Suddenly the world was filled with zombies and apocalypse was the theme du jour. The movies are one of the ways we tell ourselves the story of our dreams and nightmares. Our anxiety about the future viability of the biosphere spills out on to the silver screen. All this could be coming to an end.
As philosopher Tim Morton likes to say, the film we're both watching and creating is a noir. We're the detectives searching for the villain threatening our planet. Of course, it turns out we are the ones we're looking for. Those super villains and monstrous aliens on the big screen are disguised aspects of ourselves. We're Dr. Jekyll looking for Mr. Hyde.
Recently there's been a small change in the dream narrative. The story has always been about the hero who prevented the end of the world by defeating the villain. A new film by Darren Aronofsky starring Russell Crowe makes the story of Noah into an action adventure movie filled with big special effects. The change is that Noah doesn't save the world; he builds an ark. The world is destroyed, but Noah preserves the seed of a new world.
Hidden within the apocalypse of the flood is the idea that once the waters recede, the earth will be cleansed and the biosphere will be able to provide a new home to the virtuous ones who survived the end. It's the kind of ending that's a new beginning. We think of it as the kind of change that only happens after hitting rock bottom.
Uncontemplated is the ending in which the biosphere is no longer able to support a majority of current life forms. It's not so much a matter of poisoning the biosphere as causing it to change at a rate that exceeds a majority of species ability to adapt. In the end it will be the unpredictable strangeness that leaves so many species out in the cold.
It took listening to Jesse Thorn's Bullseye to remind me of the greatness of The Pointer Sisters. The song “Yes We Can Can,” written by Allen Toussaint, was the hit single from their first self-titled album in 1973. When I listen to it today I can hear echoes of the time, the song coming out of transistor radios, car radios and television sets. Richard Nixon had been re-elected, the Viet Nam War continued on, Pink Floyd released “Dark Side of the Moon,” E.F. Schumacher published “Small is Beautiful,” Watergate began to heat up, the Skylab space station was launched, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its DSM-II and the Endangered Species Act was enacted. Even in the face of the rising backlash against the counter-culture 60s, that song captured something of the strong optimistic spirit of those times.
The “Yes We Can” theme was famously used in Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Given the political battles that have unfolded in the interim, we look back on that sentiment as naive. From this vantage point we're singing more about going it alone than moving forward together.
Faced with global warming and the sixth mass extinction event, it's difficult to see how we can alter the course of the biosphere through uncoordinated individual action. Actually, that's how we got ourselves into this mess. We act at the level of species whether we intend to or not.
Beyond “Yes We Can” might be “Yes We Can Can.” Beyond the scientific observations and the rhetorical hammers is a groove that shows us something about the kindness that we can give.
These observations are in no particular order and are obviously incomplete.
Big Data, Big Error and Certainty
The more we use big data to justify decisions, more certain we become. This is despite the fact that big data findings are expressed as probabilities. The more certain we become the more we open ourselves to big errors. The size of these errors and the size of our certainty will be roughly equivalent.
Networked Social Streams are just Television
What looked like a new medium turns out to be an evolution of television. The large social and search hubs have taken the place of the Networks. The business model of sponsored commercial messages in the stream remains roughly the same. The major innovation is that now when you talk back to the television, more people have the potential to hear you.
Recommenders: Rough propriety vs. Optimization
The robot that can find you the stuff you’ll like isn’t doing a very good job. The algorithm “if you like this tea, you’ll also like this weak tea” is flawed except for people who happen to be drinking weak tea. More precision isn’t what’s called for. The trick will be in finding what’s roughly appropriate rather than the perfect match. In this melody it’s the wrong notes that will prove most important.
Real time is Dead
Real time media (with the exception of financial data for the purpose of trading) is the equivalent of turning on the television to see what’s on. There’s always something on, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to watch it. The flood of real-time personal digital information will be consumed and digested by equally large robots who will determine that nothing important is going on. It will turn out to be sound and fury signifying nothing. Now we can be certain that nothing’s happening. This will free up a lot of time.
The Technical Age is Inside of the Ecological Age
Humankind is constitutive of the biosphere, meaning that it is a part of a larger thing. While global warming is down to human activity within the biosphere, the biosphere isn’t something to which we can apply our human will and mold like a piece of plastic. The technical in us has the fantasy that we can “fix” the problem of the warming earth through optimizing our technical approaches. This is the faith of the scientist and the capitalist.
Plausible Deniability and the “You” who is Recorded
The poor will be recorded and prosecuted based on those recordings. The rich will purchase plausible deniability with regard to their recordings and nullify their value in courtrooms.
Silicon Valley has Over-Served the Consumer
With few exceptions, all new technology products and services will be considered superfluous. This will be the case for the next 15 to 20 years. Google Glass will prove to be indigestible. It will find a place in warfare and professional technical work situations. Pundits will keep looking for, and demanding, the next big innovation when we haven’t fully digested the last one. We barely understand the telephone and television yet.
The Enterprise was Already Social
There are many experts who will say that the Enterprise isn’t social until they say it is. Corporate enterprises are social by their nature, some new communications tools are added to the toolbox every year. This has always been true. Social in the enterprise will end up looking more like UseNet and Listservs. Real-time streams are for coffee breaks.
The Singularity and the Fear of Being Left Out
The singularity is the most important and telling fantasy of the technical age. Its practical possibility is unimportant. Those who desire and worship the singularity feel they will be included in this grand reunion of all things. They see themselves helping to build a paradise to replace the one we lost. Those who see it as dystopian exercise recognize that a machine-driven singularity may well exclude humans as too inefficient. The fallen human will have no place in the next level of evolution in which self-aware machines will dominate.
The song called ‘Big Brother’ by David Bowie keeps playing in the background of my thoughts. Of course, it’s all the noise about NSA and the Big Data work they’ve been doing to try and anticipate terrorist threats. It’s what we asked them to do, and now we’re shocked that they’ve gone and done it.
Someone to claim us, someone to follow
Someone to shame us, some brave Apollo
Someone to fool us, someone like you
We want you big data. Big data.
There’s a book by Shane Harris called “The Watchers” that provides a pretty good history of the effort. John Poindexter is the godfather of Prism and the efforts to use big data techniques to combat terrorism. Although Poindexter’s plan to build audit trails and anonymity into the original system were left by the wayside, the system we have is the one he imagined.
We want zero terrorists attacks, which means we have to stop them before they occur. Like a novel by Philip K. Dick, we have to anticipate the bad guys and stop them before they can act. It’s an impossible demand. Some will say this should be left to law enforcement— good old fashioned police work. And that’s fine if you want to catch the bad guys after the fact. Law enforcement isn’t going to stop a terrorist before the bomb explodes. And if you want to stand up and ask “why couldn’t our intelligence agencies have prevented this?”, then you have to acknowledge that Big Data, and your data, is baked into the cake.
The news media has done shameful job of reporting the story, and they don’t seem to care. The news seems to be about the court-ordered collection of telephony metadata and the potential for collection of specific datasets from the major cloud platforms as a result of court orders. The bloggers working for newspapers prefer to type up their nightmares instead of reporting the story. And, of course, printing nightmares is a good way to create pageviews. The more fear they can create the better. To anyone paying attention, this story has been well known for years.
The house seems to be filled with big brothers, we find them at every turn. Every corporation, organization and government aspires to be a big brother. When big brothers protect us, or give us “free” cloud-based applications, we applaud them. When we begin realize the guns used to defend us could be turned and used against us, we panic. Almost anything can be used as a weapon these days. Take a close look at Jeff Jonas’s real-time sensemaking systems that use context accumulation. Yes, like John Poindexter, he’s baked privacy in from the start. But if that system was pointed at you, there’s very little it couldn’t find out. You can buy that system from IBM.
The nightmare government with total access and control seems to have its roots in the figures of Alp and Mare — the elves that ride you in your sleep without your knowledge or permission. It’s as though the government is dead and now manifests as Mare. It not only has all your earthly communications, but has complete access to your unconscious, your dreams, your wishes and your fears. Government, now dead, haunts the living. It’s unmoored from the material world. It’s everywhere, it gathers up all the information about us and plots our misfortune. Perhaps it seeks revenge for shrinking it to such as small size that it could be drowned in a bathtub.
Oddly what we’re complaining about with the issue of privacy is that our “personal data” which is owned by the phone companies, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft is being given to the NSA. It should be noted that while we call it “our personal data” and “our privacy”, it’s only ours in that sense that it’s corporate-owned information about us. The Network platforms own it. It doesn’t belong to us, we gave it away in exchange for the chance to win valuable prizes. What we fear with regard to the NSA is the standard business model of the technology industry.
You’ve always already been hacked. The use of common protocols has guaranteed there’s no such thing as a secure computer network. At the end of 2010, the head of the NSA noted that the NSA works under the assumption that various parts of their system have already been hacked. They already act like crypto-anarchists and cypherpunks.
Debora Plunkett, head of the NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate, has confirmed what many security experts suspected to be true: no computer network can be considered completely and utterly impenetrable – not even that of the NSA.
“There’s no such thing as ‘secure’ any more,” she said to the attendees of a cyber security forum sponsored by the Atlantic and Government Executive media organizations, and confirmed that the NSA works under the assumption that various parts of their systems have already been compromised, and is adjusting its actions accordingly.
John Poindexter was trying to find the signal through the noise. He was trying to do what Jeff Jonas said was impossible. Jonas said you needed to start with the bad guy and then assemble the data around that point. Poindexter created “Red Teams” to devise terrorist strategies, and then based on the interaction patterns the strategies revealed, the analysts would look for matching patterns in the data. Early tests resulted in a lot of false positives. But that was ten years ago, Big Data has come a long way since then. When TIA was de-funded and removed from the official budget, the systems moved to dark funding and we lost a lot of visibility. The secret system became a secret to the extent that there can be secrets anymore.
Do we still want to try and discern the weak signal through the noise? The editor of Slate.com, David Plotz argues that we’re no longer facing terrorist threats and therefore these security programs are overreach. A position that must be much easier to take if you don’t receive daily intelligence briefings. The amount of noise is ever increasing, the question we need to answer is whether it’s really possible to detect a weak signal. Can you really see into the future with a reasonable probability? If not this way, then how?
The Overload
By Talking Heads
A terrible signal
Too weak to even recognize
A gentle collapsing
The removal of the insides
I’m touched by your pleas
I value these moments
We’re older than we realize
In someone’s eyes
A frequent returning
And leaving unnoticed
A condition of mercy
A change in the weather
A view to remember
The center is missing
They question how the future lies
In someone’s eyes
A gentle collapsing
Of every surface
We travel on the quiet road
The overload
