Could You Ever Have Trusted At All? Jamming, 06/03/2017

When I first read the story of Juan Thompson, I wanted to be surprised, but I just couldn’t.

And I'd like to check out her films. They seem interesting – the kinds of
stories that build from where Lena Dunham left us.

One of the voices I came across on Twitter put the point better than I could. The start of Erika Heidewald’s tweet storm is on the right.

I’m writing a longer reflection about this. As someone who puts in time volunteering to put diverse voices and stories into my city’s cultural conversation, I know where I stand in the politics of our generation. The existence of the misogynist left-winger is something I didn’t want to have to face.

But it’s there. Through all the rise of the alt-right – the idea of white genocide going mainstream, daily streams of harassment campaigns across social media – I thought of this sexism as a creature of the reactionary, conservative, nationalist streams of our society.

I knew it wasn’t true. If only from my own experience as a much younger man, I knew the left had plenty of misogyny, sexism, obsession, harassment, and violence against women. Our political goal was to identify and end it, but it doesn’t mean the attitude didn’t persist.

Thompson is an extreme example, and a peculiar outlier. He isn’t just an obsessed ex-boyfriend – he was a fabulist, liar, and con artist for years. His lying to his own bosses about where his sources came from – and that they were even real – was the reason for his dismissal. And he’d lied to The Intercept for years, publishing many different stories that turned out to be utter fabrications.

Juan Thompson may have played a noticeable, if small, role in shaping our political culture. With his lies.

So don’t let this wretch break your spirit. But let his example keep your eye critical. Glenn Greenwald is not a stupid man – Robinson may be a beast, but he was at least smart enough to keep a historically important investigative reporter from catching on to his con for about two years.

I've been skeptical of a lot of Greenwald's reporting for quite a while,
though The Intercept is generally very reliable about dimensions of
American news that doesn't make it into mainstream discussions.

What vulnerability could Thompson have exploited in Greenwald to keep up the charade as long as he did?

Aside from the fact that not every story he wrote was a total concoction of lies and falsehoods, I mean.

I first discovered Glenn Greenwald when everyone else did – when he reported on Edward Snowden’s leaks of secret National Security Agency wiretapping and mass data collection. Greenwald shepherded Snowden’s revelations to the wider world. The notoriety he gained from that not only made his career, it made him a historic figure.

Those were important revelations – that kind of surveillance on a mass scale is a dangerous activity for any government or institution to do, rendering literally billions of people vulnerable in ways we’ve never been before. Yet as I watch Greenwald’s public behaviour in the Trump era, it unnerves me.

I feel like Greenwald’s opposition to the Democratic Party that vilified him and prosecuted Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and other leakers has hardened. In a recent interview with Democracy Now, Greenwald focussed his energy on calling out the Democratic Party leadership for their hypocrisy and worse.

Greenwald cares more about critiquing and somehow dismantling the American intelligence and security agencies who he sees as the biggest threat to democracy. And his position is complicated, because he has, from one important perspective an important point.

The 2016 election was Clinton's to lose from the beginning, and her
margin was small enough – 70-80,000 votes across three states Trump
narrowly won and a huge total popular vote victory – that I can actually
say that the campaign and DNC's arrogance was enough to cost her.
Greenwald is right that the Democratic Party has collapsed – no serious
control of any elected body in the federal government and the
governments of more than half the states. They need to rebuild their
party and I've honestly seen no sign that this is a priority at all.

Because it is very dangerous to empower a country’s intelligence and security agencies to undermine elected leaders. The heads of such agencies have led actual coups in countries around the world, overthrowing elected officials and junking citizens’ democratic rights. So we have to eye them with suspicion.

And we have to hold our elected officials and political party administrators to account in this regard. We can’t have them abiding by policies that give intelligence agencies immense secret powers over the population.

Greenwald is right that this was a serious mistake of Obama’s Presidency, and that Hillary Clinton was an even more aggressive advocate for intelligence agencies’ priorities. But the danger of Donald Trump exists on a totally different vector.

Trump is the figurehead of a white nationalist political movement – American radical racists and nihilists. And he’s the President of the United States.

So democrats in the United States are stuck in a very bad space. It’s immensely dangerous to enable intelligence agencies to undermine and tip elected officials out of office. But it’s also immensely dangerous to have a democratic country’s executive branch run by anti-democratic radicals.

Even the people who seemed like liberators only a few years ago can, at their best, only fall into opposing one of these sides while the other slides away. So was it even worth believing them in the first place?

Tangents From a Psychologist III: Whose Eyes Are Watching You? Jamming, 05/06/2015

I originally planned to end this series of posts yesterday. Then I read some more of Ariely that got me thinking about more tangents, this time involving how his research can, in some small way, contribute to the legitimation of the surveillance state. 

Yeah, this is going to be a bit of a trip. But there’s something here, I think.

He describes a very minor experiment in his long and complex series of works on honesty and moral behaviour. It’s about an office change jar for a tea kettle. A lot of offices have a little jar or a bowl where workers can toss change whenever they make a fresh pot of tea or coffee. Just a quarter or two each time to subsidize the kitchen supplies budget. 

Will they ever stop watching me?

It’s a gesture, but it’s also linked with honesty and good behaviour. If you make a pot of tea or coffee, you throw a couple of quarters in the jar. It’s much less than you pay for coffee at a Starbucks, Tim Horton’s, Second Cup, or Aroma. And it’s for the benefit of you and all your fellow workers. But you don’t always throw change in the jar when you make each pot, or when you take a mug of coffee from a pot someone else just made.

Ariely considers this a minor immorality, and thinking about his experiment reminds me of another philosophical criticism I could make of his work. I also consider this criticism very sketchy precisely because it’s a philosophical criticism and I don’t know how appropriate it is to make it. It has to do with what exactly we’re following when we put our change in the coffee jar. 

So here’s the experiment. It has to do with how images posted above the coffee jar in an office affect people’s frequency of contribution. Posting a generic image of flowers above the jar prompted no significant change in the level of people’s contributions. What was most effective in promoting compliance to the unspoken rule of contributing to the subsidy jar for coffee and tea?

An image of staring, accusatory eyes. 

He writes that even the feeling of being watched encourages compliance to morality. We act more morally when we have the impression of being surveilled.

This is, of course, a terrible suggestion given our current political climate. It doesn’t uncritically endorse the surveillance state, since there are no actual cameras in the image of those hungry eyes constantly watching you while you make your coffee. But it may imply that an elaborate conspiracy to make the country’s entire population believe that it’s constantly being watched will be just as effective.

Why yes, they are watching you. Pop music is creepy.

It’s Michel Foucault’s panopticon, basically.* And it’s utterly anti-democratic. Either it’s genuinely complete surveillance over real life, partial universal surveillance in which everyone is aware that government agents could be watching them all the time, or an elaborate conspiracy theory that’s universally believed so that everyone believes they’re being watched all the time without the government having to spend any money on real surveillance. The overall effect is governance by fear of authority.

* Yes, I know Jeremy Bentham thought of it first, but Foucault developed the elaborate framework of conceptual analysis that lets us understand the panopticon not just as a weird way to build a prison, but as the conceptual framework for a billion-dollar international security apparatus. 

It reminds me of my major problem with Joseph Heath’s proposals to make people more rational in their everyday lives: they all require state micro-engineering of everyone’s environments to rid them of deceptive features that disrupt our reasoning abilities.

Ariely expresses his interpretation of this experiment as part of a process of investigating human psychology. He never goes so far as Heath did in Enlightenment 2.0, and make proposals for government action. But the discovery itself is troubling. If we’re only moral insofar as we’re affected by the subliminal suggestion of an authority watching us, that doesn’t leave much hope for genuine ground-up social progress.

But I think there’s one angle where I can make a legitimate critique of Ariely’s ideas. I’m not trying to walk into his disciplinary territory, as I’ve been nervously stepping over the last couple of days after finishing Dishonesty. Now, I’m dragging Ariely into the territory of philosophy, and asking just what people are really following when he posts those intense eyes above the change jar.

Because I don’t think it’s morality. . . . To be continued.

Giving Up on Objectivity, Jamming, 13/03/2015

I came across a curious video on Twitter the other day, an interview on FOX Business between anchor Deirdre Bolton and Stewart Baker, a former general counsel to the NSA. It’s the typical FOX softball interview with someone saying sort of insane things about the government’s right to spy on American companies in the name of national security, except for a few points. 

Essentially what state surveillance agencies do all the
time. Just replace the toilet with a smartphone.

You can find it at the FOX News website, but I prefer you to watch it at this link, where I originally discovered it through Twitter, for reasons that will be clear by the end of the post. Here’s a brief run-down. Baker advocates that the American government’s spy agencies should have the right to monitor iPhone transmissions all over the United States and the world because ISIS members have communicated using iPhones.

Baker seems to be going on a tour lately to convince people that it’s wrong to want privacy from the American government’s secret surveillance. And that it’s wrong for large American companies to care about maintaining the privacy of their customers. I find it increasingly sad that the fears of some of the world’s more paranoid encryption nuts are coming true.

But we know all this already. The American government is spying on its citizens. This isn’t news.

What interests me is a particular, almost throwaway, comment of Baker’s to disparage the source of the information that Bolton was interviewing him about: that the CIA had been attempting to hack Apple’s iPhones for years. It came from Edward Snowden and The Intercept, which Baker said was an “ideologically motivated” media organization. 

Baker said that on the FOX Business network. The irony was obvious. The tweet where I first saw it appeared in the feed of Glenn Greenwald, who I follow on Twitter as a source of generally solid dissident journalism* and an interesting person. Like it or not, he is a historic figure in journalism already.

World-historical journalist Glenn Greenwald.

* Naturally, I don’t agree with everything he says. But he’s a perfect barometer of the modern left. In general, everything he writes, links, and tweets criticizing the American surveillance state is wonderful and illuminating. But I find that he gives something of a soft ride to Iran and anti-Israel militant groups. The left, however, should never enforce total unity of thought on all its members. It goes against the entire idea of liberation.

Bolton’s response was more illuminating than a FOX anchor had any right to be: sarcasm. “Stewart, you're talking about editorial judgment! Believe me, that’s a scandal.” Baker spoke as though being ideologically motivated would automatically discredit The Intercept, meaning that they aren’t trustworthy. 

I’ve spoken before of how the concept of objectivity as an ideal for journalism arose as a public image for papers like the New York Times. They strove for objectivity in reporting to distinguish themselves from a more nakedly ideological, sensationalist newspaper media environment in a manner that would earn public trust. General public trust in the objectivity of their reporting would secure the New York Times a reliable revenue base through subscription. 

That’s not to say that the ideal of objectivity was necessarily always a lie. The New York Times and the papers that followed the subscription model used a less sensationalistic, more objective tone of writing and approach to journalism to support their public image as objective. The most foolproof way to appear in a particular manner is actually to do it. 

But an editorial director is always a person, and so comes with presumptions about what is politically reasonable and what is more or less important news. And such people will hire similar people to work with them. Unless hiring a token figure with different moral and political attitudes, usually to appear more objective in the social context of the time. 

I find it very disheartening that even the most insanely
paranoid cryptanalysis junkie of Neal Stephenson's
body of work has turned out to be pretty much right
about the dangers of government surveillance.

Bolton understood something that’s always been true about the media environment. Editorial judgment is the process of ideologically motivating a media organization, or really any organization that produces content or does anything. Our ideologies are our frameworks for our moral and political beliefs. They’re our beliefs about what is reasonable to believe. In that sense, ideology is inescapable, and any editorial judgment is an exercise of ideology.

We know this, generally, as a culture. Though we often take a nihilistic attitude: if the total objectivity that the New York Times convinced me to believe in (so I'd buy a Times subscription) isn’t true, then I guess there can’t be any objectivity.

Maybe not literally, but there can still be what we used to use the language of objectivity to achieve: trustworthy, rationally considered, well-researched journalism. Journalism that doesn’t openly proselytize for a particular ideology, to create a shared mass ideology among its viewers such that they all see the world in a single, simple way.

Such mass ideology is called dogma. Its self-destructive effects are why societies need heretics, to keep these totalizing forces of uniformity at bay. If everyone thinks the same way and does the same thing, and such action was a mistake, there won’t be anyone left to think again. Dogma must be fought because it damages our capacity for social adaptation. 

Disappearing From Life and History, Research Time, 25/11/2013

My entry last Friday about my reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism had an air of finality to it, seeing as it was about Hannah Arendt’s account of where the death camps fit into the essential structure of totalitarian political philosophy. They really were an essence, the purest expression of a system that exists to strip a person of everything that’s remarkable about them, both for the victims and the perpetrators. It was a world without singularity or individuality, where your only nature was the external determination of the orders you were giving. On its own, it was a wonderful transition to reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, which I started Sunday night.

But there’s one more Arendtian idea from the earlier book that I want to discuss, because I don’t do smooth transitions. That’s too easy.

One of the concepts underlying the utopias project is the human relationship with time. My central idea is that political philosophies that are threats to human freedom privilege an imagined ideal past or a hoped-for ideal or perfect future over the messy singularity of the present. An idea of Arendt’s about a peculiar relation of totalitarian secret police to the past of their regimes throws a wrinkle in this hypothesis, but I think it’s a productive complication rather than a problem.

The secret police have many important functions in a totalitarian regime. A key feature that distinguishes totalitarian regimes from more ordinary dictatorships is that the secret police now becomes an open secret. They’re no longer the subject of whispers and kept from official reports and ceremonies. The secret police now make their central position in the government hierarchy widely known to the general population: they’re present at official functions, give press conferences, appear blatantly in their role as important government functionaries. Nonetheless, the secret police remains an organization bent on making people disappear.

Disappearing people is the essential function of the secret police. Regular police send riot police to destroy your political associations and your homes, and lock you in prison. But everyone still knows where you are when the regular police are done with you: You’re lying on the ground trying to cry the pepper spray out of your eyes, or you’re in a jail cell. You can be seen. If you’re dealing with a secret police, once they have you, you’re never seen again. The peculiar danger of this secret power is that this kind of police doesn’t even need to have a reason to take you beyond the act of taking you.

The temporal element appears when Arendt examines one of the curious attributes of Stalin’s purges. Not only did he make various officials in the government and party disappear, he also had the secret police erase them from government records. They’d be airbrushed out of photos, their names blacked out of records and legislation or else all the written record of your existence is outright destroyed. Not only do you no longer exist, you have now never existed. History has been rewritten. The secret police is the closest humanity has come to time travel: the ability to wipe people from history.

Philosophy can be considered a discipline working in pure
concepts. But sometimes the experiments of science-fiction
can create a more pure concept than philosophers. We have
to step our game up, people.

[One of the frustrating things about writing philosophy is that philosophers lately seem, in some circumstances, to be in competition with science-fiction writers for explaining some of these concepts. Appropriately for its 50th anniversary week, I remembered an old Doctor Who story, a Paul McGann audio called Neverland, which featured a terrible Time Lord weapon that had never been used. It was able to wipe, literally and completely, anyone it was used on from history. But the only reason it had never been used was because the machine erased the event of its use from history along with all the other events that constituted its victim’s life. 

This is a fascinating idea, but it essentially turned a key figure among Doctor Who’s heroes, Romana, into a totalitarian murderer. As President of the Time Lords, she authorized using the erasing machine a VERY LARGE number of times, but because her previous uses were erased from history, she had no idea she had erased hundreds of people, despite agonizing over each decision as, literally, the first time she would ever use it. Previous presidents were much worse.]

So the temporal relationship of, specifically, totalitarian secret police to history was their ability to rewrite it. Totalitarian movements want to push society toward a future state that they take to be perfect, the absolute triumph of their ideology over the world. So their eyes are on the future, at the expense of the present. But they also do violence to the past through totalitarian secret police having the power to erase people from history. Where there was once a person with accessible concrete facts about her life, there is now only a rumour at best. 

They may not have been able to change history in a literal sense, though our friends in the sci-fi world have explored already how having such a power would make even the most liberal regimes horrifyingly corrupt. A liberal regime could be as fascistic as it wants, as long as they know that their crimes will be erased not only from official records of history, but from causality itself. But this is the corrupting force of the secret police, the ability rewrite history at the expense of humanity.

•

One last point about the secret police, a curious historical footnote for me. Arendt describes a historical detail, the types of files that the secret police of Russia before 1917, the Okhrana, used to keep on people. These files included cards with graphical diagrams tracing all the associations of suspicious persons: co-workers, family, friends, anyone who might be corrupted by the anti-Czarist thoughts of the central suspect. This was how the Okhrana enforced guilt by association. The only problem was that their cards were only so large, and could only trace so many connections.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those Facebook apps that create a graphic image of all your connections in the network, but this is basically what a modern Okhrana would use to keep track of you and all your possible associations. And we’ve done it for them already in private industry. I won’t go so far as to say the NSA operates on secret police principles: after all, they may collect terabytes of information about the citizenry of the United States and the wider world every hour, but they don’t use that information to make people literally disappear. But if some NSA-like organization were ever to go full NKVD (and I honestly DO NOT AT ALL think they EVER WOULD), it would be very easy for them simply to requisition or steal all the files from Facebook or LinkedIn and have a complete map of the associations of almost everyone in their country. 

"Hannah likes German Philosophy and The
Right to Dissent."

This is why I always sort of chuckle at people who think they’re somehow anonymizing themselves when they use a fake name (like when Steve Smith’s Facebook name is Scotsman Flibby-Magoo) for their profile, but otherwise connect to all their friends and associates, and allow themselves to be tagged in photos and statuses. People who actually understand security on the internet and don’t want to be found aren’t on Facebook. I understand security on the internet, but I don’t actually do anything threatening to any military or government powers around the world. I’m trying to start a career as a university professor and public intellectual, so I need visible social connections to promote myself and my work, like this blog. 

Public intellectuals aren’t threatening to modern anti-democratic politics. At most, our products act as a release valve for people’s frustrations with the modern world so that they feel better about their mediocre lives and don’t become so enraged that they act violently to change them. If anything, that’s the lesson that the architects of the modern surveillance state have learned, at least to some degree. 

People like Aaron Swartz are still persecuted until they’re financially ruined suicides. But this is really the crude reaction of state prosecutors and other officials who don’t fully understand. Total domination, the persecution and destruction of all dissent and dissenters against our laws and our social/political structures is overkill. Violent resistance becomes inevitable in such circumstances, if not from within then from without as neighbouring countries became shitlessly scared of you. Swartz was ultimately harmless to the surveillance state and the police. 

The secret is that it doesn’t matter practically how much government and private intelligence agencies know about us. What only matters is that we know that they know and what they know, and that they don’t use this knowledge to destroy and manage the populace.