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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.

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?

March 25, 2016

Mad Max but Computers Instead of Cars

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

Tonight I watched Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981). The Mad Max world is dystopian, but not at all cyberpunk. As you may know if you watched 2015’s blockbuster Fury Road, the series postulates a universe — confined to the Australian Outback — where some kind of apocalypse has taken place and both gasoline and water are incredibly scarce resources. Especially gas.

The Outback — rechristened the Wasteland — is ruled by the equivalent of motorcycle gangs, who appear to be on meth all the time. (In the case of The Road Warrior, vaguely sadomasochistic motorcycle gangs, but that’s beside the point.) A few communities that actually deserve the label “community” have popped up, and they’re targeted by the psycho gangs.

Even though Mad Max is the opposite of a hyper-networked cybersphere, it poses some interesting questions for those of us who are fascinated by an oppressive computer-mediated future. As I see it, these are the issues to ponder:

What’s the scarce resource? Possible answers: attention, privacy, solitude.
Who are the strongman groups? Possible answers: law enforcement, hackers, corporations (especially corporations).
How can the genuine communities protect themselves? Possible answers: I’m really not sure.

I know it’s futile to end anything with a question, but I’d genuinely like to know what you think. I’m keen on protecting the communities that I participate in, but I guess I’m not feeling optimistic tonight. Email me?

February 14, 2016

Alan Turing & Incongruities

Here’s a snippet of Linda Bierd’s poem “Evolution”, which is about Alan Turing:

“He was halfway between the War’s last enigmas
and the cyanide apple — two bites —
that would kill him. Halfway along the taut wires
that hummed between crime
and pardon, indecency and privacy. How do solutions,
chemical, personal, stable, unstable,
harden into shapes? And how do shapes break?”

Alan Turing’s story is pretty well-known, so I won’t rehash it in detail. He was the father of modern computer science, by all accounts a brilliant and extraordinary man. Tragically, Turing was broken by the state that he helped save from Hitler’s ambition. He committed suicide a couple of weeks before his forty-second birthday.

Turing’s desk. Image via techboy_t.

What do we owe to our heroes? The ones who don’t die prematurely often end up disappointing us. For example, many people were introduced to the practice of rationality by Richard Dawkins, who seems to have lost his shit. (He thinks that Ahmed Mohamed, the Muslim kid who brought a clock to school and was accused of having a bomb, is some kind of scam artist. Don’t focus on whether that’s plausible — Dawkins’ obsession is bizarre regardless.)

Rachel Nabors, an animation expert and all-around wise lady, cautioned community-builders:

“Even the people we respect the most are flawed and can perpetuate flawed thinking, from data to ethics. When I reflected on my own life choices, what I want to be and do in the web community, I realized that I was setting myself up to be a gatekeeper, a person others go through to get to something, and that I, too, am flawed.”

We live in a world of dictators and persecution. And yet there are leaders like Nabors, who are careful not to exploit their power, even among peers in a niche professional subculture (web animators). One reality contains many sub-realities, and we must wander between them.

February 5, 2016

Open-Source Squabbling

Nadia Eghbal wrote an interesting overview of the history of software development — the nuts and bolts of how the future is being iterated — with a focus on open-source programming. In the 1980s:

“Sequoia Capital funded Oracle to make database software. IBM hired Microsoft to write MS-DOS, an operating system for their PC.

Suddenly, the idea of free software seemed insane. Software was a commodity; if you could make millions of dollars charging for it, why wouldn’t you?

Writing free software became a political act of defiance, and a strong counterculture rose around it. If you wrote open source, you weren’t like Oracle or Microsoft. People who wrote free software believed in its potential as a platform, not a product.”

Now open-source software is a significant part of the status quo — every single computer-based company uses it, and the startup ecosystem would flounder without it — but the idealistic pull of OSS remains strong. People join because they want a communal project as much as they simply want to build something. However, trying to generate consensus is incredibly frustrating and the effort is often fruitless. Eventually, project maintainers must make and enforce decisions.

Currently there’s a big hubbub among contributors to the programming language Ruby about whether to adopt a code of conduct. It seems silly to me — the human race invented rules for a reason — but people are very distressed. The worry is that controversial developers will be attacked unfairly, that they’ll fall prey to petty “SJW” vendettas. On the other hand, proponents of codes of conduct point out that articulating anti-abuse norms is powerful.

Ideologically, I tend to side with codes of conduct, but I also believe in self-determination. If the majority of the Ruby community doesn’t want one, and open-source initiatives are specifically meant to be defined by participants… what’s the fair solution? Should a project maintainer decide one way or the other, as I indicated above?

January 29, 2016

Conspiracy Theories Suppressing Conspiracy Theories

Today’s dispatch was contributed by Ken Rodriguez.

I recently watched the first installment of The X-Files’ new six-part series. In order to avoid spoilers, let’s say that the conclusion is surprising and expected at the same time. The government is hiding more — and less — from us than we think (according to the show’s plot). Watching it reminded me of a thought that I had several months ago (when no one was encouraging me to write about it). I was wondering whether “the powers that be” allow us to have a certain amount of entertainment that criticizes government and corporate intervention in our private lives. Are movies and shows like The Machine, Breaking Bad, and Idiocracy rationed at a high enough frequency to let us blow off some steam, but not so often that we can keep the concepts in our collective minds and put the pieces together? Is there more than an element of truth in what these shows contain?

Scully and Mulder depicted by Taylor Rose; $30 on Etsy.

The American public is maddeningly forgetful and inattentive. We see it in our lionization of figures such as Oliver North, George Gordon Liddy, and Howard Dean. Even Patty Hearst and OJ Simpson have a certain cachet. We scare ourselves with movies like The Matrix and Terminator, happy to idly ponder if we’re really being controlled by something outside of ourselves — but then we go home, crack open a beer, watch the game, and go to bed. We go on with our lives because, really, what are we going to do about it? We need food. We need shelter. We have children. People are depending on us. It’s easier and safer to go on as we have because to do otherwise is to face the possibility of disgrace, upheaval, or worse.

Since 1999, Donald Trump has quit the Republican party, been a Reform Party candidate, a Democrat, and a Republican. Does anyone remember this? We’re too busy being entertained by him to consider his policies. Barack Obama came into office on a left-wing wave against government conservatism, only to deport more immigrants than any other president before him and mount a drone war that makes him look as hawkish as George Bush. We didn’t protest when Obama failed to employ grand juries to investigate the banks and brokerages behind what we are calling the “Great Recession”. If it isn’t in our faces right now, it never existed.

This ignorance exists in an era when there is more information available than ever before, and it is right at our fingertips. Yet we know more about our Netflix queue and our Facebook friends than we do about who is the vice president. Anybody remember Google Glass? The evening news only carries the most sensational stories because ratings are more important than current events. Are we amusing ourselves to death?

Contemporary entertainment is full of conspiracy theories and government plots to exert more control over the citizens. Corporations are demonized regularly. These works reflect the reality that we see in targeted advertising, the Patriot Act, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to name just a few. When we go to the movies or watch our favorite shows, we rail against the intrusive government or the evil corporations. We feel angry about what is being done to us by the faceless entities that we fear.

Chris Carter, before the first run of The X-Files, was afraid the FBI was about to “shut [him] down”. We may even think ourselves smarter than the average American zombie because we see through the commercial propaganda that permeates even the programming we pay for (remember when cable TV had no commercials?). But when someone tries publicly to do something about these intrusions, they are “too radical” or a “weirdo socialist”. We like to see someone in the movies succeed against the oppressors, but we don’t want to be the one who sticks their neck out. We’ve heard too many stories like those of John Savage in Brave New World or Winston Smith in 1984.

With all of these anti-authoritarian ideas out there, how much is enough to make us break out the pitchforks? Or is it this very content that prevents rebellion? The cyberpunk Facebook page where I hang out has plenty of curmudgeons and anarchists. There’s copious ranting about government intervention in our private lives and about corporate control of media and government. Weekly we have a dustup about some meme or post that the administrators deleted. Are we defeating our own angst by having these blowoffs?

We experience the effects of endorphins when our brains shift from left to right during TV watching. This is what gets us addicted to visual media. Is this pleasure short-circuiting our outrage, making us docile and suggestible? Or have we just not yet reached a critical mass in our frustration? Or are we afraid that, like Howard Beale in Network, if we’re “mad as hell” and are “not going to take it any more”, we will end up like him, with the corporate media having appropriated even our anger and rebellion?

January 26, 2016

I Swear I’m Not a Statist

Allow me to string some ideas together, using technology as a metaphor:

“A world where people, businesses, and governments rely on IT for almost everything they do is a world where SIGINT will be the most important form of espionage.” — John Schindler on “SpyWar”

“If you’re not looking for the structure, you won’t find it. If you are, it’s obvious.” — Scott Alexander on his mystical universe

“Only machines that can be inventoried and centrally managed can reasonably be secured against advanced attackers.” — Brandon Wilson on enterprise security

The community of Bitcoin developers is currently struggling to decide between a couple of different technical directions that I don’t understand or care about. The interesting parts are the human conflicts and what the whole brouhaha says about group politics. When I wrote “Power Is Necessary”, this controversy was on my mind.

Wind turbine photographed by Paulo Valdivieso.

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. Centralized power is efficient. Hierarchies of decision-makers, each able to dictate and veto the level below, allow for instructions to be disseminated and enforced.

“It is generally considered that there are four forms of structure employed by terrorist groups: conventional hierarchy, cellular, network & leaderless resistance. The decision to employ one of these formats is grounded in the security/efficiency trade-off of each; conventional hierarchy providing the most efficient and least secure, leaderless resistance the opposite: highest security, least efficiency.” — Tom Hashemi on guerilla warfare

I love the ideals of anarchy, but it fundamentally doesn’t work. Neither does direct democracy or its hands-off “don’t tread on me” equivalent. Coercion is a basic component of societal structures that accomplish things and manage to self-perpetuate. Are fear-based incentives good? Are they virtuous? No, of course not. But they get the job done.

January 23, 2016

Who’s In Charge, Anyway?

“Any form of protest can be effectively prevented if the state is willing to employ the full range of its resources for authoritarian repression and control. The only form of ‘direct action’ which cannot be contained by the state is popular revolution. […] We can win the cooperation of the police for precisely as long as we fail to genuinely threaten the existing social order.” — Rob Sparrow in “Anarchist Politics & Direct Action”

Photo by Cory Doctorow.

I tend to be a cynic, like I said earlier this week. So I agree with these specific fatalistic sentences from Sparrow’s article (and a few of his other statements). However, I’m doubtful that an anarchist revolution is feasible, and revolution is Sparrow’s overall goal. Then again, plenty of smart people disagree with me. Theorists, organizers, and perhaps an economist or two — they believe in better governance by the people, for the people. I mean, democracy was supposed to fill that niche, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Remember how the Ferguson protests didn’t show up on Facebook because the News Feed algorithm doesn’t like ~negative~ content? I don’t think the state needs to employ its full range of authoritarian resources. We’ve constructed systems for ourselves that do the job just fine. When we gave up our lives to corporations, it was a sign that we like control — at least most of us — and we don’t want to make our own decisions in every instance. Who has the energy to choose, choose, and choose momentously again?

Quote from The Intercept.

I don’t believe that we entirely lack autonomy. Free will is a myth, of course, which I’ve written about extensively. But there’s grey space between humans as automatons and humans as gods, masters of our own fates. We’re somewhere in between — more like pre-programmed machines executing decisions in reaction to various stimuli.

What do you think? I genuinely want to know. Just email me. (But I can’t guarantee that I’ll agree with you…)

January 22, 2016

Uber Versus Ethics

I’m dwelling on the future of transportation because of an episode of the Exponent podcast about, well, the future of transportation. Electricity replacing combustion engines, autonomous vehicles, and driving as a service, oh my! Ride-sharing startups like Uber and Lyft are currently filling that last niche, and eventually they’ll do it with fleets of self-driving sedans, SUVs, minivans, etc. No humans required — except for the software engineers and passengers.

Prototype of a self-driving car by Google.

Uber has a cutthroat reputation, and they’ve earned it. I’m not a fan of their company culture, but I think the more interesting question is about the ethics of their business model. They depend on low-paid drivers who are independent contractors rather than employees, and thus are unable to organize and advocate for themselves. In the same vein, drivers have to deal with all the taxes usually handled by businesses, and they don’t get overtime or health insurance.

Is this arrangement immoral? On the one hand, we have labor regulations because companies will exploit people in every way they can. We need those laws. (Capitalism is not a foolproof system!) On the other hand, drivers opt in. They choose to work for Uber.

Who bears responsibility — the company who created the system, or the individuals who choose to participate?

January 20, 2016

Power Is Necessary

“No freely occupied and used commons extends endlessly where human societies are involved.” That’s Doctor Chris Demchak, quoted in an article about LUElinks, which is an invite-only forum similar to Reddit. LUElinks was created in 2004 because another forum called GameFAQs banned a user named LlamaGuy for posting Goatse. (Do NOT search “Goatse” on Google Images.) LUElinks has never been as lawless as 4chan, but it was specifically created to escape rules. Recently — twelve years after the community’s inception — a high-profile user was banned for calling the cops on another user. (I know this because I’m friends with a longtime LUEser.)

As Doctor Demchak said, rules will always develop. Even if they’re not spelled out at first, community norms usually transition from implicit assumptions to specific codes of behavior, often written down. Controlling groups emerge — cliques, elected officials, or charismatic dictators. It’s impossible to escape power structures; the best anyone can manage is to pretend that they don’t exist (which is a bad idea). Human nature makes these dynamics unavoidable. Jo Freeman wrote a very insightful article on this topic called “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”. Bitcoin developers and community organizers should all read it.

Cyberpunk fascinates me as a genre because it explores the way technology manifests and accelerates human power differentials. The gadgetry is cool, but the political ramifications are deeply engrossing. (For the record, I am not a libertarian or an anarchist, although both philosophies appeal to me. Fundamentally I am a cynic/pragmatist rather than an idealist. Utopia is unachievable.)

Image by fusion-of-horizons.

The Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania. Flickr user fusion-of-horizons wrote an interesting caption:

“I feel like rioting when I remember how the statist world I was born in tried to destroy any place of personal freedom including organized religion and private property. Constructing the palace in this image and the huge remodeled area around it called The Civic Center required demolishing much of Bucharest’s historic district, including 19 Orthodox Christian churches (plus 8 relocated churches and monasteries), 6 Jewish synagogues, 3 Protestant churches, and 30,000 residences. Even the army was mobilized to build this and many soldiers and workers died during construction because safety was regularly sacrificed to increase building speed.”

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