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Tag: politics (page 3 of 4)

This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

July 7, 2016

No Justice, No Peace — Will We Ever Get Either?

Artwork by TheoJunior.

I’m writing this on Thursday night. Yesterday two innocent black men were shot dead by police. You may be familiar with their names: Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.

The appropriate term for the willful elimination of life is “murder”, but numerous media outlets have used “officer-involved shooting”. (So ambiguous. So difficult to sue over.) This is one of the many details that add insult to injury.

The murders themselves weren’t unusual; cops kill people all the time, and frequently those people have brown skin. What’s unusual is that we’re all paying attention. For the moment.

Periodically this happens.

A video surfaces that shows the gory details — I mean “gory details” literally. I watched Philando Castile bleed out on Facebook Live while his girlfriend narrated her horror with eerie calm.

The video circulates widely. There is an outpouring of grief, and a corresponding outpouring of racist justification. Shoulda coulda woulda done this, that, or the other thing to avoid being executed by an employee of the state. (Don’t believe that people think this? Read the comments.)

Calls to actions and GoFundMe pages. (You can donate to both victims’ families here and here.) People, myself among them, urge you to contact the elected officials who ostensibly represent your interests.

All of this will subside. The reactionary shooting in Dallas, too, will blow over. A painful upheaval, a denouement, and then no movement until another tragedy provokes our outrage.

I don’t say this to try and minimize the pain or to diminish the sheer badness of these events. Neither am I making a new point. I am repeating what others have said: there is a pattern here.

Meanwhile, the dissemination of crucial information and the ensuing discussion of these events takes place on platforms ruled by billionaires (white men, natch) who aren’t remotely prepared to steward serious public discourse:

“Facebook has become the self-appointed gatekeeper for what is acceptable content to show the public, which is an incredibly important and powerful position to be in. By censoring anything, Facebook has created the expectation that there are rules for using its platform (most would agree that some rules are necessary). But because the public relies on the website so much, Facebook’s rules and judgments have an outsized impact on public debate.” — Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler on Vice’s Motherboard

Facebook pulled down Diamond Reynolds’ video of her boyfriend dying and then claimed it was due to a “technical glitch” — frankly, this strikes me as an outright lie. I would bet money that Facebook users reported the video and some underpaid moderator in another country, given no context, axed it because they thought it was just another snuff film.

I’ve argued before that human societies can’t escape from centralized power. Facebook is a centralized power with a huge and increasing influence over the information that is available to people, both in crisis and on a daily basis.

I’m still not sure that we can get away from central authorities, and I still don’t feel good about it. Authority warps people, even people with the best of intentions.

For example, Mother Jones sent reporter Shane Bauer undercover as a “correctional officer” at a private prison in Louisiana. This is a passage from his novella-length investigation, reflecting on how working as a prison guard changed him:

“Striving to treat everyone as human takes too much energy. More and more, I focus on proving I won’t back down. I am vigilant; I come to work ready for people to catcall me or run up on me and threaten to punch me in the face. I show neither fear nor compunction. […] It is getting in my blood. The boundary between pleasure and anger is blurring. To shout makes me feel alive. I take pleasure in saying ‘no’ to prisoners. I like to hear them complain about my write-ups. I like to ignore them when they ask me to cut them a break.”

No justice, no peace. Well, are we capable of justice or peace? Even though I run a dystopian newsletter, I want to believe that the world keeps improving slowly, even if change is only perceptible when we zoom out to decades or centuries. I want to believe that human nature’s best parts can win against its worst parts.

It’s hard to believe that on nights like this. We are a brutal species, and we wield every tool that we have brutally.

May 31, 2016

Meandering Digital Meta-Anxiety

The infamous Skateboard Academic on Twitter.

Sometimes I make grand declarations: “Fundamentally, I am a cynical optimist.” Imagine that accompanied by a sweeping gesture. But it’s not true, of course. Fundamentally, I ride the tides of the media I’m absorbing on a given day, and whether I’ve remembered to take my meds or not.

(A cynical optimist believes that the world is gradually improving over time, but that human beings are selfish above all else. I do believe both of those things. However, like most ideological posturing, at core it’s probably just my way of signaling a certain set of sympathies.)

“You are what you eat.” I am what I consume, information and images included. And so are you, meaning that I’m feeding you right now, if we stretch the metaphor a bit. The phrase “media diet” is kinda played out by now, but you know what I mean.

Does this seem disjointed?

Photo by Dave Bonta.

Well, it is disjointed. That’s how I read nowadays so it’s also how I write. I came back to this browser tab after detouring through Facebook and Slack. It’s okay, I suppose. The ideas are still here. Or at least I don’t know about the ideas that have been sacrificed.

“To the days beyond this one which are still perfect” — that which is unborn is unspoiled. It’s easy to expect so much of the days that haven’t come yet. But I worry, too. I’m sure Y Combinator and everyone who hates Y Combinator will find a way to make their basic income experiment contentious, for example.

Here in the US, those of us in the Blue Tribe are increasingly frightened by Trump as the election trundles onward like some perverse version of Manifest Destiny where meme magic conquers every plot of land and the fucking alt right gets to decide who can sharecrop.

So the days beyond this one are not only perfect — the possibility also exists that they’re horrific. And we’d obsessed with both dialectical futures.

May 29, 2016

Something Something Blockchain

Yay, We Don’t Need Politics Anymore!

The DAO’s logo, grabbed from their website.

I wanted to resist writing about The DAO — that stands for “decentralized autonomous organization” — but after going through my notes from this past week’s reading, I realized that I can’t avoid it.

The reason I wanted to steer clear is that everyone else has already said it better, but maybe you don’t subscribe to their newsletters. Besides, who else will address the cyberpunk angle?

Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine covered The DAO with delightful snark:

“One of the great joys of our modern age, with its rapid advances in financial technology, is examining the latest innovation to try to figure out what centuries-old idea has been dressed up in cryptographical mystification.”

To summarize aggressively, The DAO wants to crowdsource an entire company, which will sort of act as a venture capital partnership, dispensing ETH, a bitcoin-like cryptocurrency. You can read plenty more about their structure and setup on their website. The DAO’s main differentiators are “smart contracts” and, as the name suggests, decentralized governance:

“The ETH held by The DAO will never be centrally managed. DAO Token Holders are able to vote on important decisions relating to the management of The DAO, including the power to redistribute its ETH amongst themselves.”

Cryptocurrency Art Gallery by Namecoin.

The cryptocurrency crowd fascinates me because many of them seem to think they can opt out of normal human power structures, or somehow use code to avoid disputes. And I think that’s… well, impossible. (Maybe I am strawmanning egregiously, in which case I hope a cryptocurrency enthusiast or garden-variety libertarian will email me to point it out.) As I’ve written before:

“There is a reason why centralization happens over and over again in human history. We didn’t invent the Code of Hammurabi out of the blue. Monarchy did not develop randomly, and republics require executive branches.”

Direct democracy is a terrible system; I would go so far as to say it’s unworkable. Does anyone endorse mob rule? And centralized power is an oft-repeated pattern because it’s efficient. Furthermore, we have courts and the like because they’re useful — because the need for arbitration arises frequently despite the existence of contracts. Going back to Matt Levine’s article:

“The reason that ‘law and jurisdiction’ come into play is that sometimes stuff happens that is not addressed with perfect clarity in the contract. Sometimes the parties need to renegotiate to address something not specifically anticipated in the contract. Sometimes they can’t agree, and need an outside adjudicator to decide what should happen. And sometimes the project affects people who never signed the contract in the first place, but who have a claim nevertheless.”

And as business analyst Ben Thompson wrote in his “Bitcoin and Diversity” essay:

“I can certainly see the allure of a system that seeks to take all decision-making authority out of the hands of individuals: it’s math! […] If humans made the rules, then appealing to the rules can never be non-political. Indeed, it’s arguably worse, because an appeal to ‘rules’ forecloses debate on the real world effects of said rules.”

Lots of people don’t want to do the hard things. They don’t want to admit that decisions always carry tradeoffs, and they don’t want to negotiate messy human disagreements. But a world without those hard things is fairyland — nothing more than a nice dream.

As we continue to integrate computing into our daily lives, our legal system, and our financial system, we will have to keep grappling with human fallibility — especially when we delude ourselves into thinking we can escape it.

Update circa June 19: I was tempted to write about The DAO again, since it’s been “hacked” (sort of) and a “thief” (sort of) absconded with $50 million (USD value). However, a lot of other people have already published variations of what I wanted to say. The drama is still unfolding — /r/ethereum is a decent place to keep track — so I can’t point you to a canonical writeup, but Matt Levine’s new analysis is both cogent and funny. Also this Hacker News comment is smart.

May 26, 2016

The Mad Monk in a New Century

Artwork by ReclusiveChicken.

Some men gain their reputation and influence through sheer charisma, perhaps with a dash of self-engineered notoriety:

“I realized, of course, that a lot of the talk about him was petty, foolish invention, but nonetheless I felt there was something real behind all these tales, that they sprang from some weird, genuine, living source. […] After all, what didn’t they say about Rasputin? He was a hypnotist and a mesmerist, at once a flagellant and a lustful satyr, both a saint and a man possessed by demons. […] With the help of prayer and hypnotic suggestion he was, apparently, directing our military strategy.” — Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya)

Now imagine if Rasputin had deep learning at his disposal — a supercomputer laden with neural nets and various arcane algorithms. What would Rasputin do with Big Data™? Perhaps the Rasputin raised on video games and fast food would be entirely different from the Rasputin who rose up from the Siberian peasantry.

Which rulers would a modern Rasputin seek to enchant? Russia has fallen from its once formidable greatness, and I don’t think Vladimir Putin is as gullible as the Tsar was. China is the obvious choice, but Xi Jinping similarly seems too savvy. Somehow I doubt that Rasputin, the charlatan Mad Monk, could gain much traction in a first-class military power these days. Would he be drawn to the turmoil of postcolonial Africa?

Maybe Rasputin would be a pseudonymous hacker, frequenting cryptocurrency collectives and illicit forums. Would that kind of power suffice? Would he be willing to undo corporate and governmental infrastructure without receiving credit? Would he have the talent for it, anyway? Not everyone can become a programmer. Maybe he’d flourish on Wall Street instead.

What I’m really wondering is whether Rasputin’s grand influence was a result of being in the right place at the right time. Would he have been important no matter when he was born? You can ask this question about any historical figure, of course, but I want to ask it about Rasputin because he’s cloaked in mysticism. I can imagine him drawing a literal dark cloak around himself, shielding his body from suspicions that he was just a regular human.

You’ve probably heard the rumors about how hard Rasputin was to kill. Who is the Mad Monk’s modern counterpart? Which person who wields the proverbial power behind the throne will be very hard to disappear when it comes time for a coup?

April 10, 2016

Ag-Gag Laws & Political Maneuvering

Illustration by Hobvias Sudoneighm.

Agriculture is not a sexy topic. Even modern high-yield factory farming is pretty mundane. Monsanto suing small farmers? Not the futurists’ concern — leave it to anti-GMO hippies. I’m not convinced that buying organic produce will stop the world from going to hell in a handbasket. But the way the industry has succeeded in litigating the spread of information — that piques my curiosity and raises my hackles.

Are you familiar with the ag-gag laws? They’ve been around for a while, but here’s a refresher, focusing on Iowa:

“HF 589 […] criminalizes investigative journalists and animal protection advocates who take entry-level jobs at factory farms in order to document the rampant food safety and animal welfare abuses within. […] The original version of the law would have made it a crime to take, possess, or share pictures of factory farms that were taken without the owner’s consent, but the Iowa Attorney General rejected this measure out of First Amendment concerns. As amended, however, the law achieves the same result by making it a crime to give a false statement on an ‘agricultural production’ job application. This lets factory farms and slaughterhouses screen out potential whistleblowers simply by asking on job applications, ‘Are you affiliated with a news organization, labor union, or animal protection group?'” — Cody Carlson, a former Humane Society investigator

It’s a clever loophole. Lobbyists for Big Food achieved their desired result by coming at the issue sideways. The New York Times’ editorial board said, “These laws, on the books in seven states, purport to be about the protection of private property, but they are nothing more than government-sanctioned censorship of a matter of public interest.” Any sane person would find this a little disturbing — the obviousness of how a government can and will serve large-scale corporate interests, rather than prioritizing the needs of the regular citizenry.

“I have always said that there are two types of politics — what people see and what really makes things happen.” — Andrés Sepúlveda, who purportedly helped rig South American elections

This is the argument for political participation. I waffled about whether I was going to vote this year — after abstaining in 2014 — but I decided that I’d rather choose between imperfect choices than opt out of having a say. It’s probably impossible for a modern electoral race to involve candidates with true integrity, but maybe I can settle for “less blatantly corrupt than old-school Russian bureaucrats”. Of course, there’s a significant chance that voting makes no difference whatsoever.

All opposition is controlled opposition.

My friend Gerald Leung left some astute comments on Facebook, so I want to clarify my point: Is it okay to lie on a job application? No, and before any ag-gag laws were passed, you could already get fired for deceiving your employer. Is that behavior worth criminalizing? Debatable.

What bothers me is that this suite of laws was passed because of the industrialized agriculture industry’s desires. Iowa’s HF 589 specifically addresses agricultural production. It’s not like the Corn State was plagued by an independent surge of people lying on their job applications.

April 5, 2016

The Productive Attitude to Privacy

Instead of considering privacy to be a right that you deserve, think of it as a condition that you can create for yourself. Comprehensive privacy is difficult to achieve — aim to hide the pieces of information that matter to you the most. Even in countries that say their citizens are entitled to privacy, abstract guarantees are meaningless if you don’t take action to protect the information that you want to conceal. (Remember, you’re only one “national security emergency” away from losing all the rights you were promised.)

Photo by Cory Doctorow.

For the most part, protecting information with your actions means restricting access to it. As I wrote before, “when you trust third parties to protect your privacy (including medical data and financial access), you should resign yourself to being pwned eventually.”

The key to perfect privacy is to avoid recording or sharing any information in the first place. If you never write down your secret, then no one can copy-paste it elsewhere, nor bruteforce any cipher that you may have used to obscure it. Thank goodness we haven’t figured out how to hack brains in detail! But unfortunately, some pieces of information — like passwords with plenty of entropy — aren’t useful unless you’re able to copy-paste them. Who can memorize fifty different diceware phrases? The key to imperfect-but-acceptable privacy is figuring out your limits and acting accordingly. How much risk are you willing to live with?

The main argument against my position is that responsibilities that could be assigned to communities are instead pushed onto individuals, who are demonstrably ill-equipped to cope with the requirements of infosec.

“Neoliberalism insists that we are all responsible for ourselves, and its prime characteristic is the privatisation of resources — like education, healthcare, and water — once considered essential rights for everyone (for at least a relatively brief period in human history so far). Within this severely privatised realm, choice emerges as a mantra for all individuals: we can all now have infinite choices, whether between brands of orange juice or schools or banks. This reverence for choice extends to how we are continually pushed to think of ourselves as not just rewarded with choices in material goods and services but with choices in how we constitute our individual selves in order to survive.” — Yasmin Nair

Reddit user m_bishop weighed in:

“I’ve been saying this for years. Treat anything you say online like you’re shouting it in a crowded subway station. It’s not everyone else’s job to ignore you, though it is generally considered rude to listen in.

Bottom line, if you don’t want people to see you naked, don’t walk down the street without your clothes on. All the written agreements and promises to simply ‘not look’ aren’t going to work.”

April 3, 2016

Small Internet Ingroups

“Under low uncertainty, you have to find a way to like one of the few default options available. Under high uncertainty, you have to eliminate options and avoid premature commitment.” — Venkatesh Rao

Photo via The Preiser Project.

At the end of the dispatch inspired by Mad Max, I asked how genuine communities can protect themselves in the chaotic dystopian milieu. Is it possible to avoid the fallout and continue trusting each other? I got a couple of interesting answers. Uel Aramchek said:

“This is where I think the Mad Max side of the internet is most clear — in the bubbling and sequestering of communities. People band together against trolls and opposing voices through a number of tactics that create a desert between online groups. Through blocking, moderating, filtering, featuring, etc. Communities are tightened, but the space between them is widened. Online fights and factionalizing have grown far more brutal as this has increased.”

Great description of Reddit, tbh. That’s exactly how the upvote function in a sub works. Twitter “tribes” follow the same principles. See also: Scott Alexander’s brilliant essay “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup”, which makes the case that politics = identity signalling. I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I don’t want to associate with people who hold a bunch of beliefs that I judge to be bigoted. On the other hand, how much intellectual enrichment am I sacrificing for the sake of social cohesion?

From a different angle, Reddit user inpu weighed in:

“I think most [communities] won’t [be able to shield themselves]; they’ll just hope that they’re not interesting enough to get into trouble with the surveillance state or the companies.

I see only two ways to protect yourself:

Live a low-tech, off-the-grid life.

Become a hacker yourself. This will require a lot of knowledge and skills. Understanding all the necessary details about IT and encryption is already complicated, and it will only get more so.

I could see some cooperation and overlap between groups 1 and 2, with people using little technology in general and creating the tech that they need themselves or have hackers do it for them.”

I tend to be a cynic, so I’m not too hopeful about the ability of lone-wolf hackers to circumvent governments and huge multinationals. But there is the possibility that a tool created by a small group can scale up to have a far greater impact. Bitcoin is a prime example.

One of the reasons why I’m intrigued by the open-source and free-software movements is that they try to do an end-run around typical corporate power structures. They don’t entirely succeed, of course, but it wouldn’t be fair to expect that.

I’m still pondering what my own modus operandi will be.

March 8, 2016

Infants For Sale At Walmart

The following article was written by mofosyne, Cornelius, and Zhenya Slabkovski for the subreddit /r/blastfromthefuture. Distributed here with permission. Edited and expanded for this venue.

Walmart recently launched their new line of Chubby Cherub infants. Early sales records show that Millennials prefer the Chubby Cherub brand to other leading names, such as Amazon’s FatCheeks. However, this cutting-edge product and its competitors are not without controversy.

Conservative groups have protested what one impassioned citizen deemed “the dehumanizing effect of selling infants on store shelves”. Most readers will be aware that this movement’s popularity has swelled since the July bombing of Walmart’s BioLife research facility. This week, a notorious incident in Washington DC led to the deployment of LRAD police drones, which successfully neutralized a riot attempt by au naturel protesters outside of the Supreme Court.

Photo by JE Theriot.

The conservative rally coincided with a special court session in which the justices ruled on legality of “shelf babies”, as Chubby Cherubs and FatCheeks are called on social media. The Supreme Court effectively gave the commercial infant retailers an all-clear sign, prompting the furor outside. Well-known conservative politicians attended the court session and later participated in the protest. In particular, Senator Zhenya was heard shouting, “My pastor will hear of this. Repent!” while being roughly escorted to the door by security personnel.

The industry alliance behind “shelf babies” points to the benefits of standardized human manufacturing. Babies grown in controlled environments have demonstrated greater intelligence and more rigorous health in preliminary studies conducted by the University of California at San Francisco. But the Child Design Group warns that the prevalence of off-the-shelf babies will endanger genetic diversity. A spokesperson recommended that aspiring parents use their specialty design service.

Now go join the sub and upvote the story!

Tag: politics (page 3 of 4)

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