Tuesday, December 28, 2010

The pop-culture singularity

Patton Oswalt:

That’s when we’ll reach Etewaf singularity. Pop culture will become self-aware. It will happen in the A.V. Club first: A brilliant Nathan Rabin column about the worst Turkish rip-offs of American comic book characters will suddenly begin writing its own comments, each a single sentence from the sequel to A Confederacy of Dunces. Then a fourth and fifth season of Arrested Development, directed by David Milch of Deadwood, will appear suddenly in the TV Shows section of iTunes. Someone BitTorrenting a Crass bootleg will suddenly find their hard drive crammed with Elvis Presley’s “lost” grunge album from 1994. And everyone’s TiVo will record Ghostbusters III, starring Peter Sellers, Lee Marvin, and John Candy.
For a while now I've made mention of a certain quality of "self-generated-ness" that certain pop-culture artifacts have. Like keyboard cat. It feels like it spontaneously generated out of the primordial soup of the internet...

Saturday, December 25, 2010

What Wikileaks reveals about the US

Says Glenn Greenwald:

As revealing as the disclosures themselves are, the reactions to them have been equally revealing. The vast bulk of the outrage has been devoted not to the crimes that have been exposed but rather to those who exposed them: WikiLeaks and (allegedly) Bradley Manning. A consensus quickly emerged in the political and media class that they are Evil Villains who must be severely punished, while those responsible for the acts they revealed are guilty of nothing. That reaction has not been weakened at all even by the Pentagon's own admission that, in stark contrast to its own actions, there is no evidence -- zero -- that any of WikiLeaks' actions has caused even a single death. Meanwhile, the American establishment media -- even in the face of all these revelations -- continues to insist on the contradictory, Orwellian platitudes that (a) there is Nothing New™ in anything disclosed by WikiLeaks and (b) WikiLeaks has done Grave Harm to American National Security™ through its disclosures.

It's unsurprising that political leaders would want to convince people that the true criminals are those who expose acts of high-level political corruption and criminality, rather than those who perpetrate them. Every political leader would love for that self-serving piety to take hold. But what's startling is how many citizens and, especially, "journalists" now vehemently believe that as well. In light of what WikiLeaks has revealed to the world about numerous governments, just fathom the authoritarian mindset that would lead a citizen -- and especially a "journalist" -- to react with anger that these things have been revealed; to insist that these facts should have been kept concealed and it'd be better if we didn't know; and, most of all, to demand that those who made us aware of it all be punished (the True Criminals) while those who did these things (The Good Authorities) be shielded.



Thursday, December 23, 2010

Wikileaks must-reads


In case you haven't run into it, a seminal piece of commentary on Wikileaks and Julian Assange's mission is here--it's a long essay but well worth the read, and--BONUS--even makes a reference to The Wire (you can read the interesting account of how this obscure blog post came to dominate the commentariat here).

In general, you will want to keep up with Glenn Greenwald, who is the gold standard in civil rights advocacy. I have also found NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen to be insightful.

Also, the Atlantic has a post that contains a general summary of Wikileaks and a timeline of events so far, which you may find useful.

For continuing news on Wikileaks, Assange, and the revelations from the cables themselves, the best place to check is the Guardian.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

The DDoS attacks aren't lie-ins--they're tea parties

Here Boing Boing contributor and all-around internet superstar Cory Doctorow talks about the recent DDoS attacks by Anonymous and whether they can be justified:

Doctorrow from REC Radiocentrum on Vimeo.



I think I mostly agree with everything he's saying here, though I would say that, though ultimately anonymous DDoS attacks are not a legitimate and effective tactic for the reasons he describes, it's also true that in rare cases it's more important to take a drastic, imperfect action than no action at all. For all the ethical hand-wringing and negative public reaction the attacks have induced, they have also made the issue of internet freedom and corporate control of political speech front-page reading in newspapers around the world, and the subject of discussion and debate in the blogs.

As Doctorow mentions in the video, supporters of the DDoS attacks have likened them to the lie-ins of the civil rights era, but to my mind a closer historical parallel isn't the calculated, well reasoned lie-ins of the 1960s but the cathartic "fuck you" impetuousness of the Boston Tea Party in 1773. As in today's case, that act of defiance--in which 342 chests of British East India Company tea were dumped into the ocean--was carried out anonymously and, it seems, without a whole lot of forethought:

While Samuel Adams tried to reassert control of the meeting, people poured out of the Old South Meeting House and headed to Boston Harbor. That evening, a group of 30 to 130 men, some of them thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped all 342 chests of tea into the water.[59]

A further similarity to today's DDoS attacks is that the Tea Party--which involved the destruction of private property--was not readily embraced by supporters of the Colonial cause, and did much to anger and unify the broader British consensus against them:

In Britain, even those politicians considered friends of the colonies were appalled and this act united all parties there against the colonies. The Prime Minister Lord North said, "Whatever may be the consequence, we must risk something; if we do not, all is over".[63] The British government felt this action could not remain unpunished, and responded by closing the port of Boston and putting in place other laws known as the "Coercive Acts".

In the colonies, Benjamin Franklin stated that the destroyed tea must be repaid, all 90,000 pounds. Robert Murray, a New York merchant went to Lord North with three other merchants and offered to pay for the losses, but the offer was turned down.[64]


Like today's DDoS attacks, the Boston Tea Party was difficult to justify and, on its face, harmful to the cause it purported to defend. But its value was not in its academic correctitude or tactical efficacy, but rather in its function as a catalyst of events and the rallying effect that such a sheer act of bravado can have on the hardcore supporters of the cause. Consider the chain of events--of harsh British responses and resulting Colonial escalation--that the Tea Party helped set in motion:

The Boston Tea Party was a key event in the growth of the American Revolution. Parliament responded in 1774 with the Coercive Acts, which, among other provisions, closed Boston's commerce until the British East India Company had been repaid for the destroyed tea. Colonists in turn responded to the Coercive Acts with additional acts of protest, and by convening the First Continental Congress, which petitioned the British monarch for repeal of the acts and coordinated colonial resistance to them. The crisis escalated, and the American Revolutionary War began near Boston in 1775.

We must remember that when Anonymous launched the attacks, it was not working with the benefit of hindsight. There was no way to know how many people would end up joining the attacks, or if they would provoke the government into some kind of blundering over-reaction, or what. And yet, it was a near certainty that if no extraordinary action were taken, the government and its corporate proxies would continue business as usual and the establishment media would do little to challenge them. So it was a way to shake things up and perhaps introduce a little serendipity into the historical proceedings.

In the end, though of course it is important to dutifully rebuke the DD0S attacks, I would hope that rather than spend our energies heaping criticism on Anonymous and their flawed methods we would instead salute their pluck and turn our attention to a more constructive task: devising an ethical and tactically sound method of internet civil disobedience.

Monday, December 20, 2010

The erosion of civil liberties: we have slipped down the slope

Quick thought:

Generally speaking, the pattern for many civil liberties arguments is of the form, "we must protect the rights of X, for tomorrow the government may go after Y", where X is someone or something unsympathetic and universally reviled, and Y is someone or something seen as meriting praise and protection from government abuse. And so we protect Larry Flynt's right to publish filth so that some future muckraker may be protected; we give an undisputedly guilty monster of a human being all the trappings of a trial and due process to insulate some future target of a witch hunt from injustice; and so on. In all these cases, we apply a general prohibition on government power in order to protect against those relatively rare instances (well, hopefully they're rare) when government power really is misused to imprison the innocent or silence dissent.

It occurred to me that perhaps what has gotten me so wound up about the Wikileaks case is that--in my opinion at least--what we're witnessing is a violation of civil liberties against not a reviled X, but a praiseworthy Y. Since 9/11, throughout the Bush years and right on up through the Obama years to today, we as a society--and the political and media establishment--have stood idly by while the government has opened up huge exceptions into the general prohibitions on its powers--the prohibitions whose very generality is the means of protection from government abuses. And now we're seeing those exceptions expand and swallow up the legal system whole, to the point where now a media organization, Wikileaks--who in the case of Cablegate has done nothing different than any other media organization--must struggle to remain online as one corporation after another bows to government pressure and withdraws its services from Wikileaks.

Even if you disagree with me that Wikileaks is serving a legitimate role, the government's due-process-free campaign to silence the organization should be causing alarm bells to go off. Should the government's campaign be successful, a precedent will be set that could allow it to target (or threaten to target) mainstream publications like the New York Times in the future. Of course, at that point we would have fallen very far down the civil libertarians' slippery slope. But as the Wikileaks case shows, we've fallen quite a ways already.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

The corporate enablers--and disablers--of free speech

A few days ago I wrote a lengthy comment responding to a post by Wendy Kaminer called "Wikileaks and the Unfree Market". In that post, she observes that "corporate control over speech is nothing new":

Authors and journalists in the pre-digital age were dependent on publishers willing to disseminate their work -- without publishing support, they were mere street corner pamphleteers.... Still, recent demonstrations of corporate power over WikiLeaks seemed to resonate with the force of revelation, mocking any lingering illusions of the Internet as a frontier free from corporate as well as state control.

Yes, it's true that the Internet potentially offers significantly larger audiences to electronic pamphleteers than they'd ever find on any street corner, even in Times Square; and for better and worse, a few break through, thanks to their demagoguery or thoughtfulness, marketing acumen or luck. But the Internet is an ocean, and without a berth on a corporate or corporate sponsored ship, most people will quickly sink, or swim unnoticed. And, while the street is a public place in which the government's powers of eviction are limited by First Amendment rights, the Internet has always been (pardon the metaphor shift) a gated community. If virtually anyone can enter, the right to remain and speak your mind is generally subject to corporate control, as the WikiLeaks fracas has shown.

...

I'm not dismissing concerns about the threat that corporate control and homogenization of speech poses to the flow of information and dissent. Having worked as a freelance writer for some 30 years, I am only too keenly aware of marketplace censorship. But it's a fact of life, and First Amendment editorial freedoms, which the private press enjoys.... There is no significant political constituency for free speech on the Internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is right: "Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary." But we the people, not private corporations, are the weakest links in the chain.


My response, in which I try to make the argument that there is in fact something unprecedented going on here:

Wendy, I think you are mistaken in viewing Wikileaks' position as no different in principle than that of a pre-digital age individual "dependent on publishers willing to disseminate their work". Wikileaks is not a single author or publisher--it is itself a media organization, no different in principle (I argue) than the New York Times.

Suppose Lieberman had called for all companies to sever ties with the New York Times, so that the NYT suddenly found nobody could pay them using a credit card; their bank accounts were frozen; their domain name was deleted by their domain name provider; and that whoever they rent their servers from dropped them as a customer, essentially hounding the NYT from the internet. Does this strike you as analogous to a pre-digital age author who cannot find a publisher for his political pamphlet? It seems to me the proper pre-digital age analogy would be if the government told all paper and ink companies to stop selling their wares to a particular newspaper, and took steps (freezing accounts, making it difficult to transfer money) to keep that newspaper from functioning on a day-to-day basis. To my knowledge such a snuffing-out of a publisher, orchestrated by the US government in concert with corporate interests, is indeed unprecedented.

I take your point that free speech has always been dependent on the distribution mechanisms provided by corporate entities. But what has changed is the degree of this dependence, and the higher-ordered-ness of the dependence. In the pre-digital age, you would need money of course to print a newspaper, but political and cultural norms rendered the idea outrageous that the government could suffocate the operation by denying it the raw materials it needs to function or the financial infrastructure (bank accounts, credit transfers, loans, etc.) is needs to survive as a business. In other words, the individual was dependent on a wealthy corporate publisher; but the corporate publisher was not dependent on some higher, more powerful corporate entity. What we are seeing in the Wikileaks case is unprecedented and, I think, extremely alarming: now political speech is at the mercy of entities further upstream in the corporate food chain (Visa, MasterCard, Amazon), handing the government a far more powerful means for controlling political speech than anything that has come before.

My feeling is that large corporations like Amazon and MasterCard--that provide a platform for some general activity that is abstracted from the specifics of the particular activities that take place on the platform--do not like being in the position of free-speech arbiter or government-enforcer. I think their preferred outcome would be a law that ties their hands and prevents them legally from meddling in cases such as these without some kind of judicial court order, thereby protecting them from the possibility of political recriminations for not complying with the government. For example, in the current case, Amazon would have simply said to Lieberman: "Sorry! We legally cannot kick Wikileaks off our servers. You have to get a court order for that."

I would just add a couple of things. First, interestingly enough it turns out that the New York Times rents its server space from none other than--you guessed it--Amazon. So that comparison turned out to be pretty apt: if the government can get Amazon to kick Wikileaks off its servers, what's stopping it, in principle, from getting Amazon to kick the New York Times off its servers?

Second, it is worth pointing out that, ironically, the leaked cables themselves provide an insight into the ways that large corporations like Visa and MasterCard can be beholden to the US government. According to the Guardian, documents show that the US government was actively involved in lobbying the Russian legislature on Visa's and MasterCard's behalves, to ensure that the card payment companies were not "adversely affected" by some proposed legislation there. This clearly illustrates that for an international corporation to take a stand against a government request--however informally or implicitly made--is to risk political recriminations in the form of losing out to one's competitors when it comes to special favors such as these.

Wikileaks awakes me from my blogmatic slumber

Oh hi there.

A little more than a year ago Izott went silent, partly because of a conscious decision to spend less time on the internets, but mostly because I had become disillusioned and bored with politics in general. I had always meant to write a conclusionary post to tie things up properly, but just never got around to it. So Izott has been collecting dust and the odd Chinese spam comment ever since.

Now, though, with this Wikileaks story, I'm motivated to write a few posts so that I can get my thoughts straight about the matter. It's a very important story, I feel, and one that deals with a pretty foundational basic right--freedom of speech--which is not a topic that has really come up in a serious or interesting way since I started blogging. For the first time in a while, there's something new under the sun in politics.