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Category: Newsletter (page 17 of 28)

Archives of the Exolymph email newsletter.

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.

April 12, 2016

Release the Panama Papers, Please

Jack Smith IV on Twitter, linking to an article that I quote further below.

The massive corpus of documents called the Panama Papers has been reported on, selectively, but not released for public review. I have a problem with this. I don’t think the journalists involved are malicious, but I also don’t trust them, for all the regular reasons why I don’t trust people who control the flow of information. Craig Murray’s excoriation of “western corporate media” overstates the case a bit, but he does a good job of summarizing the obvious concerns.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists coordinated this shindig. In response to criticism like Murray’s, the head of ICIJ told Wired “that the media organizations have no plans to release the full dataset, WikiLeaks-style, which he argues would expose the sensitive information of innocent private individuals along with the public figures on which the group’s reporting has focused.” Again, I don’t doubt that the ICIJ is a reputable organization, and their data analysis sounds quite rigorous. But this gated approach is fundamentally dangerous.

I summed up my initial thoughts on Twitter: “Yes, opening up the data would compromise the privacy of innocents. I think transparency is worth the collateral damage. Tradeoffs!” Also: “True accountability doesn’t take place in silos.” I am by no means an open-data absolutist, but I think this is a case where the benefits outweigh the costs. Cybersecurity reporter JM Porup went further in The Daily Dot:

“Whoever funds the investigation affects what gets covered — and what gets emphasized — and what doesn’t. As Wikileaks pointed out, USAID funded the attack story on Russian President Vladimir Putin. What stories did not get funded because they might make America and its allies look bad? This is a subtle form of economic censorship, but censorship all the same.”

Given all of this, I’m annoyed that the Columbia Journalism Review posted a sanctimonious article condemning critics of the ICIJ’s closed-data scheme as conspiracy theorists, lumping all of us in with Alex Jones. Jack Murtha wrote, “What’s most striking is how a misunderstanding of how the news media works can simultaneously condemn proven muckrakers and empower state-run propaganda arms.” Uh, no. I don’t think anyone misunderstands how the news media works — journalism is actually very straightforward at an object level. We just disagree with your methods, sir.

As LA Times reporter Matt Pearce quipped on Twitter, “Nobody loves a gatekeeper.”

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 7, 2016

Slow Down & Don’t Confiscate My Graphical User Interface

Exploratory bot. Photo by Takuya Oikawa.

Here’s a fun headline from The Register: “‘Devastating’ bug pops secure doors at airports, hospitals”. I’m sure we’ve all read similar reports before! Enjoy this snippet of the story, for flavor…

“Criminals could waltz into secure zones in airports and government facilities by hacking and jamming open doors from remote computers over the Internet, DVLabs researcher Ricky Lawshae says. […] Lawshae says the attacks, which can open every door in a building, are possible because of a command injection vulnerability in a LED blinking lights service.”

Wait, what? Why is an “LED blinking lights service” hackable? Allow me to note, very unoriginally, that the Internet of Things is dumb. Not every tool or appliance needs to have wifi access jammed into its design specs. The much-mocked “smart juice” startup is the pinnacle of this awful trend.

I have similar feelings about the bot services craze. People seem to be jumping on this technology without stopping to ponder how it might turn out. When your next venture capital round depends on glossing over potential problems, it’s easy to assume that the impact of your harebrained scheme will be beneficial.

“Conversational commerce” isn’t quite as problematic as the Internet of Things, because it doesn’t pose a security threat (at least not off the top of my head). But people are still building things without considering whether their chosen medium fits the stated purpose of the tool. The last thing I want from an app is a replica of the phone call, this time rendered in text.

I demand clickable buttons! Give me a GUI or give me death! On the other hand, maybe I’m a dirty Luddite. Perhaps I should resign myself to relearning how to interact with computers every couple of years. I’m not against experimentation — what futurist could be? — but my mood is decidedly curmudgeonly tonight. Also, fuck Snapchat.

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 31, 2016

Anti-Nausea Luxury Engineering

Photo by JD Hancock.

A human is a complex and finicky device. You can’t just buy one and let it be. They need daily care and maintenance. A responsible owner also has to keep an eye out for patches — security updates and plugins for boosted functionality are available frequently. It’s important to stay current! Listen, I’m not trying to discourage you. Just consider your level of commitment before making a purchase. These are very special gadgets.

You’re visiting us for the first time today, right? We encourage first-time companion buyers to start with a basic model. Don’t worry, you can always trade it in for credit when you’re ready to upgrade to one of the high-spec humans! Get your sea legs, so to speak. No, really, we’ve engineered nausea out of the latest genomic algorithm. Many of our clients take their humans sailing. We’re even considering a communal cruise! Let me know if you’re acquainted with any good yacht brokers.

My apologies, sir, I’m getting off-topic. Tell me what features you’re looking for.

Ahh, that’s a common request. Yes, we have a variety of decorative options. But we can’t replicate your dead wife! Ha! Strictly joking, of course. I’ve been skimming a history module about proto-human marriage rituals. Norms were very much changing before we came along and upended their world. Poor little guys.

Do you want to tour the showroom? We’ve got some real beauties in the shop right now! Don’t take what I said about starting with a basic model too seriously — as long as you’re willing to put in the time… It’s very rewarding! I can show you a few testimonials from our other clients. They’re very pleased with their humans.

March 29, 2016

A Hard Day’s Night of Fake Work

Original photo by R Pollard.

I’ve been playing a lot of Game Dev Tycoon, a business simulator in which you start and build a game development company. (Hat tip to Way Spurr-Chen!)

Sonya: “This game is so addictive.”
Alex: “That’s how you know it’s good!”

It is bizarre that I come home after work, usually drained from relating to people all day, and I want to pretend to go right back to work. A business simulator is most compelling when it mimics real professional stress. Game Dev Tycoon‘s appeal is the edge-of-your-seat anxiety that arises from owning a hypothetical small-to-medium business. You have to watch your revenue like a hawk, balance decisions about future investment against the necessity of meeting payroll, and respond to the vagaries of the market.

In his book Play Money, journalist and MMORPG expert Julian Dibbell talks about this trend — the convergence of work and play — in what you might call “post-developed” countries. He hypothesizes that it’s a condition of late capitalism. When your daily tasks consist of manipulating symbols on a computer screen, the content of work starts to closely resemble the content of recreation. Or vice versa?

Facebook, Tinder, and their ilk bring everyone’s social life into the fold as well. Your entire experience of the world can be directed through a carefully designed software interface, constructed to guide you toward certain actions and away from others.

For the most part, none of this is new. Board games and card games are also best when they involve resource management and strategic goal attainment. But the internet and ubiquitous computing greatly increase the scale of our reliance on interactive Platforms™ for employment, entertainment, and community.

March 27, 2016

Software Meets Capitalism: Interview with Steve Klabnik

Old woman working at a loom. Photo by silas8six.

I interviewed Steve Klabnik via email. If you’re part of the open-source world, you might recognize his name. Otherwise I’ll let him introduce himself. We discussed economics, technological unemployment, and software.

Exolymph: The initial reason I reached out is that you’re a technologist who tweets about labor exploitation and other class issues. I’m currently fascinated by how tech and society influence each other, and I’m particularly interested in the power jockeying within open-source communities. You seem uniquely situated to comment on these issues.

Originally I planned to launch right into questions in this email, but then I start opening your blog posts in new tabs, and now I need a little more time still. But! Here’s a softball one for starters: How would you introduce yourself to an oddball group of futurists (which is my readership)?

Steve Klabnik: It’s funny that you describe this one as a softball, because it should be, yet I think it’s actually really tough. I find it really difficult to sum up a person in a few words; there’s just so much you miss out on. Identity is a precarious and complex topic.

I generally see myself as someone who’s fundamentally interdisciplinary. I’m more about the in-betweens than I am about any specific thing. The discipline that I’m most trained in is software; it’s something I’ve done for virtually my entire life, and I have a degree in it. But software by itself is not that interesting to me. It’s the stuff that you can do with software, the impact that it has on our world, questions of ethics, of social interaction. This draws a connection to my second favorite thing: philosophy. I’m an amateur here, unfortunately. I almost got a higher degree in this stuff, but life has a way of happening. More specifically, I’m deeply enthralled with the family of philosophy that is colloquially referred to as “continental” philosophy, though I’m not sure I find that distinction useful. My favorites in this realm are Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marx, and Deleuze. I find that their philosophical ideas can have deep implications for software, its place in the world, and society at large.

Since we live under capitalism, “who are you” is often conflated with “what do you do for work”. As far as that goes, I work for Mozilla, the company that makes Firefox. More specifically, I write documentation for Rust, a programming language that we and a broader community have developed. I literally wrote the book on it 🙂 Mozilla has a strong open-source ethic, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve ended up working there; I do a lot of open-source work. On GitHub, a place where open-source developers share their code, this metric says that I’m the twenty-ninth most active contributor, with 4,362 contributions in the last 365 days. Before Rust, I was heavily involved with the Ruby on Rails community, and the broader Ruby community at large. I still maintain a few packages in Ruby.

Exolymph: To be fair, I described it as a softball question precisely because of the capitalist shortcut you mentioned, although I’m not sure I would have articulated it like that. Darn predictable social conditioning.

What appeals to you about open source? What frustrates you about open source?

Steve Klabnik: I love the idea of working towards a commons. I’d prefer to write software that helps as many people as possible.

What frustrates me is how many people can’t be paid to do this kind of work. I’ve been lucky to been able to feed myself while working on open source. Very, very lucky. But for most, it’s doing your job without pay. If we truly want a commons, we have to figure out how to fund it.

Exolymph: I’ve been reading a bunch of your blog posts. I’m curious about how you feel about working in an industry — and perhaps doing work personally — that obviates older jobs that people used to count on.

Steve Klabnik: It is something that I think about a lot. This is something that’s a fundamental aspect of capitalism, and has always haunted it: see the Luddites, for example. This problem is very complex, but here’s one aspect of it: workers don’t get to capture the benefits of increased productivity, at least not directly. Let’s dig into an example to make this more clear.

Let’s say that I’m a textile worker, like the Luddite. Let’s make up some numbers to make the math easy: I can make one yard of fabric per hour with my loom. But here’s the catch: I’m paid by the hour, not by the amount of fabric I make. This is because I don’t own the loom; I just work here. So, over the course of a ten hour day, I make ten yards of fabric, and am paid a dollar for this work.

Next week, when I come to work, a new Loom++ has been installed in my workstation. I do the same amount of work, but can produce two yards of fabric now. At the end of my ten hour day, I’ve made twenty yards of fabric: a 2x increase! But I’m still only being paid my dollar. In other words, the owner of the factory gets twice as much fabric for the same price, but I haven’t seen any gain here.

(Sidebar: There’s some complexity in this that does matter, but this is an interview, not a book 🙂 So for example, yes, the capitalist had to pay for the Loom++ in the first place. This is a concept Marx calls “fixed versus variable capital”, and this is a long enough answer already, so I’ll just leave it at that.)

Now, the idea here is that the other factories will also install Loom++s as well, and at least one of the people who’s selling the cloth will decide that 1.75x as much profit is better, so they’ll undercut the others, and eventually, the price of cloth will fall in half, to match the new productivity level. Now, as a worker, I have access to cheaper cloth. But until that happens, I’m not seeing a benefit, yet the capitalist is collecting theirs. Until they invest in a Loom2DX, with double the productivity of the Loom++, and the cycle starts anew.

Yet we, as workers, haven’t actually seen the benefits work out the way they should. There’s nothing that guarantees that it will, other than the religion of economists. And the working class has seen their wages stagnate, while productivity soars, especially recently. Here is a study that gets cited a lot, in articles like this one.

“From 1973 to 2013, hourly compensation of a typical (production/nonsupervisory) worker rose just 9 percent while productivity increased 74 percent. This breakdown of pay growth has been especially evident in the last decade, affecting both college- and non-college-educated workers as well as blue- and white-collar workers. This means that workers have been producing far more than they receive in their paychecks and benefit packages from their employers.”

We haven’t been really getting our side of the deal.

Anyway.

So, this is a futurist blog, yet I’ve just been talking about looms. Why? Well, two reasons: First, technologists are the R&D department that takes the loom, looks at it, and makes the Loom++. It’s important to understand this, and to know in our heart of hearts that under capitalism, yes, our role is to automate people out of jobs. Understanding a problem is the first step towards solving it. But second, it’s to emphasize that this isn’t something that’s specific to computing or anything. It’s the fundamental role of technology. We like to focus on the immediate benefit (“We have Loom++es now!!!”) and skip over the societal effects (“Some people are going to make piles of money from this and others may lose their jobs”). Technologists need to start taking the societal effects more seriously. After all, we’re workers too.

I’m at a technology conference in Europe right now, and on the way here, I watched a movie, The Intern. The idea of the movie is basically, “Anne Hathaway runs Etsy (called About the Fit in the movie), and starts an internship program for senior citizens. Robert De Niro signs up because he’s bored with retirement, and surprise! Culture clash.” It was an okay movie. But one small bit of backstory of De Niro’s character really struck me. It’s revealed that before he retired, he used to work in literally the same building as About the Fit is in now. He worked for a phone book company. It’s pretty obvious why he had to retire. The movie is basically a tale of what we’re talking about here.

Exolymph: I’m also curious about what you’d propose to help society through the Computing Revolution (if you will) and its effect on “gainful employment” opportunities.

Steve Klabnik: Okay, so, I’m not saying that we need to keep phone books around so that De Niro can keep his job. I’m also not saying that we need to smash the looms. What I am saying is that in a society which is built around the idea that you have to work to live, and that also rapidly makes people’s jobs obsolete, is a society in which a lot of people are going to be in a lot of pain. We could be taking those productivity benefits and using them to invest back in people. It might be leisure time, it might be re-training; it could be a number of things. But it’s not something that’s going to go away. It’s a question that we as society have to deal with.

I don’t think the pursuit of profits over people is the answer.

Go follow Steve on Twitter and check out his website.

March 26, 2016

Surveillance Status Quo

“Every country knows [that telecoms networks are] vulnerable, but no one wants to fix the problem — because they exploit that vulnerability, too.” — Robert Kolker in a Bloomberg article about StingRays

Here we’re confronted with the problem of incentives. Police are incentivized to spy on citizens, whether innocent or guilty. The success of law enforcement is measured by arrests, not by the population’s peace and happiness. Definitely not by how well civil liberties have been protected. None of that fits in a spreadsheet! Nation-states are incentivized to spy on each other, for the sake of regular ol’ espionage as well as obtaining commercial secrets. It’s desirable to keep an eye on the neighbors. What are they up to? When and where are they going to sell their newest invention?

Photo via Thierry Ehrmann.

Maybe this sounds paranoid, but it’s not. The US increasingly relies on its information economy, which means that data and insight are both especially valuable. Other developed countries are similarly beholden to ideas and intellectual property. One of the profound dangers posed by China is its disregard for patents and copyrights, and its subsequent explosion of innovation. Being surpassed is America’s direst fear. We need to make ourselves great again, right?!

I’ve written about apathy before. It’s the enemy of the entrepreneur and the activist. In a world full or products and causes, it’s tough to cajole someone into caring. Who has the time? And, more crucially, who has the correct incentive structure? Mister Average Joe doesn’t need to worry about surveillance — it doesn’t impact him immediately or concretely — and consequently he simply doesn’t bother himself with the subject.

Every time I say something like this, I’m accused on complacency. And I guess that’s fair. I’m resigned to reality, and I don’t try to agitate against the status quo. Selfishness makes me more interested in surviving and excelling than in overturning power structures.

“I said yes to the mandatory government implants […] because I, like everybody else, just wanted to be safe.” — short story by Maverix75

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