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Bruce Sterling on Geeks and Spooks
apsmith writes: "Bruce Sterling's
latest Viridian piece is a written version of a talk on why we're in such a mess with crypto, why the computer industry is going nowhere for the next few years, and what Lawrence Lessig, the NSA, Echelon, Oliver North and Abdullah Catli have in common. Thought-provoking stuff, even if you might not agree with quite everything ("Why don't you geeks just sit down with your cheap, crappy plastic boxes, and shut up? Here in the TV biz, our boxes look nicer anyway!")." This is a lunch-time talk, and it's meant to be entertaining, and it is. :)
A few people care an awful lot about cryptography, but the overwhelming majority of people just want safe credit card transactions. So that's what we've gotten. Cypherpunk types have colorful fantasies but are a joke if you're talking about real world implications. So the anti-crypto forces have beaten them but it's a Pyrrhic victory since the real challenge to the secret-keepers is highly available global information sharing.
Also, Sealand is stupid.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Taking the medieval analogy to its logical conclusion I have one question: who gets to be the pope? Bill Gates or Richard Stallman?
This is NOT off-topic...
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OSS projects as centers of power? Are you kidding me? The manager at your local K-Mart has more power than Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman combined.
What you're missing, is that the "code artists" are the serfs. Writing code is low-level labor--to the information age what plowing fields was to the age of agriculture. The only way you can cease to be a serf, is to cease writing code. Code is just a commodity, like wheat. Useless in and of itself. Useful if you can make money off its sale. The management class is the one that structures deals and creates wealth. That's the way it always has been and always will be.
I found this highly entertaining, but people who do not have a particularly dry sense of humour may not enjoy it. I think he makes some excellent points, especially when addressing some of the things our spy industry does that the mainstream media covers up.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Why not use a PGP/GPG like signature on passports? Or drivers licenses for that matter? A simple national key for signing all visas, passports, or other means of identification could easily verify the validity of such a piece of paper. It would be hard to forge, and easy to verify.
Bruce also made some rather silly/stupid comments:
You know what I want? I don't want a National ID Card. I want a Global Coalition Visa. .
Now, I was all for the national ID card when the idea was first proposed. It seemed worthwhile at the time : every person known to have terrorist connections could be tracked ; airlines could notify the government of movement, the government could warn the airlines that a suspected terrorist was on a plane. I realized the negative possibilities of this system, and have since changed my viewpoint, now seeing it as a possible way to eliminate virtually any privacy that even remotely exists on a personal level. A global card would be remarkably worse: not only would one not have any privacy at home, one would not have any privacy away from home; escape would become impossible. I, for one, have always assumed that IF domestic policies ever got to the point that they seriously bothered me, I would leave. A global card leaves you with no destination.
Video for Online Dating Profiles
If...wait, BIG IF...Sterling and Lessig are right about the concentration and fragmentation of power going on right now, then in order to attract new features/projects, the big remaining software powers, lacking all creativity, will eventually be forced to grant monopolies to the most promising software creators. (Just as in the medieval period, guilds were often established as a "recruiting tool" to snarf the foreign experts in some new field.)
It is the combined package of code that works, lore about that code, and restricted access to the CVS tree that is interesting... Without this, I agree with you that serfdom is the unfortunate result.
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Sure, perhaps we would suddenly see thousands more videos a la Rodney King or perhaps even volunteer "Thought Police"-types of citizan groups (there's a Louisville, KY paper called "Snitch") but isn't that reason alone NOT to make such things? Enabling people to securely document unseemly behaviour of authorities would surely prompt many "corporate privacy protection" laws or the outright declaration that video recordings of Federal, State, and Municipal employees are verboten. On the other hand, the goody-two-shoes neighborhood snitch crowd would threaten the private citizen's right to be anonymous.
But despite these objections, these things are already starting to happen -- the surveilence culture is already well established. Xcam, anyone? Indymedia is an example of how cheap video equipment, the internet, and PHP can provide an alternative news service for those who disdain the mainstream sources. The cops routinely videotape everything they do, and sometimes re-edit it later as they see fit.
The difference between the current trend of surveillence culture and Sterlings's pleas to geeks are that regular joe can't compete with the likes of CNN in getting those memes out there. Plus States' resources in information management; ie. linking downtown London's streetcorner cameras to Interpol mugshots.
Imagine a Slashdot style system of posting video clips (except really really user-friendly); user-moderated, with "karma" exploded into multiple ratings axes (rather than being 1-dimensional), decentralized, with multiple points of entry (not just different browsers -- different ways of getting the info).
The difference between this and TV news is a reported doesn't simply present information -- they interpret and filter it to a large degree. However, how could a news organization ignore a video clip that gets boosted to the top of the pile?
Brainstorm, rant, reaction....
[pink beam of light]
I suppose I should be proud to have someone like Bruce Sterling making any kind of comments about me... (I wonder if he'd show up if I invited him to a party?)
Actually, our quality of life out on Sealand is pretty high. Any geek thing which fits in 5k square feet of dedicated-to-accomodations space, for a fairly small number of people, we have. Gig-e, dvd library, 5 TB of mp3s (and divx), wavelan throughout, on-site anonymizing proxies and mixmaster remailers, a pool of laptops, IEC 320 outlets on the walls, and about 16L of diet coke per person per week. It's really no different from a big house in the middle of nowhere, except in 2 hours I can be in London, or 4 hours in Amsterdam, or 11 hours in San Francisco, LA, etc. Admittedly, I'd far prefer living in one of the 5 interesting cities in the world, but this makes money. And, most of the people living here are security/maintenance, not geeks. The big drawback is our no-drug/no-alcohol policy, and the lack of random unplanned social interaction; friends of mine from SF fly out and visit, but nothing really happens spontaneously or serindipitously. Again, much like living on a farm or something.
No one really promotes Sealand as a tourist destination or place to live; it's effectively a big colocation facility at present, and likely to remain so indefinitely.
I *do* agree with his fundamental point there, though -- if I were going to be living in isolation with a small number of people, I don't know if people who are dedicated to bringing down governments and complete individual liberty are the best companions. Although *bland* people are probably the "easiest" to get along with, if I were picking some people to spend long amounts of time with in a remote location, once basic skills were taken care of, people interested in science, art, literature, etc. would be a lot more interesting than "glee club" or debating society or politicians or lawyers or the others Sterling mentions as the most interesting. A lot of the "hacker" conferences attract a good cross-section of people; I think of all the 5000-person subsets of the world, the people at events like HAL, nanotech conferences, Burning Man, etc. would be some of the better ones.
As for his overall point about the rate of cypherpunk progress; I don't know. A lot of the things we want already exist -- ssh is *widely* deployed (to the point that anyone sending passwords in the clear over the net is a fucking moron, and widely recognized as such); SSL web pages are common; anonymization through mixmaster or proxies is understood and deployed. HavenCo provides a small piece of the puzzle by making it easy to anonymously, reliabily, and security host servers. The only thing we're missing is true blinded ecash, but progress is still being made on that front, and almost-as-good alternatives, like e-gold, paypal, etc., already exist. I'd say we've done a pretty good job on the datahaven front, given that it's been discussed in sci-fi for 20-30 years, and most of the pieces are there now; how long were they discussing space travel, biotech, wide area networks, etc. before they were deployed to a similar degree? The dotcom collapse is certainly a setback for everyone, but the underlying trend of decentralization and individual control which started before the dotcom boom is still going strong.
Mr Sterling's manifesto reads a lot like many other anti-establishment whack-job's ramblings. Just as he starts to make a point, he wanders off into anecdotal bits of dead-spy arcana which somehow is supposed to make you think he must know what he's talking about. Except he forgets to ever really say anything that can be grabbed onto so you can say, yeah! you got a point, (or even, hey, that not right).
When it comes right down to it, the culprit is the maturation of the tech industry. Its not so fun anymore, all the low hanging fruit has been picked. And the drama about crypto and spy-hackers that gave geeks a sort of mystery and coolness just never amounted to much, and wishing won't make it so.
Maybe there aren't many interesting things to run on a high-end PC *now*, but there will be.
;)
I firmly believe that a moment will come when there will be something better to run than a desktop OS. (And for the desktop head over to www.kde.org right away
Speaking AI? Knowledge based systems, machine learning, planning, language processing, and a whole lot more. There will be stuff that you wouldn't dare write in a novel.
Speaking network? Where is my distributed OS, will there be one Avalon that I can login to? Who knows... Today we've got lots of cluster stuff, computational network projects and a beowulf at our research lab but tomorrow...
Speaking privacy? Come and decypher my GnuPG encrypted emails. The better algo's we need, the more they will be made.
Happy writing,
--exa--
I'd argue that it's not that there is any less innovation, it's just that thanks to the Internet, all the early adopters get the innovative new technology in some barely usable beta state, impressive but not exciting to the point where its called "innovative", and by the time its refined to a solid and usable point, we take it for granted. Also, alot (but not all) of the "innovative" stuff in the past was doing the simple and obvious stuff in a way that was far from simple and obvious becase to get it to run on the hardware of the day would mean all sorts of fancy optimizations. Take for example innovations like streaming video. Everyone went through all sorts of effort to make ultra-efficient compression codecs and stuff, but once broadband gets to a point where its as fast as your average LAN, it will become merely the transmission of a video stream over a network in a way that seems no different than playing it locally, and won't seem like anything innovative at all
There's already too much information, code, hardware, people, you name it to keep track of. Your average feudal lord didn't have to keep track of a gazillion different people doing a gazillion different things. You don't need Sealand or Grenada to make an Island in the Net; all you really need is relative obscurity and the ability to quickly shut it down and set it up somewhere or somehow else. He makes the mistake of regarding anarchists as these in-your-face kind of people who are out on the streets raising hell, when I bet most of them are just quietly going about their business keeping a low profile. He also makes the mistake of regarding the spooks as these omnipotent, omnipresent gods; the events of 9/11 alone disproves that idea. High profile people like Dimitri and that Finnish kid get the heat while shadowy crackers and sharers continue on, barely being noticed by anyone. We've got a brand new spanking Homeland Sercuity department and a Justice Department that's wanting to wiretap and spy all over the country, but neither of them can stop that kid downloading MP3s or knocking off the corner liquor store. Remember the war on drugs? Last time I checked, drugs were winning.
If one looks at the technology and software that's out there, it can be easy to conclude that there's little real innovation out there. It would seem that we're in a period of small refinements to old hat stuff. But isn't it the social innovation that really makes the internet unique?
Part of the problem with science fiction writers is they tend to write novels where one person single-handedly saves the world or changes it in opposition to some monolithic oppressive entity. I'm afraid Sterling's fallen prey to that - he's looking at the people who want to be big players and what they're doing, while all the time, the bit actors are stealing the show by sheer force of numbers. Yeah, great, the government's going to have a number on everyone and observe everything they do - but how in the hell are they going to keep track of it all? How many words are created on the internet a day and how many people would you need to keep track of them all? People argue about anomynity all the time, but there's a simple truth - if you are one of millions, you are anomynous unless you do something very obvious to draw attention to yourself or get very unlucky.
What he's done here is the equivalent of judging the ocean by what he can see looking down on it. He sees the first few surface feet and meanwhile, 99.99% of the water goes uninspected.
Okay, although this has probably been pointed out by someone 'neath the +3 thresh that I browse at, I'd like to ask: What is this with the `geek tribe' inventing microsoft and stagnating tech?
I've always been under the impression that Microsoft was more a marketing-management invention; Aside from the founder-coders, Microsoft is actually (I've heard) rather rough on its geeks (outsourced labour and permatemps and all that 'Niaomi Klein' jazz. I would be more inclined to think of geeks as the usual Slashdot cast --- interested in technological innovation and (as a distant second) society in general, not so interested in thumbing through wads of cash made by market hammerlock (a lot of us write code for free, for chrissakes.)
And what is it with Bruce's prediliction for, you know, the second tense colloqualisms? Sorry. IMO speeches shouldn't read like character dialogue.
- undoware.ca
No. The reason MS is the 800 pound gorilla is that any time they see someone else's innovation they work it into their operating system, buy the company outright, or code a workalike and release it for free. And I think what you see on SourceForge is a very public process, beginning with the idea phase, early development and planning, up to the few mature beta projects and then no insignificant number of release quality packages. I bet if you had similar full access to all the developer machines at Microsoft you'd find a similar number of ideas that never gained traction, a lot of early code that got chucked after the skeleton was written, enough parallel development of certain things to make you wonder who's in charge and if they are awake, and plenty of beta stuff that never makes it to release, and a handful of release quality stuff.
Note on the word release: *any* release is really just a beta until users get a chance to test it, only with Microsoft they can't call their first release beta because then no one would pay for it, the updates in the form of service packs are usually no charge-- free software can call stuff beta forever if they want, giving a package a release number is good for the public process of knowing when to feature freeze and do more rigorous testing for a while, but not much else.
Personally I think Sterling is flat out wrong. He does give some okay insights into why geeks might be a little wary of the government (after all the spooks are scary to just about anyone, and the spooks are actually interested in the geeks), but as to his assertion that there is no innovation going on... I think that's just plain nonsense.
Of course, when computing finally reached the level where you could put a really powerful machine on someone's lap there was a rush to fill in all the blanks, software-wise. But there's still plenty to be done, and people are working on it. Natural language parsing, non-mouse/non-keyboard interfaces, wearables, portables, AI, agent software, there may be lots of great clients out there (like Excel or Powerpoint), but just wait until there is an Excel server and two people can really easily start to work on the same spreadsheet simultaneously... I could go on and on with the things that are likely happening or have happened that we aren't really aware of yet...
His quick dismissal of Moore's law is based on small computers, look at the things big computers are doing that before were essentially impossible! Even if the underlying software or programming paradigms are the same, the real world application of the tools is drastically improving.
Finally, just because the last fifty years have seen this rate of growth in computing that's astronomical, we cannot and should not expect it to always feel like that: it's not even safe. When you get on the freeway you accelerate from zero to 60 rather quickly, but once you're on the road, just because you've stopped accelerating doesn't mean you're slowing down. Tech is perhaps done accelerating, but even at cruising speed we're still going places.
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