The Breakthrough Dialog is always one of the highlights of my year, a chance to be immersed in fascinating ideas and grand plans, meet interesting people, and catch up with old friends.  The most recent Dialog was no exception.  The theme this year was “the Good Anthropocene”, an exploration of the ideas proposed in their recent Ecomodernist Manifesto.  No stranger to controversy, Michael and Ted invited several staunch critics of the manifesto to speak, along with a solid core of presentations of concrete actions that are being taken in a positive direction. From the distance of a few days, I'd like to offer my personal take on the event and ideas.

The Anthropocene is a term popularized in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, referring to this geological epoch as “the age of man.” The core of the idea is that humanity as a species has become a major factor in several large scale earth systems: atmospheric carbon, the nitrogen cycle, land use patterns, extinctions of species, and that our actions are significant enough to register on a planetary scale. There are disagreements about the best definition of the Anthropocene and its start date, along with a solid chunk of people who regard the whole idea as dangerous nonsense, but I think the Anthropocene serves as useful flag to rally under.  The conventional wisdom in the ecological community is that the Anthropocene is a disaster, a funeral dirge for rapidly disappearing nature, and then the deserving end of humanity as a species.  To those who coined the term, the idea of a “Good Anthropocene” is contradictory nonsense.  And yet, the dialog presents a clear vision.

Since the beginning, the core principles of the Breakthrough Institute have been that ecology doesn’t need to be depressing, that there is space for positive action, and that innovation, technology, and reasonable profit will be the keys to the future. The Ecomodernist Manifesto sketches out a broad vision of how this might happen: deployment of new energy infrastructure, with a key role for next-generation nuclear, to decarbonize industrial economies and literally empower the 3 billion people in the developing world, intensification of land use near cities to feed and house everybody with an awareness of impacts on earth systems and long-term sustainability, and the return of marginal lands to nature through rewilding programs. 

Twitter has preserved a decent chunk of the highlights under #GoodAnthropocene, but I’d like to present my own more considered reflections.  The program opened with Mark Lynas introducing ecomodernism much as I have above, and Clive Hamilton making the fascinating counter-argument that the idea is nothing more than secular theodicy; an apologia for the beneficence of God in a world that clearly contains  great evil and suffering, and that it leads to both arrogance on the part of people who believe than can control complex and tightly coupled Earth systems, when their tools are at best nudges, and that it would lead to quietism on the part of those suffering most.

The robust criticism continued the next morning, with Bruno Latour proposing that ecomodernism was neither particularly ecological nor modern, but might represent a way beyond the fundamental modern illusion of a divide between nature and culture. Steve Fuller asked if there is any reason why the developing world would accept the very Bay Area “middle youth” that is a major stylistic component of the Ecomodern Manifesto.  Jenny Price called for more historical and humanistic sensitivity to when things leave nature, say oil pumped from the ground which presumably crosses a threshold somewhere between geology and refinery, and what this means for rewilding. Compressing the ideas of great thinkers into a sentence necessarily entails some damage, but I hope this captures the essence of the diversity of views at the Dialog.

The policy and activism presentations were equally diverse.  Some of my favorites included Joyashree Roy looking at air conditioning in Calcutta as the only way to mitigate many heat related illness. The success of Kruger National Park in South Africa as the world’s largest wildlife refuge, and an attempt to create a similarly –scaled wild tiger habitat in India. And finally the narrative ecology of Elena Bennett, who studies Quebecois communities planning for changing agricultural patterns, suburbanization, and a proposed wilderness corridor linking the Adirondack and Laurentian mountains, which revealed that the relative location and access of protected areas may matter more for their success than the their simple area.

Perhaps the most fascinating of the conference was my breakout panel, Anthropocene Opportunities, which opened with the provocative question, “We know that all animal species in a finite habitat expand until they reach the limits of their resources, and the recoil hard. What makes humanity different from all other animals, and how might that let us make a good Anthropocene?” The discussion was both deeply freewheeling and deeply informed. Humans are super-cooperators, capable of working in large groups for good or ill. Moreso than any other animal, we have the ability to plan, foresee years and generations ahead, to tell stories and weave facts into coherent wholes.  Opportunity exists in better ways of muddling forward, and in distributed action. One scenario might see major cities coordinating their climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, extending their political and economic networks out in a few hundred miles radius to balance high intensity human habitation with wild areas.  (I welcome more answers to this question in the comments).

The reason why the Breakthrough Dialog, the Good Anthropocene, and the Ecomodern Manifesto matter, is that climate change and the future of our civilization are as big as problems get, and the Good Anthropocene provides a way forward that includes a diversity of viewpoints and actions.  There are many things that a reasonable person could disagree with: the Breakthrough Institute’s embrace of nuclear is an enduring sore spot with the rest of the Green movement; I’m not sure that intensified land use is compatible with a smaller footprint on vulnerable earth systems, even with better ecological sciences.  But think of the alternatives.  Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si, praises human creativity, but castigates a technocratic worldview based on dominance and exploitation and calls for a spiritual reawakening as its central point.  I served as facilitator for the Worldwide Views on Climate and Energy forum as a lead-in to COP21, and the UNFCCC seems to know the weakness of its position from the materials presented and questions asked. Any agreement must arrive by consensus of the 192 countries of the international community, and be assented to by a democratic majority of their citizens. Real change, with deep cuts in carbon emissions and international wealth transfers for mitigation and adaptation, will require deals and enforcement power that the even the UNFCCC doesn’t have. Do these ideas seem realistic?

By comparison, in the words of my good friend and credible source Jesse Jenkins, “No one here believes that embracing technology means rejecting politics, or that ecomodernism is passive. All of us are asking ‘What is to be done?’” Ecomodernism and the Good Anthropocene is an open framework into which many smaller ideas and actions can fit, without radical alterations in human nature or a single point of technopolitical passage.  Stories that recognize that humans and nature are inseparable, that human rights and the political process and economic growth should flourish, and that there are things that can be done to ensure the Anthropocene is a good one.  No one sane denies that there is pain ahead.  Even if we somehow shut off industrial civilization tomorrow, we are already in the midst of human-caused sixth mass extinction, and the Maldives will go underwater. The point is not to ignore the pain, but to treat it as a birth rather than a death, to provide a positive vision for humanity and wilderness to coexist and coevolve through deep time.

One of the perennial guests at the Breakthrough Dialog is Stewart Brand, of the Long Now Foundation, and the Blue Marble Photo, and the Whole Earth Catalog, and basically everything interesting or cool since 1965.  His current project is de-extincting the Wooly Mammoth. For a while, I’ve thought this was neat, but basically distraction. Now I get it. Wiping out the mammoth was the first major ecological crime of our species; bringing it back would not erase all that we’ve done, all that we do when we flip a switch or press a gas pedal because, but it would mark a turning point. Symbols and stories matter, along with plans and technology. I agree with Clive Hamilton that the Good Anthropocene is a secular theodicy, but that might be just what we need, given how our historical traditions have melted away to air under the harsh lights of technological change and scientific knowledge.

Human beings have to believe in something. I choose to believe that we can be good.

There are some things that are beyond the ken of man. Quilt patterns, for example.  Leslie had been looking at quilts for at least a half hour, trying to match them to her collection of throw pillows and asking Dave what he thought. Dave thought the quilts all looked like Grandma’s house and that the throw pillows were hard and scratchy. He wanted to curl up in a pile of fleece blankets, but Leslie said that he looked like a hobo in his blanket fort, and they needed something nice on the bed for when company came over.

Something caught David’s eye: A perfectly black rectangle, roughly as tall as he was, stood in the center of the store aisle, between shower curtains and espresso makers. Leslie was busy considering the merits of the B. Smith Lexie Quilt. She didn’t notice as Dave approached the monolith. His fingers brushed the surface, and there was a sensation of distance and speed.

Dave was in a room, perfectly square. One wall was lined with thousands of bottles, each one filled with a gel of a different color. Another row of shelves held cooking utensils of indescribable geometry. Home storage solutions locked together in a fractal pattern of perfect organization. The monolith loomed above him, taller now. “Where am I?” He asked.

The answer bubbled up from the depths of his mind, as if he had always known. 

THIS IS BEYOND

He fell backwards, into the soft embrace and modern elegance of the Ink+Ivy Taylor Reversible Comforter Set. In minutes, he aged, died, was reborn, and found himself back in the prosaic world of BATH, already holding a box. He found Leslie where he had left her, no wiser than before.

“I think we need this simplehuman Triple Wall Mount Pump,” the being that had once been Dave said.

There was so much he could teach her.

The past three months have seen a lot of bytes spilled about GamerGate. What started as a campaign by a bitter ex to ruin the life of game developer Zoe Quinn has grown into a firestorm that is consuming the attentions of the gaming press and has spilled over into the legitimate news. Having followed this for a while, my personal alignment is pretty clear: For the record, GamerGate is a hate group fronted by D-list Conservative con artists that pisses everybody the fuck off (thanks Chris Kluwe). Differences aside, the one thing that all parties appear to agree upon is that this could change everything. This is the future of the culture wars, with the SJW side seeing this as the final militarization of reactionary identity politics and the GG side seeing themselves as the last bastions of free expression against a hegemonic culture of political correctness. 

I don’t deal in culture (I just put my affiliation up there out of a sense of disclosure. You can’t be neutral on a moving flamewar).  I study technology and warfare, and have some ideas about the tactics that have come to the forefront of GameGate, and how they can be countered. In short, this is a counter-insurgency campaign, and we need a way for ordinary Twitter users to protect themselves from harassment.

GamerGate feels like the insurgencies we’ve gone through recently-Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq again-because it seems like it’ll go on forever. Maybe the trolls will get bored tomorrow, or maybe some particularly high profile idiot will get arrested and the rest will scatter (say, whoever got Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at Utah State University cancelled via threats of a massacre). But I’m not expecting any miracles. This has become part of the culture wars, and it’ll just keep popping up with a different set of victims year after year. Forget the bullshit arguments about “ethics in journalism”, discussions of gamer culture and it’s “overness”, or the dueling claims of moral righteousness and corruption. Whatever GamerGate is actually about, the movement’s tactics of harassment, doxxing, and death threats are clearly unacceptable. “My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins,” as the saying goes.

Metaphors, particularly about computers, are slippery things, and while this is not literally a war, a Counter-Insurgency lens draws our attention to three things: First, the terrain, the space in which action, movement, and conflict occurs, and how the terrain helps or hinders each side. In this case, the terrain is primarily Twitter and YouTube, and they by their nature (pseudonymous, personal contacts, weak privacy protections) favor offense over defense.  Second, weapons: John Paul Vann, probably America’s most experience practitioner of asymmetric warfare famously said of the Vietnam War “This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife… The worst is an airplane.” Big shows of power are clumsy and counter-productive. I am strongly opposed to killing in this case, and even non-violently removing the so-called leaders of GamerGate wouldn’t do much in solving the problem. To modify his quote, I would say that “This is a technological war, and it calls for intelligence in algorithms… the worst tool is anything that has to be done by hand” And third, in COIN you have to protect the population to win. This isn’t over until the targets of GamerGate feel safe.

There is hope. Once before, the internet was overrun by offensive speech, and we beat it. Remember the grim days of email pre-2000, when inboxes overflowed with penis enlargement pills, dodgy Nigerian princes, and unsolicited commercial offerings? We beat spam, and it didn’t take a cultural revolution or massive government intervention. As revealed in Finn Brunton’s excellent book Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, these unwanted emails had a distinct style, a machine-readable Bayesian fingerprint that couldn’t be removed from the message without removing the pitch. The same tools can work against the hate speech that is the bread and butter of GamerGate harassment.

The basic element of GamerGate is the harassing tweet or YouTube comment. You do it, you see it, you feel good about, and the target’s background radiation of online harassment gets pushed up a notch. Being security conscious and informing law enforcement can help victims survive major threats, but there’s not much you can do about the noise on Twitter. The noise matters—the noise makes the movement appear bigger and more powerful than it is. It provides an emotional boost for people who are on the fence about doxxing and death threats. And it is frankly terrifying in and of itself.

Jeff Kunzler in what has probably been my favorite article on this whole mess, The Gamification of Terror, describes the tactical overlaps between GamerGate and the EVE Online Goonswarm Corp. Goonswarm was better lead, but the basic methods of using propaganda to  incite masses of people with too much time on their hand to conduct individually minor actions that collectively add up a knock-out punch, are pretty much the same. You make people feel like part of a movement, you ask them to do just one tiny thing, and you show them how what they did matters so they’ll do it again.  To win, to steal momentum from the movement, we need to break this feedback loop.

Trisha Prabhu performed a fascinating and fairly data-filled experiment on cyber-bullying where she showed that even the slight delay of a second confirmation box on bullying messages could reduce the number of messages sent by over 90%.  I’m not sure if the abstract environment of an experiment translates so strongly to the heated world of actual online debates, but the result shows promise.

I’d extend Prabhu’s method by having a Bayesian filter scan for abusive messages. If it detects potential abuse, it asks the sender to reconsider, and if the message is sent, allows the recipient to ignore the message or confirm that it is fact abusive. When the recipient and the filter agree on abuse, the sender gets sanctioned. Repeated sanctions lead to being banned from the service. The result is that people intent on abuse will remove themselves from the debate. This intervention is as mild as possible, requiring persistence in the face of a warning, and the agreement of an evenhanded algorithm and the human target.

Users can force their services to change. No self-respecting email service lacks a spam filter. I’m going to send a condensed version of this post to the powers that be at Facebook, Twitter, and Google, and ask them to seriously consider strong anti-harassment options with a software component in future releases. If Ello can launch itself on hipster authenticity (and deliberate anti-privacy design), why can’t some future social network base itself on not being full of asshole scum?

This is how GamerGate end: When the basic structure of the internet stops making it so very easy to conduct pseudonymous harassment and whips mobs into a frenzy. This ends when we empower targets to defend themselves, fairly, symmetrically, and in a way that reduces rather than amplifies the cyclone of hatred. I don’t want to silence anybody in this debate. If you honestly think gaming should look like it did in 1998, that’s your opinion and you’re welcome to it. And I’d love to hear more honest thoughts about really ethical game journalism and the future of video games. A future dominated by digitally empowered lynch mobs is one that’s bad for everyone-even weev deserves human rights. GamerGaters should welcome a chance to disarm, since historically violent movements tend to lose their struggles, while non-violent ones flourish.

For those of you who might argue “Well, the internet shouldn’t be censored”, that argument is not even wrong. Democracies protect the Right to Free Speech because the government already has so many powers that adding censorship to the list is overkill: traffic law, zoning codes, taxes, confiscation, imprisonment, execution, etc. etc. It is only fair to the people that they have this last bastion. Comparatively, pretty much all you can do with a computer is speech act, whether human or machine readable. To cry “censorship” is to deny the existence of power online. We’re already very comfortable with algorithms ruling our lives, and there are human mods out there, albeit desperately overworked. I can’t even begin to describe the unholy alliance of Big Tech and the NSA, but power and censorship are already entrenched, and authoritarian states can use the Internet to destroy anybody with less than perfect espionage tradecraft.

The fact is: Code is Law; Tech companies are legislative bodies. The question is: “Do we want to live in Sweden or Somalia?” GamerGate is welcome to 8chan, but they shouldn’t be able to take Twitter and YouTube without resistance.

A few weeks ago I attended the Harvard STS Summer School 2014, with Sheila Jasanoff, Ben Hurlbut, and a bunch of other incredible people. I had a wonderful time, learned a lot, and they took a brief video of me being pundit-y.  Watch after the jump.

Political hatred in America has reached a toxic level, from the collateral damage of this current government shutdown to a longer-term breakdown in general trust and rational policy-making, not to mention the literally incalculable consequences of a debt-ceiling induced default. Unfortunately, the people behind this, who Ryan Lizza has deemed the ‘Suicide Caucus’ are well insulated from any backlash: “These eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.”  In short, they feel like they’re doing the right thing, the structure of the government lets them get away with it, and the only option is to mock them as “an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too.”

The Tea Party, in particular, is powered by hate. It isn’t about Obama being a bad president; it’s about the fact that he’s an Islamo-Marxist Usurper Manchurian Candidate.  Obamacare isn’t a glitchy boondoggle of a healthcare law; it’s an unconstitutional socialist takeover that is about taking money out of your pockets and spending it on unmarried sex-havers.  Benghazi wasn’t a tragedy that is inevitable when diplomats are forward-deployed to unstable regions; it was an UN-Al Qaeda plot which Obama gleefully watched play out on live video from the situation room, rejoicing in the death of an American ambassador between rounds of cards. Don’t believe me? Check out the primary sources in the comments section at RedState.com or TeaPartyCommunity.com. I really can’t think of single issue on which the Tea Party position isn’t “My way or the apocalypse!”

There can be no compromise with fanatics. All that is left to us is hate. Aren’t we so much more righteous in our hate than they are? Feel that rage. Stoke it. Share it on Facebook.

Do we really have the high ground here? Recently, I took a trip to the halcyon days of the Bush Administration with the great cartoonist Tim Kreider (who’s comic archive is down, which means I can’t share Civil War II, or The Shithead Vote, or his immortal Reagan Eulogy), and I remembered that from 2000 to 2008, I was fucking furious! Incandescent with how my country had been stolen by amateurish chickenhawks and moralizing hypocrites, how patriotism was used to crush dissent, fear to erode civil liberties, our armed forces turned into an army of occupation, and finally how the rich stole everything from the poor and got off scot free. Maybe that whole decade has gone down the memory whole, but I’ll never forget.

And you know what? I liked it. I liked it for how it made me feel. I believe (and always will) that The Truth was on our side, and that history has already proved us right about how criminally incompetent the Bush administration was. But being right didn’t matter as much as the whole sensation of being part of the Resistance, of seeing past the lies on TV to the awful truth on the ground, of always having the distraction of ‘did you hear what those clowns in the White House did?’ And now that my guys have the White House and the Senate, wouldn’t it be just as hypocritical to deny the extremists on the other side the same pleasures?

Which is part of why I don’t want to take hate away from the Tea Party. As long as nobody gets hurt, strong emotion is a fine accompaniment to democracy. I don’t even really care that their worldview is based on a contradictory and ever shifting web of lies and nonsense. It offends me that they lack basic skills in empiricism and evidence gathering, it really bugs me that their desired policies have already made America a worse country, and maybe I hate them a little because I’m a cosmopolitan coastal elitist and they have all the wrong cultural markers. But at the end of the day, my hate is righteous and theirs is not.

This is why: My hate is a hobby, something I indulge in once in a while, much like a tumbler of single-malt scotch. And while I drank a lot during the Bush days, (metaphorically speaking, I was mostly a kid), I could put the bottle away. Their hate is the only thing holding their personal universe together. The Tea Party is that 12-pack a day alcoholic claiming they’re fine because they don’t touch the hard stuff (like that anti-war government nig-).  Social psychiatrist John Haidt argues that conservatives work from a richer set of moral foundations than liberals, but I think he misses the bigger picture in that the three conservative foundations (Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation) require respectively, an enemy, an unassailable leader, and an arbitrary system of taboos.  The conservative moral universe is intrinsically parochial and built on hate, jealousy, and fear.

As much as I’d enjoy the Tea Party discovering that oxygen is a liberal plot and quit breathing that probably isn’t going to happen (even with Michelle Obama’s help). Likewise, this vast surplus of hate isn’t going away: It wins political campaigns, drives web traffic, and is just too damn fun for all concerned. A better person than I might say that the only that ends hate is respect, compassion, and dialog. I disagree. I think the only thing that ends hate is running it over with a tank, or failing that public ridicule.

So for now, I say let it burn! Haters gonna hate, and the more the Tea Party rages and makes it clear just how nihilistic it really is, the faster it’ll implode. We in the reality-based community don’t even need to engage. Just keep talking about what unites us, a shared faith that rational and empirical policies can make a better future, that policy by ultimatum is unacceptable, and when challenged, like we’re being challenged today, raise an eyebrow and ask “Really? This is the hill upon which you’ve chosen to die? Then stop messing about with my country and put up or shut up with the dying already.”  Just remember, even when you're right there has to be more than hate.

*This doesn’t mean we should let the assclowns interfere with the business of governing again. I hear there might be enough moderate Republican votes to pass a clean continuing resolution. Not introducing a clean CR is an act of cowardice on the part of Speaker Boehner.

The recent revelations of a set of massive and longstanding NSA surveillance programs have prompted blizzard of accusations, defenses, and recriminations from across the political spectrum, PRISM and related programs have been called everything from “all the infrastructure a tyrant could need” to a vital component of national security, while leaker Edward Snowden has been called everything from a hero to a traitor. A week later, the pieces have yet to settle. But what’s been bothering me in all this is the confusion of ideas about state power, civil liberties, surveillance, computer security, and privacy. It bothers me, because without clear ideas we cannot have clear policies, and without clear policies liberty, security, and any other desired public good are achieved by accident.

PRISM is not strictly speaking surveillance.  It looks like surveillance, it feels like surveillance, but it lacks the main purpose of surveillance: creating a disciplinary power relationship.  When scholars talk about surveillance in a rigorous sense, they’re mostly talking about Foucault’s theory of the Panopticon. The original Panopticon was a plan for a prison, with the cells arranged so that a single guard could watch all the prisoners, and dispatch punishments and rewards as appropriate to the prisoner’s behavior.  Eventually, according to Foucault, the desires of the warden would be internalized by the prisoners, and they would behave as planned. They would be disciplined.

Foucault’s genius was noting that the architecture of the Panopticon allowed the mechanisms of power to operate at very little cost, because prisoners could not tell when they were under observation, and so would always have to behave as if they were being watched. Additionally, panopticonic structures were everywhere: in classrooms, hospitals, urban renewal of medieval districts into broad boulevards, even the bureaucratic organization of the modern state into administrative districts and statistical agencies, to the point that a scholar describing yet another panopticon is met with a sigh and shrug.

As Whitney Boesel of Cyborgology noted, when we look for a disciplinary purpose in these NSA programs, we find nothing. Despite editorials in the New York Times and onThinkProgress with a Foucault 101 explanation of the panoptiocn, and gestures towards the chilling effect and future potential harms, it’s difficult to point to any specific thought or speech act that someone did not have as a consequence of the potential that they might be added to an NSA database. People appear to be totally free to say and think whatever they want online, including espousing flatly anti-democratic opinions across the political spectrum. These programs are no more panopticonic than 20thcentury statecraft in general.

Privacy has a totemic value in American political discourse, but privacy as a concept is fuzzy at best. Philosophically, my colleague Jathan Sadowski describes privacy as “that which allows authentic personal growth,” a kind of antithesis to the disciplining and shaping of the panopticon. Legally, American privacy originates in a penumbra of rights defined in the 4th Amendment (protection from arbitrary search and seizure), 9thAmendment (other, unspecified rights), and 14th Amendment (right to due process). Privacy has further become established as part of the justification for reproductive freedom in Griswold v Connecticut and Roe v Wade, loading it with all the baggage of the culture war.

But what is privacy, really? Future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in an influential 1890 essay, described it as “the right to be left alone.” Brandeis’s essay was published in the context of an intrusive popular press using the then-new technology of instant photography to violate the privacy of New York society members. Brandeis extended the basic right of a person to limit the expression of their “thoughts, sentiments, and emotions” into a fundamental divide of public and private spaces. Since then, mainstream legal thought has attempted to apply Brandeis’s theory of privacy to new technology and new concerns, with varying degrees of success.

Brandeis metaphor breaks down in the face of Big Data because Brandeis was concerned with the gradations of privacy in space (it is acceptable to be photographed on the red carpet at a premier, unacceptable on your doorstep, totally illegal inside your home), and computers and data are profoundly non-spatial. There is no “Cyberspace.” That’s an idea cribbed from a science-fiction book written by a man who’d never seen a computer. Spatial metaphors fundamentally fail to capture what computers are doing. Computers are, mathematically speaking, devices that turn numbers into other numbers according to certain rules. These days, we use computers for lots of things: science, entertainment, but mostly accounting and communication. And for the latter two uses, the phrase “my personal data” (which inspires so much angst) confuses personal to mean both “about a person” and “belonging to a person.”

Advocates of strict privacy control tend to confuse the two. Privacy is contextual, social, and promethean, so I’d like to analyze something concrete instead: secrets.  A secret is something that a person or a small group knows, which they do not want other people to know. Most “personal data” is actually part of a transaction, whether you’re buying a stick of gum at the gas station or looking at pictures stored on a remote server. We’re free to keep records of your side of the transaction, yet we’re outraged when the other side keeps records as well. We could ask the other side of the transaction to delete the records, or not share them, but at its strongest this is a normative approach. There’s no force behind it.

Moving from the normative ‘ought’ to ‘is’ requires a technological fix. Physical privacy is important, but walls and screens are far more sure than the averted gaze. It’s wrong to steal, and valuable things are locked up.  The digital equivalent to walls and locks is cryptography—math that makes it difficult to access a file or a computer system. Modern crypto is technically speaking, very very good. RSA-256 is unbreakable in the lifespan of the universe, assuming it’s correctly used. The problem with cryptography is that it’s very rarely used according the directions. People use and reuse weak passwords, they leave themselves logged in on laptops which get left in taxis, or they plug in corrupted USB keys, compromising entire networks.

There is a very real chance that there is no such thing as digital privacy or security; that Stewart Brand’s slogan that “information wants to be free” is true in the same way that “nature abhors a vacuum.” The basic architectures of computers, x86 and TCP/IP, are decades old and inherently insecure in the way that they execute code. Cloud services are even worse. We as users don’t own those servers, we don’t even rent them. We borrow them. Google and Facebook aren’t letting us use their services out of the goodness of their hearts, and that data that we enter (personal data in both senses) is the source of their market power. Sure, there are cryptographically secure alternatives (DuckDuckGo, Hushmail and Diaspora come immediately to mind), but their features are lacking and relatively few people use them. Crypto is both hard, and runs directly against the business model of major internet companies.  The best way to keep a secret is not to tell anybody, and if you have a real secret, I’d strongly advise you to never tell a computer.

Practically, not even the director of the CIA follows that advice. Unless you’re Amish, you have to tell computers things all the time, which leads to the problem of what the government can do and should not do with all that data. I personally don’t like the “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear” arguments advanced by advocates of the security state, because the historical record shows plenty of good reasons to distrust American intelligence agencies, ranging from mere incompetence (missing the imminent collapse of the Berlin Wall, Iraq’s non-existent WMDs, the Arab Spring) to outright criminality (CIA backed assassinations in the 60s and 70s, COINTELRPO, Iran-Contra), but this wasn’t some kind of rogue operation: data was collected according to the PATRIOT act, overseen by FISA judges, and Congressional was informed. Certainly it was according to the letter of the law rather than the spirit, but it happened within the democratically elected, bipartisan mechanisms of government just the same. It’s hard to deny that many voters were willing to make that trade of liberty against security.

The dream of counter-terror experts everywhere is some kind of perfect prediction machine, some kind of device which could sift through masses of data and isolate the unique signature of a terrorist plot before it materializes. This is a fantasy. Signals intelligence and social network analysis is immensely useful for mapping a known entity and determining its intentions, but picking ‘lone wolves’ out of a mass of civilians is a different beast entirely. Likewise, data mining can do great work on large and detailed datasets, but since 2001 there have been only a handful of terrorist attacks in America and Europe (local insurgencies have very different objectives and behaviors). There is no signature of a immanent terrorist attack. Realistically, what these systems can do is very rapidly and precisely reconstruct the past, making the history of an event legible to determine the extent of an attack and hunt down co-conspirators.

What’s happening isn’t really surveillance; the millions of people buying 1984 are reading the wrong part of the book. Orwell’s Party is terrifying not because of the the torture chambers in the Ministry of Love, but because it can say “We have always been at war with Eurasia, and the chocolate ration has been increased to 2 oz” (when last month it was 3 oz), and what The Party says is true. Rewriting history is dangerous for nations, but as Daniel Solove has eloquently pointed out, for individuals the proper literary comparison isn’t 1984, its Kafka’s The Trial, where the protagonist is bounced powerlessly and senselessly through an immense bureaucracy.

The political problems of these programs and Big Data are not the same as the problems of secret prisons, torture chambers, and non-judicial executions, though all those things are very real and very dangerous to civil liberties. The more common assaults are the unnecessary audit, the line at the airport, the job application rejected because of a bad credit score, and the utter lack of recourse that we as citizens have against these abuses by many large scale organization, including corporations and governments.

We could mandate laws to force basic changes in how computers work and how data is collected, such as deleting everything as soon as it comes in or packing databases with random chaff.  Purely legal solutions to technological problems are almost never effective, and usually add another layer of complexity to the existing mess. As any security expert will tell you, security through obscurity is no security at all, andanonymous data is far from anonymous. Giving up and living as suspects under glass, fugitives in our own lives, is equally unappealing.

The alternative is recognizing that in a world of omnipresent computation, leaving traces behind is inevitable, but that rather than the uncertain shield of privacy, we can wield a sword of truth. To ask for privacy is to ask to be forgotten, something both impossible and generally undesirable. We should have the right to set the record straight, to demand to know what is known about us as individuals and as a population, and to appeal what are currently non-judicial and unaccountable actions. Brandeis’s right to be left alone is not the right to disappear, but rather to demand that those who would try and harass us reveal themselves and defend their actions.

This essay originally published at As We Now Think

Google's I/O 2013 conference was yesterday, and the tech journalistic consensus is trickling in.  In terms of specific product launches, there's nothing with the "wow" factor of last year's Google Glass, but according Lance Ulhoff, "Google’s worldview is finally coming into focus. The tenuous threads that connect these dozens of different applications and services are strengthening and gradually being pulled closer together. Underneath it all is Google’s vast web of information and smarts, which is all about us."  Google's products are getting sleeker, more graceful, less skeumorphic.  I might even go so far as to say 'intuitive and emotional'.  (A skeptic might say 'intrusive and creepy')

The highlights were in the post-keynote by Larry Page.

First, "We should be building great things that don't exist."  This is a pretty cool sentiment, particularly from a company like Google, which combines massive size with a desire to innovate.  I'm reminded a little of classic era Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, where a steady cashflow from telecoms/office machines went to support radical ideas in electronics and personal computing.  Google's search/advertising business gets us wearable computers and self-driving cars.

Second, Larry Page wants earth to have a mad scientist island. This is the !!! moment of the conference, and honestly, I'm not sure what to think, which is why I want to run this by you guys.

Personally, I agree with Page that research is slowed by laws and regulations, but the effect is probably not as big as he thinks.  What really slows research down is our species innate conservatism.  On the business side, this is exemplified by demands from Accounting and Marketing that the new product be profitable and interoperable with older versions of the system back to 19xx.  On the academic side, it's the publish-or-perish paradigm, which has researchers focused on "do-able" projects as opposed to "needs-to-be-done" projects.

It'd be nice to start with a clean slate, without the pressure to make everything make work with existing systems, conform to building codes, or have to make money or sense this year. But I think that such a place, if it existed, would need oversight. The planet would be rightfully concerned if Mad Scientist Island started dumping toxins into the environment, or systemically violating human rights. Independent research enclaves could be a great idea-if they could be inspected without destroying their unique culture.

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson’s recent volume on transhumanism opens with the statement of purpose “This anthology takes transhumanism seriously not because it is a significant social movement, which it is not, but because the transhumanist vision compels us to think about ourselves in light of current technological and scientific advances and to reflect on the society in which we wish to live.” I disagreed with many of the essays in the books, but not with this statement.  Transhumanism is, based on my participation in and observation of its organizations over the past five years or so, definitely a fringe vision, but Francis Fukuyama called it “the most dangerous idea of the 21st century” for a good reason.   ‘Dangerous’ is a unwarranted judgment, but what is it about transhumanism that merits further reflection?*

On the surface, transhumanism is just another glossy scifi future. The basic idea is that through science and technology, we can take control of our biological destinies, both as individuals and as a species, and engineer away such inconvenient facets of human existence like disease, unhappiness, stupidity, aging, and death. In novels, and in more serious works of futurism like Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation and the 2002 National Nanotechnology blueprint, this image of the future is one where Silicon Valley gadgetry meets biomedicine to put humanity on a perennial upgrade path guided by turtle-necked tech gurus with enthusiastic product launches. This view of transhumanism is the most common one, and is easy to mock, but underneath this shallow gee-whiz techno-utopianism, transhumanism poses a radical answer to a very old question: “What is our place in the universe?”

The oldest and most universe answer to this question of existence is that of divine creation. Some greater force made the universe, put humanity on this Earth, and imbued us with special purpose. All faiths emphasis the importance of Obedience, Transcendence, and Redemption: Obedience to moral laws of divine origin, the possibility of personal Transcendence from a mundane world of suffering to a divine world of perfection in this lifetime, and the future Redemption of the entire world to state of perfection when the divine will is finally enacted. The combination of these elements and their exact details vary significantly across faiths, but their divine origins and importance to everyday life are the foundations of all religion.

The problems with divine solutions to this question of existence are twofold. First, there is no “Universal Religion”, no single true divine law which all humans agree on. There are multiple religions, which differ not just on minor points of the revealed word of God, but on basic theological issues. Attempts to convert others to the ‘true faith’ have caused bloody wars and left syncretistic intrusions of older myths in the new faith.

Moreover, divine revelation is one of the most disruptive and dangerous forces in history. I am an atheist, and while I personally don’t believe in god, I recognize that people can feel a very strong connection to some higher power. Institutionalize churches and theological governments, with their legitimacy based in both interpretation of the arcana of past revelations and worldly political power, are threatened whenever people can start to directly experience the divine.  Look at difficulties of the Catholic Church in containing evangelical movements like that of St. Francis of Assiz, or the more contemporary problems of the Mormon faith transitioning from the personal revelation of Joseph Smith to an institution lead by Brigham Young and his successors. Religion can rule, but it loses its sacred power in the mess of politics.

With the decline of supreme religious power, codified in the west in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which reestablished freedom of (Christian) worship as a European right, people began looking for answers to this existential question outside the structure of divine revelation. Enlightenment humanism established the idea of the rational individual engaged in reasoned discourse to create progress in a naturalistic universe as a new foundation of order. Human beings were uniquely endowed with intellectual faculties: primarily logic, language, and empathy; which could be used to engage with others across space and time to discover and clarify moral laws and progress towards a state of perfection. The universe was taken as an external fact, objective and the same for all observers, the nature of which could be understood through empirical inquiry.

Humanism is at the center of Western philosophy, but it has taken quite a beating in the 20th century. Major ideologies like Fascism and Communism were flatly anti-humanist, dealing in masses rather than individuals. Disciplines such as economics and ecology replace the individual with larger abstractions, like the market or the environment. Academic elites used post-modernism, post-colonialism, and feminism to critique the humanist tradition as arbitrary and exclusive, gutting it from within. The horrors of the Holocaust and the world-ending threat of the atom bomb made the idea of the perfection of human wisdom through intellectual achievement laughably obsolete. And on a gut level, the past 150 years of rapid technological change have orchestrated greater changes in the human condition than the previous 1,500 years, or possibly even the previous 15,000 years. Marx was right: All that was solid has melted into air. We post-moderns feel profoundly disconnected from the humanist tradition.

The transhumanist program is based on an  idea of human beings as an evolved biological system, with a lineage that can be traced back billions of years to the first self-replicating bits of RNA, and then onto simple cells, multicellular organisms, and so on. Modern humans are unique among the animals because we coexist with a second evolved system, which are broadly speaking encompassed by the categories of culture and technology.

What distinguishes transhumanism from a naturalistic reading of history is the transhumanist teleology. Transhumanists see humanity merging with its tools, becoming a cybernetic species—one capable of regulating its individual bodies, and its collective environment. The classical cyborg was an idealized astronaut, designed for exploring the cosmos, and the transhuman goal is the expansion of human-descended beings through time and space. Mere biology and a single planet is too frail to guarantee our survival. Avoiding extinction over deep times means we need to turn our intelligence to the problems of existence, durability, and change.

There is a lot that I take issue with within the transhumanist program. Their theory of evolution is shallow and based more on hearsay than any kind of actual science. On an individual level, the disposable gadget orientation towards biology doesn’t have much relevance to real bodies, which are stubborn and recalcitrant things. On a larger scale, if transhumanists are serious about embarking on a project of radical evolution, they’ll need to engage and win over a skeptical public.  Currently, “responsible” policy-makers have set themselves up the direct antithesis of transhumanists, defending an intrinsic human nature from gene-hackers and insane AIs, among other existential threats.

But for all the flaws of transhumanism, the reason why I call myself a transhumanist is that it is the only ideology which is attempting to grapple seriously with the problems of our future as a technological species. We’ve already altered our planet; the new word in conservation is the anthropocene. The wonders of modern medicine have increased healthcare costs more than they’ve extended life; we need to move beyond curing death one organ at a time towards a holistic rejuvenation approach. The weakening of social cohesion, widespread increases in psychological instability, and the inexplicable nature of contemporary violence, can be laid on the rise of greed as the only universal value. Money is a useful tool, but there must be other ways to find value and purpose in the world. And finally we need to begin looking seriously at the fragility of our technological networks, and ways in which they can be made more resilient. These problems are wicked; fraught with irreconcilable conflicts over values and the basic terms of the debate, but I believe that debate and action are necessary.

Transhumanists may be committing the crime of hubris, but hubris is better than willful irresponsibility. The overwhelming public dissatisfaction that the status quo is breaking down can only be met with new ways of seeing, thinking, and being in the world.

*This essay is the companion to January’s Three Faces of Transhumanism

The past weekend saw EMERGE 2013 at ASU.  The theme was “The Future of Truth”, and there was a level of carnival creativity rarely seen in the rather stolid world of academia; there were dancers, full body 3D scanners, philosophy in public, and similar insanity.

A full accounting of the speeches and events that went on at EMERGE is beyond me, but I’d like to note a few highlights. Brad Allenby remains eminently quotable and provocative, playing clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey and advising us not to make out with strange monoliths. Claire Evans of YACHT gave a dangerously smart talk on how rock and roll is a post-modern cult for the 21st century. In a panel on “The Myth of the Future”, Bruce Sterling declined to found a sci-fi cult (dammit! I’d bring the Kool-Aid), while Betty Sue Flowers discussed global myths and Brian David Johnson mediated between the two, advising us to take control of our own future stories.

My part of EMERGE was a workshop called “Truth and Atrocities: What is the Future of Investigating Human Rights Violation in the Age of Facebook?” which Dan Rothenberg, a legitimate human rights lawyer and expert on truth commissions, was kind enough to let me help out with. Truth commissions are part of what is called ‘transitional governance”, the process of taking a country from a period of dictatorship or civil war (and associated atrocities) and building civic society and robust democratic institutions. They aren’t war crimes tribunals, as people are rarely charged with a crime, but they are instead intended to lay a common factual truth of what happened, to give voice to victims, and allow forgiveness of perpetrators so that the culture can heal and move forward.

The first truth commission was established to deal with the fate of The Disappeared, victims of the Argentina military junta who were abducted, tortured, and finally murdered, with these actions comprehensively disavowed by the State. The Argentinian Commission on the Disappearance of Persons recorded the names of the victims, the location of secret prisons and graves, and generally made it impossible to ignore the crimes of the old regime.

Dan and I decided to focus our discussion on drones, since they’re a controversial issue which may require a truth commission in the future—as the next generation of policy-makers will have to reconcile the common knowledge of the Drone War, with official administration denials that any strikes are taking place, and in any case, only terrorists are harmed (a patent lie). Our group included the awesome Jasmina Tesanovic, along with a full spectrum of students, professors, and journalists willing to argue for and against drones. On the second day we took up the roles of a Truth Commission investigating a drone strike in 2019, establishing a detailed sequence of personal narratives that looked at this one event from many perspectives.

The participants did an amazing job making the events of that day come alive. For my own perspective, I began to question my technological conservatism on autonomous drones. While current policy requires that a human being pull the trigger, future drones which are designed to operate in more hostile environments may have more independence of motion and sensor fusion and analysis. Of course, a human will still have to give the kill order, but the drone might wait several minutes before firing to maximize a hit and minimize collateral damage. Once those capacities are in place, an ‘ethical governor’ that determines that the whole mission is wrong does not seem so unrealistic. A sudden call from our drone, an MQ-47 named “Sparky”, brought the house down.

Otherwise, I had several great conversations with the brilliant Caitlin Burns of Starlight Runner Entertainment. Her company is responsible for Forward Unto Dawn (best military scifi of the past decade), and I am firmly convinced that gaming, literature, film, art, advertising, and maybe even politics are blending into some new thing. Less sure if that’s a good thing, necessarily, but it’ll be interesting.

Of course, no conference on a topic as big as “The Future of Truth” could end with answers, and so I’d like to pose two big questions I’m left with.

Truth Commissions have traditionally been conducted through oral history (speaking has a healing value) and forensic examinations of field sites and archives. Drones and camera phones (even Third World Peasants have camera phones now) have introduced massive proliferation of video into post-2000 investigations. Does the number of cameras in contested zones make atrocities harder to commit and get away with? Conversely, does the potential for omnipresent video footage mean that old-fashioned oral testimony is less credible? Truth commissions operate from a place of empathic distance: how do these technologies make that perspective easier or harder to obtain? Dick Fink threw together a 6 panel video mashup of drone footage and Arab Spring clips (thanks bro!) to help illustrate the panel. Drone footage is mesmerizing in its abstraction—black and white IR dots, and then an explosion, and then some of them stop moving. Conversely, cellphone videos—grainy, jerky, poorly framed as they may be, have an undeniable presence. It is difficult to maintain distance just hearing about massacres. What if you had those atrocities caught on video? Could the past ever fade away?

Second was about the long term purpose of EMERGE. As Bruce Sterling said in his keynote discussing Vaclav Havel, there’s a big difference between having fun and being provocative, and dealing with the administrivia necessary to keep things running. As EMERGE becomes an institution, something that happens more than once or twice, how will it find its purpose beyond being an intellectual festival? How can bringing artists and scientists together for a few days help advance ASU towards the three moonshots of health-span extension, sustainability, and educational transformation? (as laid out by President Crow in the morning). I think that a sense of fun, of transdisciplinary public engagement, of an intellectual adventure, can be very beneficial for a scholarly community. I hope that future EMERGEs live up to the high standards of this one.