<nettime> The ideology of technology (Was Re: 'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists)

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

On 12/17/17, 01:07, e@x80.org wrote:
> For better or worse it seems to me that the only way to escape control
> from computers is not rejection, but in-depth education about them.

Yes.

The following are my contributions to an e-mail exchange which I 
resisted putting on nettime as it didn't offer any practical actions, 
just talk talk talk. But it seems that's all we have these days, so here 
goes (if the other side still wishes the whole thing can be published):



...

To get access to deep technology and infrastructure design you must play 
ball. It takes huge efforts and money to build things that matter (one 
way or another.) On average, "a thing that matters" costs $2-5MM to 
develop, then many times more to productize (we are not talking apps 
here, but silicon, devices, switches, radios.) Many startups founded by 
people that want to make a difference burn such amounts, only to find 
that the system does not want a change. It has nothing to do with 
'consumers', but with gatekeepers (B & C round VCs, monopolies and their 
industry associations, etc.)

Loners ('hackers') can't do shit, except leave some graffiti. There were 
exceptions (RMS' gcc, P. Zimmerman's PGP), but it's not a sustainable 
model, and the industry got mature in the meantime.

Whether something can be done from the inside is hard to say. Perhaps, 
if you are persistent, lucky, pay your tithes, and gatekeepers get careless.

It is frustrating that people with energy for change and action are 
mostly unaware of the real playing (or battle-) field.

...

What is to be done? I cringe at this question, as the answer sounds 
depressing.

If we agree, for the sake of discussion, that most people 'will never 
get to this level' regarding understanding the technology, how can these 
same people exert democratic pressure on institutions? What it is that 
they want these institutions to do?

The 'technology' is not just key escrow, backdoors, surveillance etc. It 
is also modulating mass behavior with instruments below the noise level, 
using amassed data and inferred patterns. It is also long-term 
conditioning humans whose eyes are consuming handset output for many 
waking hours.

What are 'most people' supposed to request from their democratic 
institutions, and how they assert that their requests have been 
executed, if they don't understand these technologies? Better life?

This is the known concept of trusting experts employed by the elected 
government. For example, in medicine, most of us don't know the details, 
but the government regulates the field and there are vaccinations, 
public health, etc. etc., for all to benefit. In medicine, in the end, 
people do figure out who lives and who dies, and everyone benefits from 
being alive.

But in the case we are considering, this is the technology of power (ie. 
how can few of us control many of you, without much fuss), and we are 
supposed to ask those we elect to power to contain it? Sounds like a 
conflict of interest to me. I think that the concept of delegation is 
breaking down due to the cognitive gap, and that we are experiencing the 
consequences of that.

Back to the depressing answer, I see no other way than narrowing the 
cognitive gap. This is what many open source activists and 'hackers' 
instinctively do, the Prometheus gig (and some do get liver problems.)

I do not agree that "focusing on the technology in terms of how it is 
engineered and what it's technical capacities are (aka the hacker 
perspective)" is "politically a bit of a dead end", by its 'nature'.

I think that this position, widely adopted, is product of the ideology 
in its purest form. It is very hard to see through it, as we've been 
saturated with it in the past decades. The concepts of abstraction 
layers and 'need to know' have been twisted and corrupted to create 
artificial barriers. It's an easy sell: user-friendly, idiot-proof, 
easy, etc. Everyone loves it. Experts get to enjoy the rarefied air. 
Hackers also compete who is going to deliver more user-friendly tools 
(privacy etc.) to the unwashed masses, thus guaranteeing the failure.

The adoption of this ideology is fantastic - I'd say five nines.

It's not even new - it's ancient: Socrates condemned literacy because 
"it destroys memory and weakens the mind, relieving it of work that 
makes it strong. It is an inhuman thing." Today it's fully developed, 
and the US anti-intellectualism ('nerds') has been successfully 
transplanted to Europe.

But it is ideology and nothing more, and the fixing must start at the 
ideological level, like all real fixing, and not within the cosmetic 
action space bounded by the same ideology.

That is the heresy I can offer: many can understand the technology of 
power to the level required to take action, really understand, without 
being patronized. Many. This is going to be uphill, hard work, against 
the expert ecosystem and its beneficiaries, against the professional 
intermediaries, and against the powers employing all these. It is not 
going to consist of creating a new technological gimmick or a new 
freedom-fighting conference for the same old audience.

I'm fully aware that this sounds crazy. My conclusions are result of 
direct observations - once chaff and fluff are removed, stuff can be 
explained. It is not a rocket science, and, BTW, rockets are not that 
complicated. There are stupid people, but half are above average.

The alternative is simple: if the cognitive gap is believed to be 
inevitable, then we are looking at the feudal future with few families 
on the top, lots of tech under them replacing the expert class, and the 
rest enslaved or simply eaten.

There is *no* middle ground.


...


Just to repeat something we all know: the power relationships are 
primary, institutions follow. When the power relationships change, the 
institutions (democracy, media) become hollow until they catch up.

I think that the new phenomenon deeply affecting power relationships (in 
the last 3-4 decades) is the technology getting to the point where it 
amplifies the cognitive gap with no limits. Being (mis)informed and 
(mis)educated was never as crucial as today. The majority of individuals 
became extremely vulnerable to the organized technology. Changing the 
power relationships requires reducing this cognitive gap.

[There is a sleight of hand, assigning this gap to IQ distribution (in 
more or less politically correct way), implying that nothing can be 
done, the dims will simply become pets if they are lucky. One doesn't 
need to be a genius to see that there is concerted widening of the 
cognitive gap, as very small number (getting smaller every day) is 
required to understand how the things really work. The access to 
knowledge is systematically removed from the majority. It's not just the 
greed of the naked capitalism - a very greedy capitalism invested in 
education when it needed it - now it needs the opposite. It's the method.]

De-education is structural and systemic. It uses technology to saturate 
people with data, facts and replayed emotions which they are not able to 
interpret at machine speeds. It has subverted the last few centuries of 
progressive social constructs by packaging them into machine firehose, 
drowning everyone with deluge of memes we cannot fight. Huge investments 
are made into tools - in "AI", getting far more people involved, 
compared to few sociopathic social engineering pioneers they had to rely 
on before. [BTW, take a look if you haven't: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA . My bet is that it's in the 
development, not so tiny yet, but will get there in 2-3 years, it will 
became available to everyone, like cars, and the favorite way of getting 
rid of inconvenient people will switch from "car accidents" to "killer 
drone accidents".]

These are techniques, and cannot be fought just by ideology. This is, I 
think, the big mistake that whatever passes for intellectuals these days 
are making. They are looking for alternatives to 'capitalism', which 
appear eternally elusive, while failing to see the obvious, that the 
opponents are well armed and they are not. Armed in the sense of 
controlling idea transmissions, where individual words, without power 
backing their propagation, have zero influence. There is no philosophy 
behind it, just the arms race which they lost. The whole narrative of 
the left these days looks like rants of the guy who took a knife to a 
gun fight, and now looks for imaginary alternatives to gun fights. 
People with guns are not impressed.

Technology funded by the centralized entities ends up centralized 
("there can be only one"). This is not the 'nature' of the technology, 
it was just designed to mirror and reproduce the prior power 
relationships. This can only be countered with distributed technology, 
re-establishing distributed relationships, immunizing people from 
centralized information firehoses.

But enough of describing the dystopia. The interpretations stay hermetic 
and irrelevant. Thinkers' instinct to tell the truth to the masses 
doesn't work any more, as the truth is now technical in nature, and the 
audience is not equipped to handle it. Back to narrowing the cognitive 
gap. Or else.

Practical work: not big schemes, instead providing point solutions that 
may narrow the gap or at least stop it growing, in the long run.  Show 
that it is possible to effectively fight back at the structural level. 
One has to be careful here, there are many fake prophets, fake hackers, 
celebrities ..., all working to put everything new under the existing 
umbrella of virtual freedoms (when you spot the word "server" in the 
proposal, run away.) As you said: even gut feelings can be subverted. 
How do you know what works? A good sign is that they go after you 
(tenure, salary, credit). For example, Phil Zimmerman and PGP - he 
narrowly escaped jail. It took decades of concerted subversion ("it's 
hard, not user friendly, who wants that, use public key servers,  ...") 
to make public effectively forget about the importance 
individual-to-individual privacy.

That is one example of the point solution - individual-to-individual 
privacy, which is for all practical purposes nonexistent today. It 
doesn't change the world overnight, but it enables private 
communications and removes self-censorship. People think differently 
when they know they are not being recorded forever (like this e-mail.) 
This is possible. But it's not even a topic. The topic is how to beg 
governments not to abuse escrowed privacy too much. The topic is how to 
publish everything about self. These guys are good.

Another point solution example: uncensored self-publishing and 
distributed reputations. It doesn't exist, apart from drug and porn 
dealers on .onion. We are talking not relying on publishers, platforms, 
providers and DNS. There were attempts that might have worked (Mojo 
Nation comes to mind), were there not well-funded oppositions.

Yet another point solution example: information transmission method that 
does not rely on the infrastructure (fiber, copper, ISPs, etc.) This is 
possible, it's slow as hell but unstoppable.

The point of the point solutions like these is to slightly shift the 
power relationships at the base level. However slight, this shift is 
real as it changes the baseline. I don't think there is anything else 
that can practically be done (except maybe founding a new religion.)

This cannot be left to techies. In the first crypto war only the 
technologists were fighting it, and they miserably failed in 2001 (but 
we still have, world-wide, legal encryption, though not for long.) There 
were really no thinkers involved, apart from some primitive Californian 
ideology and crude liberalism. In the meantime many in the thinking 
business lost their jobs and income, so perhaps the next time they will 
be more perceptive. Most insiders in the tech industry do not understand 
structural consequences of their work ( 
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/19/how-tech-leaders-delivered-us-into-evil-john-naughton 
). The ideology goes deep, and while the right thing to do looks like a 
technical decision, it is narrowly framed by the ideology.

Why is there no successful ideology countering technologies of social 
control? Why are the statements of high priests like "The privacy you're 
concerned about is largely an illusion." (L. Ellison, 2001 - 16 years 
ago) repeated as mantras? Why did concepts of civil liberties collapse 
so easily? Because there are no effective counter-measures available, 
and no amount of begging defunct institutions is going to change 
anything. US 2nd Amendment appears to be far more resilient than 1st or 
4th - largely because guns do exist.

We don't need grand solutions. We need oxygen to enable thinking, it's 
that simple. The current environment is not the result of natural 
catastrophe or inevitable historic processes. It's just the tech that 
has amplified thugs that would otherwise rule a street block, to rule 
the planet.

My suggestion would be picking several concrete point solutions in the 
social engineering techniques and counter-measures, and getting sapient 
non-techies behind them. It worked for some movements, latching onto 
concrete and doable, however misdirected it might be, it can mobilize 
the audience. Some form of tree-hugging.

Long time ago (and long before the level of general awareness of the 
surveillance we have today) the fashionable thing to do was to get as 
many as you can to use PGP. It was painful, but many did. Fail again, 
fail better.

I am sure that there are other point solutions, which I am completely 
unaware of, that may be good starting points.

The sustainable motivation - connecting structural inferiority with the 
life's outlook - is next to impossible to achieve without education. 
Isn't it funny that the propaganda and technologies of social control 
are never taught in schools? Perhaps open source social engineering is a 
countermeasure?


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