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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.

September 25, 2016

Personalities, Bought and Sold

Sara Watson wrote about the contradictory selves that each of us scatters around on the internet:

I catch glimpses of her in sidebars and banners, in the branded ads creeping into my infinite scrolls. She surfaces in recommendations and personalized results — fleeting encounters unless captured by screenshot.

She is a pixelated, automated portrait of myself. She is fragments, an amalgamation I see in the digital mirror. She’s me, now through a glass darkly.

She is a pastiche of my patched-together digital detritus. She is my browsing history, my status updates, my GPS locations, my responses to marketing mail, my credit card transactions, and my public records.

Artwork by Matt Lyon.

As a pretty public person who makes a living writing (or at least tries to), I struggle with this. I don’t care about the personal effect that ~surveillance capitalism~ has on me (I do care about the political effects, don’t worry!) because let’s be real, the personal effect is nil. I just get advertised to a little more effectively. But it does frustrate me that my public persona is so fractured.

There’s cyberpunk me, which you get exposed to via this newsletter, and which also comes out in the chat group, on Twitter, and on Hacker News. There’s business-y me on Twitter, my website, and occasionally Facebook. But I have a whole separate sphere of interests centered on makeup and other “girly” stuff, expressed via Instagram and Reddit.

I feel really weird when I “cross the streams” by talking about makeup on Twitter or whatever. I’m not presenting something cohesive, from a branding perspective. And since clients come from everywhere, that potentially threatens my livelihood, or at least de-optimizes it.

There are always tradeoffs. The internet and social media have been such a boon to me, especially since I do not function well in normal office environments, but constantly pitching myself to anyone who drops by is exhausting.

Globalization in action. Photo by Roel Hemkes.

September 19, 2016

The Internet, Globalization, and You

Beau Gunderson’s $10 Patreon reward prompt was, “How does living in a cyberpunk world affect our self-determination?” So first let’s talk about regular ol’ self-determination. There are a couple ways to interpret this: sovereign or individual.

The poli-sci version of self-determination is that the citizens of a country get to choose their own mode of government and get to define their constitution. Wikipedia says, this “cardinal principle in modern international law […] states that nations, based on respect for the principle of equal rights and fair equality of opportunity, have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no interference.”

The individual form of self-determination is a similar idea, but scaled down — the right and ability to direct your own life. If you examine this closely it’s an obvious illusion, but because free will doesn’t feel like an illusion, we pretend that it exists. I am the master of my fate! It’s a more practical attitude.

Sovereign Self-Determination

Europe and the United States are seeing a split in public sentiment between corporate elite globalism and protectionist plebeian nationalism. I frankly don’t know how this is playing out in South America, Asia, Africa, Australia, etc, etc — but whither goes the USA, the rest of the world tends to follow.

I’d bet on the elite winning over time, and thus the power of governments relative to giant transnational companies weakening and weakening. I mean, hey, at least Cthulhu swims left. But that might take a while, so perhaps global warming will force a sea change first? (Pun very intended.)

The internet is a globalizing force, and it’s so economically compelling that no country or group of people can resist it forever. The winner-take-all dynamics of internet businesses help create new hegemonies that transcend borders. I do want to note that there is significant upside! But upside is not my beat 😉

Personal Self-Determination

I said we pretend to have free will, so even though I don’t believe it exists in a philosophical sense, I’m just going to use conventional language.

Does a cyberpunk world erode the choices available to you? The internet substantially empowers huge companies (think Google, and Facebook) but it also substantially empowers individuals.

You can talk to (almost) anyone, broadcast whatever you want (unless it’s child porn, but I’m okay with that restriction), and sell just about anything anonymously (provided a certain level of opsec prowess — unfortunately this one does apply to child porn). Those caveats don’t negate that more opportunities are available than ever before.

I do worry that I’m over-indexing on my own reality. I have lots of cultural capital, a middle-class safety net, and live in the a place full of jobs. Elsewhere in my country and probably yours as well, there’s a demographic that is saturated with despair.

Opportunities are available. Being equipped to take the opportunities is another thing, yeah?

Header photo by Roel Hemkes.

September 13, 2016

Cyber Arms Racing

Cybersecurity researcher Bruce Schneier published a provocatively titled blog post — “Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet” — which can either be interpreted as shocking or blasé, depending on your perspective. The gist is that sources within high-level web infrastructure companies told Schneier that they’re facing increasingly sophisticated DDoS attacks:

“These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they’re used to seeing. They last longer. They’re more sophisticated. And they look like probing. One week, the attack would start at a particular level of attack and slowly ramp up before stopping. The next week, it would start at that higher point and continue. And so on, along those lines, as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure.”

Schneier goes on to speculate that the culprit is a state actor, likely Russia or China. So, I have a few reactions:

1) I would be very surprised in the opposite case, if Schneier asserted that no one was trying to figure out how to take down the internet. Just like the executives of public companies have a fiduciary duty to be as evil as possible in order to make money for their shareholders, government agencies have a mandate to be as evil as possible in order to maintain global power.

When I say “evil” I don’t mean that they’re malicious. I mean they end up doing evil things. And then their adversaries do evil things too, upping the ante. Etc, etc.

2) Schneier’s disclosure may end up in the headlines, but the disclosure itself is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Venkatesh Rao said (in reference to Trump, but it’s still relevant), “It takes very low energy to rattle media into sound and fury, ‘break the Internet’ etc. Rattling the deep state takes 10,000x more energy.”

3) I don’t expect whoever is figuring out how to “DDoS ALL THE THINGS!” to actually do it anytime soon. Take this with a grain of salt, since I’m not a NatSec expert by any means, but it would be counterproductive for China, Russia, or the United States itself to take the internet offline under normal circumstances. “Normal circumstances” is key — the expectations change if an active physical conflict breaks out, as some Hacker News commenters noted.

I suspect that being able to take down the internet is somewhat akin to having nukes — it’s a capability that you’d like your enemies to be aware of, but not necessarily one that you want to exercise.

I also like what “Random Guy 17” commented on Schneier’s original post: “An attack on a service is best done by an attacker that doesn’t need that service.”

August 18, 2016

Expansive Transhumanism, Already in Practice

As his $10 Patreon reward, Jeremy Southard asked me to write about transhumanism. So that’s been in the back of my mind for a few days. The trendy H+ story this week is DuoSkin, hyped by MIT Media Lab:

“DuoSkin draws from the aesthetics found in metallic jewelry-like temporary tattoos to create on-skin devices which resemble jewelry. DuoSkin devices enable users to control their mobile devices, display information, and store information on their skin while serving as a statement of personal style.”

Via the MIT Media Lab website.

DuoSkin is pretty and I would love a pink version, but I can’t get excited about the technology. I’m sure there are useful applications — a clandestine version could add to the espionage toolkit — but this cosmetic rendition seems a little gimmicky.

If you look at past Exolymph dispatches on transhumanism, you’ll notice that I’m more drawn to examinations of ways that we already augment our bodies than to speculative developments. Here’s why: I have zero interest in gadgets — what fascinates me is the sociology, the power relationships, the humanness of how we react to new tools. (This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with liking tech for its own sake.)

The most important transhumanist technology to emerge in the past fifty years is the internet, or more specifically networked computers. It’s a bit boring, since we’re all so used to living with it now, but the ability to store and access information at this scale is unprecedented.

I guess people don’t think of the internet as transhumanist because it’s not physically integrated, but to me that just seems like an implementation detail. For example, I store 90% of what I read online so I can reference it later. Effortlessly. My archive is quite literally a personal memory backup that I can keyword-search.

But I’m a power user. You can argue that instead of localized, individual-specific augmentations (whether targeting the body or the mind), the future is about massive crowdsourced extensions. Think Wikipedia.

Pokémon Go also loosely fits into this category — is your fitness assistant an app personalized for you, or a clever game featuring beloved childhood characters that your whole social circle uses? Which sounds more 2016?

Actually, I’m calling it now — augmented reality and transhumanism will merge beyond sensical separation within fifty years. Or maybe I just have a particularly expansive notion of what counts as transhumanism?

But consider this: Pokémon Go, widely lauded as the first consumer-focused augmented-reality success, would not be possible if most people didn’t already have smartphones in their pockets. Now imagine the mini computer is embedded in your hand, or your retina, or what-have-you. In what meaningful way would augmented reality be separate from transhumanism?

It may seem like pure semantics, but language reflects and shaped how we think about things. Our bodies are already less discrete than we think they are.

August 7, 2016

Arboreal Networking: The Internet of Trees

We gave the Internet to the trees. Their cyberspace is alien, they grow roots through it instead of moving about, commune in giant rhizomes

You plant a kread, a treeform avatar in one of their groves and they talk to it, a slow intertwining of roots, exchange of virtual chemicals

krëad: (n) from kreîas (meat), analogous to dryad, except it’s flesh trying to talk to wood, a tree of bones, meat, skin and hair

— Eye of Beholder / @allgebrah on Twitter

Photo by Hitchster.

Redwood trees are among the tallest in the world. Come to the northern coast of California, and visit some of our national parks. It is difficult to convey in words just how massive the trees are. Just how ancient they are. I suspect that most Exolymph readers are atheists, as am I. But when standing beneath a centenarian redwood tree, it’s easy to understand why early humans ascribed spirits to these organisms.

The modern version of a spirit is a computational mechanism. That’s how science conceives of our brains — the metaphor of a biological machine fits decently well.

Back to redwoods.

It might be intuitive that such tall, heavy trees would have deep roots. They don’t. Instead, redwoods have shallow roots (one of the reasons why they need plentiful water nearby). Their roots stretch out horizontally, intertwining with other redwoods in their forest. The whole city of trees is woven together beneath the soil. Storms and heavy winds are easier to withstand.

Illustration by Emilia Varga.

The Tree of Life is a recurring religious archetype, a subset of the “sacred tree” mytheme. Redwoods are evergreen, but deciduous trees visually embody the seasons, mirroring the Maiden-Mother-Crone cycle as their fresh green leaves turn gold, dry out, and fall to the cold ground.

Industrialization didn’t wipe out the resonance of this metaphor. Now that we’ve reached the digital age, how will we bring the tree mythos up to speed? Is that desirable, or should we treasure the old, slow-moving beings as they are?

The Anthropocene epoch is not always kind to old, slow-moving beings.

What if we put together a multi-entity Tree of Life that was in fact an arboreal internet? Linking together all the trees into one vast system that thrived on information rather than nutrients? (It’s been posited that some trees already have a version of this.)

In the Judeo-Christian canon, one of the functions of the Tree of Life is to induct humans into the way of knowledge, a fundamentally divine domain — which ruins our innocence. The current internet performs that task well enough already.

Illustration by Eddy Adams.

Progress Is Unpredictable & Therefore Frightening

I write this newsletter because I’m scared. I’m terrified. The nature of the future is to be uncertain, and I know that I can’t change that. All I can do is prepare myself. All I can do is get better at coping with surprise. I want to be able to tackle a world based on different underlying assumptions. Maybe I won’t figure out how to do it.

Image via ▓▒░ TORLEY ░▒▓.

I was born in the mid-1990s. When I came of age, computers were already ubiquitous and the internet was well-populated and lively. My first experience with online discourse came from the forums on Neopets. I’ve been addicted ever since. There is something incredibly intoxicating about the power to command and give attention based solely on ideas.

I didn’t witness or participate in the sea change from a world of paper to a digital universe. Sure, I lived an analogue life until about eleven, but omnipresent connection has always been available during my conscious personhood, and it started to scale up with the spread of smartphones in 2008. A world of stories and data in which you can immerse yourself whenever you wish — that seems natural to me.

What will be the next paradigm shift? The next communication medium that devastates incumbents, or the next layer of infrastructure that obviates the current stack? Virtual reality? Artificial intelligence? Wearable computers? A combination of all three? Or something that hasn’t occurred to me, something the mainstream tech companies aren’t working on?

My explicit intention with Exolymph is to explore possibilities — to evaluate trends and propose twists and turns in the human condition. I do this for selfish reasons. Sure, it’s entertaining, but as a person with last-century skills (writing), I’m desperate to anchor myself in the future. I’m hoping to build an advantage today that I can leverage tomorrow.

Tag: internet (page 2 of 2)

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