uncomputing

i don’t mean to blame every bad thing in the world on computerization–but i think it is crucial part of computationalist discourse that when a critique of computerization is offered, instead of rebutting the critique, the answer is usually to raise some putative good that computers do (this is a pattern i encounter in person, at talks, in print, in class, and so on–persistent throughout the culture, and of course not by any means restricted, or directly related, to computationalist discourse). but there is rarely more elaborated discussion of the critique and whether it is correct. my view has never been that computers are without good effects–jesus christ!–but that we don’t want to look at the bad effects, so we focus almost exclusively on the good effects.

which may be why it’s the case that a remarkable number of contemporary crises have computerization at least in part at their core. for example, as anyone paying attention (including no less a computer wizard than woz himself) knows–the problem with toyota’s cars isn’t related to mechanics but to the on-board computer-systems, and for that reason incredibly hard to pin down (as can very rare errors in any large computer system).

as long as i’m at it–all the data about the toyota computers is completely proprietary, totally unavailable to customers or regulators, and has been held secret for years when it would have been useful to the public–neoliberal, free-market, radical libertarian computationalism at its best (within the corporation), and not a trace of openness–and by the way, the mechanical systems that used to operate brakes and acceleration in cars, remember them–they were open.

computers, even computers in cars, do all kinds of good things. no doubt these computational systems have saved lives. they aid in navigation. but that doesn’t mean we can or should look away from the kinds of deep problems they can facilitate (not “create”–we create the problems).

anyone about to cheer the wall street journal’s giving evgeny morozov a platform to speak will revert to their usual outrage at rupert murdoch’s flagship publication in today’s remarkable op-ed by “media and information industry advisor and executive” and former wsj publisher l. gordon crovitz published under the heading: “climate change and open science: in the internet age, transparency is the foundation of trust.”

i’m not going to talk about climate change here (mostly), but want to point out the clear instances of computationalist rhetoric for neoliberal purposes in the op-ed, evidenced in that amazing subtitle.

crovitz concludes his screed with this fuller articulation of what comes about as close to true newspeak as one can imagine:

The lesson of the chill of the global-warming consensus is this: Those who want to persuade others of the truth as they see it need to make their case as transparently as possible. Technology enables access to information and leads us to expect open debates, conducted honestly and in full view.

sounds great, right? but in what godforsaken sense has the climate change debate been about transparency, honesty, or openness? the “climate change debate,” in my rough estimation, consists of tens of thousands of university scientists, on the one hand, doing direct climate research on their own very limited research dollars and publishing their work, for the most part in peer-reviewed journals; and on the other hand a much larger group of people who devote their full time to debunking the work of the first group, who are funded at a rate of at least 10x that of the scientists, and who for the most part do no primary research but simply try to poke holes in the research of the other group–and this effort is so non-scientific that instead of explaining how and in what way the theories they don’t like are wrong, based not just on reviews of literature but competing research results, the goal is to dismiss all the work of the scientists by finding minor errors in the published work.

for example: if someone publishes an errant claim that the himalayas will be free of snow in 50 years, a scientific critique would include direct examination of the primary claim and an adjustment to the facts, so that we would say: “no, only 80% of the snow will be lost in 50 years” and/or, “all the snow will be gone in 100 years,” or “the snow isn’t melting at all,” or whatever. you don’t get to say the whole thing is not even worth considering just because you find a minor flaw in some of the sourcing for the original claim; that isn’t science, it’s something much more like cultural criticism, of which i’m a big fan, but i don’t use it to argue about sea level.

now about openness and computers, two vital points: in fact, many of the absolutely most critical issues in the world today that impact this issue are absolutely closed: we have for decades been fighting a largely losing battle to extract accurate data from public corporations about their damaging environmental practices; information about what china is doing to its environment is virtually non-existent; the practices of the agw crowd itself are highly secretive, unlike the scientists (who have to publish in peer-review journals to get tenure & funding, etc.). so crovitz’s claim that the debate has been “conducted honestly and in full view” is just a lie–among the most critical parts of the debate, namely the strategic development of propaganda campaigns meant to destroy climate change theory whether it is right or not; the practices of these groups include, for example, deliberately targeted rewriting of over 5000 wikipedia articles by an industry shill.

second, many of the other most critical issues in the world are almost entirely closed, including those most prized by wsj-types themselves. corporate knowledge is totally owned; the wsj view is that corporations should be able to operate completely without restrictions, up to and including fraudulent practices. one of the most obvious areas of concern is the development of pharmaceuticals and petrochemicals, about which the wsj position is no regulation whatsoever. in fact, it is kind of startling for wsj to be arguing for “openness” at all here, since its basic economic position is that the central actors in society (which for them is the market) have the right to be absolutely closed with regard to almost all their practices. and one needs look at no example more striking than the financial industry itself, in which huge amounts of data about the recent crisis are kept far beyond our reach, and even that of regulators.

so what’s the openness rhetoric doing here? i think it’s doing what it usually does: providing cover.

trust? who’s zooming who?

appendix: the article itself was so infuriating that i made a comment under my own Real Name™, reproduced below:

I want to back up and put this very simply.

Thesis: The climate change argument is that we are making changes to our environment drastic enough to cause large-scale catastrophes, and that we should try to minimize these changes to reduce the chance of catastrophe.

Each side is arguing that the other side is about to make a huge mistake (believing a theory that turns out to be wrong–climate change, or AGW). These can be described in two scenarios.

Scenario 1: The thesis is (mostly) wrong, but we act as if it’s right; suppose that 50 years from now, we have made significant changes to our world involving shifts to green energy, less deforestation, less pollution in general, and scientists reach a “reliable conclusion” that climate change would never have happened.

Scenario 2: The thesis is (mostly) right, but we act as if it’s wrong: in the next 50 years, we experience an accelerating series of catastrophes, and the science builds up more and more that we could have done something about it.

I find Scenario 2 much more frightening, and I do not see the terrible problems with Scenario 1. Furthermore, since one way of understanding the advice given is to REDUCE POLLUTION, something that I am very happy for wherever it’s happened (can we even use the word “pollution” any more?), I do not see the direct harm of taking the risk.

Furthermore, from my reading, many insurance companies, among the purest forms of market-based knowledge there is (which I would expect WSJ readers to rely on even above science), appear to also be finding that the risk of Scenario 2 outweighs the risk of Scenario 1. You can argue that they’ve been brainwashed by climate science, but it seems to me that is second-guessing a source of knowledge which free marketeers rarely question.

And frankly, I will be much happier to be alive 50 years from now with egg on my face, in a world with less pollution than we have today, rather than seeing what Scenario 2 looks like.

sometimes, the truth is just out there.

i’ve been learning a lot from evgeny morozov for a while and i’d like to think that his work fits with a slightly disturbing clarity with my recent  book the cultural logic of computation and the recent work of a number of other second (third?) wave digital theorists (eg christian fuchs, matthew hindman) suggesting that we are in need of some very rapid rethinking of our attitudes toward “the digital” per se.

i don’t care whether he wrote he wrote the lyrics to my favorite grateful dead song (for which he once used to be much more famous than for his cyberpolitical views)–i know exactly what politics jpb (and, for most of his life, bob weir too) represent. it’s not even jpb’s radical libertarianism–it’s the part of his belief-system that fits into the the same neoliberal agenda common to hilary clinton and google (and to which our alternative is china?).

today there’s an article by morozov in the wall street journal titled the digital dictatorship with the subtitle: “it’s fashionable to hold up the internet as the road to democracy and liberty in countries like Iran, but it can also be a very effective tool for quashing freedom. evgeny morozov on the myth of the techno-utopia.”

With regard to Iran, morovzov notes, for example, that

one can have “organizing without organizations”—the phrase is in the subtitle of “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky’s best-selling 2008 book about the power of social media—but one can’t have revolutions without revolutionaries.

and

The excessive attention that many Western observers devoted to the role of the Internet in the Iranian protests also reveals another, more serious impact that techno-utopianism has on how we think about the Internet in an authoritarian context. Unable to transcend the hackneyed framework of post-electoral protest, we are becoming blind to more general changes and effects that the Internet has on authoritarian societies in between elections.

a main point of morozov’s analysis is that there is no twitter revolution, something on which i’ve been insisting since anyone even made the absurd suggestion, but which apparently still needs to be shown conclusively (and yet will continue to be asserted, or i suppose may not until there actually is a g***** revolution in iran–btw, is it clear that a revolution is the right thing to want in iran? the last one didn’t turn out so well, and we in the us don’t have such clean hands there either. anyway…).

but we need to make a further point, & the one i think desperately needs to be added to the discussion: we come up with ideas like “twitter revolution” because we are orwell’s children in 1984: we are looking for ways to justify and account for the destructive and terrifying apparatus to which we have given ourselves over.

let’s face it–the number of amazingly critical issues facing our world, especially climate change, could not be more frighteningly urgent; whatever they are doing to “us,” the “instantaneous worldwide availability of every piece of knowledge” “organized for us” has not prevented the development of a know-nothing political discourse structured so tightly that one may not even mention the very political system we have been most repeatedly warned is associated with total surveillance, the one we should really be worried about (the one whose name begins with f, but which in teabag land has somehow mystically become the same system as the ones beginning with s and n, and which can only be detected via: ovens [the f/n version] or any affront to absolute corporate-capital authority [the s/f version]) and it curiously has to do with relation of corporation and state, another topic we are told not to discuss since “that government governs best which governs least,” according to a person who specifically did not mean that private corporations should be subject to that lack of rule–let alone dream of “limited liability” or “corporate person.”

while the American public is actively engaged in a rich and provocative debate about the Internet’s impact on our own society—asking how new technologies affect our privacy or how they change the way we read and think—we gloss over such subtleties when talking about the Internet’s role in authoritarian countries. It’s hard to imagine a mainstream American magazine running a cover story entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Case of China,” as the Atlantic did (without the China part) in 2008. Such attitudes almost smack of orientalism-in-reverse: While we fret about the Internet’s contribution to degrading the civic engagement of American kids, all teenagers in China or Iran are presumed to be committed and engaged global citizens who use the Web to acquaint themselves with human rights violations committed by their governments

note that both questions, directly referencing carr’s 2008 atlantic monthly article, were part of the latest (#4 if you are counting) pew future of the internet survey, which I think still fails to ask the most pressing questions, for the most part.

to be as clear as possible: the question isn’t whether or not there’s a twitter revolution: the question is the source of the pre-emptive belief in and surveillance for a twitter revolution, especially on the part of computationalists who otherwise eschew most engagements with actual world politics.

btw, as i’ll expand on in a further piece, among the most dangerous parts of computationalist ideology is that some technology or other “enables activists to do x…” Digital technologies generally enable anyone who uses them to do x. So if something enables activists, it also enables states, corporations, and activists on sides you don’t like. I think the empirical evidence is overwhelming that the narrowcasting and personalization of current computers exacerbates divisions, rather than spreading knowledge; and I challenge anyone to honestly look at contemporary us politics and say that as a whole it is showing signs of “more open democracy.” computerized open information doesn’t even prevent know-nothingism; it certainly doesn’t make “good” revolutions of “just the kind we want” more likely.

thanks to smd

the brilliant christian fuchs reflects on google buzz in a posting distributed today on nettime-l and [idc] titled “Google Buzz: Economic Surveillance – Buzz Off! The Problem of Online Surveillance and the Need for an Alternative Internet.” Among the more interesting observations including what is becoming for me one of many indications that eric schmidt is starting to appear very much like orwell’s big brother in the flesh:

In December 2009, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt commented about online privacy: “If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place.”

fuchs is one of our most articulate critics with regard to the neoliberal “positive power” that encourages us to sacrifice privacy under social pressure:

Google Buzz is part of Google’s empire of economic surveillance. It gathers information about user behaviour and user interests in order to store, assess, and sell this data to advertising clients. These surveillance practices are legally guaranteed by the Buzz privacy policy, which says for example: “When you use Google Buzz, we may record information about your use of the product, such as the posts that you like or comment on and the other users who you communicate with. This is to provide you with a better experience on Buzz and other Google services and to improve the quality of Google services. […] If you use Google Buzz on a mobile device and choose to view “nearby” posts, your location will be collected by Google” (Google Buzz Privacy Policy, February 14, 2010).

on a related front, some observers have started to notice that buzz and wave are suspiciously similar. in fact, i’d go further: wave is much more like an api than an application, and buzz is something like a gmail implementation of the wave api. but i digress.

fuchs’s complete article is online at http://fuchs.uti.at/313/

the following hour-long satirical chinese machinima video quickly garnered 10 million or more viewers. “New York City based trends research and innovation company” PSFK quotes this description from Chinese media blog DigiCha:

The film tracks the fight between The9 and Netease over the renewal rights to Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, the requirement that skulls be removed from World of Warcraft (hence the Skull Party), the bureaucratic battles between GAPP and the Ministry of Culture over the re-approval of WoW in China, the money-obsessed Uncle Yang and his Internet addiction camps and electro-shock therapy, and the attempts to impose “Green Dam Youth Escort” software on Chinese web users. The movie concludes with an impassioned speech calling for Chinese World of Warcraft players to end their silence and raise their hands in protest to fight attempts to harmonize China’s Internet and keep them away from World of Warcraft, followed by an agreement between the warring bureaucracies-GAPP and MOC–to put aside their dispute and go after Netease for more money.

PSFK also copies this comment from the video’s page on host site YouKu:

More than a few Chinese netizens have hailed The War of Internet Addiction as more valuable, and more entertaining, than Avatar…. Watching this you’ll realize that it’s not just about World of Warcraft, but about the relationship between young, tech-savvy netizens and a paternalistic, authoritarian state. The “impassioned speech” toward the end of the movie moved many viewers into tears.

the video’s in chinese, so far without 英文 小标题 for 老外:

a nice retrospective of new technology in recent Iranian politics on the BBC this week was advertised on radio in triumphalist terms, evidenced in the story’s first and second sentences. follow the story to its end, though, and discover that it’s the repressive and invasive powers of computers that are most apparent, while the democratic ones remain as chancy as all other efforts at real democracy.

They called it the “Twitter revolution.” Iran’s post-election protests showed the world the power of new media to organise and publicise opposition in a controlled society.

On the anniversary of the Islamic revolution in 1979, once again Twitter, Facebook and other internet tools could be crucial in helping the opposition organise another major protest.

Since Iran’s disputed election in June of last year, the cyber war between government and opposition has taken on a whole new dimension.

“Absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented” – that was the role of the internet in Iran’s election dispute according to Hamid Dabashi, who presents an opposition webcast to Iran from New York every week.

His webcast is broadcast on YouTube, and his staff say it then goes “viral” – spread across Iran by other websites, CDs and Bluetooth links between mobile phones.

Mr Dabashi described the role of the internet in helping to organise the huge post-election demonstrations.

“Nobody called for it except on the internet,” he said.

“Cyberspace was buzzing with information that there was to be a demonstration from this square to that square. As a result if there is a leadership… it is really the networking that the internet has made possible.”

Raw power

Just over a week after the election, the footage of a young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, bleeding to death from bullet wounds was sent from a mobile phone and relayed around the world.

The opposition believes she was shot by one of the government’s Basij militia.

The Iranian government continues to deny responsibility, but the pictures have swayed opinion internationally.

That raw power has been noticed by governments.

The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, hosted a conference recently on it in Washington and proposed new support to try to free the internet from censorship.

The Iranian government has become far more sophisticated in its handling of the internet as well.

A day after the election, Iran closed the internet down entirely for half an hour, then slowly loosened its grip, as the authorities struggled to gain control.

“If you look at what was going on after the election, it was very clear that they had no solid plan in place,” explained Austin Heap of the Censorship Research Center in San Francisco.

“The way they were filtering, what they were filtering. Just basic things like the speed the internet was operating at would change day by day, week by week. And if you look at just the past three months their filtering attempts have become more co-ordinated and organised.”

Crude blocking

Mr Heap has been writing an anti-censorship program, Haystack, which he hopes to spread to internet users in Iran.

My experience from two years in Iran was that both sides struggled to gain the upper hand.

Any program to prevent filtering would have a limited life, as the government eventually found a way to block it.

But at the same time the filtering system was crude and ineffective.

In the turmoil that followed the election, that “mood swing” became even more dramatic.

One morning the whole BBC website would be inaccessible, and even usually secure connections were blocked.

On other days the controls would be mysteriously lifted, enabling us to use the internet to broadcast live from our office in Tehran.

Now Iran says it has organized a new “cyber army” with a more sophisticated approach.

Supporters tracked

According to experts I spoke to in the United States, the Revolutionary Guards have drafted, sometimes against their will, some of Iran’s bright young internet-savvy generation.

Not only are they helping to block opposition communications and track down opposition supporters from their use of the web, they have taken the battle to the enemy.

The cyber army claimed responsibility recently for what Mr Heap said was a well co-ordinated attack on Twitter and other websites.

“The attacks were very well organised,” he told me.

“They had back-up plans and back-up back-up plans, all of which got enacted. It was clear with the timing and the co-ordination that people had planned this ahead and were trying to make a statement.”

The battle for control of the web is carried out between governments and individuals.

Each new censorship tool used by Iran or other authoritarian countries is taken up as a challenge by many thousands of young computer experts around the world.

It is a game of cat and mouse, likely to change the face of the internet for the indefinite future.

Cyber battle has become cyber war, and there is no sign of a ceasefire.

from The New York Times, Feb 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/books/10mason.html?pagewanted=2&emc=eta1

A Calculus of Writing, Applied to a Classic

By Larry Rohter
Published: February 9, 2010

…

In person, Mr. [Zachary] Mason is extremely soft-spoken and tends to talk in a flat, unemotional tone, though he does note with regret that he “turned down Google two weeks before their I.P.O.” (He’s now employed at a Silicon Valley start-up.) He approaches literature almost as if it were a branch of science, governed by laws that are quantifiable and predictable, as when he talks of devising an algorithm, later discarded, to determine an optimum chapter order for his novel or when he compares writing to the annealing of metals.

“What I’m interested in scientifically is understanding thought with computational precision,” he explained. “I mean, the romantic idea that poetry comes from this deep inarticulable ur-stuff is a nice idea, but I think it is essentially false. I think the mind is articulable and the heart probably knowable. Unless you’re a mystic and believe in a soul, which I don’t, you really don’t have any other conclusion you can reach besides that the mind is literally a computer.”

…

As a result, “The Lost Books” also came to the attention of Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus. After acquiring rights to republish the book, he and Mr. Mason set about fashioning version 2.0 of the novel, which is two chapters shorter, drops the tongue-in-cheek author’s biography in which Mr. Mason described himself as a “professor of Archaeocryptography and Paleomathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford” and also eliminates the original preface and appendix.

“I think you could see his artificial-intelligence training more in the apparatus for the first edition, and that has sort of been expunged, in a way,” Mr. Galassi said. “There were some things that seemed overly complicated and distanced the reader from the magic of the storytelling itself. This way, without the protective layering he didn’t really need, you’re really dealing with the myths more immediately.”

thanks to jw