– @dmytri
#28c3, @doctorow, In order to stop the net from being squared, we need change the way we produce and share.
December 28th, 2011 by Dmytri | Permalink
On July 17, 2009, Amazon remotely deleted Orwell’s classic 1984 from the personal kindle ereader devices of purchasers after discovering that the publisher lacked rights to publish the book. Truly an Orwellian moment.
Yesterday, at his 28c3 talk Cory Doctorow imagined a future where copying is easy, where everyone has tiny portable storage devices capable of storing the entire history of recorded and text media, and transferring it to other such devices in fractions of a second.
Yet, this future assumes that we are allowed to have such devices, as opposed to remotely manageable devices like that that Amazon is engineering, where the data you store locally is accessible and deletable remotely, or highly locked-down thin-client devices where you data is stored “in the cloud” and subject to control, including rights management, by storage providers working in cosy relationships with rights holders.
Cory’s talk was titled “The Coming War on General Computing.” driven by market forces and the interests of law enforcement, general purpose computers and general purpose networks will give way to specialized ”appliances” and crippled networks, both designed to enable approved uses, but disable uses disapproved of by corporate interests and government policy makers.
Doctorow lampooned the instincts of law enforcement to cripple the Internet in order to prevent crime by comparing it to banning wheels because bank robbers use wheels on their get-away cars. Since a car, either operated by a bank robber or a anybody else, can’t drive without wheels, banning wheels to prevent bank robberies prevents a car from doing what it is meant to do. Because a car is a specialized device, meant for driving, it is useless if it can’t drive, thus legislators would never consider such measures.
Yet, a computer is a general purpose device, not being able to use bitTorrent or Tor doesn’t mean that you can’t play computer games or visit the cheezburger network. Thus, legislators don’t perceive passing laws that limit certain usage makes the computer useless, just as having less features. Cory gave the example of the banning the hands-free telephone feature from cars, which would not make them useless as cars, since they could still drive, just with one less feature. Since legislators don’t generally understand how computers work, passing laws aimed to eliminate child pornography or piracy seems to them to be more like banning a feature, like the hands-free telephone, than banning a critical component, like the wheel.
Yet, in order to prevent computers from running certain software, or from allowing software to perform certain operations something much more invasive than removing a feature must be done. Cory points out that a crippled appliance made to do only certain approved things is not a specialized computer with certain features removed, but a fully functional general purpose computer who’s user is prevented from using it in certain ways by software, akin to root-kits and spyware, that is designed to lock the user out and prevent certain operations from being possible.
In some ways, this is even worse that removing the wheels, it’s hand-cuffing the driver.
In Cory’s view, this is largely ineffective since such attempts to cripple general purpose devices is often easily circumventable, so legislatures pass legislation making such circumvention illegal.
Doctorow praises the efforts of groups like our close friends, La Quadrature du Net, that fight against freedom denying legislation, and issues a call to arms in the coming war against general computing.
“La Quadrature du Net” means “Squaring of the Net” a play on the old “Squaring the Circle,” an impossible problem that obsessed ancient geometers. The war on general computing and general networking is boxing up the net.
Cory is probably right that many of the legislators who pass laws that try to square the net don’t fully understand how networks or computers work, or the implications of how enforcing such laws necessities violating the privacy and autonomy of all users of computers and networks. It would be mistaken to conclude that such laws are passed in ignorance.
It is not ignorance, nor even genuinely the needs of law enforcement that is driving the war against general computing and a general network. It’s too simple to understand this war as simply tyrannical law enforcers and paranoid music execs duping clueless legislatures into locking-down cyberspace to save Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. Rather this war is simply a consequence of the fact that our technology industry is funded by finance capital, and finance capital requires profit as a return.
As such, the industry requires the control of user interaction and data in order to make profit. If capitalist funded firms can’t control the way people use computers they can’t make money from them, and thus they wont fund the development of software, networks or devices that do not provide such control. And without capitalist funding, no alternatives can be built on any significant scale.
The implications of this is that while we should certainly support La Quadrature and other groups fighting for our online freedoms and the freedom to use our personal computers as well like, we need to understand that our fight is much deeper than convincing some misguided legislators, our fight is against Capitalism.
We can’t realistically demand that freedom enabling computers, software and networks be funded by rent-seeking capitalists, we must find alternatives to finance capital. Otherwise, rather than progressing towards Doctorow’s utopia of instant and unlimited copying, we will get the Orwellian Amazon.com distopia of asymmetric, filtered and monitored networks, cloud storage and locked-down and crippled thin clients.
In order to stop the net from being squared, we need change the way we produce and share.
Great talk by @doctorow. On my way to buchhandlung http://bit.ly/buchhandlung
December 27th, 2011 by Dmytri | Permalink
– @dmytri
#28c3 @evngenymorozov & Exceptionalism
December 27th, 2011 by Dmytri | Permalink
Despite apparently lots of things going on the first night of #28c3, Stammtisch will take place in any case, I’ll be there a little later that usual, but will be there by 10pm. All are welcome as always, we’ll be there until 1 or 2am. You can find us at Cafe Buchhandlung, 32 Tucholskystr, Berlin-Mitte. Here’s a map: http://bit.ly/buchhandlung. XLTerrestrial DJ/VJ Podski will be on hand to provide the vibe. Come by and join us and pass it on, would be fun to have a nice #28c3 contingent around. And of course, no tickets are needed to attend.
In the meantime, I’d like to reflect a little on Evgeny Morozov’s keynote at #28c3 this morning.
The topic was Surveillance Enabling Technologies. Long story short, Telecoms, Tech Firms, and Governments are developing and deploying systems to control and monitor their citizens online communications, and even selling this technology to governments that are widely considered to be authoritarian. It’s this last bit that I want to expand upon a little.
As Evgeny mentioned, as did others asking questions from the audience, this can not be understood as a few unscrupulous firms making sinister deals with foreign powers to profit from the suppression of dissidents and activists. For this most part these firms are not designing and building surveillance technologies at the behest of the likes of Iran and Syria, but as result driven by law enforcement in western states. And what’s more, they are required by laws passed by western states to build-in the very backdoors and interception features that surveillance systems depend on. It’s hard to blame the companies for building in features that the law requires them to build in.
Expressing outrage that enemies of the US and it’s allies are using the technology being developed by the west also seems misplaced, and rests on regressive exceptionalist view that privileges western states as being somehow noble enough to be trusted with the ability to survey their citizens, but not sinister foreign powers.
Though certain firms are clearly beyond the pale in their eagerness to promote their freedom-denying technology. This overall view that these firms or some foreign powers are to blame was largely rejected by Morozov and by the commentators from the #28c3 audience. The blame for increased interception of communications and technological surveillance is best place at the feet of western governments, whose laws, law enforcement agencies and military-industrial corporate lobbies are the real movers and shakers pushing for more and more control and monitoring of civilian populations.
Promotors of such mass surveillance systems claim to be defending civilization itself, from the usual array of boogeymen, including terrorists, and child pornographers, but make no mistake, their real target is freedom itself.
These systems are part of the process of destroying peer-to-peer communications, to eliminate the mesh topologies from modern communication platforms and restructure them as star topologies, and the major reason for this is not to hunt deviants or insurgents, but rather to control the consumer, and protect Capitalist privilege and profits.
In The Telekommunist Manifesto, as well as other texts, I discuss that fact that Capitalism and Peer-to-peer systems are not compatible, that Capitalism depends on the ability of platform owners to control user data and interaction, in order to monetize it. Such control is a prerequisite of receiving financial capital from investors, who understand very well that there are no profits, or more accurately rents, to be had from free networks, and thus insist on control to ensure a return their investments.
The Internet, as it exists now, is an existential threat to capitalist regimes, not only does it allow individual users and groups to collectively share information that reveals the cosy relationship between governments and rent seeking corporate lobbies, more importantly it allows new forms of commerce that blur the distinction of producer and consumer, and allow users to produce and share in new ways, such fluidity of interactions puts downward pressure of profits as people share amongst themselves and “cut out the middleman,” as commerce becomes disintermediated.
This threat is of particular concern with regard to intellectual property, which can be digitized and sent across computer networks. This is bad news for western economies who more and more aim to make their profits by owning ideas and designs, while letting others actually make things. Traditional anti-capitalism focused on the ownership of the means of production, yet the modern capitalist doesn’t even want to own the means of production, they want to own the very right to produce. To control the ideas required to produce and simply charge rents for these ideas.
Capitalism thus depends on the elimination of peer-to-peer systems by replacing, freedom-enabling mesh topologies, with freedom-denying star topologies. Recent communication history illustrates this quite clearly, with Venture Capital funding Web 2.0s capture of all communications, replacing earlier and far more scalable p2p applications, and the military-industrial fueled enclosure of cyberspace is just another part of this.
Evgeny Morozov suggests that we act and get the media and our political representatives to take notice and lead an outcry against this rapidly increasing lock-down of our online platforms, yet this requires that our media and our politicians will rally against capitalism, since it’s not just a few rogue firms or states driving this development, but rather the requirements of our class structure.
At the bottom of it, Capitalism, as a system based on hierarchy, privilege and exploitation, can not create a free network, anymore than it can create a free society. If there is a way out this, it’s unlikely to be governments and popular news organisations that help us. Our only chance is to develop new ways of producing and sharing, and find ways to build communication platforms that do not depend on capitalist finance.
If we do not find ways to replace capitalist finance it is not only the internet as we know it that we will lose, but the chance the remake society in its image.
See you all at Cafe Buchhandlung tonight
@evgenymorozov and @doctorow at #28c3 today. Looking forward to it.
December 27th, 2011 by Dmytri | Permalink
– @dmytri
Looks like I’ve got a #28c3 ticket on the way. Saved again.
December 21st, 2011 by Dmytri | Permalink
– @dmytri
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