Vicky Boykis writes my favourite nerdcore newsletter. She is a computer programmer originally from Russia and has young children with all the challenges those identifiers entail. I found her on Twitter, which is why Twitter is a good thing.
Her latest issue talks about search in ways I simply had not heard before, as much as I try to keep up.
o Google is out, hopelessly commercialized and filled with Reddit links. (It is? Really? Maybe because I hardly go on Reddit I don't see that much but I agree that it is commercialized, and my other critique [which she doesn't have] -- it turns up Wikipedia results, reinforcing the awfulness of Wikipedia.) But I thought nerds liked Google so this comes as a surprise. Google issued its first-even dividend (!) today, imagine, so no wonder nerds, who lean left or at least libertarian anti-stagnant-corporation, are now banging on Google.
o She doesn't mention Bing. I go on Bing merely because it gives you points you can eventually collect to get $5 over a long period of time. Every day I do a bunch of those silly things to make extra cash.
o I'm not surprised she mentions Duck Duck Go, that's the favourite nerd one because of "privacy" -- something I don't care about.
o Then Vicki mentions a search engine run I had never heard of called Marginalia.nu run out of a guy's living room in the Netherlands -- not the Yiddish or Russian "So, nu!" I guess. I had never heard of it so I looked up "Tajikistan" which I often use as a test ("Turkmenistan" is good, too.) It had a lot of interesting and useful sites which didn't have the "half of terrorists come from Tajikistan" meme which the NYT was flogging the other day which of course is likely true at this point (see the Moscow Crocus attack in which some 140 were killed and hundreds injured).
Then I tried "Second Life". And this is where it went off the reservation in weird ways, that at least make you think -- which was her purpose.
The British Empire's Sex Toys: Second Life and Virtual Worlds
St. Augustine -- whom he does not credit for his views, being a cultist -- had this to say in Book III about the theater in his Confessions:
Stage-plays also carried me away, full of images of my miseries, and of fuel to my fire. Why is it, that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would no means suffer? yet he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow at them, this very sorrow is his pleasure. What is this but a miserable madness? for a man is the more affected with these actions, the less free he is from such affections.
(BTW, this take is damn weird re: City of God, I took an entire course on St. Augustine in 4th year and I don't recall this bit being emphasized.)
And the LaRouche guy says this:
Amongst the many different virtual fantasy worlds that exist, there are two underlying fallacies governing them all. The first: All who are a part of this Orwellian world, have no true sense of human creativity. The second fallacy rests on the first assumption, that since real creativity can not exist or be fostered, the mere arrogance that this entropic system will continue without the intervention by the real physical world, makes one have to laugh and ask: Do you think your computer lives outside the universe?
I guess I'm bewildered why the creating of the virtual doesn't count as human creativity. Because even going beyond TV and movies, which no doubt this fellow also denounces, as St. Augustine likely would, there is simply the novel. Or for that matter, the Bible. Everybody who comes after the real events of the Bible, aren't they conjuring up a virtual world? Isn't heaven a virtual world?
The point here is not to endorse but to think why it isn't true -- or if parts of it may be true. Log off, log off!!!
I agree with St. Augustine that virtuality can create ultimately false emotions untethered to real things that matter (drama, griefing, virtual relationships) and you need to go outside and hug trees.
So I do. Go outside I mean. I don't hug trees as a rule as they are scratchy.
That's why this particular artifacture "in the style of Maxfield Parrish" works for me because this guy is clinging without hugging...
The good of SL usually offset this need to hug trees, and that good is, indeed, about real human creativity made possible precisely because it is virtual.
Peter Ludlow (known in Second Life as Urizenus Sklar) has gotten himself into a terrible sex offense mess -- it's in real-life media.
It's not only in the campus news but online news and it has all the predictable cast of characters -- extremist feminists, outraged student's groups, hipsters screaming, etc. -- and even a Second Life angle. It's not only a campus case -- it is now in the court system in Illinois. Here's the court documents.
Ludlow is barred from teaching this quarter and seems to have quit (or been essentially fired) and while he was apparently in the process of obtaining a new position at Rutgers, students at Rutgers are up at arms. Although Ludlow has not been found guilty yet of any crime (from what I can tell), the mere existence of such a case is enough to get hysterical students rioting over his placement in their school.
These are people who -- like Ludlow themselves in their anti-Western contrarian politics -- who don't care about, oh, the massive abduction and rape of young girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria and aren't demonstrating against it like they would anything about Palestine, and who of course -- like Ludlow -- have nothing but contempt for law and order when it comes to Snowden stealing files and running to Russia -- or whether Weev or Browning or other creeps are let go and not prosecuted for their crimes.
But when it comes to a perceived sexual offense that does not even seem to be very serious on the face of it -- the plaintiff is not charging him with rape and indeed mass media with such headlines does appear to be defamatory -- they become absolutely hysterical. I try to understand what this is really about. No doubt Uri himself will have a paper on it someday... Surely it has something to do with the perversion of meaning or language...
Here's the thing: does Ludlow deserve his fate or is the manner of his prosecution not something any of us would want in a liberal society under the rule of law with basic due process rights?
Where does one start with Ludlow's loathsomeness? I was originally friendly with him and even shared an TSO lot with him for a time but then some friends and I pulled a prank on him to prove the outrageous fallibility of his "journalism" about online life. (We made a composite fake character called Selena, a teen-age witch, and had her tell Uri a tale of horror of online abuse by adult male warlocks -- and he bought the line and published it -- and then we revealed that she was faked and he was furious and banned me from his site for a time.)
Then there was his strange press campaign years ago to complain about his banning from TSO over his criticism of what he saw as underage prostitution -- but which was a story that he could never prove journalistically. And it was a contrived issue by contrast with another very real issue he would never criticize, which was the presence of hard-core BDSM communities and sites within TSO -- an online game which had kids as young as nine in it.
When I gave interviews to the New York Times and the Boston Globe with my criticism -- I opposed his banning on speech grounds but disagreed on the issues with EA.com, the game company, which were getting into the news -- Ludlow relentlessly searched for links between my real-life identity and my avatar's nickname until he could "out" me. He's very much of a "privacy for me and not for thee" sort of guy. He was my original experience with that sort of horrid doxing.
Then there was his delight in the dark Sim mafia -- the Shadow Sim Government -- that took over all the venues and bribed and extorted and terrorized -- in a simulated fashion of course, although you could really buy and sell the simoleons on ebay for real dollars. (The man who ran that had the last name Chase; I see his attorney has the same last name.)
Then there was his running of the tabloid Alphaville Herald, "a virtual paper for a virtual world" that was "always fairly unbalanced" which I worked at for a time despite our differences because I thought free press in oppressive online virtual environments controlled by companies was vital. We agreed on that, but of course, but only to a point. The minute I began criticizing the big corporate backers of the Alphaville's owners, who I said colluded in the copybot disaster undermining copyright in the virtual marketplace, I was reprimanded and then hounded -- so I quit. Uri presided over the most horrible harassment (known as griefing) of me inworld and out.
For years, he and the editrix in chief, Pixeleen Minstrel (who in real life was an Internet-famous guy named Mark McCahill who invented the Gopher program) vilified and harassed and ridiculed me to death in their paper because I criticized the same thing I criticize today: a) criminalized hackers b) arrogant ethics-free coders c) the open-source cult d) various online cults from BDSM to transhumanism e) the whole Chomsky/Derrida reductionist "there is no meaning" fractured fairy-tale which is philosophy today in universities -- which of course, is Uri's realm.
Precisely because of the Chomsky angle -- and his contrarian (actually -- establishment!) love of all things WikiLeaks, anarchism, Snowden, Manning, Barrett Browning, etc. -- Ludlow is very popular and seems to get tenure at every university he goes to -- and he has been to 10 or something in his career, he keeps changing them. He has published multiple books, including one on the Sims and Second Life that has a chapter on my character, Prokofy Neva, and has penned numerous op-ed pieces and articles favouring anarchist open-source cultism and copyleftism.
I don't know if scandals attend every change in his colleges, but there it is. It is common knowledge that he has had girlfriends much younger than he is (he is just my age, 57) -- I've met some of them even in real-life and in SL -- and he hasn't hidden that he makes hook-ups through Second Life of young women, but he hasn't ever been known to commit any "crime." This is legal, adult behaviour, you know -- the sort that feminists demand for themselves.
While he has an annoying online persona and belief system -- in real life, like a lot of such nerds, he's quiet, even shy, although he can be aggressive in smaller circles. Uri has a certain cult following, i.e. among the Woodbury University 4chan set.
The scandal he's currently involved in has a sordid Second Life angle -- wouldn't you know?! He was teaching a course on ethics in Second Life, and instead of discussing things like the way he and his friends would try to disrupt free association and free speech on servers in Second Life (mine) with speech they didn't like and felt shouldn't succeed, by dog-whistling and golf-clapping those who crashed servers and endlessly enabling their heckling and harassing of people, he tried to turn IBM's rather short-lived and not-too-deep involvement in Second Life as some sort of corporate evil. That's Uri - the Man, Capitalism, the One Percent -- you know, Occupy, hack, crash, whatever.
So somehow a woman in his class -- she appears to be under 21 -- gets together with him to go to an art show or something, and they wind up going from bar to bar and she claims Ludlow got her drunk, then groped her, then took her to his house and didn't drive her home.
He disputes a lot of it, but the facts of their time together, drinking, and ending up in bed (but not doing anything) don't seem disputed. Although his deputations, Uri seems to use that method so common to Second Life griefers -- pretend you are the victim and act outraged, when you are being called the perpetrator.
But...Here's the thing. If you are accused on a campus by a student, you have little recourse or rights. The hysteria, the feminists, the political correctness -- it's awful. They constitute a terrible witch hunt.
Not only is there any sense of proportion -- this is not a rape accusation with penetration we're talking about, or even groping of sexual organs against a woman's will, as in Steubenville -- this is a charge of attempted kissing, maybe a grope of a breast -- and not driving home. It's astounding that we never learn why this woman doesn't call a cab or friend and go home at any point in the evening if she had the discomfort level.
Naturally, if any of us had been on this particular scene in Second Life, we would have taken this woman aside and said, "Oh Gawd, don't hook up with Uri, he's awful, a lech, stay away." But she seemed to be pursuing -- to him tell it - and of course he could be lying -- the same way that he lies that crashing sims isn't a crime, or lies that Barrett Brown is being prosecuted for journalism, or any number of altered word-salad virtualities he passes off as reality in his Philosopher's Stone column at The New York Times (!) and elsewhere.
But...he gets to mount a defense against such accusations and he didn't get a fair trial. No one ever seems to in these campus cases. He quite rightfully pointed out that if he could bring records from the video camera in his elevator at home, receipts from restaurants and bars, and other kinds of adversarial evidence, i.e. eye-witness testimony, he might refute this girl's charges!
Yet he wasn't allowed to -- campus proceedings aren't real courts of law with laws for evidence and due process and discovery. The university simply rejects the attempts to bring other evidence.
Now that his case is in the Illinois justice system, maybe his lawyer will then get to bring forward such evidence as he can muster, and the case might eventually determine whether someone whose charges doesn't seem to amount to more than making some awkward sexual advances and not driving a woman home after a date might warrant the harsh punishment of expulsion or worse.
But meanwhile, he's already reportedly leaving Northeastern and heading to Rutgers, where he has been offered a position. And there, the Rutgers politically-correct students have their knives out and are phone-jamming and boycotting and saying that they can't have sex abusers on their campus.
Yet -- unless I missed something -- he hasn't been found guilty in a fair trial although the university seemed to automatically take the student's side and hasn't been able to mount a defense as a defendant should be able to do in a court of law.
Somehow, I think Uri and his lawyers will word-salad his way through yet another jam and pervert meaning along the way. But if you care about justice and civil rights, you have to hope that he is not punished for such mild infractions in a setting where he can't even mount a proper defense. This is a lose/lose case. If he wins, his reputation will be as low as it always was in some quarters; he will get high-fives from horrific misogynists nerdy creeps that make up his fan base; if he loses, no women's rights will actually have been served. In fact, even if he were prosecuted or fined or even jailed for cause, they would not be served. Because these cases are so often not about real rights, but about the political war-faring of enraged feminists undermining justice as a whole for all of us.
It is getting so that when you go out on a date, you have to get your date to sign a disclaimer. You have to get them to accept that you don't have a "duty of care" over them if you take them to a bar or drive them in your car. You have to get them to warrant that if they become intoxicated, it will be due to their own poor choices and not your fault. And so on. I can see contracts having to be signed even simply to have a cup of coffee. There's an insanity to all this that I just don't know where it will end.
I guess I feel that this sort of situation should be solved by real ethics -- the sort of ethics Uri and his awful hacker friends simply don't have. That would start with the basics -- that you don't socialize alone with students, taking them to bars, taking them to your home alone. These are all terrible practices. They should be unethical practices, for which teachers or professors should be censured and disciplined, but I don't think from one incident like this that doesn't have an actual rape or serious sexual abuse of any kind involved should a person be fired.
Students also should have ethics. Why do they go out with professors twice their age alone and drink with them? Are they trying to get good marks or do they have a daddy complex? No one in these situations ever wants to blame alcohol or drugs themselves, although clearly, no one has benefited from either parental or educational restrictions on over-indulgence in alcohol and usage of illegal drugs. If more people like Uri weren't blurring the lines on ethics in their teaching -- teaching that is entirely about subversion and perversion of customary meaning and morals -- we would all be better off.
I will never forget how Uri told Selena, when she texted him that she had to go and set the table, that she should deliberately put the fork and spoon out of their usual order to flummox her parents. So very Uri...
Human beings have a need for these laws -- and so what ethics can't fix because it's missing, and what morals can't fix because it is uncool to have them, the justice system has to fix -- badly! This is like trying to fix the problem of homelessness through emergency rooms in hospitals instead of through housing -- costly, stop-gap, ineffective.
For all the lawsuits and kangaroo courts and dismissals and ruinations of careers we've had in schools and universities in the last 40 years since the 1960s sexual revolution, has anything really gotten better? Doesn't it seem as if there are MORE rapes on campuses than less as a result? And it would be one thing if these were actual rapes prosecuted -- rape is a crime and has to be punished by state law, not merely campus regulations.
But how many of these cases involve just an awkard pass on a date gone wrong or somebody changing their mind? Too many...
The politically correct -- and their victims! -- would rather wield the power of troikas and draconian justice systems instead of simply conceding that the kind of morals you get from religion and civic and parental training in schools and home are necessary and should be valued. So reluctant are people like Uri to do anything but ridicule decency as some kind of cramp on their freedom that nothing but career ruination works. And now he is living that horror.
This is a situation like Weev's for some people (not me). They feel like he was so awful to Kathy Sierra (stalking her and threatening her and doxing her) and so awful to so many other people, and such an asshole in general (just review his Twitter timeline) with the most awful hate speech, antisemitism, and crazy violent shtick (the other night he sent me a link to a horror movie with a creature with a drill for a penis because...I had the temerity to say that I didn't think any force but governments should operate hacking tools) -- that he should get punished in a hacking case. But that's wrong, if you can't mount a successful harassment or stalking case (and maybe it hasn't been tried), to except a hacking case will do that job for you.
Those who want to exonerate hacking as a crime want him let off even though he's an asshole. I hope he will be prosecuted in a new venue for the crime of obtaining unauthorized access to AT&T's customer data through hacking -- yes hacking, because that's what hacking is, unintended use and stealing of customer data not intended for hackers to take and cause havoc with. His fans think it's a free speech issue.
In Uri's case, I couldn't ask for an unfair trial on hysterical feminist witch-hunting to be the way in which he meets his justice. Because then any one of us could be subject to such a politicized system.
As I said in Steubenville, when Uri was happy to sanction Anonymous wild and unethical behaviour, I'm on the side of the rape victim and don't try to diminish her suffering or plight. I'm a big believer in Andrea Dworkin's saying that the punishment for getting drunk on a date with a frat boy in your dorm should be a hangover, not rape. Certainly if these student's charges stick, some kind of discipline might be warranted short of dismissal simply because there are simply too many elements of this story that require that the student herself, even if she were under 21, should have exercised basic good judgement and remedy her own situation.
Remember, in this case, rape isn't even part of the charges, and even sexual groping or "getting a minor drunk" or whatever other offenses might pertain are not established by courts of law -- and it sounds like they won't be.
Like that dying Islamist who flew to America for medical treatment before going to Paradise about whom V.S. Naipaul wrote, Uri is now looking to law and meaning and courts and righteousness and justice to save him -- all the things he thinks are shit and the Man and should be destroyed by Anonymous and Occupy. All the things he ridiculed and undermined his whole life. I hope the irony is not lost on him and he experiences some kind of remorse -- although it sounds like there is none available in his particularly invincible virtuality.
There's an odd feature of this story -- the Rutgers Department that Uri may be hired into is the one where my cousin used to teach -- but he died recently. He fell ill some years ago and there was a vacancy -- maybe the very one that Uri is now filling.
Typical griefer effigy scene in Second Life, where my effigy is "cooked" by giant chickens, I am given a Soviet flag and Obama poster to harass me, and various objects are copybotted. Also featured is my picture from an interview I did for Wired critical of hackers.
Today I come back home to a slew of messages about a hate post by somebody who made a parody account against John Schindler, the former NSA analyst who is a professor at the Naval War College
This followed an attack on email, including Schindler's work email -- a guy calling himself "Tailgunner Joe" wrote to both Tom Nichols, another professor at NSA, and Schindler, for the express purpose of discrediting me.
I think what must have thrown him into a hate frenzy is that Tom Nichol simply tweeted that while there were many tinfoil hat comments in response to his recent post, I had some good analysis. Just that -- a simple tweet, hardly anything, and this hater went into attack mode.
In the emails, this creep brought up Second Life, the "AIDS journalist" video and other elements that I refute regularly in my "Advice to Google Witch-Hunters" column. It's an old story.
I thought "Tailgunner" might be one of my regular stalkers related to Second Life -- perhaps it was Taco Rubio (Charles Callistro of Louisville, KY), who served in the USAF, who was a regular inworld and outworld persecutor of me for years and years.
The picture used on my Wikipedia -- itself a work of vandalism regularly vandalized -- and in the XXTwitterWar Committee attack -- is cropped from a series of pictures his friend Chadrick forcibly took of me, where Taco put his arm around me and Chadrick to make it look like we were "friends". We aren't, of course. I don't object to photos being taken of me because I'm a public figure and I'm for free speech, but I point out that this was a picture taken to harass me. It was taken at the Second Life Community Conference in Chicago in 2007, and Taco -- a long time antagonist because of my critical blogging about favouritism at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life -- was furious at me because I blogged about the scandals in the organizing committee. His friends the convention organizers had not only run a deficit, but tried to make the musicians sign an agreement that would basically turn over all their intellectual property rights to the orgcomm and enable them to resell it. The musicians were so furious they quit en masse, and as a result, we had no live music at the event. I was among several bloggers and journalists who covered this scandal.
This was the same orgcomm that decided to ban me from the conference for my long-standing criticism of Second Life's elite, but also this conference's mismanagement. Interestingly, when the famous tech blogger Robert Scoble, whom I had befriended on Twitter, heard about this, he denounced it as horribly close-minded in a column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Then I was suddenly restored the right to participate. I expected trouble when I got there, but it was eclipsed by other dramas -- like a Linden Lab staff person, a long time buddy of Taco's, punching out one of the top-paying enterprise customers in a bar. Yes, that was Second Life!
Taco and his pals kept a grudge, and I think he/they are the ones who created my vandalized Wiki -- not only the picture used lets me know that, but some other clues. Either he, or that Linden Lab staffer, who had long been harassing me inworld and out and who tried to "friend" me for a time but ultimately, I blocked him on Facebook because he was so creepy and violent.
If it isn't not him or one of his Phreak Radio buddies, then it could be the Woodbury University goons, of course, a California commuter college digital arts course where the professor and the students all decided to harass me for years -- again, because I blogged critically of their destructive antics inworld, racist and anti-gay attacks in the 4chan style, and also protested about their budget waste and wrote to the vice president of the college. Linden Lab seized their simulators -- not because of my protest but because of numerous other violations of the TOS which they committed and far more serious offenses -- on three separate occasions, or four, and they kept re-spawning alts -- even this week I had a bunch of them at my rental houses again with the same racist "little black boy" shtick, and particle spewing with posters of Osama bin Ladn. Lovely.
Some other candidates might be RevJimJesus who harassed me also for years on end, although I think has stopped -- and then this Mr. X, who began attacking me on Streetwise Professor's blog claiming falsely that I was La Russophobe, another blogger who is definitely not me or my alt. I do not blog with any anonymous alts; I want the credit for my blogging and I stand by my views.
The common theme of this handful of stalkers is that they want to discredit me as a thinker to others who might read my blog -- and bully me into silence. Obviously, this has never had an effect in the more than 10 years I've been blogging.
Lately, as the Internet topics I've been blogging about for years now have become more mainstream issues and even national scandals like the story of Snowden and the NSA, and as I've also expanded into blogging more about my region of expertise, Eurasia, I've picked up more hecklers (like Joshua Foust) who mine Google for stuff they can "get" on me and use to harass me -- and usually they recycle the same tired memes that I "hate gays" or "am a racist" or "am living in a psychiatric institution" -- all untrue, of course.
This latest attack feels a lot like Mr. X, who also goes by the name SenorEquis1776 and other handles, and seems plugged into the survivalists' movement. But it picks up Russian terms and Second Life memes in the way of my past stalkers, so I don't know if it is a tag-team or chance use. Lately I've noticed that some of the most vicious stalking of me in Second Life -- where a creep with a series of Woodbury/The Wrong Hands type names puts up effigies of my real-life self, with broken glasses, or bloody chopped up limbs or head, or being roasted over flames, etc. Lovely! Although those soft of attacks abated once Soft Linden (himself a creep who banned me from the bug tracker) finally got to work identifying who it was and hash-banning them.
Skip down below the fold to the headline WHY NEWCO WILL FAIL if you don't want to read the back story here, but I think it's an interesting one.
VIRTUAL DARFUR
One day in about 2006 or so a Canadian radio journalist interested in "progressive" issues IM'd me and asked me to come to a dinner where there would be a number of interesting people who followed human rights and humanitarian affairs, and even the famous e-bay founder Pierre Omidyar. She said he would be in disguise with a different name.
After a delicious-looking dinner, which we didn't eat because we couldn't, but only interacted with animatedly, I flew around the field behind the open-air table and soon Pierre was shooting me with some kind of nerf gun that sent puff-balls or chickens or something into the air...
Yes, it was Second Life, not real, except, more than real in some ways. These were the people who formed the virtual Darfur in Second Life, an installation that was supposed to raise awareness about the suffering of the Darfurians in Sudan, as they were being massacred by the janjawid, the government-backed vigilantes on horsebak who hacked and killed people, destroyed villages and stole animals and sent people fleeing into the bush. The "before" and "after" satellite photos were devastating. (I should note that I worked on the issues in Sudan/Chad for several years in several groups at the UN so was indirectly related to this.)
Virtual Darfur and other projects like virtual Guantanamo was a subject of great hope by techno-utopians and great derision by techno-realists -- but of course, Rik was actually quite pragmatic about using the technology for education and actually had projects funded in Second Life for youth, and Ethan turned out to be really more of a utopianist, because he could never stand it that Second Life cost money and attracted mainly people who could afford it (he never got it about all the Brazilians and Poles and even Africans on free accounts who in fact showed up there) and believed that until tech could be made free for everyone by some magical power, no one should waste time on it when they could be saving humanity some Better way. Oh, you know, like blogging politically-correct stuff at Global Voices...
To be sure, I was the first to say there was a creepy aspect to the Darfur installation that was not intended -- Second Life is rich with creative possibilities and objects and props and textures, and you can build almost anything and evoke a real sense of place and mood, but somehow, the props that could evoke mass murder just weren't available. It was in little details, like the fact that the campfires used in the display had robust logs with cheerful crackling and shooting flame sounds and animations, and seemed to have been lifted out of your Girl Scout camp, not the desert. The tents and chairs and such also had that clean modern, feeling of an American national park outing, not the desperation of an African refugee camp. People who poured in to see the interactive diarama would tend to do things like take out their marshmallow sticks, provided by a particularly clever Microsoft island active at that time, and it would sort of spoil the somber mood.
Worse, griefers soon swooped down on it trying to wreck things and overload and crash the server so people couldn't visit it. Anything that had any serious purpose would be ripe for attack by 4chan and Anonymous in those days -- the idea that these thugs "evolved" into "hacktivists" who genuinely took up good causes is absurd, because in fact they were just the opposite and cynically remained so even as they engaged in reputational laundering. The griefing parties then triggered a vigilante group named the Green Lantern Corps to come guard the camp and then they endlessly sparred, detracting from the original subject matter.
Screenshot by rikomatic. I should note that the graphics of 2006 or 2007 are very primitive compared to much improved rendering today in 2013 in Second Life.
So...I happened to have met Pierre virtually in Second Life where he was an
early investor and had a secret avatar, and also chatted with him
frequently in the early days of Twitter on my avatar @Prokofy and my
real life account @catfitz.
A BETTER WORLD
Pierre's stake in Second Life wasn't about merely making money or encouraging innovative 3D technology, although that was part of it, but it was because he was imbued with the idea that the Internet and social media and content-rich virtual worlds could make a Better World. This Better-worldism is an intense variant of the California Ideology that leans more to the technocommunist and collectivist than the technolibertarian and individualistic. I always saw Pierre as something of a Robin Hood -- he took from the relatively affluent (by Third World standards) working and middle class people on e-bay trying to sell their used hair-drivers and old baseball cards, clipping a crumb from each transaction like that dad in Bonfire of the Vanities (as he explained to his son), and then taking those funds and plowing them into various non-profit causes to help conflict-ridden Africans or poverty-stricken Americans or promoting various "progressive" causes like gender awareness.
There was something that always bothered me about that grand wealth transfer because the people who were thus shaken down -- and the prices kept going up and up on e-bay to sell stuff and people like me got chased away -- didn't get to vote on the causes. Oh, businessmen are free to do what they want with their profits, of course, but the whole model -- shake down some people who have a little bit extra, give it to the nonprofit class to donate overseas to the poor or help themselves to become more powerful as a political/cultural force at home -- struck me as one that didn't have any recipe for how society could continue into the future.
In other words, there wasn't a path to create new business people and new wealth, there was only the redistribution of existing wealth in a politicized manner.
Oh, don't get me wrong. There were some great causes in the Omidyar grants, and in fact, I used to work for some of the organizations and indirectly, why, even my small salary was paid for by this process. But that's just it -- too many people in that non-profit class never question the model because they depend on it. They don't explain how capitalism -- which makes these things possible! -- could continue in their social-democracy model.
SOCIALISM IN ONE SIM: NEUALTENBERG
Pierre had a close associate named Haney Armstrong who worked at Linden Lab as a community manager -- his name was Haney Linden inworld, as all the Linden staff took the same last name, and their real first name or a pseudonymous first name.
Haney was very enthusiastic about the Better Worlding capacity of Second Life, and immediately created a contest among the early adapters -- whoever submitted a project to create some kind of online experimental community for a cause would get a free simulator or server on which they could build their utopian world.
The collection of open software freaks and Singularists and transhumanists as well as designers and curiosity-seekers and those interested in the mechanisms of civil society online (like me, who came along later) were not very willing to come up with ideas for this contest. Maybe because after they got the free sim, valued at $1000-2000 depending on its style and location in the simulated world, they would still have to pay a maintenance fee of $195 a month to keep it going.
So there was only one entrant and thus only one winner for Haney's contest -- a plan for a socialist world called Neualtenberg after the alpine-style sim it was on. Haney was delighted -- it couldn't have been more up his alley to have Europeans and Americans devoted to communal socialist experiments take up this sim.
Some day entire dissertations could be written about this virtual "socialism on one sim" and I myself could write at least a few book chapters, but suffice it to say, it ended in tears, with one of the main founders, Ulricha Zugzwang, flying through the world and deleting all the buildings she had constructed in a fit of pique over a squabble with others over some sectarian matter -- she was tried in absentia and banned permanently for "high treason and terrorism." Another spinoff of the sim devoted to more pure socialist ideals created a guild system where you had to know the people and be chosen to open up a shop or cart as a merchant in their village. At first your rent would be higher, but then if you proved yourself and sold more, then it might be lower... In other words, these sims ended the way socialism often ends in real life -- and then some.
In Second Life, you can see the Sea of Omidyar, named after Pierre, and sometimes I would row my boat around the sea, filing dispatches to the Alphaville Herald about men out booming the waters in search of Lost Lindens, staff that were fired for reasons that were never explained and who we said were thrown into the sea...
Pierre seemed to cash out somewhere after that seed round -- it's not a public company but its stock did trade brisquely for awhile in the secondary markets when it was really popular. I don't think he bothers with it any more, I'm not sure.
OMIDYAR NETWORK
Haney left, and swimming up from the Sea of Omidyar, emerged as the community manager at Omidyar Network, another venture that Pierre organized that I joined for a time on the edges -- it was awfully politically correct there and it was really hard to have a real conversation because there were just too many PC types there.
There were two other big problems with this network -- no, three:
1. People found it hard to criticize anything about Omidyar Network in form or substance because they were grantees -- they felt they had to play along quietly. This is always the problem of what we delicately referred to at the Soros Foundation as "the problem of a living donor". You're not getting a grant from an institution administered by officers, but you're getting it directly from the rich guy, and he (and his wife) who were also in it sort of throw a magnetic charge over the thing -- people are endlessly trying to get seen and suck up.
2. People who do good all day don't really feel like then coming to an online service and chatting about their do-gooding at night. That is, maybe some do, but there is a certain chore-like quality to it, and a surreal quality. I had only so much time in the day to work on, say, Belarus or Sudan issues, these were part-time jobs for me at the time. I'm the sort of person for whom human rights has been a vocation, not just a job, and I would often work on causes for free late into the night -- but then, it had to count. I couldn't justify as a freelancer coming and chatting for an hour and typing ideas for activism on top of that -- at least, in that sort of constrained atmosphere where there were moderators, with topics suggested by them, and that climate of people trying to impress.
Worst of all, they had a reputational rating system, where you could be rated for your comments -- and this added a gamification which also tended to detract rather than add. The few people who were either highly paid at no-show jobs or on fixed incomes had the time to endlessly type "lessons learned" and earn points from the mods, but the rest of us couldn't keep up.
3. For me personally, what was nasty about this particular earlier form of humanitarian Facebooking was that my personal data was not secure. It wasn't long before griefers in Second Life grabbed my real name, location, and address from this service, which was supposed to be membership-only but was open, and then pasted it all over various anonymous forums where people could then use it to harass me at home. I really hated this outing of my privacy, complained about the problem several times to Haney and others, but they just weren't willing to do anything about it. They were not willing to discipline and sanction the person who did this to me because I guess he was in their crowd. BTW, I think that's one of the same people who vandalize my Wikipedia to this day.
For these reasons (I imagine) or probably others that were more intricate involving factions or lack of cost effectiveness, this experiment was shut down. I think it's just too hard to get people to be in a virtual community online virtualizing their do-gooding -- it really doesn't result in a Better World. There wasn't any, as they say in this business of non-profiting, any "value-add."
But then, I never come at these projects as capable of changing human nature at all, as I'm not a transhumanist or Silicon Valley Better Worlder, like Pierre and the others. They should think more about governance and due process and human rights online and how to manage, not change, human nature.
BE CIVIL!
Oh, except that they did. Pierre is a smart and thoughtful guy. He next created a social media project for Hawaii, where he spends some of his time (I believe he's also in San Francisco and elsewhere), where he is from originally. This was supposed to be a civil place where there would be no griefing of the crude Second Life or Youtube kind, or even the more refinded mind-fuckery of the Well or even his Network. This would be subscribers only, with rules, and people would be rewarded for civility and everyone would live happily ever after.
Except, as I'm told by those who have been in it, and as some have commented privately here and there, it was boring, nobody went there, and there wasn't a market for it in Hawaii. I'm not sure why he didn't take it national or world-wide, but maybe he had this idea that unless people are hyper-local and tied to their real-life roots, online can't work. Otherwise, Ulricha Zugzwang comes swooping from the sky and blows up your simulated building...over whether you had 2/3 majority or absolute majority or a commission of scientists to run your planet...or Haney blocks you on the forum because you've been down-voted by the stay-at-home moms.
NEWCO OR NEUALTENBERG
So now Pierre Omidyar turns out to be the billionaire behind the story of a new new media site that will bring Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill and other neo-journo-activists on board for the new new....thing.
Once again, what I saw in Second Life and the next 2.0 generation on the Web in and around Second Life comes to real life, so to speak --- the West Coast invades the East Coast. And all the topics I've been following so avidly -- with such alarm -- come together once again.
Eric Rice, [one of the early famous podcasters in California and promoter of social media] is a friend of mine from Second Life (his avatar's name in Second Life was Spin Martin). And I remember this tweet very well back in 2007. It was addressed to Jesse Malthus, another friend of ours — who put it on his profile in Second Life. Jesse Malthus was his avatar's name; his real name was Jesse Higginbotham,
Sadly, just two days after that re-tweet, that bright young man who did a lot of coding and testing in SL was killed in a car accident at the age of 17. You can read his obituary which I wrote on the Alphaville Herald, "a virtual paper for a virtual world" that was "always fairly unbalanced."
It's great to see him immortalized in this way, he surely deserved it.
Like a lot of young people who die, Jesse's Twitter feed seems eerie and portentious.
But he wasn't a depressive or bully victim and didn't die of drugs or drunk driving -- he was just on his way to school early in the morning in a car full of kids driven by a gilfriend who lost control of the car.
Jesse and I used to get into huge arguments over the "copybot" issue - he was a member of the notorious libsecondlife which "liberated" the then-proprietary code of the viewer through reverse engineering, then got involved in deploying an inworld terror of merchants that instantly copied any object or avatar skin (although never server-side scripts, which is why coders who made a living selling scripts and animations could never grasp what copybot felt like in "little dress-maker genocide," the disgraceful term they used to openly ridicule the valid concerns of designers.)
I had no idea all those meetings we had at the Sutherland Dam (I used to hold a Friday-night salon to discuss the issues of the day) that Jesse was only 17 years old. I thought he was a 30-something IBM employee.
What was interesting to me about Jesse is that a) he told me the true story of who was responsible for copy-bot and expressed regret about its havoc in the world b) he worked to have his group yank the code from subversion until there were better checks and balances on this mayhem.
At that, at the age of 17 -- good parenting! Meanwhile, much older and more seasoned coders expressed rampant cynicism and hatred of anyone who valued copyright and advocated making as much uproar as possible with the monster to destroy the community -- and of course, to the glee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (it was in the early days of Second Life I began to first hear about them and their war on copyright).
It's funny to think of those early days on Twitter, which were very much connected to a lot of people in Second Life; they overlapped.
People who were already acquainted in SL began using Twitter as an "outworld" meta-communications platform to say some things that either might be censored on the company-run forums, famous like all MMORPGs for their bannings, or simply as a quick way to organize people inworld and outworld at once around common topics. Several enterprising coders made Second Life-Twitter relays and made word sculpture gardens with the tweets visible as banners wafting through the air in the 3D world -- I ran these for awhile myself until they broke due to some new patch either on Linden Lab's side or Twitter's side.
Second Life itself, in fact, had an inworld communications systems that enabled people to chat in real time and groups as large as 8,000 would all follow a conversation speeding by at once.
The artifacts of SL very much anticipated the issues and problems of social media to come in the following years, regarding intellectual property, privacy, surveillance, democracy.
Here Robert Scoble recalls Malthus:
It was @jmalthus who died in a car wreck this week. He was a Twitter friend of mine. So sad. Was only 17.
Sims Online cooking skills lot in 2008. Photo By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
The "social graph" -- the exposure of the network of connections of human beings, combined with other data, and the implications involved -- first was created and followed in online virtual worlds and MMORPGs (massive multi-player online role-play games). The same coders and engineers who perfected these in games and worlds went on to social media where they perfected them further, ultimately for use in elections (Obama was the first candidate to win using the drilling of social network data). Now the notion of the social graph has hit the headlines in relationship to the NSA Snowden scandals (and perhaps a related concept, the social gesture, i.e. every little thing you do online, will be next).
I first encountered the social graph in the hands of Will Wright, designer of The Sims Online, an outgrowth of the hugely popular Sims game moved to real-time interaction by real humans online. The humans obviously weren't automated like the Sims offline game, but they were automatized by having only a limited repertoire of automatic actions they could perform, and a rote set of chores and tasks they had to complete in order to stay functioning -- the diamonds above their heads had to be "kept green" and "out of the red" by having the Sim play pool, socialize, sleep, go to the bathroom, eat, dance, work, etc. Interestingly, even within the confines of this open-ended but regimented game, people devised all kinds of creative ways to do two things people like to do most: a) make money b) have sex.
Will Wright had various collectivized collaborationist "better world" notions he forced on the population, i.e. creating "group jobs" that would force people to socialize and collaborate to complete tasks. These were quickly sabotaged. Either people just built bots and made alts to run through the chores at top speed and generate "simoleons" as the world's cash was known (which had a real black market value on e-bay and gaming exchanges), or they would devise extra rules, like making bets on the outcome of pizza options, or they would optimize the aspects of the game in superior ways to try to beat their adverse disruptions -- i.e. placing toilets next to wood-working benches for the Sim to toilet while he worked as it really didn't matter if he ran across the screen to a sheltered toilet -- he was an imaginary character and there was no need for him to experience shame if that was actually reducing his income generation by taking up precious time and steps and reducing his maximum output.
If anything, it was funny to see how most people -- even with robot routines imposed on them - kept to their offline culture -- they insisted on toilets removed from workplaces and eating areas and insisted on doors and walls; they didn't want gambling and cheating because that "ruined the fun," and they chose esthetic beauty of their homes and stores rather than maximized job production or Sim recovery. It is very hard to eradicate human culture and spirit.
One of the aspects Will Wright built into the game which caused universal havoc was "Friendship Balloons". This was my first experience of the social graph -- unfortunately, I don't seem to have any screenshots left and I can't find any online today although surely someone has one, given their huge importance to this virtual world.
Everyone had a "balloon graph" or social graph that showed visually who they were friends with, how good and close their friendship was, and who their enemies were. So each time I met someone, I could choose an option to hand them a balloon, and we would be linked by "friendship". Our balloons would start out bright green in colour, but if we didn't keep visiting each others' homes, and didn't keep interacting, say, by dancing the jitterbug or at least chatting and shaking each others' hands once in awhile, the green would fade, the once-bright balloon would fall to the bottom of the graph, and then even disappear beneath pages and pages of such balloon stories.
By the same token, if someone came and slapped me or "gloved me" as the game mechanics showed, i.e. throwing down a gauntlet, then our relationship would be recorded as red. Someone would have to come back again and "piledrive" or otherwise use negative attacks on me to keep the red in -- otherwise, it, too, would fade.
The balloons picked up not only people you actually friended with the balloon gesture, it picked up other metadata -- other people who simply happened to be at the same job location or club location as you. So if you walked into a bar, all the other people would "show up in your balloons" and show up faintly as green -- if you didn't interact with them in any way, they would fade and drop down in the pages and ultimately disappear.
The game designer himself -- Will Wright on his alts -- was the first one to pollute it by buying friendship -- he paid 100 simoleons to people to friend him, so he could gather more balloons and move up the friendship list -- there were leaderboards as in all games. We could also tell that he had friended -- or accepted 100 from -- Mia Wallace, the most notorious mafia queen who ran the Sim Shadow Government which ultimately took over and ruined the Sims Online for many people with its corruption and terror -- I've always thought Will Wright deliberately allowed evil to enter his world "to see what would happen" and to see how the human spirit would attempt to overcome it (which it did, but just not sufficiently, in part because of constraints in TSO's own rules, chief of which was suppression of press freedom -- because the game company felt it couldn't check rumours and police libel, you were not allowed to report the bad behaviour of any other individual or group on the forums, and that meant no one could ever warn other players or rally against the Shadow Government.)
Besides buying friendship, what happened is that virtual wives soon discovered their virtual husbands were cheating on them -- they would see a suspiciously green balloon at the top of their boyfriend's pages -- was he dancing the jitterbug just a little too often with that certain Sim?
Another negative side effect was that people came deliberately to slap you to "red up your balloons" -- and it would spoil your reputation because people thought perhaps you got into bar fights or didn't cooperate sufficiently on group job objects and were "trouble". Some people automatically ejected from their establishments anyone who entered with a lot of red balloons in their pack.
People would endlessly study these balloon graphs --and I mean endlessly -- you could tell at a glance who was a friend or foe of whom by red or green status. They would see who were the most green; they would be jealous over literal greenness if a special friend didn't "keep them in their balloons". They would deliberately go over and try to socialize to keep certain popular people "at the top of their balloons". They would avoid others and push them down the pages out of sight.
Of course, all of this had the extra added headache or pleasure, depending on how you looked at it, of "mapping" and the option to "map" or "not map" a friend and give out those permissions. So you could open up the world's master map, and spot where your friends were, and teleport to them to keep green -- or they could block you, so you couldn't find them and keep up that green -- and would have to guess where they might be -- perhaps by checking their balloons and see who was in their inner, greenest circle -- and then guess where that person might be and teleport there. People naturally developed all kinds of mapping strategems -- knowing that people had to keep up their jitterbug and piledriving skills, they would go to the skill lots where these skills had to be kept up by interacting with various objects, and then head there.
As all MMORPG players know, there are always a set of concerted players who want to nerf or dumb down or disable the negative features of games -- so it wasn't long before people began to lobby to get rid of the "red balloons" idea as it harmed their reputations and some were deliberately going around gloving others to make them look bad.
By the time we migrated to Second Life or There or other open-ended social worlds, the balloons had been replaced by friendship cards, but these were not made visible. So it wasn't long before some bright young coder thought it would be great to design what he called the SL Wristwatch which would track all the people near you within 96 meters, track how often you were in each other's proximity, and then post this online so that people essentially could make the same kind of TSO balloons in rough fashion.
But very soon people began to howl. The online edition of these early social graphs that existed before Twitter was born, before Facebook was widely used and popular -- in 2004-2005 -- showed up people that other people didn't want their friends to know about. The same problem developed -- a sim wife would find that her sim husband was shown 96m near his old girlfriend or near some other woman and that became suspicious.
Or enemies or griefers who wanted to discredit others would keep showing up in their 96m range to make it look like they were friends, constantly showing their proximity.
This proximity data would be used to find out where the most people were and where they went hte most; who was the most popular; who was related to them, and of course led to friendship and influence seeking behaviour. But it was fairly rapidly shut down -- just like years later GirlsNearMe was shut down for the same privacy-exposing behaviour.
Then the next scandal involved another "improvement" on this proximity data -- now the IP addresses of every one coming to the sim were collected, and this led not only to showing who was with who, but it also outed alts -- people with the exact same IP address (and yes, many are in fact dynamic, or fluctuate within a close enough range) but who had different alt accounts would be outed.Also their habits would be on display -- if they went to a gay club or shopped at a BDSM mall.
So there was an enormous outcry over this privacy-stripping function -- even in a virtual world where most people were anonymous -- or thought they were. And this function was banned.
Activists in worlds and games who tried to stop greedy coders from scraping enormous amounts of data and displaying it in order to change behaviours -- all as ultimately a marketing test -- were strong enough to stop some of the geek game-god practices but didn't have enough social cohesion and sophistication and power to be able to stop them more broadly as they moved from games to social networks.
No one complained when Barack Obama drilled the social graphs everywhere to construct polling data and organize massive Get Out the Vote phone calls based on issues or demographics -- Obama for America grabbed all that right off the top, mixed it and drilled it and won, then morphed into Organizing for Action, and took all that data with them, and few complained that a Democratic Party candidate had now taken with him for his private use in a nonprofit the people's data gathered in a national election.
Those to the hard left or hard right of even "progressive" Obama only complained when the NSA, an institution with far more checks and balances and compliance with the rule of law than game or virtual world companies or social media compaines or OFA did this lawfully in pursuit of criminals.
No one complained when the chief of police in Steubenville gathered social media and cell phone data, texts and photographs, and used it to prosecute two young men who had raped a girl at a party. If anything, Anonymous, which used brutal vigilante tactics to out many others in the social graph with these men and this girl, falsely accusing innocent people and permanently ruining the lives even of those who were rightly disciplined or prosecuted with this case, was applauded by feminists for "getting" those football team members with "rape culture". The kind of "rape culture" that coders routinely disdainfully indulge in when a company or government is hacked, and they blame the victim for wearing too short a skirt, i.e. failing to salt or hash data base tables.
Today, when anthropologist Katy Pearce routinely collects openly-available Twitter accounts and elaborately tracks who has tweeted to whom about what in Nodex and other programs, nobody complains except me. She can claim to out government informants or pro-government supporters with these methods by seeing what they say and to whom, although I've cautioned, being even more a supporter of independent (as distinct from GONGO-ized) civil society than she is in Azerbaijan, that people sitting on the fence, or ordinary people still shaping their opinion, or people who just might not like the opposition for various reasons, can be mistaken in these methods for "pro-government" and in fact alienated and not won over by the movement. There are also many alts and bots polluting the information but you can't always tell the difference.
I've tangled with him, gosh, it's been about 12 years now, first in the Sims Online, then in Second Life (his name there is Urizenus Sklar so we called him Uri). I don't have time to fill in all the blanks now, but suffice it to say that Ludlow and his partner in crime, Mark McCahill (Pixeleen Mistral) spent years actively inciting and participating in griefing of me, even though I once collaborated with them on the newspaper about the virtual world called The Alphaville Herald.
Ludlow is one of those griefer professors (Edward Clift at Woodbury University is another; so is Gabriella Coleman) who thinks there is something fascinating and thrillingly "transgressive" and wonderfully interesting about hackers and their "emergent behaviour" online. What other normal people readily find to be ordinary harassment, heckling and even criminal acts, they think are part of "festival" or "whimsy" or 'innovation". They try to pretend that people who essentially spray graffiti on you or your home or who harass you with spam or obscenity or deliberately bother you are somehow the same thing as dissidents like Tesla or Turing actually doing science and making inventions. It's astounding.
Ludlow particularly believes that if he can just use language and invent a lexicon around the griefing phenomenon, he can transform it from its mundane thuggery and banality of evil into something wondrous in a Brave New World.
Uri was particularly mad at a group of us who got together once to create a composite fictional figure online, a teenage witch named Serena. We had Serena run to Uri and seek his shelter from wiccans and pagans who were luring her into their cult (supposedly) and even old lecherous warlocks who were sexting her and cybering with her online though she was underage. Like an early rendition of the Facebook Dinner Table ad for Home where the girl lives in a separate and subversive reality from her mom or grandmother, Uri would tell Serena to be subversive when she had to set the table in her proper suburban home.
"Put the fork instead of the spoon on the outside when you set the table," he would say, encouraging her to disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. This was a professor, in charge of young minds.
We worked hard to make Selena credible, and it took several of us, because one was an actual teen who had to supply teen music ideas; another was someone in an actual state and time zone they were willing to date stamp so that it would look like they were in a different place than us (and we wouldn't be suspected), and then several of us wrote dialogues and questions and kept the chat logs.
Uri claimed at the time that he had discovered an underage girl in the Sims Online who was engaged in online prostitution for money (well, simoleons, but they could be cashed out for some money at the time on ebay). He claimed to be scandalized, but it was just good copy. He then began researching this, strictly scientifically we suppose, and then gradually came to find out that the supposed teenage girl was a teenage boy, a minor at the time he began his research, but who turned 18. Uri got busy reporting this to the company, EA.com and trying to get this account banned and several others, and writing about it all the while. Because he kept reporting negative phenomena that wasn't supposed to be happening in this world, EA.com just found it more convenient to ban him. Then he made a big fuss everywhere about this as a "whistleblower" -- going to the scholarly and gaming press then the mainstream media, with articles in the Times and the Boston Globe.
While I obviously shared his concern about children as young as nine being allowed into this context with adult content, I was unimpressed for several reasons with Uri's "research*. First, when I went to check out "Evangeline" and did some research of my own, and I heard Uri also claim that when he outed this person's real identity somehow, and then began calling them at home in RL, only the mother ever answered and the supposed teenage boy was never available. That led me to suspect that maybe it was all in fact the mother or a woman making a bunch of characters. I also had research showing that there wasn't prostitution, but that what Evangeline would do with unsuspecting leches would take their money, then pile drive and expel them, never giving them their cyber fix. It was all a game.
Meanwhile, a thriving BDSM community went on in SL, something a number of us abuse reported because there was not supposed to be this kind of overt adult content in the game. Furthermore, it was not supposed to be on the profile, advertising links to real-life -- this was in fact how teenagers *did* get lured in and one woman in her 20s whom I met at the time even bragged that she started in BDSM online as a teen in just this way. Uri completely ignored this whole seamy side of SL, and even celebrated it in the Alphaville Herald, which made his crusade against this strange kid pretending to be a prostitute all the more weird. It was as if he was just looking selectively for sensations to make news, so that he himself could get covered. He later got a book out of all this.
Several of us thought this was pretty shabby and complained to the mainstream media interviewing him with such fascination. Then we did the "Selena" hoax and he fell for it completely, publishing the story, reprinting the chatlogs as if they were authentic -- which they weren't. We illustrated how easy it was to make fake people online and basically claim anything you want to journalists. This should have been a big cautionary tale. It wasn't. The Herald went on manufacturing news like that for years. They turned on me when I became critical of their collaboration with griefers to harass people and then report on them -- and they griefed me and made me a target of their "reports" as well.
Uri is of the persuasion that, like the Red Queen, if he can just say a thing and name it as he wishes, he can capture its meaning. So he invents the alternative world in which these "hacktivists" lives, idealizes them, and then exonerates them.
"Hacktivists"
is a fake term that criminal hackers have invented themselves to engage
in reputational white-washing. People in activist movements haven't
expressed any felt need for them and haven't sought their "services" --
they merely try to worm their way into existing movements and offer
"help" that in fact is about them trying to come to power under cover of
causes like democracy in Iran or Egypt. When they tackle a group like
the Scientologists, it's not about freedom, it's about a turf war over
who will get to control the Internet with which cult.
Peter
Ludlow knows this full well, but he's always been part of the cunning
and knowing white-washing of these people as long as I have known him in
multiple virtual worlds, where he has sided with criminals against
law-abiding citizens.
Ludlow continues to believe that if he can
just change the language, he can just change the thought and then the
reality. But these hackers are criminals. All these cases are
tendentiously described, and the news stories of the New York Times
could set some of it straight. Keys, for example, isn't charged with
just defacing the LA Times, but with also taking emails from a Fox News
affiliate and causing damages over $5000,
The truth has to be
spoken in fact to the power that these hackers have become, with
enormous numbers of attacks on servers everywhere from government to
business to media to nonprofits. They take away all our freedoms, and
are not at all what they seem.
***
Rights are taken away every time your
friends the hackers take down a web page or server with a zero-day or a
DDoS or any kind of hack -- and hacking isn't what you say it is, it's
unauthorized entry of any protected computer, as defined by the owner
and user, not you.
Anonymous is as rigid and conservative as
Soviet communism. They don't want any one to use the Internet in ways
they don't approve. If PayPal refuses to pay for WikiLeaks, which is
aiding and abetting the theft of classified documents from the State
Department, they savage this business or Amazon which refuses to store
them. Unless you do Anonymous' bidding, you will face terroristic like
attacks and your right of association and right of free speech are
taking away. Anonymous is particular active in doxing people and
destroying their privacy, and stalking and harassing them. These are all
basic civil rights which they violate.
When my government or business or bank or magazine or blog have their web sites down, we are all deprived of rights.
***
@Len Charlap HBGary wasn't hired by the US government to harm Glenn
Greenwald. This is hysteria. A plan to counter Glenn Greenwald who often
takes extremist "progressive positions" was hyped as a possible
hypothetical but never put into practice. Even if it were, it might be
hard to prove that it was any different, than say, the Kremlin's RT
television with its many American dissidents planning to undermine the
US government. Free speech enables speech you don't like and which
undermines you.
Your logic regarding companies is hardly
persuasive, and is rather like what Anonymous, whom you whitewash here,
itself dubbed "rape logic" in Steubenville -- the idea that if a girl is
wearing suggestive clothing or is drunk and incapacitated, it's okay to
rape here. The right thing to do in cases like that is to call her
parents or even an ambulance, not rape her. In the same way, if you find
an exploit on an AT&T server, the right thing to do is to email the
information security officer or web master, not harvest data gleefully
from the exploit. Weev did not need to grab 120,000 private emails to
prove the point -- that hack was deliberate and cunning and was about
power, not service. He never tried to contact AT&T and lies about
this as do his many fans.
In every other case here, there are
many other factors that Ludlow is leaving out; the Boston judge ordered
Aaron Swartz to obtain mental health treatment when he was granted bail,
for example.
Last night I was "doxed" (my private information was exposed) on Twitter and Pastebin, and even after I reported it to Pastebin and got the original post removed quickly, the Anonymous operative came back again and posted a new pastebin, and others weaved it into their code on other pages so it would keep showing up multiple times in search. I've waited 18 hours for Pastebin to respond again. I also filed an abuse report with Twitter, and they've declined to act. That may be due to the fact that when they clicked on the link in Twitter, Pastebin had already removed it. So I filed another AR with Twitter. In my experience, Twitter can take multiple attempts to pay attention to this kind of harassment but eventually they do act.
This is a long post because I had to include a lot of tweet documentation in it -- these can get hard to access later or get deleted.
HOW I WAS ACCUSED OF 'BULLYING' THE ANONYMOUS ONLINE VIGILANTES (!)
Now, what was my "crime" that I "deserved to be doxed" over? I really have to wonder "why now," after reporting critically on Anonymous and its related groups for nearly a decade and never being "doxed" online except by the Second Life forums (thanks Pathfinder) Second Life Herald (Peter Ludlow's revenge) and Encyclopedia Dramatica (4channers, likely Jordan Belino/Tizzers Foxchase) who linked my SL avatar Prokofy with my RL name to harass me and try to silence me But they don't count.
This doxing was an Anonymous operative named "Anonloverz" connected not to a virtual world but to a campaign very much spilling offline into real life -- the Steubenville #Knightsec or #Justicesec operation played out mainly on Twitter, but also several sites like LocalLeaks and blogs. I had never seen him or contacted him before.
I haven't followed this case very closedly, beyond writing one post, because it is one of those huge swarms of he-said/she-said type statements. Lee Stranahan of Breitbart News is following it in depth. I'm happy to let the New York Times cover it. There's only so many hours in the day.
But occasionally I will respond to some of the egregious vigilantism I see from the Anonymous gang, some of which comes from either op accounts I happened to follow or retweets from others I follow.
And when I saw several of them whooping it up and heckling people I had to respond:
@caylaaaa_x3@hausofpain Like those hardcore porn pages on your home base, 4chan, right big guy? You guys are such fakes.
DOES ANONYMOUS HAVE SHORT MEMORIES ABOUT THEIR ABUSE OF WOMEN? OR JUST A LOT OF NEW FEMALE RECRUITS WHO HAVEN'T GOTTEN THE NEWS?
I sent them to a link on my one blog post on this subject. I've never seen a single news article talk about the long history of Anonymous and their love for violent, sexist porn on 4chan; their love for Hentai, which many feel is a form of child pornography; their outrageous misogynist harassment of women and young girls online, on sites like Youtube. This all seems so evident. Doesn't everybody know this? I remember attending Social Media Week at the panel that featured John Perry Barlow two years ago in Manhattan, and Deanna Zandt a leftist social media gurl on the panel bonded with a young woman who got up and told how horribly she had been harassed by Anonymous online -- but then seemed to "get over it" and then she and the lefty giggled about how fun they were and she then made a sketch and gave it to Zandt who then tweeted it on her phone. It was bizarre. I questioned Zandt how she could endorse Anonymous and got blocked on her blog later. This was in the Hearst building, one of those cavernous towers in Manhattan with all glass and steel, where we were on like the 30th floor with a panoramic view of the city, and an ancient painting of Hearst in the hallway, showing him in dark, rich oil tones receiving a servant with a Chinese tea set.
We are so far away from Hearst and his Chinese tea. Or are we?
Anyway, on Twitter, when I ran across these agitators for vigilantism in Steubenville, I went along with a few comments like that, trying to speak sense:
Judging from her public Twitter pics, caylaaaa may really just an ordinary young girl swept up in the Anonymous mania because it seems cool. But we'll never know. She could be an elaborate "persona," or really just an undereducated young girl who works at Med Express, has a mom who works at Cafe Avalon, has a calico cat, hangs out with hillbilly rock bands, drinks beer, thinks the weather is cold when she travels to Steubenville to demonstrate in a Guy Fawkes mask, and on and on -- any Second Lifer would rifle through her pictures, triangulating and triangulating, and would be calling her boss at her job by tomorrow. Ouch. And she implies she is a rape victim with psychological and post-trauma issues. Why are young people so careless on social media?!
I've noticed that variations of the name "Kayla" is typical of all the Anon~sec type of accounts, it must have some special meaning for them, maybe because that Kayla is a hero(ine), but I heard the name used before. I guess it's just one of those girly names.
@caylaaaa_x3@hausofpain oh gosh I know you're all special snowflakes but you're all in a rigidly ideological movement so spare me.
Truly they are, as any of these interactions show you. Because when you make a criticism of any one, they gang together and whistle to their buddies and cluster around you.
@catfitz@caylaaaa_x3 in this day and age Anonymous has little to do with 4chan In fact I have only been on the site once!
Hm, okay, I bet! And as we know from Adrian Chen -- and he should know! -- 4chan has already jumped the shark, and Anonymous goes to other IRC rooms and other places. Actually, you'd be surprised to discover that there is now a large group of them *again* in Second Life with all new people and new names that actually don't seem to be the old Woodbury gang, interestingly. And they've picked up all the same memes -- Steubenville, Occupy, CFAA, etc.
@caylaaaa_x3@hausofpain than the abusive football team did in the original rape. That may be deliberate.
VIGILANTES USE THE SAME LOGIC AS THE FOOTBALL TEAM 'RAPE CREW'
Now by that I don't mean that these Anonymous kiddies online have done something equivalent to physical rape. Derp! I get the difference! Herp! Obviously real rape is a harrowing, terrifying, physically and mentally damaging experience.But in the field of addressing violence against women, it is a basic principle that when advocating for the victims and trying to get justice, you just don't re-traumatize them. You don't keep making them tell and re-tell their stories to multiple levels of law-enforcers and media over and over again -- this is a terrible thing for them. You have to take every caution to prevent that re-traumatization -- this is a staple of care in shelters and advocacy groups -- it's a principle Anonymous as never heard of, and the women's groups don't seem to have explained this to them.
But what made it a particularly humiliating experience for the girl in Steubenville is that the football team took pictures of her abused and passed out, and put them on cell phones. And one kid made a gross video where he speaks of her disgustingly and put that around. It does not appear that it is a film made *while* the abuse was happening or in the same place, but it's part of the grotesque "multi-media experience" that is the entire Steubenville story of football rape culture.
THE WHOLE BASKETBALL TEAM
Unlike the conservative sites that are the only ones writing about vigilantism, you don't have to get me to concede the nastiness of sports culture in little towns. Fortunately, I've never been sexually assaulted, but I remember what it was like when the entire basketball team in my 9th grade class decided I was a lesbian and would jeer hateful slurs down the hallways at me. To this day I can see those menacing tall boys in their silk shorts leering at me, so that I couldn't get by and go to my class. They said this about me merely because I went to a basketball game with a girlfriend -- it was crazy.
I didn't feel traumatized or intimidated, but I just thought it was unfair -- like other things in childhood and school, like the fact that the kids in the fancy suburban houses would harass and heckle the children from the farms. I haven't thought of this incident in years because it just wasn't important to me. I joined another groups of kids, the ones known as the "freaks" or "the hippies" and did different things than sports, which became less interesting to me, like orchestra and poetry magazine. I wonder why young people don't do more of that today instead of accentuating their victimhood. Yes, I take bullying and the fear of suicide extremely seriously -- when my brother was only 10, his best friend, a boy very short in height who was mercilessly teased (the way my brother was teased because he was fat) -- committed suicide. Did you know that children that young commit suicide when they are bullied? The entire tragedy was suppressed because we were in a Catholic school where at the time no one would hold a Mass or a service or a burial for a suicide.
But it's a different age with the hideousness of MIPS and social media amplification, and in my view, Anonymous has made it 1000 times worse by making the woman's humiliation nearly a Hollywood blockbuster and as I said a multi-media spectacle with cross-media social media campaigns to boot.
ANONYMOUS IS LIKE SPORTS RAPE CULTURE THEMSELVES IN TACTICS AND DYNAMICS IF NOT EQUIVALENCE
And what is Anonymous just like? Oh, they're like that whole basketball team that harassed me because they thought I had put my arm around a girl -- imagine, the horrah lol. They take "evidence" they think they have and blast it out without any checking of facts of any sort and try to organize public lynchings of people they think are guilty.
It's my hope that the women's organizations like NOW will eventually get wise to this. So far, unfortunately, they are playing into it because they think the town fathers or "mainstream media"or "conservatives" are "suppressing" the story. They think Anonymous has done some kind of public service by releasing some of these pictures and videos and tweet feeds implicating some of the "rape crew" as they call them. (Stranahan denies there is a "crew" because only two are indicted -- well, two is enough of a crew if they have the whole football team at their back).
You can read my whole back twitter feed here. There isn't anything that constitutes "bullying" here. What there is, is the usual Anonymous tactics. "Isolate and fixate" or "distract" or "displace" or "accuse the accuser". Some people call these the "Saul Alinsky methods". They were actually Lenin's methods before Saul ever adapted them.
Pointing out that Anonymous is now what makes this woman's life miserable, I wrote:
@hausofpain@caylaaaa_x3 Nonsense. You've sent her story & pictures & humiliation to the entire Internet. Thanks, guys.
They claimed she was thanking Anonymous. Oh, maybe she is -- now. But I'm not sure. And sadly the result of all this social media infused glare is that now one account seemingly related to Anonymous although I think this is questioned has now released court transcripts that reveal the victim's name. Awful.
ANONYMOUS SCORNS DUE PROCESS AND REAL JUSTICE
Justice has always contained two basic elements:
o the right to face your accusers -- so people can't just make KGB-style anonymous denunciations behind your back and
o the right of a rape victim to keep her identity hidden -- the media has always had a voluntary code on this and courts also respect it.
Now, the people of Steubenville don't get either of these chief facets of justice.
@catfitz@hausofpain I don't want to live in a world where people call others fucktards. Where is the class? We have spoken to Jane doe so
@caylaaaa_x3@hausofpain Nonsense. The public didn't have every little creepy phone photo and you spread it further & amplified. Shame on u.
And I certainly stand by my very strong statement even including an obscenity because I think that's what is required with this awful Anonymous phenomenon -- coverage of it, and moral condemnation. That's what blogging is about.
Naturally, that cranked up a firestorm of concern-trolling about the use of "fucktard" as "horrible" and "mean to disabled people". calaaa began to claim brother was mentally disabled and how dare I, etc. Naturally one of the many heckling Anonymous accounts bothering me on Twitter used the exact same word himself in another conversation -- and we saw no rage-fits from @hausofpain. Old story.
COMPLAINING ABOUT VIGILANTISM IS 'HARASSING' AND 'BULLYING' ANONYMOUS *SNORT*
@catfitz@hausofpain you are preaching that we are harassing but what would you call what you are doing to us? Calling us fucktards and such
CS
@caylaaaa_x3@catfitz@hausofpain I don't viciously attack anybody, but you calling us fucktards was pretty malicious. This convo is over. Good day :)
Imagine, pearl-clutching over an obscenity that they use on the IRC channel among themselves all the time, and faux rage over strong condemnation of what is really scary -- the overthrow of the justice system.
Honestly, it is injust: we're supposed to pretend that a hacker who steals 4 million files or all of the Stratfor data bases with people's credit cards or damages SONY is all free speech and love and peace, and meanwhile somebody who criticizes lack of due process gets doxed (me) and a tasteless football kid who make indeed made a gross video that is nevertheless not in violation of the First Amendment has his entire life ruined and has to leave his university.
Hey, what happened to those hackers' touching concern about the punishment fitting the crime?
This is the poor, poor pitiful me stuff that these Anonymous people do after calling me an old lady, troll, in need of help, etc. etc. and of course denying every legitimate critique I have of unjust vigilantism that deprives people of due process. Hey, I missed these crusaders for women's rights all this last year, as I've had ugly real-life effigies of me naked, bloody, burnt, and dead constantly served up to me in Second Life by their Anonymous cousins.
ARE THE ANONYMOUS TEAR JERKING STORIES TRUE?
I actually don't think there is a brother, just like I don't think that Anonloverz, the Anon in charge of this operation who doxed me because I was "bullying a brother" (*snort* - did he not notice my interlocutors were "sisters"?), doesn't really have a cousin who committed suicide over bullying at the age of 13. I just don't think she exists. Of course she *could* exist -- see above what I just wrote about my brother's friend and the tragedy in our school 45 years ago.
At the end of the day I would rather be the girl who stands up for what she believes in then the person who bullies me for it!
Well, as Stranahan has told them: Pro-tip -- keep your personas straight!
INTERNET HISTRIONICS
But I've come to see the stories online peddling by the legions of Anonymous sympathy trolls as suspect. That's because I see all the signs of Internet histrionics here, maudlin tale-telling to gain sympathy online and manipulate public opinion.
That is, there are two Internet cultural phenomenon here at work. One is deliberate manipulation to gain recruits and sympathy in a sinister anarchist movement to disrupt society. Another is an individual's sick need to gain attention from others online. They dovetail well around Steubenville, in my view.
I saw this sort of thing back in 1999 when I first started a Sims Family Albums group on Yahoo, and then joined the then-famous Uncle George Sims group and had one of those histrionics show up who claimed her daughter was kidnapped and it was all so horrible and her husband was beating her...but then it all miraculously cleared up in a few days after everyone had stood on their heads to help her, and then a few people, skeptical, began to call the police and read the wires and see there was no such thing...
Awfully convenient, eh, that so many of these Anons showing up around Steubenville say they are rape victims, post stories in their feed about rape trauma, and if you criticize Anonymous' vigilantism tactics, they fly at you with rage that you must be belittling rape victims and siding with the "rape crew". Gosh, Anon technique no. 222.
We will never know unless Anonloverz reveals both his own name and location and his cousin's -- and he'd rather strip away my privacy than be accountable. He's the bully -- I'm a legitimate critic. Calling somebody a "fucktard" because they launch a vigilante riot with awful consequences isn't "bullying"; it's legitimate speech and needed activity. In fact I practice this deliberately without any "vitriol" or "anger" or "need for therapy" because I think it's what must be done.
'WE JUST WANT JUSTICE SO WE HAVE TO USE INJUSTICE ON YOU'
Now the guy with the BDMS-like name (it's certainly related to BDSM in every single game, world, forums, etc. I've ever seen, so sue me), says:
@BreitbartUnmask I have little use for @Stranahan who even failed to credit a scoop to me once, but who cares abt his relations to his dad?
BREITBART'S STRANAHAN TAKES ON ANONYMOUS
Stranahan intervenes and first says he doesn't use people's names unless they request it, but I remind him of my blog that came out nearly 48 hours before his did on Occupy and the Natasha Lennard video. Indignant, he says he discovered this all on his own, without my blog, and has emails with Breitbart to prove it. Well, I have no recourse other than to take his word reluctantly -- I think that the obscure bookstore video buried in long posts on the Jacobin website which most people don't keep on "refresh" at the top of their tabs was not something he would just find -- I found it only through diligent research trying to find out more about Lennard who I sensed was not just some victimized New York Times reporter but a cadre in the underground movement (and she was let go of the Times eventually -- she was the stringer who covered the Occupy Brooklyn Bridge story). Stranahan spoke of the "anarchist book fair," but it was actually a public talk in an anarchist book shop in New York City.
Naruto agrees that 4chan is "twisted," but apparently he can't have a debate without sicing the big bros at Anon to harass other people.
ANTI-STRANAHAN VIGILANTES
I then attracted the attention of two more people following Stranahan and also ganging up on any critics of Anonymous, and I reply to them:
@IncognitoMD@Xcitizen10 Doesn't matter whether @Stranahan is right or wrong. He's ACCOUNTABLE and NOT ANONYMOUS like you all. Big diff!
I had never heard of either of these people. Xcitizen10 wanted me to write a denunciation of Stranahan. I refused, naturally. Are they daft?! IncognitoMD claimed to be a psychiatrist. I doubt that sincerely.
I get more and more pileons from Anons trying to prove to me what an evil welfare-mooching BDSM porno wife-abuser Stranahan is. I hugely doubt he is all those things -- and all I was talking a about was what I felt was a failure to link to my blog since I got to the story first. I then saw there is a huge Anonymous-made ruckus around Stranahan, trying to portray him as abusive and a BDSM practitioner in the belief this will discredit his skeptical reporting about their role in Steubenville. It's completely wild and crazy, and it shows what happens to people who try to cover this story.
Gosh, since when did Anonymous join the Newly-Acquired Conscience Society about BDSM?! You're going to tell me that not a single one of the JustSec anons have ever been to the 4chan hardcore site or other sites like that? Not a single one of them has ever sent out particle spam of Tubgirl textures in Second Life and other worlds? Really, guys?
Maybe there really is a new upright and clean Anonymous generation *cough*, but then, if they really care about BDSM in culture, they should take on 50 Shades of Gray or criticize the Superbowl ad that casually showed a guy climbing out of bed with fur handcuffs still attached to him while he attempted to get "his favourite shirt" off a sleeping girl. Ugh. We missed them on those giant, big, influential cultural memes that represent that sadly, the culture incubated in Second Life and other online worlds like Red Light District and is now metasticizing. Instead, they're pawing through some decade-old porn trash talk of Stranahan's in some chat room. Ridiculous.
Anonymous' foot soldiers try to make it seem that if Stranahan is somehow related to porn or BDSM or even abuse of women (some wild story of him offering his wife for prostitution, etc.), then he is unfit to cover the rape story. Hmm. Well, possibly, but given Anonymous' anonymity, and their propensity for wild lying, then I'd have to ask for a successful court record, maybe a record of a restraining order from family court or a prosecution for assault, or something that would show the porn/BDSM angle reached the level of some sort of crime. I'm not seeing it. Sounds more like harassment of a journalist to me.
@_b_king@Xcitizen10@Stranahan And you find this out...how? By hacking & doxing? This is due process? They teach civics in school?
Because really, that's what it comes down to. What someone does in the privacy of their home is their business. Obviously, um, Anonymous wants that privacy for themselves! You can't claim it has impacted their professional work unless you really have a case not just ugly insinuations.
CATS ARE IMPORTANT - BUT I DON'T LIKE CATS
At this point someone else piles on who has come to this thread from seeing it in her feed from one of these accounts. I haven't contacted her before -- my CC to her isn't me manually picking her out to CC, but a return of a "cc all" because one of the others have included her.
So later she accuses me of harassing her through CCs -- even though I don't know her, haven't approached her, haven't ever heard of her, and only hit "REPLY" to a tweet *to me* in which *someone else* had put the CC.
And that's the game they all play ferociously, as I've discovered, because they've found out that Twitter will now suspend accounts of people for "cc abuse" -- contacting people "too many times" in ccs to others, with their views. I've known one person suspended for a time over "cc abuse" -- again, perplexed as to what this is really about -- I fear that it's Twitter's way of bringing in "track block" which Gilmor wanted in 2007, and which I protested vigorously against (and he ended up inviting me on his podcast show but then shutting off my mike).
I can't even begin to describe the weirdness of @catsrimportant -- just a few examples, read her thread.
@catfitz
I follow the Steubenville hashtag and RT . I think I have something to
add as a gang rape survivor. It's my right. 1st amendment
If I had not had years and years of experience in Second Life, where griefing with these methods is honed to a fine science practiced by grown-up male digital arts professors and middle-aged IBM programmers, not young women, I would think this account and her attack on me was about mental illness or again, histrionics. And of course it may end up being about that. But I don't think so, once I see there is more to the story and this person has showed up in Anonymous griefing clusters as Stranahan has discovered andalso shows up on Crooks and Liars providing research assistance.
The technique goes like this:
o distract -- and talk about something else instead of the point at hand, which is the wrongfulness of Anonymous' vigilantism
o accuse me of not caring about rape because I'm critical of Anonymous' vigilantism -- apples and oranges.
o blast me with links to articles about rape, and then accuse me of not caring about them because I won't *right that minute* go and look at them -- this, over and over again, hysterically.
o shrill insistence that this person is "not anonymous" and has nothing to do with Anonymous, but never really a link explaining a real identity, either -- one is given ultimately, but the name "Melissa Brewer" seems only to circle back to the same Twitter identity and not go outside of the loop.
@catfitz I don't have any "Anon pals" and I was not aware anyone doxed you. Seriously. That has nothing to do with me.
But she does have Anon pals. That's how she came to the thread I had with them -- I didn't contact her. She followed them to come gang up on me, and decided I was a "rape denier".
I'm not putting the actual link -- unfortunately, it's still there, 18 hours later after three abuse reports to Pastebin. I informed him that I had AR'd him to Pastebin and Twitter, and got this gem:
@JustBatCat as Noah called himself on Twitter joined with KnightSec, who I remember was the first one I came across with the Steubenville rape cause, seemed to go along with the Anonymous "op crew" in hacking the football team's site and doxing people involved but then broke ranks and talked to the media. Bizarrely he works for the DoD:
Computers and gadgets are hobbies, Noah said, and he indicated he's a civilian contract worker for the Department of Defense.
Or not so bizzarrely, as the military and hackers are all intertwined as we saw from the Navy/Tor/JacobAppelbaum story and even our little Second Life. Now the Anonymous gang warriors are after him because he broke ranks and became an "egofag". And if the phone chat screenshots are authentic, he sounds as creepy as Anonymous in his thuggish take on how to control Anonymous. These people are cut from the same cloth.
Is this actually some kind of sting from the government? The funny thing is that it may well not be, and that Anonymous probably does have government employees in it who hold all their beliefs religiously yet combine it with routine computer work for the Man.
I still have to wonder why an important Anon who hacks the feds and gets upset at the comrade breaking ranks would bother with me because I pointed out principles of due process to him and his little friends and used the term "fucktard" to describe people who interfere with justice as vigilantes and re-traumatize rape victims in social media.
And it's because of that bro stuff that gang warfare and Russian mafia types and other sub-cultures and counter-cultures have, where any perceived slight or dis of your bro is something you are honour-bound to react to. What, the little fellow named doesn't have the doxing capacity of anonloverz and needs his limp dick held for the job?
And the doxing was such a strange amateurish job. A combination of stuff that is not online, although perhaps you can fetch it if you pay one of those shady services, and then various unrelated stuff from other people just randomly vacuumed up. That poor girl in Canada with the snowy photos that Anonloverz posted the link to with the denunciation "Shame" as if they were BDSM porn lol. Snowy back yards in Canada?! Then when I pointed out that they were harassing young girls with similar names, he dug some more and came up with a single svelte bodybuilder with my name and her photos on some page -- I had to LOL as I am a middle-aged overweight mother of two.
Some people think you should just take hilarious doxing like that take its course for that reason!
OCCUPY STEUBENVILLE? OH NO...
So, #OccupySteubenville is coming up on February 23, Soviet Army Day.
Which brings me to my conclusion about this --which I realize no one will share, but I don't care. It's just my operating hypothesis.
I think the fast and furious ops Anonymous is staging around Steubenville are all merely to distract from their hero Assange's rape charges and their own recent arrests as I've said. But I also think it's about a more sinister agenda of some intelligence services of some foreign powers that want to find ways to disrupt America and discredit it and just cause general chaos.
Now, I happen to believe that the Steubenville rape is contemptible and has to be prosecuted and is not a concoction of the Kremlin or Tehran or something like that. It's real. It is not invented by the KGB. That's not what I mean. And Anonloverz is probably somebody who couldn't even find Russia on a world map.
I mean something more sophisticated -- that these foreign operatives are exploiting these kinds of online movements and hysterical stories to make havoc. And they've succeeded. A brutal gang rape in India led to a woman's tormented death, and now this case is being compared to it, althought is is less severe as the victim survived and evidently without serious injuries. That doesn't make it any less of a case to prosecute and to put mechanisms into place to prevent. But the uproar around this, like the Trayvon case increasingly mean that the justice system cannot function normally and adequately. Now whose goal is that?
I can see that Anonymous is now on a red roll like the Red Wheel Solzhenitsyn wrote about. They enjoy pouncing and outing and scaring and hurting people with doxing and flashmobs and they can' t afford to let this particular story end because it's so enjoyable for them. It's about coming to power.
So they are enlarging the story even as they roll along, trying to make up a hysterical case for how all teens are abused by the government and their parents, who send them to re-education camps. The true stories of a few abused in this manner, even to the point of being killed, are now magnified to be an entire national trend, with a whole Reddit thread and constant victimology around the theme.
There's something so contrived about all of this, and with the masks and the methods, I think it's more than we realized, and it is sinister. But along the way, it's also just goofy and stupid, and involves a lot of little people doing lots of stupid things. I just happened to bump into a couple of them and tell them off -- and rightly so, more people should do this and we wouldn't have this riot then. They abused their ill-gotten power and harmed me by putting up my private information that can lead to all kinds of havoc -- and they also threaten *more* harm if I don't "shut up".
I remember years ago when the KGB followed me because I contacted dissidents in my human rights work, I felt it was at least a sort of predictable routine. They had certain rules they would abide by; both the CIA and KGB had understandings that they wouldn't kill people on each others' territory, for example. Then after Putin came to power, I began to feel that all those rogue agents let go under Yeltsin and reformatted as the security departments of banks or football teams or whatever, were now unsupervised and without ethical codes, such as they were in a country with a history of mass murder, and that now they would kill foreigners -- and they did, people like Paul Khlebnikov, the Forbes journalist in Moscow. There was a point when I worked on one certain case that I had three different kinds of these "services" following me, the official intelligence and then their off-brands or something. It's very creepy.
When the newspapers started doxing gun owners after the Newtown massacre, there was a big push to give them free speech rights like it was the Pentagon papers. The harm and exposure it brought to those legal gun owners was overlooked. Eventually they had to turn around on this as they themselves got threatened by angry Second Amendment activists and then in the ultimate irony had to hired armed guards.
That's what anarchists try to do: try to make societies not like themselves, the opposite of their beliefs, confused and contradictory.
One danger of the tactic is that it creates an escalating, endless cycle of paranoia. After a Time magazine
story on the Church of Scientology, the controversial group is alleged
to have gone after the journalist’s personal information in an early and
well publicized variant of doxing. These “fair game” tactics were a
central rationale given by the fledging Anonymous group in 2008 in their famous video
that declared war on Scientology for its “campaigns of disinformation”
and “suppression of dissent.” Now we have come full circle, and some in
Anonymous have become the thing it once claimed to despise, actively
promoting disinformation and attacking critics with relish as was shown
in the Stephen K. Bannon film Occupy Unmasked.
I remember when and where I saw the Anonymous campaign against the Scientologists -- in 2007, and in Second Life, the Great Prototyper, in SL groups and avatars obsessed with this cause.
They were the same people who griefed me. They will come for any of you next. "Because none of us are as cruel of all of us," as their motto tells us.
My ancestors spun looms at home or dug potatoes or peet in Ireland. In this country, they either worked their small family farms in Virginia or Kentucky or they ran a small tavern and inn on the wrong side of the tracks, where the whole family worked, serving the rail workers and traveling salesmen in Corry, Pennsylvania. One grandfather took care of horses and then cars at the Hotel Quebec.
Today, I often think that while a century or even two centuries separates us from our ancestors, we're not really substantively different. I still have to spin my Internet loom late into the night to write news copy for websites or translate articles or books; my aunt prepares book indexes; my brother fixes people's websites and servers. How different is it taking care of somebody's horse or car and taking care of somebody's web site or server? How different is working your fingers on a loom to spin thread or typing on a keyboard to spin words? My great uncle Ray died from a mule kick to the head on the family farm. When the power was knocked out for two weeks during Hurricane Sandy, I wondered what we would do if it stretched weeks -- our family farm of computers and a router burned out in the blackout were all we had to sustain us. A FEMA worker asked me if I had lost any "tools for work". "My router," I explained.
I've seen the nonprofit and news industry, where I used to readily find jobs, shrink to a fraction of its size. I don't whine about this because I've always adapted and done other kinds of consulting and of course translation. But I don't glamourize the new "work at home" online businesses and Internet-ized "sharing" businesses involving homes and cars and errands because I see they are never going to be a decent living. Only some people with already pre-existing assets are going to benefit, and the managers of them benefit most of all, with a huge discrepancy between their lifestyle and that of their Internet minions. Shouldn't all those Occupy Wall Streeters who couch-surf care more about this 1%?
Whimsley has had a very interesting discussion challenging the whole unregulated -- and unethical -- area of the Air BnB type of Internet-ized services and has even written an open letter challenging Timothy Wu who was touting them at the New York Times.
Peer-to-Peer Hucksterism is exactly the right title for this blog. Whimsley is more of a socialist or "progressive" than I am, certainly, so he approaches the problem of the Silicon Valley hustle from the perspective of the regulated social state -- what horrifies him more than the collectivization of private property involved in these entrepreneurial escapades is that the democratic state cannot properly control them so that people are not harmed. I agree regulation is needed, and I don't mind if the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which people regard as crooked because it charges huge fees for medallions, is the entity to regulate -- and therefore ban -- Uber. Uber was unconscionable during Sandy, gouging prices for rides like common Russian mafia karservisy. Disgraceful.
Paul Carr has a really great series of articles calling out these Internet thugs in Uber and the other businesses here,here and here. He calls out their Randian "Atlas Shrugs" attitude -- one blog is delightfully called "Asshole Shrugs". Myself, I call out their technocommunism. I don't favour Randianism at all, I just think the Leninist NEP that these entrepreneurs are hawking isn't an improvement over traditional free enterprise in a marketplace that in fact doesn't have to be over-regulated to still be under the rule of law and the courts. That's what bothers Whimsley as well.
Now comes Tomio Geron at Forbes touting "AirBnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy". The comments are filled with predictable snots who tell others to be disrupted and die while they make their fortunes, and Brazilian third-world sharers who sneer that those who can't accept sharing must "adapt". Ho hum, this is an old story played out in the Russian Revolution and lots of other revolutions.
So here's my intervention at Forbes:
Look, we are not glamorous, we Internet subsistence farmers, and
trying to pretend that the jobs that are going away for good are going
to be replaced by our Internet subsistence farming doesn’t impress us.
I might make my income each month by translating something online
from Russian for somebody in Vladivostok or an international agency in
another country, or copy-editing somebody’s film script within an hour
turn-around, or re-renting my Second Life servers and selling digital
furniture for avatars, or taking in revenue from Google from my blog
ads. The Future is Here! the Future is Now! Except, the future is
unevenly distributed. Whoop-de-doo. I’m poor.
I don’t have a car; I live in New York. I can’t rent out part of my
apartment — I’d lose my lease in a building where the landlord zealously
polices sublets and enforces them by video camera surveillance and
electronic card-entry to the building with cards that can only be issued
to paying tenants and approved residents. This Air bnb stuff is not a
plan for the third world; hell, it’s not even a plan for Rochester, MN
or Rochester, NY. It’s *just* a plan for sunny California where hipsters
have houses in Malibu and Prius cars that they can chop up,
collectivize and let the new oligarchs sell for them under this
technocommunist regime. The rest of us are going to be scratching in the
digital dust.
We can’t be unionized even by the freelancers’ unions — they require
letters from employers, and what, I’m supposed to get 100 letters a
month from people I did two pages of translation for or 20 minutes of
errands picking up an item they need or re-renting 1024 square meters of Second
Life server space for US $1.50 a month? Please. I’m all for
micropayments and Mechanical Turks, but you need to look at the nature
of the work and jobs on all these task rabbity sites — they are very,
very marginal and the only people who really make decent wages are
*coders*. Once again we are seeing geeks pretend that they are making a
Better World.
I’m not complaining — I chose my Internet subsistence farming after
the nonprofit I worked for failed with loss of funding after 9/11; I
chose it after my conventional media companies downsized because the
Internet killed them. I could be working at Home Depot and have health
insurance; instead, I chose this. It’s all good.
The most disturbing thing about this new collective farm where we
pretend to work and they pretend to pay us, however, are these new
oligarchs who make billions why we make 17 cents from somebody maybe
clicking on a belly fat ad.
Hey, when they’re ready to get out of the way and let their systems
be run by robots and in fact people like us, and get the tycoons and VCs
out of the way, maybe we can believe in their revolution. I don’t think
that will happen any time soon. Collectivization isn’t going to work in
the virtual world any better than it did in real life. I’m for free
enterprise. That’s not what this Brave New Internet World is. It’s
“capitalism for me, communism for thee”. It’s not just.
***
Then there's one person who thinks that the resistance to the "sharing economy" is about traditional "phobia" in America against communism and socialism and that technological advances will make this go away.
Nonsense. There’s a good reason for the ‘phobia’ about socialism and
communism in America — a lot of the people among the immigrant
populations know first hand about the horrors of mass murder under
communism and suppression of entrepreneurialism and human rights under
socialism. So they came here. They are telling the truth about communism
— she isn't.
In fact, the worst aspects of the collectivization we knew in real
life are in these digital services — the lack of accountability, the
lack of transparency, the ability of a few to exploit the labour of many
fervent collectivized believers who don’t have union benefits or
retirement plans but just get to chop up their personal property into
more and more time or space slivers.
Work on the Internet collective farm is not everything that it has cracked up to be. Write when you get work.
Some of the commenters at Forbes point out to the reputation management aspect and the "curation" or -- once again, the customer service state which would have to supervise that "curation" by the lovely commuuuuunity.
Here's the problem with having collective brow-beating to manage the collective. Group-think kicks in and fanboyz and the "community managers" -- not elected or accountable, but just corporate drones -- then become harsher and harsher trying to maintain order. We've all seen this in the virtual worlds and the game worlds -- this is going to be awful to watch as it leeches out into real life! Ugh...
Imagine if someone doesn't think the thread count on your Egyptian sheets or the view from your urban window is as wonderful as they thought seeing the picture, and they downrate you. Now you've gone from having a thrilling and fun sort of Internet hobby like that B 'n B you always dreamed of, to having some Internet dickwad threaten your livelihood because they arbitrarily leave a bad comment. You have nowhere to go for adjudication or fairness because the company will not care or have the resources to manage these things. It will be like "Rate my Professor" on steroids. Your only hope, like on Amazon or ebay, is that after enough sales, you could right the bad rep some thin-skinned nerd has given you.
The worst thing I saw at the beginning of Air BnB was that when a woman wanted to protest the horrible thing that happened to her, where lowlifes who rented her place set up a meth lab and stole and wrecked her stuff, was that Robert Scoble told her she was whining and to shut up -- the company was just getting its next round of VC cash and this was more important to nurture than responding to the complaints of one disgruntled customer. The company at first ignored her. She had to shout and shout and scream and put up with the nastiness of the Internet boys on TechCrunch and such until she finally started to get normal mainstream press attention and the company had to turn around on her case and make it good. They did, to their credit, but you got a sense of just how hard it is to challenge these Silicon Valley favourites and their horrid fanboyz with high traffic and views in the tech blogosphere. It was impossible to be heard above the noise when I tried to criticize Uber in New York -- I was hated on and drowned out on TechCrunch. It took Paul Carr from the alternative Pando Daily to get heard with these same kinds of obvious concerns anyone would have.
Meanwhile, without a car or a rentable apartment what assets do I have to rent out timeshares on? Would anyone like a dilapidated pepper plant half-eaten by a cat to grace their home temporarily and give it that lived-in look? How about a shelf of do-gooder and idealistic books that will make you seem intellectual? Say, need two well-mannered and drug-free teenagers that wash their own dishes and actually pick up their rooms? Okay just kidding.
Foreign policy should not end like this... Transfer of remains of diplomats killed in Benghazi. Photo by state.gov DipNote.
State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters at the news briefing September 14 that until an FBI investigation was complete, no more comments would be made on the events in Benghazi, Libya where our ambassador and three Embassy staff people were killed:
I am going to frustrate all of you infinitely by telling you that now that we have an open FBI investigation on the death of these four Americans, we are not going to be in a position to talk at all about what the U.S. Government may or may not be learning about how any of this happened – not who they were, not how they happened, not what happened to Ambassador Stevens, not any of it – until the Justice Department is ready to talk about the investigation that it’s got. So I’m going to send you to the FBI on any of those kinds of questions, and they’re probably not going to talk to you about them while the investigation is open.
When a reporter asked, "Are you saying now that if there is something wrong with what was given out as correct information, it’s not going to be corrected because of the investigation...?" -- Nuland responded, ""I will make a personal pledge to you that if I become aware that information we gave that first night is radically wrong in a way that you deserve to know, I will do my best to get that information to you. But I have to respect the fact that this is now a crime scene."
Having closed of journalistic inquiry -- although of course some bloggers will continue to ask questions -- the Administration is now filling the gap with a key version of the story that may not be true: that the attacks were spontaneous, and not organized.
Today, Amb. Susan Rice said definitively -- before the FBI investigation was completed -- that the attacks were not premeditated. She then elaborated to the extent that we come back to... finding it was premeditated -- just by different people:
"We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to - or to the consulate, rather, to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo," Rice said. "And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons… And it then evolved from there."
As Jake Tapper of ABC reports reports, this is in direct contradiction to what Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf is saying: "It was planned, definitely, it was planned by foreigners, by people who entered the country a few months ago, and they were planning this criminal act since their arrival," told CBS News.
I'm hardly persuaded by this claim because the battle against Qaddafi was long and hard and his supporters could remain. Qaddafi was reported to cooperate with Al Qaeda and recruit suicide bombers for Iraq and that connection could still be in place. Of course, the rebels have always rejected the idea that Al Qaeda was behind anything in Libya, because it was discredited their authentic uprising, but there's no need for us to accept these narratives as all-encompassing truths. Interestingly, Firedoglake took Malinowski's claim about the Libyan government's distractive claims to indicate the attack was pre-planned -- now that this notion is being spun by the Obama Administration, will FDL change its line, too?
In fact, it's a deadly miscalculation to believe that there were only pure democrats fighting for freedom, they won, and now there are no more forces lurking around to undo it, whether fellow rebels with a beef, Qaddafi supporters, Al Qaeda agents or otherwise. There are forces that have killed our diplomats! We need to keep an open mind on examining this situation and not adopt the arrogant scorn of the Beltway on analyzing these events.
I can see why the Administration has immediately become wedded to the "spontaneity" idea -- because if were a planned attack, then that would mean they might have done more to prevent it. A lot of focus has gone on the lightly-guarded US compound without any US marines, but Nuland is right that for a consulate outside the capital, this might have been "normal" enough, although the sense that it was a "rebel-held" capital might have added to the false sense of a lack of threat.
Amb. Rice, in articulating the line as it has likely come in cables, is conceding that behind the spontanteous outbursts were those who "hijacked" what is implied as an angry but non-violent or at least non-lethal - demonstration. But hijacking takes planning...
And one indication we have about something being very wrong in this situation comes, from all places, the game chat of Sean Smith in the hours before his death. As every news article and obiturary has noted, Sean was an avid player of EVE Online. EVE is an intricate game of strategy and deceit whose developer once said with a twinkle in his eye at a conference I attended at New York Law School on virtual worlds and games, "We make fraud fun."
EVE Online is intensively demanding and difficult and a notorious time-suck and even cult. And interestingly, it's the only online game or world where a players' council that interacts in a form of democracy with the game developers has actually worked successfully. Sean Smith, known as "Vile Rat" in the game and also playing the role of a diplomat for his Goonswarm alliance, was on that council. He also attended the Fanfest or gamers' convention for EVE -- that shows he was even more heavily involved in this intensive community than the typically obsessed player.
My first question -- one asked only by a few other people on various forums, and always only by women -- is why Sean Smith was playing EVE online or at least chatting to EVE buddies at work -- even if not during work hours -- and chatting about security matters.
You cannot possibly know who is in those games as the avatars are all anonymous. And speaking of Anonymous, many of them got their start on the Something Awful forums where Sean was a moderator.
People are loathe to ask these questions in the shock of the news of our fallen heroes, and I totally understand that, but it is a question that inspectors have to ask. The FBI must get his game chat transcripts from EVE or from Jabber or Skype as they are matters of national security.
What stood out chillingly for me are the last words of Sean on September 11, 2012 as recorded by his EVE buddy The Mittani, which he and his fellow EVE mates seem only to evaluate on the level of a marker for being in a dangerous situation:
(12:54:09 PM) vile_rat: assuming we don't die tonight. We saw one of our 'police' that guard the compound taking pictures
But what this line tells us, for anyone familiar with embassies and consulates abroad, is that Sean Smith did not feel as if he could trust the Libyans guarding him. He used the word "police" in scare quotes. He apparently didn't believe they were acting like real police. That could mean they were incompetent, or that he couldn't be sure they were on the right side -- and I think probably the latter.
And that's because in the next phrase, he said they were taking pictures. Why were people guarding a compound stopping and taking pictures of that compound -- oh, like Iranian spies caught taking pictures of the Midtown Tunnel or something?
Could it be because they were helping those who were later coming to attack the compound in a planned attack by showing them the layout of buildings? Could this seemingly simple game chat from Vile Rat with his game buddy contain a clue of a planned attack.
Are those Libyan guards being interrogated and are any of them under arrest?
Of course, they could have been taking pictures like tourists or trying out their new Instagram apps. But it's more likely they were taking them for a purpose -- a purpose that stood out for Sean and made him comment -- and it was part of the uneasy signals from his environment that made Sean Smith say "assuming we don't die tonight."
The way the news stories went, it seemed as if he typed that line in chat, then typed "FUCK GUNFIRE" in the next line and was never heard from again.
I got the idea that all these chat lines came later at night, right before the attack -- at 9:30 pm or 10:00 pm. But the game chat is time-stamped 12:54:09 PM. Is that the time-stamp of a game player located in the US? Or Iceland? Tripoli is two hours ahead of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, where EVE online's company is located. Games are often set to the time of their physical developers' locations. That means when it is 12:54 pm in Reykjavik, it is 2:54 pm in Tripoli, or about 7 hours before the 10 pm attack. Game time could be irrelevant here, however, if the two men were only chatting on Jabber, a chat program for game fans to use outside the game itself.
He was on jabber when it happened, that’s the most fucked up thing. In Baghdad the same kind of thing happened - incoming sirens, he’d vanish, we’d freak out and he’d come back ok after a bit. This time he said ‘FUCK’ and ‘GUNFIRE’ and then disconnected and never returned.
When?
It seems likely that if Sean heard gunfire, it must have been right at the moment of the attack? Or was there any gunfire earlier in the day?
@j_smedley I'm afraid that when we find out the details of what happened we will become blind with rage. How many guards did they have?
Indeed.
So Sean could have been chatting on his lunch hour or after hours late in the evening - and not necessarily intensively playing the game that in fact he had somewhat withdrawn from, as he stepped down from the players' council in EVE's star chambers. He could have Jabber tabbed out in one window while he multi-tasked.
The question is why, if he saw the Libyan guards acting strangely, as information officer, he didn't alert the department of security, or even send a cable to Washington. But an information officer's duties even in this war setting, and even as a former military man, would not necessarily include reporting on the scene and its worrisome factors, when the job duties were more about making statements of US policy and news of the post's activities.
It sounds like a fantastic science fiction novel, doesn't it? A third-rate hate video gets uploaded and has help going "viral" and gets rebroadcast on powerful and influential Egyptian TV, and it ends in the death of a gamer who is a virtual diplomat in a world of shifting and treacherous alliances in a grim outer space. Nobody wants to blame the Internet for anything. They could this time.
It's clear that Sean Smith was inured to danger, and his game buddies even bragged about how he told them of his dangerous assignments, which added to his allure -- it's typical in these anonymous virtual scenes that people use the coin of real life or "RL" as it is known to trump game-acquired skills and amplify them. Through the acceleration and amplification of virtuality, somebody who is an information officer can become Kissinger or Brahimi.
Sean was a hero for accepting this dangerous assignment and walking into harm's way to help both his country and the Libyan people. He was a military man skilled in assessing situations. So we need to take his seasoned instincts seriously, and ask why Sean wrote negatively of those Libyan police, and why and what else he saw. But we also have to ask why he discussed this so casually with a game buddy, and why he reported it in chat or in a game, but not to the security in his compound.
Of course, I'll be the first to say this is a rather obscure line of inquiry, when you also have American and Libyan eyewitnesses in real life, ballistics reports, fire department and police reports, and everything else that the FBI is now looking at.
But I'm not liking the left's effort to chill any debate around this national tragedy that occurred, truly as if planned, on September 11, exploiting the good will and active participation of dedicated foreign service officers, Amb. Chris Stevens and his staff.
As if they participate in some heavily ritualistic religion that forbids ever speaking of the dead or criticizing national leaders when deaths have occurred abroad, Obama administration officials and their avid supporters in the press and blogosphere have been scolding Romney and any others raising questions as if they've committed, well, blasphemy.
Nonsense. When Americans die abroad in this brutal and startling away right in their supposedly untouchable consulate, truly we need to ask questions, and the president and his foreign policy record aren't off limits. When statements like the US Embassy made in Cairo are coming out to supposedly "manage" the situation, and don't work and a conflagration occurs, indeed we do get to ask about the entire Middle Eastern policy of Obama and how he has handled the Arab Spring -- which has, in fact, since 2009 in the Cairo speech, but a question of accentuating guilt, exhibiting deference to unpredictable forces, and scant on human rights universals.
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