(photo from Ghosts of Alexander)

Actually, all places are complex. It’s hard to understand what this means if you’ve only spent time in your own culture, especially if it’s a reasonbly functional first-world democracy. The developing world in particular can be phenomally fluid and mystifying, and one of the feelings I associate most intensely with travel there is the sense that not all is as it seems, that I can’t quite grasp the true motivations and power relations of the people around me. In my more paranoic moments I even suspect that my interactions are, to some extent, stage-managed by the locals so as to give me a particular impression.

If a recent article by a sociologist studying Afghanistan is any indication, I was right about all of this: the local socio-political scene is very complex, and it is deliberately hidden from “outsiders” of various types. The implications are dire for any sort of foreigner who wants to try to come in and “help.”

To be completely honest, you would have to be an anthropologist who spent many months in a village to understand well just that one community. The situation will be determined by local conditions. It really seems to be a case by case scenario.

So how to interact with these local authority figures and power/survival structures? Are NGO workers and soldiers to act as an agent of the central government, extending its authority to a more local level? Or are they to give more weight to the needs of locals? Or of local authority figures? And is there a way to conduct oneself that can be acceptable to both the central government, local communities and local authority figures? And how does one reconcile those with the goals and needs of the foreign military and international aid community? How do you avoid pushing the losers of local power struggles onto the insurgents’ side?

The piece raises far more questions than answers, so it won’t be appealing to, say, those whe believe that all true solutions are basically simple. Nonetheless, it beautifully captures the sense of labrynthine complexity I’ve felt so many times on the ground — exactly the sort of complexity that inevitably screws up the planning scenarios of international agencies of any sort.

The full article is highly recommended. It even contains actual survey data on local Afghani power structures, not merely anecdote and speculation!

The result is a terrorist attack that was specifically enabled by policies designed to prevent terrorist attacks.

I think this scenario re-illustrates several things:

1. Security Theatre is not only ineffective, it is dangerous. As Bruce Shneier has so eloquently discussed, if you’re going to go through the trouble of confiscating something, it’s imperative to treat it as actually suspicious.
2. Continually changing the rules in response to specific, previous threats is mostly silly. Security needs to be forward-looking, not reactive.
3. We’re losing our rights for this?

Fortunately, there are reports that the TSA (and international equivalents) will relax the liquid ban in 2009.

Wikileaks is often in the news, but for the wrong reasons. The web site provides a highly public outlet for “classified, censored, or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic, or ethical significance.” It is designed to be a journalistic tool for whistle-blowers and citizens of oppressive government and corporate regimes, a place of first and last resort for sensitive information from sources who need protection. It is a great irony, then, that an organization which specializes in censored information only makes the news when somebody violently objects.

I first stumbled upon Wikileaks about a year ago and have been watching it closely ever since. Despite its mission of openness, the site has a certain mystery about it: nowhere on the site are the principals publicly named. I was delighted, then, to attend a talk by two of the Wikileaks founders at the 25th Annual Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. The 50-minute presentation was titled Wikileaks vs. The World, or “a talk about some conclusions observing Wikileaks.”

You may have heard about some of the things we’ve done in the media, but what you hear about tends to be what is frequently of greatest salacious interest to the Western media and to people in general. That doesn’t tend to be our everyday work.

A look at the front page of Wikileaks today shows all sorts of topics: The un-redacted report of Abu Grhiab whistleblower Samuel Provence. The German Foreign Secret Service report on Kosovo, 2005. Alperin vs. Vatican Bank, 2008 concerning Nazi assets allegedly laundered in 1946. A Scientology Department of Special Affairs lecture. Documentation showing that Swiss Bank Julius Baer put USD $300 million through the Cayman Islands in 1999. “The secret internet censorship list of Thailand’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT).”

Wikileaks posts anything submitted to it complete and unaltered; that is the point. In this policy they represent the purest possible interpretation of the ideals of transparency and freedom of speech. Usually, the documents they post are applauded or at least ignored, but sometimes they draw the ire of those who feel that there is a case for certain secrets. A few weeks ago Wikileaks posted a list of Danish web-sites ostensibly censored for child-pornography; this summer they released a document describing the technical details of the Warlock signal jammers used by American forces in Iraq. They defend both choices, and indeed all of their leaks, with the same argument:

Who’s to judge the relevance, the political relevance? if it’s us who is to judge the relevance, then are we robust enough to judge this for all of society? … This is something for the public to do, and the political groups in the public, and not us.

Fighting censorship is what they’re all about. They believe deeply in the “fourth estate,” the role of the press and public cognizance as a check against tyranny. Like Wikipedia, they place great trust in the intelligence and enthusiasm of the public at large, who are asked to vet, analyze, and publicize the anonymously submitted documents. This ultimately represents a different model of society, an almost ridiculously open and transparent society. I did not hear the Wikileaks speakers ever concede that secrecy sometimes has its purposes, that there are legitimate reasons for knowledge to be hidden; instead, they repeatedly articulated the dangers of censorship.

The question is not what we need to be told. The question is what we need not to be told and who decides. Secret censorship systems are unaccountable and dangerous.

But again we are distracted. The possible mistakes and harm of Wikileaks cannot be judged in a vacuum, but only against the overall activities of the project. And sadly, sometimes it is the successes that draw the least attention.

There are a lot of things we do routinely that are very serious, but still get little attention. For example we have exposed many, many political assassinations. We released only three months ago a very important report on Kenya documenting 500 extra-judicial assassinations that had occurred in the past 18 months. There was some pickup in the Kenyan press, but the rest of the world, nothing. So getting leaked documents out is extremely important, but it’s not the only thing. Sometimes there is no interest group to care to spread the information.

The speakers urged the audience to get involved: to read, to analyze, to disclose. Our collective reality is only information, they said. “Everyone here is what he knows.” Every decision we make about what to say to someone else or what to write on our blogs defines the future world we live in, and defines what actually happened. It is not an absolute world; it is malleable. And, they claim, it is being changed in all sorts of ways with or without our knowledge or consent. Contrary to popular belief, “no medium is easier to censor than the internet.”

There is a complete eradication of certain parts of history going on. This is much easier than anyone in this crowd here most likely will think. We can see that censorship is being implemented systematically and globally. … George Orwell said that ‘he who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future,’ and this is never more true than with electronic archives. We have seen many, many examples of major newspapers pull material from the archives permanently … For example, this year there were seven stories removed from The Guardian, The Telegraph, and the New Statesman, in response to fear over legal costs. If you go to the URLs for those stories, you won’t see that this story has been removed by legal action, you will see ‘not found’, and if you search the index you will see ‘not found’. Those stories not only have ceased to exist, they have ceased to have ever existed. So the centralization that is occurring in archive repositories means that censorship is very easy.

Speaking to an audience of hundreds of hackers, researchers, anarchists and artists at the CCC in Berlin, they reminded everyone that Wikileaks is real. At the CCC I learned about the flaws in proposed cryptographic technologies for electronic voting; I even learned that SSL itself has been compromised. But technology is not people.  And this, perhaps, is the key point of the entire lecture, and the entire project:

All these documents are real. It is hard fact that is documented. And all these documents reflect some facets of something that is happening at some point somewhere in the world. This is reality. … These documents pertain to violence that is caused by truth being told, by documents surfacing to the society. So It is important to understand that is not a hypothetical construct, some project that is dealing with something very obscure. We are actually dealing with information that reflects a very important facet of lives all over the world, and that has an influence on the quality, the freedom, and all other aspects of lives, living beings that we all need to have compassion for, and care for. This is very important in the mission that we try to bring across.

The streaming video of the complete talk has been archived in WMV format (859MB) here and here, and in OGG video format (445MB) here and here.

Geeks line the hallways, young men in black t-shirts each with a laptop. And they’re always young men. There are no girls here. There are a dozen open wifi networks and I wouldn’t trust any of them. There are tangles of cables. There are anarchists. There are flying robots and broken flying robots being soldered in public.

The air is thick with something, but I don’t know what.

It’s not just tech but politics, a worldview. One of the only non-black t-shirts says “stop software patents.” The government is the enemy; this is not an argument, just an assumption. “Managers and politicians have discovered technology too,” reads the summary of one talk, “but they have one serious disability: they aren’t geeks and thus by definition not capable of using it in a useful, effective way.”

Some of the best computer security researchers in the world are here. “Computer security researchers.” Hackers. We’re just showing where the problems lie, they say. There’s a talk about running your own GSM base station. It’s neat. “This part of the encryption system, no one has broken yet,” says the presenter. “Unfortunately.”

All software should be free and open. The government needs to be maximally transparent. All standards should be open, because security through obscurity is beyond laughable. Intellectual property is theft. A poster on the wall says “Meet Wall-E on ftp” and gives an address where the blu-ray rip can be downloaded. There are 780 kb/s of bandwidth per person at this conference center.

A man gets on the stage of the main room for the 6:00pm session, titled “we got hacked by (rhymes with ‘unease’) and all we got was a t-shirt.” He announces that the presenters have been contacted by the Secret Service and asked not to disclose anything that is not already public. They couldn’t change their slides in time and so, says the man, “this talk has been cancelled by the United States Government.” The rhyme is “Chinese.”

There are some heavy hitters here. There are some big stories. There are secrets. Most of the boys here harbour adolescent fantasies that the government, some government, is after them — and only their foolproof use of open-source anonymity and encryption technology can prevent the awful abuse of power. Others, just a few, actually are in trouble with the government or some nameless corporate power or other. There are lawyers here. There are also quacks.

I’m tempted to give a talk called “computer security without anarchist politics.”

But this sprit, this politics — this is what made technology in the first place. This is the basic mucking around with microprocessors that led to the personal computer. This is the next generation of ace software engineers, security experts, technology laywers. These kids building robots that balance on their heads and playing with old mechanical crossbar switches — they make such a great sound when the dial of the old rotary telephone turns! — some of them won’t be able to help changing the world. That’s the part of this myth that isn’t myth: technology is powerful. And fun. And it needs to be freed from the hordes of black-shirted boys tapping on tiny laptops, like me.

Do you edit your subject of expertise, or the one you wish you were an expert on? Is Wikipedia so shallow it makes you cringe, or so technical that only experts can read it? Is editing an impulse for you, that fanboy urge to correct, or do you plan your essays? Do you learn by editing? Do you know what you’d like to learn?

Who is writing our collective present? Are they white and middle-class like me, geeks with too much education and even more bandwidth? Are they high-school kids in small towns with no one else to feed their minds? Are there any women on the internet? When will Wikipedia be on StuffWhitePeopleLike? What does the Arabic version talk about? Will British or American spellings prevail?

Wikipedia is a tool of the conservatives; wikipedia has a liberal bias. Food irradiation is perfectly safe, and you’re violating NPOV. Who made you an administrator, anyway? So, revert revert revert! Biodynamics is not psuedo-science, it’s anthroposophy. Why can’t the entry for The Beatles just explain that they were way better than Elvis?

If you wrote your own book, what would it be on? Will Google Books ever let us read every page? Will our parents ever be comfortable with instant messaging? Do you believe that touch is more important than words? Do we all need to get out more?

Who was that one person in your life who was once patient enough to give you their best answer, over and over, to your plaintive “why?”

Wikipedia will save the world. Information is tolerance. When the internet succeeds and all humanity finally has egalitarian access to all information everywhere, a new era of enlightenment will dawn.

Oh really?

We’ll just weigh all available evidence and come to reasonable conclusions about how the world should be, right? Or, I’ve got it this time: the real problem is that we all grew up in isolation. We never met a Muslim until we were seventeen, we never saw a picture of the whale that’s going extinct five thousand miles from our home. The internet will fix this. When we can get the true numbers on starving African children with a flick of the wrist, we will suddenly care. On the day that Israelis and Palestinians begin to IM each other about the new coolness on YouTube, there will be peace.

Humans do not seem to be naturally talented at bridging disagreements. Suppose you put a bunch of people with diverse opinions into a room. They discuss. When they walk out, instead of converging towards some sort of moderate position, the individuals often come out with more extreme views. This is called group polarization. Or, take someone who already believes in capital punishment and show them supporting evidence. Their conviction strengthens. Fair enough. Show them contradictory evidence. Their conviction still strengthens. What the fuck?

We are not built for reaching consensus, and probably a lot of what we hold dear is arbitrary anyway, which is to say that no principle of nature will ever really referee our disagreements over what is right. What we are built for is unclear, but pattern recognition seems to be important — we more readily see the patterns we’ve already recognized, which makes us much more likely to see evidence that already supports our beliefs. We  also respond peer pressure, because we have to live with the people that we have to live with. And we like to divide us from them at all scales, maybe so that we can hog all the good bits for “us”, but maybe just because it’s more fun to believe we’re better. Those guys are dweebs.

This is why I believe that mere communication — up to and including the global awesomeness of the internet — is not enough. Talking about it, getting everyone to the table, the deliberation of deliberative democracy — well, when we run the experiments, good discussions aren’t enough. They do seem to get everyone thinking about things in the same underlying framework, but usually still disagreeing. That is, talking about it lets us agree on the terms, such “left” versus “right” in Western politics or even “Muslim versus West” in global politics, but it doesn’t often produce a consensus on what the world should look like.

It is interesting to me that there are people whose entire life is brokering agreements: moderators, diplomats, those who work in conflict resolution of all kinds. It makes me wonder how successful they are, and what they know that I don’t. Turns out you can get an entire degree on this subject, for example. (Or at least read a book?) Anyway, I think this is probably an important thing to know. The internet is so new and so exciting, it’s easy to forget that we don’t actually know how to use it.

When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

FCC Chairman Newton Minow gave this speech in 1961, decrying the state of the medium that many had hoped would bring new light to humanity. What is to say that the Internet will not sink into the same mediocrity?

There are differences, of course. The internet is (currently) very much an active, two-way medium; the internet is (currently) a very democratic place, where anyone can espouse their worldview to the whole world for only the effort of typing. And the internet is (currently) far too large and diverse to be effectively controlled by any particular corporate or goverment interest.

But I have a morbid interest in dystopia; and already I see signs that not everyone realizes what freedoms we could lose. Like bad science fiction, here are a few scenarios where the internet fails to live up to its almost obscene promise, where it becomes just another “vast wasteland.”

The Telcos Tell us What To Watch

YouTube sucks. The bandwidth is so damn low; they’re too cheap to pay for proper 3D transmission. I’d rather watch the big ‘V’ — you know, the ViABNBCNNFox channel. I guess they get a volume discount on bandwidth. Good thing that Net Neutrality legislation didn’t pass or it would be even more expensive for them.

Useful Information Ends up Costing Money

There used to be a free encyclopedia, but now it’s subscription only. So is the Library of Congress Catalog, now that it’s been privatized. Of course, online academic and scientific journals have always been restricted; there was a brief flash of interest in open-access Journals in the 2000s, but no one really seemed to care, so the idea died. It’s fine though, since everyone can still read these things; it just takes a few bucks. Everyone can read them in this country anyway. There are subsidies in other places for citizen access. I think.

Intellectual Property Law Serves Satan

No, you can’t show those Citibank documents to your friends — they’re all protected by copyright and trade secret law in perpetuity. Of course it’s legal; intellectual property laws serve the public good by creating incentives for content creation. Why, without copyright law, why, our information-scape would be severely impoverished! Incidentally, this is also why Wikileaks was shut down.

We Forget the Developing World, Again

BBC World News 12 July 2025:

Internet Still not Useful in Africa

A new study released today by UNDP Africa showed that despite a decade of near-uibiqutous access to the internet, those living in African nations are still ten times less likely than their European or Asian peers to consult the web for news, information, or services. “The problem is media formats,” explained the study’s author. “Africans access the web on their phones through the existing 5G mobile networks. The screens are very small, so most web pages don’t view well. Also, most of the major news sources and reference works are poorly represented in native African languages.”

Search Monopoly Goes Bad
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 never happened. If they did exist, where is the record? There’s nothing in the national archives in Bejing, and you can’t find it on Google. What do you mean, check another search engine? Hey look: it says here we’ve now at war with Eurasia!

The Mainstream Wins

Yeah, of course I’m online. Er, I really just use MySpace and Facebook. There are other big sites out there I guess, but I’ve never heard too much about them. I mean they never have any games or whatever.

We Had Stars in Our Eyes

We thought that everyone having free access to the world’s information was enough. We were so dazzled by our new collective intelligence, we never thought of what else might be important. And that is the subject of my next article.

]]> http://jonathanstray.com/how-the-internet-can-fail/feed http://jonathanstray.com/how-to-end-poverty http://jonathanstray.com/how-to-end-poverty#comments Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:53:31 +0000 admin http://jonathanstray.com/?p=153 It just occurred to me that it’s worth Googling this phrase.

The fact that this five-second act has a reasonable chance of turning up a representation of the most carefully argued opinions of large cross section of (admittedly English-speaking) humanity, including quite possibly the opinions of the people who might actually understand the problem best — I find that quite a testament to the progress of, you know, civilization. And that capability is only about a decade old.

Who says that the olden days were better?

Next up, an article about how the internet might still drastically fail to achieve its potential.

Okay, but how did I end up on this side and not that side?

I went through this in Russia last year, when I was hosted in Moscow by a global warming skeptic; apparently it’s politically popular there to deny global warming, which sounds like a slight to Russia except when you remember that it’s politically popular here, too. But anyway, I was plunged headfirst into the debate with an ambitious little snot of a web-startup wannabe millionaire (”You should see our new offices! The Mafia used to operate out of there! They still visit someimes.”) Running through the arguments in great detail (as I previously reported here) I was forced to ask the very pertinent question, why do I believe that global warming is real, and man-made, and a serious problem?

The quick answer is that I believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, but that’s also just ink on paper. Why do I trust them?

It has to do with process. To begin with, I know what the IPCC process actually is. They have devoted almost as much dead tree to how they reached their conclusions as to the conclusions themselves. In short, they collected something like 600 climate scientists from 40 countries, locked them in a library with a complete and current set of all relevant academic and scientific publications, and threw raw meat at them through the bars until they reached consensus. Actually, that’s not quite how it happened. Some of them were vegetarians.

The 2007 Fourth Assessment Report was then further reviewed by another 600-odd people, corrected, argued over, politicized, and finally published. Although there is no way to guarantee against bias in the author and reviewer selection process, at least a very diverse range of viewpoints could be expected to be represented, and at least the people involved have some reason to know what they’re talking about, having spent significant chunks of their lives asking questions about the ecosystem. This is as global and as sincere an effort to answer a question as humanity has ever seen, and it was all meticulously open and transparent.

There is a moral here.

One of the great things that thorough education teaches you — any education — is just how deep the rabbit hole of knowledge goes. It’s a smart person who realizes how big and complex and subtle any real discipline is; and I am absolutely at a loss to answer the tricky questions of someone else’s field, be they about global warming, the effectiveness of acupuncture, or whether cutting taxes will really help with unemployment (or not.) The only truly universal approach, our only hope for living in a world too big for reason, is to learn to evaluate how any given body of knowledge decides what is true and what is not true. In painful depth and detail.

The method, philosophy, and process of coming to believe: that is everything. I can’t say I even understand this process in myself, let alone an entire civilization, but I can say with conviction that it’s my favorite field of study.

Unfortunately, it’s also a fake. The video is totally awesome, to use the technical term, but a large part of its awesomeness derives from the fact that some ordinary person not only came up with this completely implausible idea, but executed it brilliantly for no discernible reason. That makes it art, if only because we  don’t have many other good names for this type of behavior. One of the millions of untrained, unlicensed plebes rose up and did something amazing, and it’s inspiring precisely because it makes us think that we just might be able to do it ourselves. It’s our art.

Except that “we” didn’t do it. The video was produced by creative agency Droga5, according to the credits on this page, which also lists the CG animators. Doubly fake. Not only was this piece created as a viral marketing ploy for Guitar Hero, but the events in the video never actually happened.

“Authentic” is very hard to define. It’s easy to give flip answers like “love, not money,” but plenty of good art has been created to pay the rent. For an internet example, take the brilliant “OK Go on Treadmills” video. Sure, they did it to sell their album, but somehow it feels very “real”. I also like to imagine the jazz and blues musicians of old New Orleans, playing genius riffs in the clubs every night. They were great artists, but they were working artists. Conversely, real culture can be executed as fake. For some reason the whole world loves an Irish pub, and you find them in every civilized country. But while any idiot can throw up dark wood paneling and serve Guinness, it’s not hard to tell when you’re being scammed for the tourist dollar. The trouble is, I’m often very hard pressed to say precisely what it is that makes one Irish pub phony and another authentic. Is Bike Hero no longer art now that we know who paid for it?

However, I don’t like being lied to. Undercover marketing is designed to make us believe that it’s not marketing at all, and that makes it the eptiome of inauthenticity. For this reason I have to give Bike Hero two thumbs down.