5 Mar
2013
5 Mar
'13
3:35 p.m.
(Matthew: I see your comment was posted to me but not posted to list, so
I've redacted it from this posting to the list, which is in reply to
you. If you want to post your comment to the list, feel free. Everyone
else: it wasn't a scathing criticism or something scandalous, in fact I
think Matthew may have wanted to post it to list but didn't hit Reply
All. That said, it's up to him.)
The surveillance ecosystem is already enormous, and the vast majority is
in the private sector.
General rule: "Dissipative structures form ecosystems around
entropy-gradients." Organisms are dissipative structures; work is
energy-conversion. This explains much of human social behavior as well
as physical ecosystem behavior.
For example people want music and they're willing to work hard (convert
energy) to get it. Energy conversion produces an entropy gradient. The
music industry middlemen (RIAA) insert themselves into the path between
sources & sinks (artists & audiences, and that relationship is two-way)
to tap as much energy out of this process as possible, in the form of
money. Illegal file downloaders as well as self-produced bands who use
Creative Commons or Copyleft, are seen by the music industry as
short-circuits in the system.
Consumer behavior in general is an enormous energy source (money
source), and the goal of capitalism is ultimately to surround every
consumer with the equivalent of a Dyson sphere to capture as much of
their work output as possible. The modern surveillance ecosystem is all
about "predicting and controlling" individual behavior, toward that end.
So, per Matthew, one way to counter this is to set up a countervailing
ecosystem, with entropy gradients tilted in such a manner as to produce
incentives to fight back against the surveillance.
As for defending privacy: privacy is equivalent to free speech. As a
lawyer told us when I was working on "crypto for the masses" in the
early 1980s, the right to freedom of speech necessarily includes the
right to choose your audience. Today we commonly use the term "chilling
effect" to refer to what happens when you can't choose your audience,
e.g. when your boss and the credit bureaux etc. are likely to be
watching you on "social" networks.
It's been said more than once, that you can tell when someone's boss is
watching them on Facebook: all of a sudden their comments go totally
bland (not that any of us should be using Facebook unless we're
deliberately using it as a publicity tool for political or other
campaigns). That's the chilling effect in action. And if DARPA and
Google have their way, where everyone's every conversation, private and
in-person included, is recorded and archived and made searchable, the
chill will be so total that it will make life in East Germany under the
Stasi look like a picnic by comparison.
Knowledge is power: when THEY know all about YOU, but you know nothing
about them, who has the power?
As the old song said, "Getting to know you / getting to know all about
you..."
Not to mention, "He sees you when you're sleeping / he knows when you're
awake. / He knows if you've been bad or good / so be good for (getting
lots of presents) sake!"
Going back thousands of years, societies envisioned deities as concerned
with individual "moral behavior" (i.e. sex) as a way of strengthening
tribal cohesion. Western cultures in particular evolved with the very
strong sense that their deities were keeping a close watch over them.
This gave people a sense of comfort and protection.
Today as agnosticism, atheism, and various forms of transpersonal
beliefs (in effect religion without personalized deities) are on the
rise in the geek sector, the sense of comfort from "being watched over"
has transplanted itself from the deity to the surveillance
superstructure. Many people are secretly fond of the idea that Big
Google is reading every word they write, listening to every phone call
they make, and following them around. This is nothing more than a new
deity taking the place of the old one: "someone big who watches over us."
It seems to me that a necessary part of the evolution of rational people
away from the need for personalized deities, is to get away from the
need for the "comfort" of being watched over. Individuals who are
rational self-aware autonomous moral actors have no need of being
watched over by anything other than our own consciences.
-G.
=====
On 13-03-05-Tue 2:43 PM, Matthew D. Howell wrote:
(Comment was sent to me in private email, not to the list, so if Matthew
wishes he can repost it to the list.)
=====
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Anon195714 <anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net>
wrote:
3:38 p.m.
New subject: Dystopia Watch: Surveillance drones coming to a cafe near you.
> If everybody had a head mounted camera, police
brutality would become non existent.
not sure if non existant or spectator sport
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Matthew D. Howell
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cell: (617) 755-1481
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On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 3:37 PM, Jehan Tremback <jehan.tremback(a)gmail.com> wrote:
3:46 p.m.
New subject: Dystopia Watch: Surveillance drones coming to a cafe near you.
If everybody's head-mounted camera was connected to Google, taking video
of police misconduct would cause their credit ratings to drop and their
employment situation to become precarious.
The thing that holds "the masses" down, isn't the threat of a billy-club
upside the head or a face full of pepper spray. It's the threat of
losing their job, their house or apartment, and their medical care. Ask
anyone who has kids. The degree of conformity and everyday oppression
that people are willing to endure "for their kids' sake" is enormous.
Government largely serves capital. What capital wants is to surround
every person with the equivalent of a Dyson sphere to capture all of
their energy output either in the form of work or consumption.
-G.
=====
On 13-03-05-Tue 3:37 PM, Jehan Tremback wrote:
4:01 p.m.
New subject: Dystopia Watch: Surveillance drones coming to a cafe near you.
" The degree of conformity and everyday oppression that people are
willing to endure "for their kids' sake" is enormous. "
I quite agree.
- - - -
Part of what I think contributes to a greater sense of personal
freedom is, simply put, chaos. Though, (I believe) we need to create
new cultural chaos at just the right speed. Revolutions that are fast
enough to confound the use of law to limit them and slow enough to not
be met with violence and thus be reverted to the oldest and most
boring thing, war. To shift the places where the middle men posit
themselves at the right speed to avoid inevitable full resource drain.
Even better is to create sustainable methods of cultural stagnation
avoidance and employ ourselves to do it.
Not sure if its possible..
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Matthew D. Howell
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cell: (617) 755-1481
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 3:46 PM, Anon195714 <anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote:
5:19 p.m.
New subject: Chaos & freedom & kids (oh my!)
(I'm changing the subject header on this just to keep the conversation
topics easier to follow.)
Conformity & oppression "for their kids' sake": This points to the need
to hack the social software as it were, liberate parenthood in some
way. To my mind, liberating economics is the key to that: parents who
have economic security aren't under pressure to conform "or else."
Chaos: VERY interesting and thought-provoking take you have, on a
subject that sometimes falls prey to cliches.
Assume one axis of measurement from order to chaos, and another axis
from predictability to randomness. These are not the same thing, in
that "chaos" in the strict mathematical sense can be deterministic and
thus in some cases potentially susceptible to being computable
(predictable and controllable).
The goal of capital is the same as that of any other dissipative
structure, which is to extract energy from entropy gradients. The key
advantage capital has is that it is ultimately "pure information" and
thus is orthogonal to thermodynamics (though governed by economic
variables that can have effects similar to those of thermodynamics, for
example "discounting" which is similar to anticipated entropy over
time). (The thermodynamic cost of transferring a billion dollars across
the globe as compared to a penny, is merely the energy cost of
transmitting the bytes for the additional digits in the dollar amount: a
miniscule energy cost for an enormous increase in the effect of the
outcome.)
However the individuals who control capital are also dissipative
structures seeking to maximize their own net energy gain. Thus they
often act in ways that are inimical to the interests of their employers
or The Ownership generally. For example financial executives in the
lead-up to the 2008 crash, acted for their personal benefit at the
expense of their companies and shareholders: this because the benefits
of serving themselves at the expense of capital significantly exceeded
the benefits to be gained as an outcome of serving capital.
Very often we find individual actors in the oligarchy, who specifically
act to destroy established systems of whatever kind, in order to benefit
from the sudden release of energy from those systems. For example
corporate raiders who dismantle corporations in order to sell off all
the assets and earn a fast profit at the expense of the other
shareholders and stakeholders. By analogy as if Bin Laden set up a
scrap metal company before 9/11/2001, to profit from selling the
wreckage of the World Trade Center. "oooh, look at all that potentially
profitable scrap steel just waiting to be liberated by gravity plus a
couple of jet airliners!"
Very often the proponents of revolutions are operating on a radically
different sense of time than the general population who are the intended
beneficiaries of the revolutions. For example I've wanted marriage
equality all my life (gay & single here) and when Mayor Newsome in SF
started the ball rolling, I got impatient for court victories right
away. However what finally worked was the strategy Obama had, of
starting by de-segregating the military (repealing DADT), and then using
that as the lead-in for changing cultural values that would erode the
opposition to marriage equality. Judging from the outcome of various
state elections in 2012, Obama's methods have been working, and will
probably result in either a partial or complete victory (California or
nationwide) at the Supreme Court.
What WE have: we the hackers and makers, little and poor though most of
us may be, have some enormously powerful assets: Being small, we're
faster than the oligarchy and the middlemen. Being poor we're frugal
and we can make every dollar go much further. Being committed to
ideals, we're willing to endure temporary hardships that the oligarchs
and middlemen (with their dependence on lives of luxury) are not willing
to endure. In terms of business activity we tend toward
micro-enterprise and co-ops, which have the advantage of economic
efficiency in not having to generate significant return to capital aside
from repayment of relatively minor debt.
So the task at hand is basically "same as it ever was":
To shape the overall ecosystem in a manner that is conducive to OUR
advantages, at the expense of the oligarchy's and middlemens'
advantages. This is part of what makes the conservative version of the
Gaia Hypothesis tick: organisms exert feedback on ecosystems to preserve
the viability of their own niches. All organisms do it.
This also explains part of the big push by the likes of Google and
Facebook, for the "transparency" of a world of one-way mirrors where
privacy is "an obsolete virtue." (Remember back in the Reagan days,
along with "greed is good," we heard "loyalty is an obsolete
virtue"...?) They want to "predict & control" down to the individual
level, for the purpose (among other things) of shaping the social
ecosystem to their own advantage. Our defense of privacy creates
liberated zones or temporary autonomous zones where they cannot do that:
zones where they can't predict or control, from which we not only defend
ourselves, but attack our adversaries.
(And y'all thought that Google's keyword searching of emails & phone
calls was merely to send you targeted advertising?)
We need to "operationalize the variables" and figure out where the
oligarchy's and middlemens' weak spots are, and attack them there. To
my mind the most significant things are the financial system and the
marketplace. Anything we can do to build alternative economics,
strengthens us and weakens our enemies, and builds a world that's more
sane, humane, and sustainable. But there's also room for guerrilla
actions, such as "bombing" Google, Facebook, and Twitter, with
deliberate misinformation and disinformation on a scale sufficient to
foul up the oligarchy's predictions. (Though, make no mistake, this
does require sufficient scale, more about which some other time.)
More later, gots work to do...
-G.
=====
On 13-03-05-Tue 4:01 PM, Matthew D. Howell wrote:
3:37 p.m.
New subject: Dystopia Watch: Surveillance drones coming to a cafe near you.
hehe I like that my comment was redacted, thanks :P
i was just sayin:
Now I am thinking about the "surveillance ecosystem" that is growing
on top of our current "security ecosystem" and create fun and
innovative ways, not to defend privacy, but to create interactions,
economies, revolutions, and subcultures with privacy and publicity;
tools and hacks..
cheers!
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Matthew D. Howell
misterinterrupt, tHe M4d swiTcH, the RuinMechanic
cell: (617) 755-1481
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 3:35 PM, Anon195714 <anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote:
4461
days inactive
4462
days old
6 comments
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participants (3)
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Jehan Tremback -
Matthew D. Howell