Offering multiple perspectives from many fields of human inquiry that may move all of us toward a more integrated understanding of who we are as conscious beings.
Very interesting article from The Atlantic on "secret societies" and how they stay hidden in the postmodern world of Twitter, cell phone cameras, and instant information.
It all started with a Facebook message from a dead guy. His name was Ernest Howard Crosby and his profile picture showed an old-time portrait of a man in a dapper vest sporting a bushy Civil War beard. The message came on behalf of New York University’s Eucleian Society, a literary club formed in 1832 around the same time that secret societies began sprouting up at university campuses across the country.
"The Society is interested in your potential membership and would like to invite you to learn more… Time is of the essence."
There was a link to a Facebook group that contained a long list of male undergraduates, mostly white (like me), a few Latinos and Indians, and one black guy. The list also contained the avatars of a few other dead guys, like Crosby, and the identity of the Group itself was similarly concealed beneath another guise: “Vote Arthur Watkins for Second Circuit Judge.”
The page, paired with the campaign-ready photo of an old guy holding an open book, appeared to be a 1930s-era political campaign. The comments field on the Group page was disabled, but a note in the Description section directed us to fill out a questionnaire (via Google Forms) that asked about our backgrounds, our political views, and our religious ideologies.
Before submitting to interrogation, I first searched online for any information I could uncover about the “Eucleian Society.” A Wikipedia page drew on sources from NYU’s Bobst Library and Digital Archives, as well as academic books that covered the broader topic of “secret societies in America.” The society was founded the same year instruction began at NYU, first operating out of the Main University Building, where it held oratory debates and readings. Topics under discussion spanned philosophy (“Whether humanity is naturally depraved,” Decision: Affirmative) to legal theory (“Should the capital of large moneyed corporations be limited by statute?” Decision: Negative) to romantic truths (“Resolved that adultery is the only true way to cohabit”). The names of Eucleian alumni would later grace major buildings around campus (Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, Jerome S. Coles Sports & Recreation Center) and university curricula (Gallatin School of Individualized Study). Then, in 1942, the society seemed to have disappeared. NYU archives showed no official record of the society after this date, meaning everything that has turned up since then regarding its members and any ongoing activity is hearsay. Most recently, in 2009, there were student newspaper reports of a “beeper” prank which was attributed to the society: a handful of devices were choreographed to go off at the same time in various classrooms on NYU’s campus. Each device was attached to a signed note:
Truth is something you find outside of the classroom, outside of the walls of this university, and only from the professor in front of you insofar as he can serve as an experienced guide… NYU has its secrets too.
The prank elicited little response from the student body, perhaps a sign of the changing times. Maybe a new generation raised on unprecedented levels of connectivity was less intrigued by antiquated notions of “secrecy” or “privacy.”
My recruitment with the society was doomed from the beginning: Three months after I received the original Facebook message, I was slated to leave the country and study abroad for a year and a half. But I was still curious. I submitted my answers to the online questionnaire and almost forgot about the whole thing—until a week later, when we recruits received our first directive.
* * *
A mass email was sent to recruits’ NYU accounts, which we had provided in the questionnaire. The sender’s alias was “John S. / Odysseus” and he introduced himself as a senior member of the society and head of its recruitment efforts. He told us the process couldn’t begin until we chose a nom de plume for ourselves and created a corresponding Gmail account to be used exclusively for all society-related communication. His email included a list of links to over a dozen Blogspot pages, YouTube videos, and Google Groups, all of which he told us to read through and absorb “ASAP.” He also sent us a Google Calendar invite to join a weekly online group chat, the first of which would focus on discussing this trove of information.
Screenshot courtesy Matt King
I browsed the webpages, many of which contained abridged histories of the society, largely regurgitated from Wikipedia. One recurring storyline was the society’s relationship with Edgar Allan Poe, a frequent guest lecturer during its early era. After Poe’s death, the group adopted the raven (from his popular poem) as its unofficial mascot. Meme-ified photos captured various society shenanigans around Washington Square Park—a raven perched atop the Giuseppe Garibaldi statue; a faint trail of raven footprints around the fountain. Other blog posts included opinion pieces extolling Society philosophy (“Social Capital as Exclusive and Intergenerational”) and shared YouTube excerpts of films—like a scene from the 1990 comedy-drama Metropolitan about essential Manhattan evening wear—as though it were educational material.
Finally, I reached the page displaying an index of suggested Greek pseudonyms along with their associated mythological histories. I settled on Calchas, a famous soothsayer whose contributions included the Trojan horse scheme during the Battle of Troy. I created my corresponding Gmail address and notified John S. and the other recruits of my new name. I felt like I was wading through a time or reality warp, still doubting whether any of this was real.
The initial emails from John S. had been staid and boilerplate, but the impression he gave off in the online group chats was almost bipolar. He started the conversation by asking who was drunk, or trying to get drunk, or already hungover. Complete sentences collapsed into incoherent fragments, his tone swinging between mildly serious and almost manic. One minute, he sounded like a fraternity president rallying his rushes:
“let’s be clear there are going to be guys who you are doing shit for as apprentices that you don’t really hear from etc. if we ask you to send a get well card to sean sure he may not be around but get him one. if we want mike in Afghanistan to have a piece written for him about how he’s a fucking war hero of the type that has never been seen ditto”
The next minute, he devolved into misogyny:
“let’s run thru this like a girl on x and coke at a fraternity party”
“i hope you hit that lil girls ass so hard it looks like two jap flags”
Many of the recruits took turns responding with a “haha” or “lol.” Later they invented obscene one-liners of their own in a show of one-upmanship, a chorus of fake Greek names shouting obscenities at each other in digital bursts.
The “serious” work accomplished in these online chats involved appointments. Each Google Group represented an “initiative” the Society was pursuing around campus. These were coded in confusing acronyms (PUR, ICR, TT) but included relatively traditional ideas like an academic law review, a political debate club, and a community service organization. Recruits were to volunteer their time to lead as many projects as possible.
The strange thing was that no part of any of these “initiatives” had been established yet. It was apparently our class’s job to build the entire ecosystem from scratch. John S. advised that additional directions would later follow, but the best place to start was with a good-looking website—it was “the quickest way to make any org look legit.”
At this, my suspicion grew deeper. Given the hastily constructed webpages John S. had shared, this offhand piece of advice almost felt like something from his own playbook. He claimed to be an NYU alum, but was there any definitive reason to believe him? He could’ve been someone else entirely. A con artist performing one of his ploys or scams. Some prankster or hacker kid prodigy with an affinity for orchestrating elaborate online pranks in his spare time. Maybe the Eucleian Society really did die in 1942. And this is the problem inherent to secrecy, especially one as hyped-up as this: It leaves open the possibility for endless conspiracies.
About a month after we received the original Facebook message, two online group chats had taken place, dozens of virtual toasts and dirty jokes were shared, and all but one of the Google Group “initiatives” had assigned leaders (my task: a weekly newsletter covering the conservative side of issues affecting millennials). To celebrate such progress, John S. decided it was time we finally met each other in the actual world for our first “social.” Thursday, 7:30pm at La Maison Française, NYU’s French Intellectual House.
Maybe John S. was for real.
* * *
When I arrived 15 minutes late, there were no open seats left. The front of the room was blocked off by two large tables formed into a V. Seated on the near side were the familiar faces from the Facebook profiles of my fellow recruits. Standing before us were three strangers. A man with light-black skin and large freckles smiled and introduced himself as John S., his voice calm and cheerful. Behind him were two white guys introduced by first names only, fellow members of his induction class. All three of them were middle-aged and paunchy, wearing loose-fitting suits. John S. conceded that society activity had dwindled since the early days of their induction, but said a core group of guys, many of whom we’d meet later, were dedicated to reviving it.
He explained that we had been handpicked as potential members due to our academic achievement. (Later, after the third round of drinks, one tipsy recruit revealed with a goofy smirk that his GPA was under 2.0). He also made vague allusions to the society as a stepping stone to higher, more storied organizations. When one excited recruit asked if that meant the Freemasons, John S. just smiled. As he wrapped up his pep talk, two more strangers arrived, also in suits, both white, carrying between them a cooler full of beers and mini-bottles of wine.
Everyone grabbed a drink and broke off into pockets, one stranger per group. They talked generally about their work—commercial law, renewable energy, consulting for political lobbying firms. Many recounted stories of getting into trouble during their undergraduate days, and asked about what bars were popular now with students. Every few minutes we orbited back to the coolers for another drink, re-congregated into little circles and met another stranger.
As I looked around the room, it seemed like most of the recruits were buying into the show, or at least willing to participate in an extended trial period. The unspoken reality remained that we had nothing by which to judge the society’s integrity other than a bunch of shoddy websites and a few guys in suits talking about power and money. The real Twilight Zone moment of the evening arrived when I realized I almost didn’t have any more questions to ask. The older guys had an answer to every society-related inquiry thrown their way. Like a tall tale or fable, the truth they spewed was both outrageous but also undeniable—if only because it was by nature unprovable.
I remained in the recruitment loop through Invitation Week, which arrived just before I left for Europe. My final adventure was to the W hotel in Union Square, where, at my allotted time, I was to search the lobby for a man wearing a raven pin. I found him in the corner by the window. A stranger I'd never seen, he smiled and made a quiet “caw! caw!” sound as I approached. The envelope he handed me had a yellow faux-antiquated look and was sealed with red wax. Inside was a congratulatory note printed in calligraphy, followed by a breakdown of dues (total annual cost: $600).
Weeks later, from my hostel in London, I read urgent emails from John S. asking about these dues, but my mind was busy with plans to see the world. As I backpacked around Europe, I realized fewer group email threads populated my inbox. Society-related pages and groups on Facebook disappeared. I re-visited the old Blogspot pages and Google Groups, but the URLs were now broken. Finally, one night, I returned to the original forum only to find my login disabled.
Just like that, I had been phased out.
* * *
Before the Internet, secret societies often covered their trail with fire. They burned unwanted documents, and if destruction wasn’t an option, they scratched out vulnerable names or references from physical records. For John S. and his mysterious constituents, covering their tracks online may have been easier—as simple as pressing a button to “Delete” or “Block User”—but it was also less complete. Email threads and attached documents remain archived in my inbox. Ernest Howard Crosby’s Facebook profile still exists, as do cached versions of a few of the Blogspot sites.
Given how easy the Internet makes it to create new environments and facades representing all kinds of identities, can we ever be certain about whom we’re speaking with, or who might be listening?
Sometimes now when I find myself in the Village, passing by La Maison Française, I’m haunted by the ghost of the experience. My imagination plays up the conspiracy. Perhaps we were just one of many online threads being run by John S., all of them largely automated, simultaneously opening and closing, roping as many peculiarly ambitious young men as possible into an ancient web of secrecy.
This story is a tragedy, in my opinion. Aaron Swartz was being made an example of for having embarrassed the government on a couple of occasions. Even the case for which charges were finally brought did not cause any financial harm to his target (JSTOR), who urged the government to drop the charges. The Feds refused - Swartz's conviction would serve as a warning. Instead, the young man hanged himself in his NYC apartment.
Here is a key passage that explains why so many of us supported Swartz's "work":
Swartz’s manifesto didn’t just call for the widespread illegal
downloading and sharing of copyrighted scientific and academic material,
which was already a dangerous idea. It explained why. Much of the
academic research held under lock and key by large institutional
publishers like Reed Elsevier had been largely funded at public expense,
but was now being treated as private property – and as Swartz
understood, that was just one example of a massive ideological victory
for corporate interests that had penetrated almost every aspect of
society. The actual data theft for which Swartz was prosecuted, the
download of a large volume of journal articles from the academic
database called JSTOR, was largely symbolic and arguably almost
pointless. (As a Harvard graduate student at the time, Swartz was
entitled to read anything on JSTOR.)
Academic publishers like Reed Elsevier, JSTOR, Science Direct, Nature, Hindawi, Springer, and others control nearly all of the published research in nearly every field, much of which is funded by tax dollars either directly or indirectly.
These publishers then charge authors hundreds [sometimes thousands] of dollars to publish, and charge more if the author wants open access; they charge for images in articles; they charge libraries hundreds of dollars for subscriptions, even digital subscriptions; and they try to charge consumers (like me) between $30 and $70 for use of an article (often on 24 hours).
Anyway, first up here is a review of the film and the life of its subject, via Salon, followed by an open access version of the film from Open Culture.
Brian Knappenberger’s Kickstarter-funded documentary The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, which premiered at Sundance barely a year after the legendary hacker, programmer and information activist took his own life in January 2013, feels like the beginning of a conversation about Swartz and his legacy rather than the final word. This week it will be released in theaters, arriving in the middle of an evolving debate about what the Internet is, whose interests it serves and how best to manage it, now that the techno-utopian dreams that sounded so great in Wired magazine circa 1996 have begun to ring distinctly hollow. What surprised me when I wrote about “The Internet’s Own Boy” from Sundance was the snarky, dismissive and downright hostile tone struck by at least a few commenters. There was a certain dark symmetry to it, I thought at the time: A tragic story about the downfall, destruction and death of an Internet idealist calls up all of the medium’s most distasteful qualities, including its unique ability to transform all discourse into binary and ill-considered nastiness, and its empowerment of the chorus of belittlers and begrudgers collectively known as trolls. In retrospect, I think the symbolism ran even deeper. Aaron Swartz’s life and career exemplified a central conflict within Internet culture, and one whose ramifications make many denizens of the Web highly uncomfortable. For many of its pioneers, loyalists and self-professed deep thinkers, the Internet was conceived as a digital demi-paradise, a zone of total freedom and democracy. But when it comes to specifics things get a bit dicey. Paradise for whom, exactly, and what do we mean by democracy? In one enduringly popular version of this fantasy, the Internet is the ultimate libertarian free market, a zone of perfect entrepreneurial capitalism untrammeled by any government, any regulation or any taxation. As a teenage programming prodigy with an unusually deep understanding of the Internet’s underlying architecture, Swartz certainly participated in the private-sector, junior-millionaire version of the Internet. He founded his first software company following his freshman year at Stanford, and became a partner in the development of Reddit in 2006, which was sold to Condé Nast later that year. That libertarian vision of the Internet – and of society too, for that matter – rests on an unacknowledged contradiction, in that some form of state power or authority is presumably required to enforce private property rights, including copyrights, patents and other forms of intellectual property. Indeed, this is one of the principal contradictions embedded within our current form of capitalism, as the Marxist scholar David Harvey notes: Those who claim to venerate private property above all else actually depend on an increasingly militarized and autocratic state. And from the beginning of Swartz’s career he also partook of the alternate vision of the Internet, the one with a more anarchistic or anarcho-socialist character. When he was 15 years old he participated in the launch of Creative Commons, the immensely important content-sharing nonprofit, and at age 17 he helped design Markdown, an open-source, newbie-friendly markup format that remains in widespread use. One can certainly construct an argument that these ideas about the character of the Internet are not fundamentally incompatible, and may coexist peaceably enough. In the physical world we have public parks and privately owned supermarkets, and we all understand that different rules (backed of course by militarized state power) govern our conduct in each space. But there is still an ideological contest between the two, and the logic of the private sector has increasingly invaded the public sphere and undermined the ancient notion of the public commons. (Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani once proposed that city parks should charge admission fees.) As an adult Aaron Swartz took sides in this contest, moving away from the libertarian Silicon Valley model of the Internet and toward a more radical and social conception of the meaning of freedom and equality in the digital age. It seems possible and even likely that the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto Swartz wrote in 2008, at age 21, led directly to his exaggerated federal prosecution for what was by any standard a minor hacking offense. Swartz’s manifesto didn’t just call for the widespread illegal downloading and sharing of copyrighted scientific and academic material, which was already a dangerous idea. It explained why. Much of the academic research held under lock and key by large institutional publishers like Reed Elsevier had been largely funded at public expense, but was now being treated as private property – and as Swartz understood, that was just one example of a massive ideological victory for corporate interests that had penetrated almost every aspect of society. The actual data theft for which Swartz was prosecuted, the download of a large volume of journal articles from the academic database called JSTOR, was largely symbolic and arguably almost pointless. (As a Harvard graduate student at the time, Swartz was entitled to read anything on JSTOR.) But the symbolism was important: Swartz posed a direct challenge to the private-sector creep that has eaten away at any notion of the public commons or the public good, whether in the digital or physical worlds, and he also sought to expose the fact that in our age state power is primarily the proxy or servant of corporate power. He had already embarrassed the government twice previously. In 2006, he downloaded and released the entire bibliographic dataset of the Library of Congress, a public document for which the library had charged an access fee. In 2008, he downloaded and released about 2.7 million federal court documents stored in the government database called PACER, which charged 8 cents a page for public records that by definition had no copyright. In both cases, law enforcement ultimately concluded Swartz had committed no crime: Dispensing public information to the public turns out to be legal, even if the government would rather you didn’t. The JSTOR case was different, and the government saw its chance (one could argue) to punish him at last. Knappenberger could only have made this film with the cooperation of Swartz’s family, which was dealing with a devastating recent loss. In that context, it’s more than understandable that he does not inquire into the circumstances of Swartz’s suicide in “Inside Edition”-level detail. It’s impossible to know anything about Swartz’s mental condition from the outside – for example, whether he suffered from undiagnosed depressive illness – but it seems clear that he grew increasingly disheartened over the government’s insistence that he serve prison time as part of any potential plea bargain. Such an outcome would have left him a convicted felon and, he believed, would have doomed his political aspirations; one can speculate that was the point. Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. attorney for Boston, along with her deputy Stephen Heymann, did more than throw the book at Swartz. They pretty much had to write it first, concocting an imaginative list of 13 felony indictments that carried a potential total of 50 years in federal prison. As Knappenberger explained in a Q&A session at Sundance, that’s the correct context in which to understand Robert Swartz’s public remark that the government had killed his son. He didn’t mean that Aaron had actually been assassinated by the CIA, but rather that he was a fragile young man who had been targeted as an enemy of the state, held up as a public whipping boy, and hounded into severe psychological distress. Of course that cannot entirely explain what happened; Ortiz and Heymann, along with whoever above them in the Justice Department signed off on their display of prosecutorial energy, had no reason to expect that Swartz would kill himself. There’s more than enough pain and blame to go around, and purely on a human level it’s difficult to imagine what agony Swartz’s family and friends have put themselves through. One of the most painful moments in “The Internet’s Own Boy” arrives when Quinn Norton, Swartz’s ex-girlfriend, struggles to explain how and why she wound up accepting immunity from prosecution in exchange for information about her former lover. Norton’s role in the sequence of events that led to Swartz hanging himself in his Brooklyn apartment 18 months ago has been much discussed by those who have followed this tragic story. I think the first thing to say is that Norton has been very forthright in talking about what happened, and clearly feels torn up about it. Norton was a single mom living on a freelance writer’s income, who had been threatened with an indictment that could have cost her both her child and her livelihood. When prosecutors offered her an immunity deal, her lawyer insisted she should take it. For his part, Swartz’s attorney says he doesn’t think Norton told the feds anything that made Swartz’s legal predicament worse, but she herself does not agree. It was apparently Norton who told the government that Swartz had written the 2008 manifesto, which had spread far and wide in hacktivist circles. Not only did the manifesto explain why Swartz had wanted to download hundreds of thousands of copyrighted journal articles on JSTOR, it suggested what he wanted to do with them and framed it as an act of resistance to the private-property knowledge industry. Amid her grief and guilt, Norton also expresses an even more appropriate emotion: the rage of wondering how in hell we got here. How did we wind up with a country where an activist is prosecuted like a major criminal for downloading articles from a database for noncommercial purposes, while no one goes to prison for the immense financial fraud of 2008 that bankrupted millions? As a person who has made a living as an Internet “content provider” for almost 20 years, I’m well aware that we can’t simply do away with the concept of copyright or intellectual property. I never download pirated movies, not because I care so much about the bottom line at Sony or Warner Bros., but because it just doesn’t feel right, and because you can never be sure who’s getting hurt. We’re not going to settle the debate about intellectual property rights in the digital age in a movie review, but we can say this: Aaron Swartz had chosen his targets carefully, and so did the government when it fixed its sights on him. (In fact, JSTOR suffered no financial loss, and urged the feds to drop the charges. They refused.) A clean and straightforward work of advocacy cinema, blending archival footage and contemporary talking-head interviews, Knappenberger’s film makes clear that Swartz was always interested in the social and political consequences of technology. By the time he reached adulthood he began to see political power, in effect, as another system of control that could be hacked, subverted and turned to unintended purposes. In the late 2000s, Swartz moved rapidly through a variety of politically minded ventures, including a good-government site and several different progressive advocacy groups. He didn’t live long enough to learn about Edward Snowden or the NSA spy campaigns he exposed, but Swartz frequently spoke out against the hidden and dangerous nature of the security state, and played a key role in the 2011-12 campaign to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a far-reaching government-oversight bill that began with wide bipartisan support and appeared certain to sail through Congress. That campaign, and the Internet-wide protest of American Censorship Day in November 2011, looks in retrospect like the digital world’s political coming of age. Earlier that year, Swartz had been arrested by MIT campus police, after they noticed that someone had plugged a laptop into a network switch in a server closet. He was clearly violating some campus rules and likely trespassing, but as the New York Times observed at the time, the arrest and subsequent indictment seemed to defy logic: Could downloading articles that he was legally entitled to read really be considered hacking? Wasn’t this the digital equivalent of ordering 250 pancakes at an all-you-can-eat breakfast? The whole incident seemed like a momentary blip in Swartz’s blossoming career – a terms-of-service violation that might result in academic censure, or at worst a misdemeanor conviction. Instead, for reasons that have never been clear, Ortiz and Heymann insisted on a plea deal that would have sent Swartz to prison for six months, an unusually onerous sentence for an offense with no definable victim and no financial motive. Was he specifically singled out as a political scapegoat by Eric Holder or someone else in the Justice Department? Or was he simply bulldozed by a prosecutorial bureaucracy eager to justify its own existence? We will almost certainly never know for sure, but as numerous people in “The Internet’s Own Boy” observe, the former scenario cannot be dismissed easily. Young computer geniuses who embrace the logic of private property and corporate power, who launch start-ups and seek to join the 1 percent before they’re 25, are the heroes of our culture. Those who use technology to empower the public commons and to challenge the intertwined forces of corporate greed and state corruption, however, are the enemies of progress and must be crushed.
”The Internet’s Own Boy” opens this week in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Toronto, Washington and Columbus, Ohio. It opens June 30 in Vancouver, Canada; July 4 in Phoenix, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.; and July 11 in Seattle, with other cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand from Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vimeo, Vudu and other providers.
* * * * *
Luckily for us (especially those of us in a town too small to get a showing of this film, or who can't afford to pay per view), there is an open access version of the film available online.
According to the film summary, the new documentary “depicts the life of American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. It features interviews with his family and friends as well as the internet luminaries who worked with him. The film tells his story up to his eventual suicide after a legal battle, and explores the questions of access to information and civil liberties that drove his work.”
This week's podcast from All in the Mind (Australia) focused on how the internet and social media can be harnessed for everything from taking the emotional pulse of the nation to suicide prevention.
With the rise of smart phones, GPS devices and social media we leave ‘digital breadcrumbs’ wherever we go. Many fear the power of big data and technology in the wrong hands but there's a growing movement to harness this wealth of information and use the power of the collective to better our society. We hear about what the new science of social physics tells us about human connection, how Twitter can check the emotional pulse of a nation, and how sharing personal stories through social media is an effective suicide prevention campaign.
Professor Noam Chomsky visits Google Cambridge to answer the following questions from Googlers: 1. Your early view of the potential abuse of the Internet as a political medium seemed to convey a wait and see attitude. How has your view evolved and where do you think the balance of power is headed? 2:43 2. What is the most interesting insight the science of Linguistics has revealed but that the public at large seems not to know about or appreciate? 13:00 3. In "Hopes and Prospects" you mention your colleague Kenneth Hale and his work with Native Americans. In your opinion, how important is the problem of language extinction? That is, how important is it - for humanity to preserve the current level of linguistic diversity? 18:03 4. Can you comment on the contribution of research in statistical natural language processing to linguistics? 30:00 5. What, in your opinion, are the most effective strategies for building a more just and peaceful world? And in your view, what are the most significant takeaways from Occupy, the Arab Spring, and the Ukrainian "Euromaidan" uprising? 35:11 6. In "Hopes and Prospects" you compare Obama with Bush2. It's 4 years later now. What would you say today? 41:39
In this opinion piece for Wired, Kevin Kelly argues that we should embrace surveillance because it is a necessary piece of the new technological world we are creating. But there are two kinds of surveillance, and only one of them is workable.
[O]ur central choice now is whether
this surveillance is a secret, one-way panopticon — or a mutual,
transparent kind of “coveillance” that involves watching the watchers.
The first option is hell, the second redeemable.
The answer, he says, is coveillance, creating symmetry and transparency in how we are being watched, and in watching the watchers. Sounds about right.
Still, I cringe at the thought of how little privacy we now have in the technological present. Anybody and everybody can know your business - it's like living in a small town all over again.
By Kevin Kelly 03.10.14 Image: Twentieth Century Fox & Dreamworks
I once worked with Steven Spielberg on the development of Minority Report, derived from the short story by Philip K. Dick featuring a future society that uses surveillance to arrest criminals before they commit a crime. I have to admit I thought Dick’s idea of “pre-crime” to be unrealistic back then. I don’t anymore. Most likely, 50 years from now ubiquitous monitoring and surveillance will be the norm. The internet is a tracking machine. It is engineered to track. We will ceaselessly self-track and be tracked by the greater network, corporations, and governments. Everything that can be measured is already tracked, and all that was previously unmeasureable is becoming quantified, digitized, and trackable. If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species it is that the human impulse to share trumps the human impulse for privacy. We’re expanding the data sphere to sci-fi levels and there’s no stopping it. Too many of the benefits we covet derive from it. So our central choice now is whether this surveillance is a secret, one-way panopticon — or a mutual, transparent kind of “coveillance” that involves watching the watchers. The first option is hell, the second redeemable. We can see both scenarios beginning today. We have the trade-secret algorithms of Google and Facebook on one hand and the secret-obsessed NSA on the other. Networks require an immune system to remain healthy, and intense monitoring and occasional secrets are part of that hygiene to minimize the bad stuff. But in larger doses secrecy becomes toxic; more secrecy requires more secrets to manage and it sets up a debilitating auto-immune disease. This pathology is extremely difficult to stop, since by its own internal logic it must be stopped in secret. The remedy for over-secrecy is to think in terms of coveillance, so that we make tracking and monitoring as symmetrical — and transparent — as possible. That way the monitoring can be regulated, mistakes appealed and corrected, specific boundaries set and enforced. A massively surveilled world is not a world I would design (or even desire), but massive surveillance is coming either way because that is the bias of digital technology and we might as well surveil well and civilly. In this version of surveillance — a transparent coveillance where everyone sees each other — a sense of entitlement can emerge: Every person has a human right to access, and benefit from, the data about themselves. The commercial giants running the networks have to spread the economic benefits of tracing people’s behavior to the people themselves, simply to keep going. They will pay you to track yourself. Citizens film the cops, while the cops film the citizens. The business of monitoring (including those who monitor other monitors) will be a big business. The flow of money, too, is made more visible even as it gets more complex. Much of this scenario will be made possible by the algorithmic regulation of information as pioneered by open source projects. For instance, while a system like Bitcoin makes anonymous bank accounts possible, it does so by transparently logging every transaction in its economy, therefore making all financial transactions public. PGP encryption relies on code that anyone can inspect, and therefore trust and verify. It generates “public privacy”, so to speak. Encoding visible systems open to all eyes makes gaming them for secret ends more difficult. Every large system of governance — especially a digital society — is racked by an inherent tension between rigid fairness and flexible personalization. The cloud sees all: The cold justice of every tiny infraction by a citizen, whether knowingly or inadvertent, would be as inescapable as the logic of a software program. Yet we need the humanity of motive and context. One solution is to personalize justice to the context of that particular infraction. A symmetrically surveilled world needs a robust and flexible government — and transparency — to enforce adaptable fairness. But if today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species it is that the human impulse to share trumps the human impulse for privacy. So far, at every juncture that offers a technological choice between privacy or sharing, we’ve tilted, on average, towards more sharing, more disclosure. We shouldn’t be surprised by this bias because transparency is truly ancient. For eons humans have lived in tribes and clans where every act was open and visible and there were no secrets. We evolved with constant co-monitoring. Contrary to our modern suspicions, there wouldn’t be a backlash against a circular world where we constantly spy on each other because we lived like this for a million years, and — if truly equitable and symmetrical — it can feel comfortable. Bitcoin generates ‘public privacy’, so to speak. Yet cities have “civilized” us with modern habits such as privacy. It is no coincidence that the glories of progress in the past 300 years parallel the emergence of the private self and challenges to the authority of society. Civilization is a mechanism to nudge us out of old habits. There would be no modernity without a triumphant self. So while a world of total surveillance seems inevitable, we don’t know if such a mode will nurture a strong sense of self, which is the engine of innovation and creativity — and thus all future progress. How would an individual maintain the boundaries of self when their every thought, utterance, and action is captured, archived, analyzed, and eventually anticipated by others? The self forged by previous centuries will no longer suffice. We are now remaking the self with technology. We’ve broadened our circle of empathy, from clan to race, race to species, and soon beyond that. We’ve extended our bodies and minds with tools and hardware. We are now expanding our self by inhabiting virtual spaces, linking up to billions of other minds, and trillions of other mechanical intelligences. We are wider than we were, and as we offload our memories to infinite machines, deeper in some ways. Amplified coveillance will shift society to become even more social; more importantly it will change how we define ourselves as humans.
Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at WIRED. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999. Kelly is the author of What Technology Wants (2010), Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities (2013), and other books. He was involved with the launch of the pioneering online community The WELL (1985) and also co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference.
As I read this article, I was continually reminded of trauma survivors, especially those with developmental trauma, and the parts of them who criticize, ridicule, shame, and essentially hate them. These parts once served a role - they exposed every possible flaw and weakness before it could be seen by others and possibly be targeted by others.
The thinking is this: If I can shame myself for my weight before anyone else does, it won't hurt so bad when someone else does it; or this: If I am aware of every flaw I have then I will work extra hard not to let anyone else see them, which would make me the target of shaming and ridicule.
These are examples of the inner critic, a very common and difficult part in many of us, but in trauma survivors that part can be brutal and debilitating.
No healthy person would ever even think of doing this ("self-trolling") - but a trauma survivor with an inner critic that is partially or wholly dissociated sure would. The internet provides a public venue for what has traditionally happened in private. I have seen people with Dissociative Identity Disorder carve insults into their flesh with razors - now they can make the self-shaming even more obvious (and potentially deadly) through "self-trolling."
Why would anyone post dozens of fake messages of abuse about themselves on a social media website? And then complain that they are the victims of bullying? Could it be a form of research? Self-hatred? Or a perverse effort to find love? If this self-abuse is the "answer", then what on earth's the question? We can't ask 14-year-old Hannah Smith because it may have been precisely this exercise that killed her. During a pre-inquest review into her death last week, it emerged that there was no evidence she was the victim of trolling, with her father revealing that police believe she sent the anonymous messages to herself. If true, Hannah killed herself last August in the ultimate act of self-criticism. And then there was 24-year-old Michelle Chapman repeatedly posting self-slanders – of a "very unpleasant sexual nature" – from false Facebook accounts in the name of her father and step-mother before having them both arrested. After a legal investigation, Michelle found herself in jail for 20 months. What is the profit in pretending that people hate you when they don't? In the Chapman case, it was possibly some sort of response to a family fracture but these don't usually involve assassinating your own character as a means of redress. Statistics are scant help. One research study from the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Centre found that 9 per cent of 617 students might be tempted to bully themselves online falsely. When asked about potential motives, they came up with "cries for help", "gaining adult attention" or "forcing peers to support them".
In the pantheon of attention-seeking disorders, self-trolling has much in common with self-harming and self-starving. There are possible parallels with Münchausen's syndrome where patients typically fake illness to gain care. Even Hilaire Belloc's poem "Matilda" (who "told such dreadful lies it made one gasp") may be relevant because the child crying wolf – rather than asking for what is wanted – seems to be an underlying mechanism. So in the absence of data or definitions, what to make of it? As a therapist, I think we're confronted by people in severe distress feeling insecurely attached to parents, guardians and peers. As a result, mental processing remains juvenile whatever their biological stage. Their sense of personal identity seems fluid, fragile or miscalculated (one reason to denounce yourself in public is to conduct a rather risky opinion poll). Fantasy becomes reality – it's notable that some of the American students in the study came to believe that they'd been trolled for real just because their own words in print said that they had.
Michelle Chapman was sentenced to 20 months in prison for setting up fake Facebook profiles to send herself offensive messages
It's no help that the inner world of emotionally damaged children already contains its own bully. Starve children of enough affection and stability and they're too terrified to decide that the world is mad; instead, they invent a fantasy of themselves as evil. I think it's quite a simple step to graduate from such a mindset to active self-trolling. Better to self-blame aloud in four-letter tirades than conclude that nobody cares. Bad attention is always better than none. And yet despite feeling hopeless, the child is also angry enough to act. Self-trolling differs from self-harming by being more exhibitionistic than secret. All of us when disappointed in love tend to seek power as an alternative. The self-troller is masochistically gratified up to the moment their self-abuse causes social disaster. Is this type of behaviour new? No. Every town in history has probably contained someone who sent a poison-pen letter to themselves and basked in the resultant outrage. But it is probably no help that ours is an era of digital delusion. First, with a computer you can transmit much bigger messages. Second, we already suffer from the misconception that happiness is a Twitter following. Think @MsSallyBercow (5,508 followers) over her various tweeting mishaps. The result is that we are slow to perceive that the internet is both illusory and lethal. This subject of cyber self-harm matters because children die. We need to remember that when young people say one thing it may often mean the opposite.
Phillip Hodson is from the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (psychotherapy.org.uk). His views are personal.
For years, conversation about the changing ways we take in information has been characterized by polemics and a general sense of doom: Is Google making us stupid? Is Facebook making us narcissists? We keep trying to pinpoint what, exactly, is changing, because something surely is. But rather than strategize about how to wage war on distraction, or rebuild dissolved attention spans, Full Stop has decided to jump out of our poorly constructed lifeboat and wallow in the vast and undulating sea of information. With this questionnaire, we would like to explore, yes, how the internet is changing the ways in which we create, curate, and consume information (be it in the form of fiction, non-fiction, or criticism) but with an eye open for the pockets of potential in such changes. Astra Taylor is a writer, political organizer, and documentary filmmaker whose works include Zizek! and Examined Life. Her book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age will be published in April. Where does the most interesting (innovative in form and content) writing find its home right now? I’m tempted to say books, if only to be a bit contrarian. If we are talking about writing for a wide public, not for small groups of friends or comrades, then I think books are it. There’s a lot of interesting ephemeral writing online, but much of it is intended for specific recipients (like the weird SnapChats I send my little sister from the road) and not broad audiences. The notes I used to pass to my classmates were innovative in a similar sense. I’m standing by books because they offer writers the space to dig in, to see if formal innovations and experiments can hold up, and provide the space for authors to take ideas to their limits. (I know space is unlimited online, but paradoxically the consensus is that stuff must be short and punchy to thrive; meanwhile, the constraints of the printed book actually focus reader attention and offer boundaries for writers to push against and subvert.) There are other examples I could point to, but one genre that exists online, and which I don’t think really had a print counterpart, and that I gravitate toward and am excited about, is the type of informal academic commentary you see on scholars’ personal websites. This type of writing has probably come to life partly because the Internet frees the people who produce it from the rigmarole of academic publishing (impossibly slow scheduling, editing by committee, paywalls/obscurity, limited audiences). So you can read Corey Robin or Zeynep Tufekci or Tressie McMillan Cottom or Aaron Bady’s blogs. Related but different, there are articles like “Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Man-Child” in The New Inquiry, which is a fascinating example of a direction a similar kind of work can go. It was a sassy, entertaining, and ultimately extremely smart and spot on critique of Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. I remember liking the magazine Lingua Franca for the brief flash I was aware of it before it folded, and there’s stuff that approximately fills that space but is more direct and edgier, and I’d like to see even more of it. Today, we’re flooded with stories via the internet — on personal Tumblrs, Facebook and Twitter statuses, the abundance of magazines and newspapers that make their content free online. With so many narratives all around us, why do we still read (and pay for) novels? I might be the wrong person to pose this question to, given the fact I don’t read many novels, at least compared to how much non-fiction I read. That said, I have read a few this last couple of months, but I’ve been making a concerted effort to do so. Instinctively I prefer non-fiction when it comes to both books and cinema, and I don’t understand those who hold up fiction as somehow a higher art form — though there are many novels I love deeply. In my opinion, non-fiction can do everything fiction can do formally and aesthetically (given a writer with the impulse and ability), while to me the fact non-fiction remains somehow bound and beholden to reality only makes it more powerful and potentially profound. That said, I can at least share why I have been making a concerted effort to read more fiction. It had more to do with a kind of mental rigidity I felt coming on and that I wanted to shake off. Almost three years of intense critical writing working on my book and intensive political organizing (through the Occupy offshoot Strike Debt) had created some habits of mind and judgment. With the hope of opening up other avenues of experience and expression I’ve been trying to read more fiction, and I’ve been doing other things like playing music with friends. I’ve enjoyed these excursions, but my heart remains with non-fiction nevertheless. What do you think is good about the way we interact with information today? How has your internet consumption changed your brain, and writing, for the better? First the good: There’s a lot that’s positive and worth celebrating compared to the olden days of the nineties, when I had to go to the library to find stuff and I was too young and broke and ignorant to subscribe to any decent magazines (I remember this line cook at a vegetarian restaurant I worked at in Athens, GA reading a copy of The Nation and it being a revelation that such things existed, but it still didn’t occur to me to check out their website or subscribe so I didn’t see another issue for a few years). But this is the story we all know so well: Thanks to the Internet it’s never been easier to glean preliminary information about a given topic, whether through a simple search or following Wikipedia links, or finding experts or obsessives or articles on whatever subject has caught your fancy. The challenge is going deeper, beyond the first few pages of Google results and other obvious discoveries. That said, going deeper and having the discipline to do real research always required conscientious labor, so what’s new? You have to put in the time and be extra vigilant about resisting the bandwagon effect. As a documentarian and sometimes journalist, I’m biased towards reportage and investigating things for myself, towards moving from information to first hand experience, and sometimes I feel it’s too easy to read a few op-eds or breeze through some links and feel like I have a subject covered. I’m still regularly surprised by topics I think I know a lot about when I go out and ask some questions. It usually turns out I don’t know nearly as much as I believed I did. On how my brain has been changed, I’d say Internet consumption has had an effect, but how can one really know for sure? My attempts to seriously engage with information and to try my hand at writing coincided with the Internet becoming an ever stronger and more constant presence in my life, so it’s impossible to really separate the two. Over that time I’ve also grown up and become more knowledgeable and confidant in my work and my writing — my brain has become more capable in lots of ways, but as I mentioned earlier I fear a kind of sedimentation or rigidity that can come with age and figuring out one’s general perspective on things. I know what I think about something before I even know what the thing is I’m thinking about, if that makes sense. On that front, I’m not sure my information gathering habits do much to expand my conceptual horizons, and perhaps that’s a problem that has to do with the structure of our networked communications system — that’s a topic of lively debate. And like a lot of others, I wrestle with distraction and the feeling that it’s easier to ingest info-pellets than commit to sustained, deep reading and reflection. But I don’t blame the Internet for that problem, I blame myself — and the fact that so many of the platforms we use are engineered to be irresistible because that’s the path to profitability. How does writing online become significant? It depends on what you mean by significant. If you mean worthy of attention and admiration or that something is particularly relevant or insightful, then a lot of timeless advice applies. Advice about writing on difficult subjects, writing about things that matter even if they are unpopular, writing without dumbing things down or cutting corners, and just doing the work and putting in the time. This kind of significance applies to writing whether it is online or offline or both or whatever. But if you mean significant in the sense of having garnered attention, as in “that piece was really significant because it was read by tons of people” — which is what the “become” in “become significant” implies — then my answer is more ambivalent. There are lots of tricks to making things more shareable and infectious online (and, to be clear, many of them are tricks carried over from less than venerable print publications, so we can’t blame “the Internet” for inventing them). Of course those tricks have evolved, egged on by those in the virality business. There are click-baity traffic-ginning techniques, and there are the ways individuals fish for attention online (like picking fights — or starting “argumercials,” to use Caleb Crain’s apt neologism — or writing about already trending topics). What that means is that there’s plenty of good writing that is at a disadvantage in the current media ecosystem. The more interesting and less cynical answer to your question would ponder how to make things that are significant in the first sense significant according to the second one. How do you help good writing reach the people? This can happen in various ways, but the first step is finding ways to support people to write serious or “significant” work to begin with — not easy to do given the realities of the marketplace, but necessary — and then, alongside that, to build communities that can help amplify worthwhile work, which is what many of the interesting small magazines (The Baffler, n+1, The New Inquiry, Jacobin) are doing, by engaging readers through all available means, whether by social media or by convening people away from their keyboards through events and conferences, et cetera. Building institutions and community are both key. Information online is both supremely malleable and under unprecedented scrutiny. How has the Internet changed non-fiction writing? It’s hard to generalize, and there are lots of contradictions. One can write about anything under the sun, but there always seems to be some scandal or outrage that everyone is piling on. One can toss something off in the blink of an eye, but it will remain posted forever, or at least the foreseeable future. On the one hand texts online are easily updatable and correctable compared to print, but there seems to be an endless stream of errors and falsehoods. What these examples point to is a pressure to be of the moment and relevant, to be “now” — certainly that pressure has always been felt by writers but it seems to have intensified. How is quality writing on the internet facilitated? How is the role of an online editor different than that of an editor for print? Quality takes many forms and can be found all over the place, from a long review in the LRB or the LARB to those hit-the-nail-on-the-head pithy Tweets that some people (not me) regularly come up with. Nonetheless, I still think a certain kind of quality writing, especially the kind that requires deep reportage, needs to be facilitated by institutions that can support writers (and editors too), by paying them to go out and report, supporting them financially and also legally so they can take risks and challenge powerful entities (all the cliches of what journalism can and must do, which I still believe in, at least in theory). As a writer I just want an editor who edits smart and hard, whether they are editing for a website or for print. Look at something like TomDispatch, edited by the estimable Tom Englehardt. Everything he posts is fantastic and meticulously edited; he’s someone who honed his skills as an editor of books. He understands the logic of Internet publishing but doesn’t pander to it, or rather he caters to its better tendencies. As a result, the articles he releases have a surprisingly wide reach, especially given their challenging themes and how lengthy and dense they can be. The internet makes possible new forms of collaboration and discussion. How has this changed the concept of authorship online? It’s interesting how people often assert that digital technologies have challenged the notion of the author and authorship. There may be some truth to this claim, but it also seems to me the idea of authorship has metastasized in some ways. Now curators are authors of a sort, which I understand and am sympathetic to, but people also get credit (hat tips or vias or whatever) for unearthing or just posting links. I admit to finding it a bit strange when someone credits me for posting an article that is sitting on the Guardian’s homepage, and to having been surprised when I’ve seen folks upset at others for sharing “their content” without acknowledging them. I guess the answer is, I don’t know. Authorship is a fraught concept that emerged against the background of industrialization, and it’s evolving and mutating as digital capitalism comes into its own. Seeing ourselves as authors — even if it’s just in our curating of our personal news streams — seems to me crucial to the expansion of the whole social media bubble. Anyway, there’s a lot of hype around writing collaboratively these days, and often it comes from individuals steeped in Silicon Valley rhetoric, so my skeptical instincts kick in. Still, on another level, I see the appeal of this idea, particularly when there is a clear political imperative. One project I played a small role in through Strike Debt is The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual, which we self-published in late 2012, giving away over ten thousand printed copies and many more free PDFs. A new edition is coming out next month through Common Notions press. We are advocating for a collective solution to the current debt crisis, which is typically very isolating and demoralizing to people being crushed by housing, medical, or student debt; it made sense to try to write collectively given our ambition of inspiring a resistance movement. In my limited experience it is actually harder to write well collaboratively than it is to write alone (alone with the help of a talented editor, ideally). Not just in terms of sense making, but also putting your ego aside and allowing yourself to be edited or erased. It can be a healthy exercise and worth it creatively, should circumstances call for such an approach.
