Yorker treatment (finally the TED cult has gotten a New Yorker critique that helps explain the greatest thing wrong with it, almost in spite of the author's intent as he seems bowled over by the cult: that it is emotional, not scientific, and plays on emotions, and is not science-based).

So the gov 2.0 debates still play out in more arcane or sequestered places, or blogs like Tom Slee's -- he is a critic, or even mine although I don't spend too much time on it because it takes away from more urgent struggles and I think it will completely collapse of its own weight if Romney comes in, and even if we get Obama II, it will become a more visible target of failure and retired. It's expensive, all those consultants.

Crooked Timber, always interesting to read but tilting to the left with the "progressives, has had a series of posts: here, here, here, here including by Beth Noveck and John Wunderlich about whether or not in fact big data is a good thing and helping bring accountability to government or just a distraction from the need for "structural reforms". As I explain my post there, basically, open data is a Silicon Valley hustle and does have more than its share of collectivism injected into it, but it's of the "capitalism for me, communism for thee" school of Internet platforming.  Meanwhile, what Beth Noveck and Aaron Swartz want is far more radical -- Beth wants to "blow up Congress," for example and replace it with "collaborative democracy".

Anyone who has spent any time in Soviet studies or studying or working in Russia gets where all this comes from, and within seconds of posting a tweet about the awfulness of "collaborative democracy," Clay Amerikanets, an American living in Russia who used to slam my critiques of Russia when A Good Treaty egged him on two years ago, but maybe has seen the light about Putin, in fact immediately recognized this "collaborative" stuff as merely "democratic centralism" of the sort Gorbachev said he would "invigorate" -- but which, of course, was designed by Lenin and perfected by Stalin.

Remember "the cadres decide everything?"

Well, they still do, when Beth Noveck's in charge as she was at the Office of Science and Technology in the White House for two years, before her academic leave kicked in and caused her to return to university or face loss of tenure.

I first encountered Beth Noveck where I encountered all Internet prototype things -- in the virtual world of Second Life in 2005. I was horrified at her writings. I hadn't read anything so profoundly scary and disruptive of liberal democracy ever and began blogging in horror about these bad ideas that were merely Soviet collectivism dressed up with cyber-clothing and pretending they had no provenance in Bolshevism.

In 2009, when she came to power as part of the Obama transition team, I expressed more horror.

Of course, there are those who dislike my critique of technocommunism and use of this term and find me a crank. I don't care. I'll do anything to jump up and down and get attention to the loss of liberal democracy and freedom in my country -- and this is it.  At its most benign, it's stealth socialism like other Obama-isms --  which isn't so benign -- but at its worst, it's a communist-style cadre revolution that hopes to take power by overthrowing the executive branch of government in a technocratic coup, and achieving this through "rules in agencies" or whatever stealth technique they can use to take over. It should be stopped. It's not even being debated, however.

I was first tipped off to the horror of the collectivism with this concept for a virtual world's avatar -- and if you think it's exotic, think again, as you are now an avatar on Facebook and an avatar on Twitter, even if you aren't in Second Life, because you moved yourself online, didn't you?

Avatars are “public” characters, personalities designed to function in a public and social capacity. Avatars think and act as members of a community, rather than as private individuals. Having to construct an avatar in a virtual world not only allows me to see myself but it demands that I design a personage for interaction with others

Of course, avatars in fact are profoundly individual and free and possess all the rights they have offline in the online world, and although highly flawed with development-speak that threatens government intervention, the new Internet freedom resolution at the UN Human Rights Council at least stresses that much.

Not for Beth Noveck, Clay Shirky and others with this online collectivist ideology -- the group is more important and more special and more modern and cool now. "Demanding that I design a personage for interaction with others" when constrained by ethics-free and undemocratic code on commercial platforms is in fact a horror, not progress.

Beth Noveck (Lawlita Fassbinder in Second Life) opened up a simulator (an island) called Democracy Island in Second Life. There you can see her notion of invading the rules-making bodies and overthrowing those agencies to put in collectivism since it's much harder to do with Congress the democratic way (and she wants to blow up Congress).

The first thing that happened with Democracy Island is that it had a closed group -- you couldn't join it as you could many other groups in SL like "Thinkers," a huge discussion group active for a number of years. The next thing that happened is that Democracy Island became physically closed, subject to the whims of the devs and the managers -- basically Beth got tired of its inability to attract the "masses" and lots of old-media style press coverage and went on to other things, leaving it to students. It ended, as one of the students I befriended told me, with dragon furries (i.e. the alternative movement of humans who like to role-play as animals online) fornicating in the empty meadows of the unused Democracy pavillion... The Creative Commons licensing kiosk also gathered cobwebs (thank God!) after only about 30 uses...

People don't really like being collectivized online, although there are "thought leaders" ready to use the age-old techniques to manipulate the masses who turn them into flash-mobs. But that's not democracy, it's something more akin to anarchy or even Bolshevism, as usually only a few cadres who are "advanced" decide everything. (One thing that Parmy Olsen's book on Anonymous is good for is exposing this myth that Anonymous is some kind of lovely loose-knit democracy, when in fact it is a rigid, cult-like hierarchy, as I've always said.)

Clay Shirky is fascinated with "Here Comes Everybody" and groups and collectives -- until they don't work out, then he wants to engineer them. Beth is no different. In her stay at the White House, she tried to get various group collaborationist efforts going, sanitizing and controlling the debate by shutting off comments quickly on the moderated website -- finally completely shutting them down. But, as she wrote:

It is no longer an issue of whether we ought to give power to groups; they are taking it.

By that she means groups she likes, whether as extreme as Anonymous or Occupy Wall Street, whatever, they can be "managed".

If we take seriously the power of groups and the impact of technology on collective action, we ought to think about what it means to give them body as well as soul — to “incorporate” them.

And by that, she means simply organizing the filtrated-out cadres of "the likeminded" -- and the rest is history that we should be careful not to repeat in this country.

The first tip-off to how destructive this gang is of real democracy is that they remove the vote. There can't be any vote. Or there can't be any "no vote". There has to be "liquid democracy" type of coded software that frog-marches people into "constructive" or "collaborative" discussions. So watch when the up and down secret ballot on a vote disappears, and the coders insist that it has to be removed because it's "negative" or not "constructive".

And the first sign of victory on this here is in the appearance of a company called Zoomph which is going to launch today at [email protected] They're even giving a happy hour. Now what could be wrong with something that manages Twitter with a cool name like that, and is having a happy hour for geeks?!

Well, it's because they've solved the problem (that of course Metanomics and scripters in Second Life long ago solved) of how to appear cool and have real-time tweets with conference hashtags and running live-blogging and commenting on a conference, but get rid of the people you don't like. Get rid of those negative types! Get rid of the critiques!

So all that happy flow of people eating noodle salads in 140 character bites, but no "negative criticism".

Zoomph of course is mainly for business -- "find out what people are saying about your brand" they say.

But they're all about MANAGED DEMOCRACY in this:

Real-Time Twitter Conversation Moderator:
Approve or reject content you want displayed on your Tweet stream.

So they actually have not only a software suite like a Tweetdeck, but live people who will come and run your conference and filtrate out the people like me : )

It will be fascinating to see this in action -- comparing the hashtag at the conference on Twitter itself, and then see what they filtrate out on the big screen in the room.

Obviously, conference-controllers got really, really tired of being overthrown from the floor of their conferences by tweeters.

Open data doesn't really interest Beth Noveck, as she has bigger fish to fry and more radical fish:

But until we stop talking about data and start talking about complex and collaborative governance, we will fail to appreciate how open data can both protect consumers, lessen the burdens on entrepreneurs and catalyze more effective institutions.

From her collectivist perspective, she's right that data by itself isn't much unless you overthrow government itself and install communism. Liberating data, for someone like that, is only a half-way house and seems too bourgeois and social democratic when the real problem is how to have the avant-garde of the workers take over.

As always, it will be interesting to see a person whose views I find antithetical to real freedom and democracy in person. Of course, I saw her years ago at State of Play and in avatar form in Second Life and have seen the youtubes and the TEDs. But in real, is she effective? Do people debate her? Do they realize the problem with what she's pushing here?

Given how filtrated the Twitter feed is, I imagine the Q&A will be missing or very limited and only the fanboyz will get picked, and unfortunately I'll have to run back to the other conference and will be unlikely to be able to ask a question.

"Participatory budgeting" and "collaborative democracy" are collectivist clap-trap. Those of us in Soviet studies learned this 50 years ago if not 25 years ago and keep learning it. A new generation of people born long after the Cold War and even the collapse of the USSR don't get it, and will have to be shown the basics so that history doesn't repeat again. And I don't think that if it repeats in cyberspace instead of real life it is then necessarily farce and not tragedy.

The reason WikiLeaks occurred is not only because of the destructive power of Julian Assange and other anarchists and their foot-soldiers in Anonymous, but because our government and military institutions were already beginning to be weakened by unexamined wikitarianism.  There's a big difference between using modern new media and social media tools for useful collaboration and the cultist movement of "collaborative democracy" that is essentially the communist "democratic centralism".  Hopefully, some people will start understanding this better soon.

Here's what a colleague in Second Life had to say about this movement two years ago -- a thoughtful and smart person whom I have long debated who is mainly a social democrat herself, from Portugal:

The Wikipedia pages on "collaborative democracy" and "collaborative governance" are... strange. Some are just stubs pointing to Metagovernment, an ideological organisation that is set to destroy reprsentative democracy and replace it by collaborative governance. Others fail to show pro/con arguments and just discuss how absolutely wonderful collaborative governance is supposed to be, once it becomes widely implemented.

Since Prok [that's my avatar in SL] wrote this article [ on the Coming Collectivization] Beth Noveck was appointed as an official of the Obama administration, as advisor to the President.

And this is also coming to Second Life. Although I know that Prokofy will always label the Confederation of Democratic Simulators "Bolshevik collectivism" :) now we have a new threat to fight: the collaborative democrats have "invaded" in force, and, armed with the banners of Noveck, they're slowly getting rid of representative democracy (a model they claim to be "obsolete" and "outdated") and setting their own version of collaborative democracy instead. Of course it's at a tiny scale. But it shows the kind of strategies these people employ to subvert representative democracy by slowly employing "wikigovernment" instead, which has a huge acceptance among techies, lawyers, and political scientists...

Noveck and friends have few detractors. Prok's article is pretty much one of the few I ever read. Either the detractors are, indeed, few (I hardly imagine nobody has seen the consequences of this model!); or, thanks to wiktatorship, they have been silently removed. So I felt like publishing an article of my own:

http://cdsobserver.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/the-pitfalls-of-collaborative-democracy/

PS the "Confederation of Democratic Simulators" ended badly and is no more, from what I gather. They got invaded by those "collaborationists" and like Europeans in real life, also caught the bug of infatuation with Islamism and allowed the Caliphate sim to join them and they eventually forced out dissidents and took over, then collapsed.

Arrogant Google Engineer Dreams up Self-Serving Geek Code of Conduct

Rebecca MacKinnon, who is known for her radical vision of the Internet, has posted a hideous "code of conduct" for coders on liberationtech, the closed list that anyone can join but which is not made public by the list owners and which has a high level of censorship "moderation".

There's a lot of this "bill of rights" and "duties and responsibilities" stuff going around these days, it reminds me of how kids go up in tree houses when they are 9 years old and draw up rules for their club, then change the rules the next day. But whenever you see a Google engineer strike up a pious pose like this one, watch out, your rights will be taken away from you.

Here are the following things wrong with this idea:

1. First, if it is truly to be liberal, democratic and transparent, a code of conduct should be the end of a process, not the beginning. Drafting it and putting it out to a list of your peers and posting it on G+ and calling it "transparent and open" is ridiculous. Of course it's not. It's merely the usual geeky sectarian operation. Perhaps if some existing organization of engineers, the IEEE or something, or Computer Scientists for Social Responsibility, or some organization with a board and membership, or even TechCrunch were to post something they've drafted, it might reach more people and have more seriousness. One wonders why the CSSR code already in existence wasn't good enough for this Google boss -- probably it wasn't collective and coercive enough.

But the best thing would be not to have such a code of conduct for ethics-free hackers, but apply existing national and international law to them and prosecute them when they break existing organic law.

2. The notion hinges on a concept of "the commons" which I really find repulsive. We can see it outlined in MacKinnon's book as well -- a utopian, socialistic space of coders and programmers and their chroniclers like MacKinnon herself, and some other politically-correct folk, who collectively, and collectivized, make up "the Internet" or "the commuuuuunity" as geeks always call it reverently. Their "commons" is like the Second Life sandbox where the furries go to script objects and decide whether to crash the servers or not, and if they crash them, claim this is a good deed that is testing the system and "helping" to make it stronger by bug, er, testing.

The commons is merely a computerized commons -- not people, not real people in their real communities in the real world, but the artificial coded commons with the code-cave culture reigning. That explains what comes next in the code of conduct:

3. It's now fashionable for people who in fact believe that "code is law" and not law is law to speak airly of the rights-based approach. In fact this term has a long and twisted history at the UN and in various NGOs and is being discarded by people who want to ensure that it isn't just a cover for the same old Marxist or authoritarian newspeak being dressed up with a sanctifying "rights" concept. The rights-based approach was originally designed and promulgated particularly by Kofi Annan in fact to take the UN out of its Soviet-style culture where agencies like UNDP would do "development," like put in giant dams because a communist party had ruled it, instead of finding out if that actually served people's livelihoods and wouldn't ruin their communities. Rights-based was an antidote to big ideological straightjackets that made development more accountable to universal civil and political rights and people's needs.

But in the Internet world, geeks are now wielding notions of "rights" as the Marxists at the UN once did, in order to get rid of commerce, profit-making, free enterprise, business, corporate rights as persons, etc. etc. That's all.

3. Max Senges claims code is "a product serving no other purpose than to benefit man in general, not merely some men".

But that's utter bullshit, even by the tekkie's lights. They are the first to claim that technology and code are inanimate, neutral, and "just tools". Of course, I always argue that in fact their culture is baked into it, when I wish it weren't. And here Senges as good as admits it by telling us that code in fact has a purpose welded into it -- or SHOULD have welded into it -- "to benefit man in general, not merely some men."

Why? Who gets to decide? Why this collective deciding this coercive thing? If someone wants to make code to help only some set of users, that's fine. They aren't required, in a business, or a non-profit, to be all things to all men. And why should code "serve humanity"? Most code in fact is entertaining and time-wasting. Is this serving humanity? Maybe not, but it's part of the free market and human freedom to do what they want online, as long as they don't break the law, and they need not be coerced into some agenda to create a "better world" or have to be "benefited". It's pious utopian bullshit and needs to be called out as such instantly.

4. Now listen to this particular arrogant outrage:

"I will seek to  understand the technological, economic, socio-cultural and ethical   dimensions and interdependencies of the online ecosystem, always aiming not   to hamper user-centered development and innovation but to further creative   destruction and open competition.

When I wrote about my theory of socialware (back in 2009 before there was a company by that name and no Google returns on that word) -- I meant that social media software  would in the future (and it can't get here soon enough!) cease to be generated exclusively by coders (and their VC backers) but would actually be rooted in existing communities that needed some web or electronic task done that they would then themselves very much participate in creating. That is, these users wouldn't be tacked on as an afterthought or as some condescending nice thing to do; the project would begin with them, not end with them; it would not happen without them. This was to counter the constant collectivism, engineering hegemony, and just plain bad ideas that harm people or are just stupid that are rampant in Internet "innovation".  Yes, in a world of free commerce, you will go on having all that arrogance and stupidity and can't stop it.

But what you can do is stake out some areas that in fact really, truly are user-centric -- and "user" as in "ordinary people like your Mom" -- not some power user in the devs' insiders' fan clubs and groups. Imagine a world in which regular, ordinary people decide what kind of software they need to live their lives and what its features are and how it should operate -- as philosophical and social and spiritual premises -- rather than coders. A world in which they really decide and really control this process. Such a world would require a revolution in the consciousnesses of coders -- or a dismissal of the existing class of coders and the creation of a completely different one. In conceiving of this dream, I was responding to the insanity of every beta-test that I had participated in, every outrageous open-source project that was anti-human, every geek-centric enterprise that ended in tears not because of PICNIC ("problem in chair, not in computer) but because of PANIC ("problem about nerd, not in computer".

This high-and-mighter coder Max Senges is no different -- he puts himself as a coder at the center of the universe, and then -- striking a noble and pious pose -- pledges to "help" users. No, we don't need your fake sacrifices, asshole. Especially when your goal is the hugely fake "creative destruction," where you are always disrupting and destroying somebody else, but it never touches you, eh? Just once, just once, if a piece of software bit you as hard on the ass as it has some of us, you might be chastened, you might be humbled! "Humility is endless."

Instead, Max sees himself surrounded by adoring fans, dispensing code magnanimously to the grateful masses.

As for competition, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. Google is terrible at social, but it has to have social to compete with Facebook, when it should apply its talents to other things it does well and not be so greedy.

5. And here we see more collectivization -- such an ominous trend with all these people:

" collaboratively generate knowledge and to contribute to sound decision  making"

Knowledge isn't always generated collaboratively. Sometimes it's generated by a lone individual by himself or two partners in a proprietary company. That's ok. "Sound" decision making? Is that another code word for the sciencism approach, that only *some* decisions made by the collective are "good," and the individual free decisions of participants in the free market are bad? Sounds like it! Be gone!

6. "I will take critics seriously. Governance is about constructive  dialogue rather than representation."

Oh, baloney. You don't take critics seriously or you wouldn't be writing such self-centered poppycock. And who says criticism has to be "constructive"? Who gets to decide? Your gilded guild?! Governance is in fact about representatives -- congress people, parliamentarians. Representative democracy is a good thing; one person, one vote is a good thing. The notion of special collectives online that deliberate "constructively" is a fiction, a communist utopia that disguises the "thought leaders" and the "cadres who decide everything". They should not be deciding. Direct democracy is not democracy. Deliberation is not a vote. Democracy is rowdy, free, negative, with *gasp* even ad hominem attacks and swearing! Good! Let it be free, and keep your clutchy, controlling paws off it.

7. Note the creepy mafia-like omerta approach in no. 3. If there was a real human rights violation, why aren't you publicizing it or calling the police? If one of your little script kiddie friends DDOSes the Pentagon, you should call the FBI, not "solve it internally" or just have a "little talk" with your peers inside the group.

When Catholic arbishops followed this approach with pedophile priests, the world rightly condemned them. Why is this particular geek clergy given a pass in doing the same thing? We need more, not less, calling out of "misdeeds" of the whole ethics-free coding class -- and how!

8. And here we go again with the open-source cult -- no validation of code for commercial purposes, or proprietary code, but just this silly hippie utopianism:

"henever possible I will contribute to the commons and the public  domain. Subsequently I will always practice a strong bias towards open innovation and open standards."

I've got news for these goofs. The commons lives without them and beyond them and around them. The commons is living and diverse and the aggregate of every person or institution or government or group on the Internet of every type, not coders.

The role of the coder is merely to write instructions for machines. It's about at the level of a garage mechanic or a gas station attendant. And that's where we need to have these people realize they are: not running us, not running our "commons," not running our code without our full-fledged equal-rights involvement, regardless of our technical capacity, but serving the public like any other profession, something below doctor or lawyer, in fact.

There's more gobbledegook here -- "striving to understand the contextual agreement" -- Foucault, go home!

But it's clear that this entire construct serves only the ideology of technocommunism, privileging coders as the "avant-garde" of the working class and making a state where "democratic centralism" at best among the Party elite decides everything -- and we're to expect a favour has been done for us and our "commons".

Stop this now in its cradle!

Here's the full text as posted by MacKinnon:

By Max Senges who works for Google in Berlin, with a background in academia
and civil society.
Cheers,
Rebecca

http://maxsenges.com/?p=402
A hippocratic Oath for Techies & Policymakers
Posted on 2012/07/03 <http://maxsenges.com/?p=402> by
maxsenges<http://maxsenges.com/?author=3>
*Acknowledegements & Context*

When Rick Whitt and I were working on a paper on a framework for internet
policy that brings together complexity theory, endogenous economics and
common pool resource governance, I pondered once again about a proposal to
write and promote a hippocratic oath for internet techies and policy makers
in order to have them (including me) pledge to ?do no harm? to the potent
but also fragile internet ecosystem.

Below you find a code of conduct to which I feel I can subscribe. However
it is not and will never be final. Rather I plan to develop, add and
sharpen the code further. Please send comments and suggestions as to what
should be included and/or where it should be more precise.
**
Preamble

I recognize technology as a product of human effort, a product serving no
other purpose than to benefit man in general, not merely some men; man in
the totality of his humanity, encompassing all his manifold interests and
needs, not merely some one particular concem of his. Humanistically viewed,
technology is not an end in itself but a means to an end, the end being
determined by man. I hence promote a humanistic conception of technology in
which the desire to obtain maximum benefits is subordinated to the
obligation not to injure human beings or society at large.

Therefore the following principles shall marshal my mindset, decision
making and practices:
**
Code of Conduct

**
*1) Do no harm:*

  - I hold a humanistic conception of the internet and therefore will not
  simply compare costs and benefits of any particular code or practice, but
  follow a rights based approach as formulated in the 10 Internet Rights &
  Principles <http://irpcharter.org/campaign/>.
  - When assessing code, practices and policy proposals I will seek to
  understand the technological, economic, socio-cultural and ethical
  dimensions and interdependencies of the online ecosystem, always aiming not
  to hamper user-centered development and innovation but to further creative
  destruction and open competition.

*2) Participate in deliberation: *

  - Acknowledging that internet governance must be an open
  multi-stakeholder process, I will participate in both internal
  organisational discourse as well as in public deliberation with the aim to
  collaboratively generate knowledge and to contribute to sound decision
  making.
  - I will take critics seriously. Governance is about constructive
  dialogue rather than representation.

*3) Act responsibly  *

  - I will contribute to the internet governance discourse to the best of
  my knowledge. Should an obligation to an institution contradict my
  perspective I shall refrain from disagreeing publicly but will take the
  responsibility to argue my case internally.
  - Should I witness any error or misdeed (i.e. human rights violation) I
  shall first address and remedy it with the responsible individual or within
  the responsible organisation. However should it prove impossible to resolve
  a serious matter directly, I shall bring the case to prosecution.

*4) Promote openness & contribute to the commons*

  - Whenever possible I will contribute to the commons and the public
  domain. Subsequently I will always practice a strong bias towards open
  innovation and open standards.
  - I will always acknowledge from whom or from what text I have learned
  about a certain idea or concept and if appropriate include direct links (or
  other relevant bibliographic references)
  - I will be transparent about my social networks and motivation to
  choose collaboration partners.

*5) Respect privacy and confidentiality*

  - I will honor the contextual agreement regarding the use and sharing of
  information and data that I have access to. This means that I will use and
  discuss information only within a given institution (confidential) or
  between certain individuals (private). In order to do so I shall always
  strive to understand the contextual agreement and make it explicit when in
  doubt.
  - Given the strong socio-political and economic benefits of information
  and data that is in the commons (or public domain), I will strive to make
  transparent and public as many of the endeavors and practices I am involved
  in as possible.

**
*Acknowledegements*
I had been inspired to work on such a code of conduct some years back when
I read the excellent article ?A Humanistic Technology? (1965) Hyman
Rickover<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover>.
(The Preamble is a mashup from his text.) In the article he proposes that
given the power technocrats and engineers have over mankind they should
swear an hippocratic oath which binds them to an ethical code which is
placed above the interests of their employer or their self-interest.

Back then I chaired the Internet Rights and Principles (IRP) coalition and
the discussions about how to transpose human rights to the net and what
technical principles should be upheld was also aimed at the goal to find an
agreement on which to root internet governance (policies) and hence
practices. The group has since produced an excellent document ?10 Internet
Rights and Principles <http://irpcharter.org/campaign/>? which I naturally
use as fundament of this code of conduct.

During the development of these guiding principles I also consulted several
related texts such as ACM Code of Ethics and Professional
Conduct<http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics>andThe Ten
Commandments of Computer
Ethics<http://cpsr.org/issues/ethics/cei/>from the Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) website.

And of course I also happily followed Jeff Jarvis? proposal to President
Sarkozy (and all policy makers) to swear an hippocratic oath for the
internet back at the eG8 Summit in 2011. In fact it was when I listened to
his pretty good audio book ?Public Parts<http://buzzmachine.com/publicparts/>?
that I decided to take a shot at a prototype for such an oath as feels
right to me as professional policy entrepreneur.

Killing the Internet in Order to Save It: The Awful Free Press "Internet Freedom" Declaration

Save the Internet, a campaign of the so-called "non-partisan" Free Press, is using this stylized icon of an American eagle with a cell phone tower and an Internet network diagram in its claws to signify "freedom," but while a 501-c-3 organization supposedly engaged in education and not lobbying, its selectively focused only on stopping "bad bills like SOPA, PIPA and CISPA"

Save the Internet is an old socialist cause in new cyber clothing.

If you're tired of hearing about "technocommunists" from me, you can read it in an enlightening and accurate essay by Adam Thierer of Tech Liberation Front, who explains that one of the leaders of this campaign is none other than Robert McChesney, an avowed radical and socialist, who has a very definite and detailed vision for government and the economy -- and now the Internet. As Adam explains, with the more durable US Constitution and Bill of Rights, we actually have all we need to enjoy freedom in cyberpsace:

By contrast, if you subscribe to an alternative theory of rights that imagines there exists a litany of goodies to which we all possess an inalienable right, then you will likely be more sympathetic to efforts like the this new “Declaration of Internet Freedom” and “Digital Bill of Rights.” But that’s the problem I have with both documents.  The wonderful thing about the original Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights was that they didn’t create any expensive entitlements that required affirmative state action. Instead, they tightly bound government and curtailed its powers and left the people at liberty. By contrast, these new “Declaration of Internet Freedom” and “Digital Bill of Rights” contain all sorts of aspirational principles that could be construed as “positive rights” that require government to provide some sort of basic underlying service, or to affirmatively and aggressively regulate the information economy to protect some of these amorphous values.

Also involved in this campaign are the same crew from the Mitch Kapor-funded astro-turf outfits about which I've been writing forever -- lately here, in outlining their role in the anti-SOPA campaign.

Free Press prides itself on being "transparent," and you can even find links to its 990s, the forms they must return to the Internal Revenue Service as a non-profit organization. They don't mention WHO their funders are in their "about us" and other web site sections, and forgot (or it wasn't easy to find) the list of contributors of $10,000 or more that must accompany the 990s. But I knew that it's the Soros Foundation -- and this is a matter of public record in any event, just Google it. There's more in that vein that can be found -- "Save the Internet," far from the "bipartisan" campaign it feigns to be is a concoction of the "progressive left" -- the New American Foundation, home of cyber-freedom-fighter Rebecca MacKinnon who has a most decided radical vision of the Internet and the Free Press is basically another Electronic Frontier Foundation front.

By getting everything from Mozille and Cheezburger to Amnesty International to sign on to this seemingly innocuous platform, and spreading it around with the highly-read tech press so that every geek clicks on it twice, Save the Internet can create the impression of a "mass movement" -- something that of course socialists have always dreamed of since they first conceived of making a better world whether people wanted one by their lights or not.

And what it's achieved so far is now spawning a predictable reaction from the conservative libertarian right -- Ron Paul and Rand Paul have now targeted them in ways that also undermine the real Internet freedom cause, because now anyone who tries to criticize the socialists for re-introducing state control will be tarred with the brush of the loony Paul phenomenon (and I'll have more to say about that problem in another post).

Save the Internet pretends that Internet freedom "isn't a left or right issue" -- but of course it is, as it has to do with power, property, governance, and people, and different visions for social systems and how they are to be run.

STI pretends the proof of their "bi-partisan" nature is their "strange political bedfellows" like lefty Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has fought SOPA and fought cybersecurity measures and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) who has done exactly the same from the libertarian perspective -- these two extreme positions meet around the Internet and the utopian notions of "open" because it facilitates their drive for power.

Disingenuously, Save the Internet gets a beleaguered Egyptian blogger to morally equivocate the murder and oppression he faces in his own disrupted country with "troubling trends emerging in your own backyards" like...."network neutrality" and "draconian copyright" (!). And what sort of copyright isn't "draconian" for these guys, except maybe the few books of Cory Doctorow's that might still sell even if he doesn't give them away?

Using the stylized art work of the Infographic -- which has increasingly added a shrill note of Bolshevik-style propaganda to the web and dumbed down thought and debate -- Save the Internet has boiled its "theses" down into five principles"

Don't censor the Internet.

That sounds fine -- who can't get behind that? Except for these extremists, "censorship" can mean prosecuting piracy even legitimately. For them, "censorship" is removing links to pirate sites or prosecuting the owners of commercial pirate sites that earn hundreds of thousands of dollars hijacking TV streams unlawfully, such as is alleged in the case of Richard O'Dwyer, who the US wants to extradite from UK to "send a message" -- now that both SOPA and ACTA have failed in the crush of the Internet flashmobs.

We've also learned that "censorship" can mean merely enforcing rules of good taste or decency as a private corporation, as Apple does when it takes out nude pictures, or enforcing its own terms of service against hate speech and incitement of violence, which it does when it removes the "intifada" app.  Non-state actors don't commit censorship under the law; they aren't the actors or the enforcers of the First Amendment, and Supreme Court jurisprudence has ruled a number of times that corporations' own freedom of expression and freedom of association trump the notion that they have to supply freedom of expression to everyone at First-Amendment levels.

They don't. In a free market, there are varieties of levels, and the issue is that the *state* cannot stop a publisher of nude pictures or hate speech, not that the private company that doesn't wish to publish them has to be *forced* by "progressives" to publish them. Jurisprudence at the UN Human Rights Committee supports this interpretation as well.

Next, the freedom-fighters have demanded the socialist access -- "promote universal access to fast and affordable networks".

Who is going to do this and how they are going to pay for it all is left unstated -- typical for socialism. Sadly, this manifesto, that came out literally the same day as the UN resolution on Internet Freedom was being publicized, perfectly echoes the "development speak" of the troublesome paragraphs in that resolution:

3. Calls upon all States to promote and facilitate access to the internet and international cooperation aimed at the development of media and information and communications facilities in all countries;

Ah, Americans live large -- they want fast and affordable access not mere "facilitation" as they're offering at the more timid UN!

That this lefty manifesto conceived by socialists long ago and mooted now in a timed campaign is meant to echo the UN resolution is patently obvious, and the links in the networks with figures like Rebecca MacKinnon to both texts are on the record as well. Even so, we need to learn more about how this decision to include this identical text was developed at the State Department and by whom to understand what we might expect from Obama II in terms of more government interference in the Internet in the name of "freedom".

Next comes the coded and loaded term "openness" -- which is always and everywhere linked with promotion of open-source software with this crew.

Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create & innovate.

Say, what's missing? I'll tell you: freedom to come online and sell stuff. Freedom of commerce. Freedom of prosperity. Freedom for the profit motive to make and sell commodities or services. If you think "innovation" covers that, think again -- most of Silicon Valley's "innovations" are free, and paid for by venture capitalists or foundations like the Mozilla Foundation (Mitch Kapor again) or covered by ad clicks -- which aren't even included in the "openness" regime here cooked up by these "bi-partisan" socialists. How does Daryl Issa think the companies in his state of California are going to pay for everybody's Youtube???

Innovation, of course, is a loaded and coded term as well. It means anything that Google and other Silicon Valley companies want to do to advance their business, whether in fact it's a very tired old app based on scraping your data and reselling it to ad agencies to pitch you ads while you upload pictures of your cat, or whether it enables free accounts and uploads for free, hijacks content to sell against against, and makes IP holders chase after platform providers with DMCA takedown notices.

Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don't block new technologies and don't punish innovations for their users' actions.

"Creating without permission" is only one thing: abolishing copyright. The "permission" you need if you have a new innovative service like Pinterest is merely the right of the content "shared" by the customer. In many cases, the customers don't have rights to the content they upload. While in a small circle of friends it doesn't seem like a big deal, as the numbers grow larger and as the ads inevitably begin to be served, then it becomes a problem of rampant criminality, just as it was for Youtube, owned by Google, and Twitter and other networks.

"punish innovators for their users' actions" is merely a coded phrase for insistence on "safe harbour" status for content and "common carrier" status so that Google or other entities are not held liable for the content infringements or other crimes of their users.

Yet there's something really contradictory about all this. As we know from Google's faux Transparency Report, Google takes down millions of items every year at the behest of governments and corporations. It has terms of service that bar infringement and hate speech and so on. It responds unevenly and in fact non-transparently -- we don't know the criteria used in most cases. If Google really wasn't to blame for its users, it would do nothing and not bother to have a TOS. But it does, and it sporadically enforces it. Now especially that it is in the business of running its own social network, G+, where it has rules like "no pseudonyms", it can't go on arguing forever that it is a neutral entity that has no public responsibility for the online discussion environment created by its often aggressively anarchic and hateful users from among the Google engineer population in particular.

Then there's the finding that the "chilled innovation conjecture" is basically a fallacy.

Finally, having eliminated all private property protection by dismantling copyright, deliberately discouraging or even barring profitable commerce, and draining the state treasury to boot, the socialists at Save the Internet now want to somehow protect privacy -- trusting ethics-free coders and hackers:

Protect privacy and defend everyone's ability to control how their data and devices are used.

This sounds like a nice idea, but again, there is a fundamental contradiction: the very platforms that provide the existing Internet technocommunism -- a regime where everything is free and where we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us -- rely on a social bargain that involves you trading your private data for the freeness of the product. In fact, there's a savvy Internet meme that if you are not paying for something on the Internet, *you* are the product -- your data is being sold by the providers to various ad companies and marketers.

As for everyone controlling how their devices are used, this is an ongoing struggle, too. Geeks "jailbreak" phones that they think lock them into telecom services or other features that they think they shouldn't be locked into, regardless of the commercial agreements involved. Social media was supposed to be used for socializing, not stalking and planning terrorist attacks, yet it is -- we're supposed to endlessly supply to all users of technology the freedom to do whatever the hell they want, without any notion of the rule of law?

Of course, there are plenty of existing laws and Supreme Court rulings that work perfectly fine on what is in fact merely yet another human artifact for communication and transportation, but the Save-the-Internet gang recognizes no law in cyberspace. Courst do; that's how they could nevertheless find some way of punishing the room mate of a gay man who committed suicide after being stalked and outed with a webcam and Twitter.

Each and every one of these "Save the Internet" principles involves coercion and non-freedom that in fact will kill the free Internet as we know it now. A notion of censorship that commands private corporations to perform in politically-correct ways is an abrogation of their own freedoms. "promoting universal access" -- and even *fast* access! -- means government gets in the business of supplying a "utility" rather than getting out of the way and letting the market and free enterprise handle it as they have asically been handling it pretty well for the last 20 years. After all, the Internet isn't neutral utility like electricity that the society might wind up turning over to the Tennessee Valley Authority or other entities to supply; the Internet is a medium in which people live and move and have their being.

Insistence on only open-source software and refusal to concede the need for proprietary code and "walled gardens" (such as Facebook) means that only a certain socialist regime for Internet life is allowed, and others aren't free to *chose*.

Getting rid of copyright protection so that some people can "innovate" at the expense of others is merely the Bolshevik's "expropriate from the expropriators" updated for the cyber age. It's no more legitimate now in 2012 than it was in 1917, nearly a century ago. And these ideas are certainly not innovative, with that past-the-sell-by date.

The Squatter

Did you read about the kid who squatted at AOL after his start-up cash from Imagine K-12 ran out?

Richard Byrne hung out in the hallways dodging security guards on rounds, ate the catered food, slept on company couches and showered at the company gym -- they have all that stuff like Google for the employees.

This was so he could "live his dream" which consisted of making a web site called ClassConnect about helping teachers share lesson plans.

He wound up getting another $500,000 from investors -- I wonder who?

The problem is that while he was mooching off AOL and preparing for his "second round," he was busy undoing other people out of their livelihoods.

His site seems to stress sharing, rather than selling class plans.

There's a raging debate about whether or not such plans constitute intellectual property -- it was based on this article in the Times and whether it should be the property of the individual teacher or the school that makes the setting possible -- the platform, if you will. Sound familiar?

The thing is, there are already teachers selling to other teachers at Teachers Pay Teachers without first becoming the darling of Silicon Valley (although Pando Daily has written about them). Good!

And it seems no venture capitalists were harmed -- or enriched - with this business:

With most of the growth occurring in the last 18 months, it is clear TeachersPayTeachers is a prime target for funding at very favorable terms. However, Edelman made it clear that after his experiences with Scholastic, he is hesitant to accept funding. Instead, he is working on growing the site organically, unless funding becomes necessary to accelerate growth.

And other sites like this one where lesson plans are sold in PDF form. You cannot stop a market that wants to exist, where a willing seller meets a willing buyer instead of a coerced sharer meeting an indifferent slurper.

I'm all for teachers selling their lesson plans. It is their intellectual property. Many of them go to great lengths to add in their life experience and creativity to these lessons. They're working in soul-less situations in the public schools where all kinds of rewarmed Marxist drivel is thrust on them and the existency of teaching to the test. If they get something creative wedged in AND can sell it, great!

So why is somebody giving $500,000 to this squatter kid to make something that looks like yet another share-bear trying to "disrupt" good business?

Byrne wants to "crowdsource" lesson plans rather than reward the individual's innovation and hard work in a free marketplace.

Why?