A Barstool in Dallas

I wrote this back in 2002, as America girded itself for war with a largely concocted ‘Axis of Evil’. A massive global outpouring of dissent had mobilised tens of millions, sending them into the streets in opposition to the folly of war. Now, as the USA limps home from its latest foreign adventure, it feels like a good time to revisit those sentiments. 

It discusses activism in the 90s and into the third millennium, but obviously without the benefit of seeing how the Occupy movement turned out, or the Arab Spring, or the Iranian uprising, or the Women’s March on Washington, or Black Lives Matter.

And yet….

How George and I found faith

George Walker Bush is an earnest Christian. His road to faith was a hard one.

“A barstool in Dallas,” he is said to have uttered once, to a gathering of Christian ministers in the Oval Office.

He explained, “If it weren’t for Jesus, I’d still be sitting on a barstool in Dallas.” He was referring to a path in life that for some years had kept him drunk and good for nothing better than propping up the right end of the bar.

I know that barstool – at least, I know how to prop one up. I spent ten years of my life doing it. Like George though, I found faith and a desire to do the Right Thing. Now, I can’t speak for George on most accounts. I really don’t know him at all. So I’ll just explain how I came through….

Having arrived intact in my late thirties, I have developed what a friend of mine likes to call a modus vivendi. While I dislike the term ‘survivor’ for its connotations of helplessness, it nonetheless applies to me. I’ve passed through drug addiction and alcoholism, chronic depression and debilitating anxiety. I’ve learned that it’s possible to descend from abstraction and live – more or less – within the world.

The Romanticism that used to insulate me from the often dreary task of living has been reduced to a soft patina. Now, it exists mostly in a few sentimental indulgences: The habit of singing sappy heartbreak songs in the car. A desire to portray the world as picturesque, and to eschew things clever and complicated in favour of simpler, more traditional forms.

I am, however, still afflicted with ideals. In younger days, they led me to join a team of Greenpeace activists in scaling the Angus MacDonald bridge in Halifax, where we hung a 60 by 60 foot banner deploring the presence of a nuclear-armed warship in Canadian territory[1]. My involvement in Greenpeace continued for some time, and led me to occupy the Peace Tower to protest Canada’s involvement in the 1991 Gulf War.

My activist career would likely have continued to this day, had it not been forced to confront a number of trivial, gadding obstacles. A few years after I joined, the organisation hired a freshly-minted MBA to run it. Its popularity in the preceding years had reached such a point that it was finally playing around with a substantial and stable volume of money. So, the logic went, the best way to continue this growth trend was to apply standard business philosophy: Commoditise and pasteurise the organisation by toning down the incediary rhetoric; start putting money into maintaining offices and staff in order to sustain a serious research and lobbying effort; climb further up the power apparatus in order to leverage greater influence into greater income. And so on into cyclic growth that would make Adam Smith a happy man.

Of course, it didn’t happen that way. The reasons why are numerous and, frankly, boring. The idealists griped about increasing bureaucratisation. The more mainstream elements griped about the more anarchic ones, insisting that spokespeople be appointed and their comments vetted, in order that everyone stay ‘on-message’. The undertaking soon became so burdened with political dross, and its message so muddied, that it lost the intensity and urgency that had made it appealing in the first place.

I didn’t participate much in the unrest. As soon as I saw how the power had begun to accumulate at the center, with its attendant perquisites and prerogatives, I wandered away.

It’s hardly the first time such a thing has happened. Nor is it a particularly dangerous or damning example. Orwell’s Animal Farm describes something much more hideous. The increasing lassitude of the news media, after a brief (if idiosyncratic) flirtation with social justice in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is the source of endless flagellation in almost every privileged society.

I have a friend who’s often right. She’s an acute observer of history, quick to point out that the best elements of any society are regularly – cyclically, even – sucked into the centre of the societal vortex. Once there, they are inevitably co-opted. Every interest, once vested, becomes more concerned with self-preservation than with the risks inherent in adaptation to altered circumstance.

It’s easy, therefore, for a privileged white male such as I to spend his youth on the barricades, when he has everything to gain and nothing to lose. But with the onset of a career, family, and other long-term obligations, his concerns become more focused on protecting the little patch of turf that he’s come to identify as his own. Given the right circumstances, the logic states, every Abby Hoffmann becomes an investment adviser.

Every adult activist confronts this Rubicon eventually. Their acceptance within (not by) society is largely measured by the degree to which they compromise in the face of the apparently competing exigencies of making life better for oneself or making life better for others.

I’m not sure which was worse: Watching members of my generation ensconce themselves within the social apparatus and close the gate behind them, or watching the remaining activists’ ideals become encrusted with political expediency and organisational self-interest.

I’m not confident that my fall away from activism was any less dangerous (or desultory) than the others’. I gave up on formal organisations altogether, reserving my attempts to do good to the most finite of acts. I also avoided the encumbrances of family, mortgage and investment. By refusing to compromise on anything, I removed myself from participation in many common joys, great and small.

Let me tell you, there are worse things than chanting shop-worn, half-relevant slogans while a hundred pie-eyed, unreflective youths batter the conscience of the nation with hand-painted placards. Try standing alone on a frigid February night in 1991, lighting a single candle from the eternal flame on Parliament Hill under the bored scrutiny of the federal police.

That’s how things looked in ’91. Gatherings of the peace movement typically numbered in the dozens, and consisted for the most part of the regurgitative act of reciting second-hand polemic. The news media ignored us – they were off and away, happily scampered about within the playground cordons, gawking at the fireworks over Baghdad.

As the phosphors dimmed from the last smart-bomb video, the machinery of vested interest kept churning out its grist. Back home, artists and thinkers happily traded away the right to speak for others, in exchange for the right of others to speak for themselves – as if the two were mutually exlusive. The pool of rhetoric achieved such shallowness that mere disagreement became anathema. And Heaven help the fool resorting to reasoned critique.

For all that I could see, the 1990s described a descending spiral for much, if not all, of North American society. So, when George Bush Junior[2] stole the Presidency of the United States, and when the electorate rolled over and took it, I was embittered, but not surprised. When his administration undertook to subvert or abrogate virtually every well-intentioned piece of internationalism that a nascent world community had managed to enact, the last patches of my idealism were chafed almost to nothingness.

In the year that followed the attack on the World Trade Center, I watched that truculent late-adolescent toss the furniture of democracy into the fire, stoking the blaze of a Righteous War on Evil without regard for where – or whether – the rest of us would be left standing.

What kind of a man is it, I’ve asked myself, who can pull himself up off a barstool in Dallas, ratchet his way up the political ladder with the zeal of newfound purpose, and promptly push much of the world into the most precarious posture it’s seen since 1961? What kind of a light shines so brightly on George’s path that its shadow threatens to erase everything on which it falls?

I can’t answer that. I’ve tried time and again to understand. We share so much, George and I. We’re both the sheltered scions of privileged families. We’ve both realised, later than most, that life is more than a walking shadow. Poor players both, we’ve embraced what we can of life. But I’ll be damned if I’ve ever possessed his certitude, his faith.

I find myself recoiling from this contradiction, that someone who has found the love of Jesus could engage in such arrant brinksmanship that everyone in his purview is threatened. If it isn’t the theft of liberties or the coercive politics of power, it’s the threat of wholesale slaughter that repels me utterly.

I love Jesus too, as much as I love any human being – though maybe less than some. There’s part of me that wishes, though, that he’d left that man sitting there in Dallas, and bestowed his love elsewhere.

The Romantic in me accepts that it’s unkind to say that of anyone. And the idealist is wont to point out that, in many important ways, a significant part of humanity is poised, metaphorically, on a barstool in Dallas, swilling away its privilege. The cynic in me is inclined to join them for a round or two – at least until the Patsy Cline singalong is over.

So imagine my suprise last Saturday night, when I returned from my local cafe to find that millions – no one knows exactly how many – had taken time from their lives to walk together for a day. And imagine my growing elation as, in one news report after another, these marchers explained in reasoned terms why they felt a thoughtless march to war was wrong. The staff writers at Time and Newsweek must have been baffled by the sudden need to express a world view that was not blind to subtlety, that weighed and balanced the facts, and came to the practical judgement that the presence of evil in the world did not justify the commission of a greater sin. For one day, at least, the Western World got off its barstool.

I’m no longer fool enough to think that this marks the end of our complacency – or even our descent. Nor am I inclined to believe that the light of Jesus has for a moment illuminated all of Christendom. I am chastened, though. Chastened by the realisation that this sudden surge of human concern consisted of a single act multiplied ten million times: A man, a woman judged that this one thing required that she, that he, alone if need be, had to speak. Ten million times, she said this war is wrong.

I can’t say for certain what light it was that dawned on me. I know it’s not divine. Not in a sense that any of the ministers in the Oval Office would understand, anyway. And I don’t know for sure whether it’s knocked me clear of the bar. But I know one thing: This coming March, if I find myself walking to Parliament Hill, candle in hand, whether I’m alone, in the company of dozens or thousands, there’ll be one more barstool in Dallas sitting empty.

[1] Which, I hasten to mention, was then and is still illegal. This illegality is conveniently circumvented by a federal government which neglects to ask visiting U.S. and British warships whether they carry such weapons of mass destruction. The warships, in turn, politely decline to confirm or deny the presence of said weapons.

[2] Why does nobody call him ‘Junior’? He’s junior in almost every way.

Doing the Numbers

The pandemic is global. Why isn’t the response?

When scarcity butts up against the public good, tears are guaranteed. This year—and for years to come, it seems—COVID-19 will provide ample opportunity to cry.

First, a word of congratulations to the cohorts of ideologues who spent decades grinding the United Nations down from a place to grapple with global crises to an underfunded, slothful, toothless show dog. Great job, gang. It’s not like we needed it.

What we have instead is a creative response to vaccination in a world where governments don’t want to cooperate, let alone play by the same rules. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance was cobbled together by dozens of different stakeholders about 20 years ago to deal with something that we’ve always known is a problem: eradicating communicable disease in a world with wildly disparate levels of wealth and health.

The good news is that it was a relatively simple (albeit herculean) job to refocus GAVI on COVID-19 and to form COVAX, the global initiative designed to centralise vaccine acquisition, coordinate its delivery and reduce costs for everyone involved.

And it would be working well, if developed countries hadn’t jumped the queue. Sidelining their own contributions to COVAX, 16% of the world’s population has removed 70% of global vaccine production from control of the global consortium.

The already confusing and complex global supply chain has effectively been corralled by the moneyed nations who are intent on vaccinating themselves first.

That’s crazy, when you think about it.

It’s not crazy at first, though. I mean, it’s their vaccine. They can do what they like with it. And a lot of the money is theirs too, so ditto. And they were elected (or self-selected) to protect the interests of their own people. So… yeah. Ok.

Crying about basic injustice is a legitimate response. The fact that people are willing to shove others out of the way in order to secure a place on the first lifeboat out is lamentable, and not very cool. I seem to recall a bit of confusion about that in Titanic.

But let’s be honest. Fairness is a powerful argument, but not a compelling one.

The calculus that should be driving a coordinated global vaccination effort is the desire to see this thing ended decisively and quickly. A globally coordinated response isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s the best thing to do.

The longer the disease lingers in locales with poor health care services and large populations of people facing multiple concurrent health challenges, the more likely it is to mutate and re-emerge.

In short: If you shoot the first zombie, The Walking Dead never gets past the pilot. If you don’t, you… well, you get the show as premised.

A policy paper published a few days ago by The Lancet lays it all out. It recognises the near-miraculous speed with which the first vaccines have been produced, but warns that if production, pricing and allocation aren’t better coordinated, we could end up drowning in a rush to the lifeboats.

Scaling up production to meet global demand is a monumental challenge.14,  15 Before this pandemic, there were no existing networks of contract manufacturers for several of the leading vaccine candidates that feature novel technologies, including those relying on mRNA delivery platforms. Additionally, the volume of vaccines that is needed places pressure on global supply chains for inputs, such as glass vials, syringes, and stabilising agents.

The production of COVID-19 vaccines is limited by the highly concentrated state of global vaccine manufacturing capacity,16 and the relationships established between lead developers and contract manufacturers. A successful solution to the production bottleneck would probably require widespread technology transfer to enable the expansion of manufacturing capacity.

And yet, there’s no appreciable effort ongoing at the moment to move production into the public domain. Cooperative vaccine deals such as that negotiated by the Quad are good, but they’re just working around regional and strategic rivalries that the UN was specifically designed to circumvent.

Yes, millions will benefit from this, and that’s an unadulterated Good Thing. But it’s too small.

The Lancet makes it clear that self-interest is driving up prices for everyone, and contributing to supply shortages that virtually assure a more protracted fight against the vaccine for everyone. Looming over all of this is the spectre of COVID becoming a long-term affliction of the human species, slowing commerce and travel for decades to come, increasing distrust and instability, and punishing the poor.

Delays cost everyone. Eric Feigl-Ding is an epidemiologist with the Federation of American Scientists. He argues, “Delaying the vaccine is a terrible choice. If you were to choose, just take whatever is available because every day for 100,000 vaccinations that are delayed by just one day 15 people will die.”

That’s in the USA. The numbers for Papua New Guinea don’t bear contemplating.

We can’t say we weren’t warned. We knew that if—or more honestly, when—COVID-19 broke out into the community in PNG, it would create a dire threat. One that nobody is equipped to cope with.

Today’s announcement of an urgent effort to guarantee enough vaccines for 20% of Papua New Guineans sound good. Better than the next-to-nothing they’ve got right now, anyway. But 20% of the population in the first year has been the COVAX goal from the start.

That number was based more on market factors than epidemiology. It’s saddening that it takes a crisis of these proportions to raise even the prospect of meeting it.

We now know that vaccines don’t just protect a person from the virus, they also reduce transmission rates vastly, so its possible effective herd immunity may be reached a little shy of the 60% number that’s been bandied about since the beginning of the pandemic.

But here’s the catch: That number only works within discrete populations. We are content to divide ourselves along national boundaries for the moment, so that’s how eradication is going to manifest. The virus will be reduced significantly at first, perhaps even to vanishingly small rates in Europe, North America and large swathes of Asia.

But it only stays eradicated as long as the barriers remain.

And in pockets of the Pacific, in sub-Saharan Africa, remoter parts of Asia and South America, the virus will cling to humanity like a leech, mutating, waiting.

This is Brasil today:

PNG is even less equipped to cope with a runaway virus than Brasil is. We’ve known these were the stakes for a year. It is likely already too late. To his credit, James Marape has been pragmatic about this from the start. Some would say fatalistic.

Some would say that fatalism is an appropriate response.

A million vaccines for PNG isn’t nearly enough. If we’re being fair, the same can be said of every number, for every nation, until the virus is eradicated.

But the way things are going right now, it’s not clear that global eradication going to happen. Because there is no actual global eradication effort. And the odds of success are being driven down right now by wealthy nations getting their own self-interest exactly backwards, because they think there’s a difference between national interest and global interest.

Where they see rivalries, the virus sees opportunities.

COVAX is being undercut by queue jumpers. According to the Lancet, it is facing a multi-billion dollar shortfall, and it’s being outbid by developed nations. It has no long-term funding, and is ill-equipped to build any formal frameworks and supply chains in a marketplace that isn’t just short of vaccines, but also needles, vials, gloves, masks, protective gear—in short, every single thing it needs.

The Lancet policy paper argues convincingly for a global approach to vaccination. But there’s a difference between convincing and compelling. What we need now is the latter. We need world leaders to realise that they’re not protecting themselves if they don’t protect us all.

This is a critical moment in human history, and thus far, we’ve reacted with historic rapidity. But there’s a good chance that we won’t succeed unless we put our differences aside and tackle this global challenge on a truly global scale.

Decolonising Social Media

Decentralisation and federation allow developing countries to be masters in their own digital house

The impact of social media on developing countries has received little attention in the popular press, with the exception of horrendous events such as the attempted extirpation of the Rohingya people in Myanmar.

These impacts are real and cannot be overstated.

Here in Melanesia, societies are at once more susceptible to gossip-driven scares and even mob behaviour, and more resilient in the face of it. It’s easier to set people off, and it’s easier to spread common sense.

The simple reason is that we are closer together. Your neighbour may drive you round the bend from time to time, but go far enough round the bend and you’ve done a circuit of the island. They’re not going anywhere, and neither are you. That’s the historical truth, anyway.

Social media has made the public sphere vastly larger and noisier, but the same rules apply, more or less.

Women are harassed, abused and faced with physical harm not just by their family and neighbours now, but by the entire online population.

Gadflies and conscientious objectors face opprobrium not just from the chiefs and other people of rank, but from masses of virulent and often anonymous attackers.

And anonymity/pseudonymity is a novelty that many struggle to come to terms with. While it’s freed the tongues of many who felt constrained from speaking before, a significant minority of them have used that liberty to behave horribly to others.

But in the midst of this chaos and rancour, a fascinating thing has happened: People are learning to moderate debate in real time. The pattern here in Vanuatu typically runs like this:

A person attacks another, making allegations that might or might not be true. One side piles on, either in concert with or in reaction to the original poster. Generally speaking, the conversational tide runs almost entirely in one direction, with few people showing the gumption (or the chutzpah) to gainsay the rest.

But then, slowly and sometimes softly at first, the first words of moderation appear. Before long, others find it in themselves to support this view or to supplement it with their own objections. Eventually, a trend begins to come clear, and comments with widely divergent views either peter out or are drowned out.

The process can sometimes be outright vituperative, sometimes not. Sometimes the right answer is found, sometimes the wrong one is reinforced. But even in the worst cases, where we see incitement to violence, to burn homes, expel people, exact vengeance or pour shame on a person or group, there are few if any instances of people actually acting on them.

In cases where people actually have done reprehensible things to one another, they were seldom discussed or organised over public social media channels. Slut shaming in cases of perceived infidelity are the one glaring exception.

The flow of discourse resembles nothing so much as a village meeting. I’ve attended more than a few, and they tend to follow the same pattern. If you walk in cold to the early stages of a contentious meeting, it can sometimes feel like the only possible outcome is open conflict. The tension is often palpable.

But as it unrolls, tempers begin to subside, and more nuanced and reasonable arguments begin to emerge. By the end of it, more often than not, the chief is able to find a ruling that will carry the room, and people part with handshakes and a sense of having accomplished something.

(I’m painting with a very broad brush here, so forgive the massive elisions in that description.)

We’ve been able to resist of the worst conspiracy mongering here. Even when Indonesian state actors conducted a Cambridge Analytica-style campaign to undermine confidence in the government of the day, the effect was minimal.

But it didn’t stop until high-level meetings were held with Facebook executives. Faced with a Prime Minister fully prepared to regulate them or see them leave the market immediately, they did the right thing.

That was only one victory among literally thousands of attempts. Dozens of user reports concerning this influence network received no response at all. Hundreds of reports of incitement and hateful comments went unheeded. In rare cases where a response was received, Facebook’s so-called community standards allowed imagery and language that were shocking to us—and to any thinking, feeling human. Images of dead and dismembered bodies, sexualised and clearly brutalised children… the list goes on.

Then, adding insult to injury, imagery of people in kastom dress were banned, because apparently a nambas or a nipple is beyond the pale, even though they scarcely raise an eyebrow here.

The push here became strong enough that Facebook’s head of Global Connectivity Policy met privately with the Prime Minister to dissuade him from moving ahead with a proposal to require them to register as a local company.

The Prime Minister’s rationale was that Over The Top services such as Facebook should be required to contribute to our Universal Access Policy, the same way all local telecommunication providers are.

But another, and I believe more compelling, argument is language. There is no business case for Facebook to provide support for Bislama, Solomons pidgin, Tok Pisin or any other of the thousand-plus languages in the Pacific islands. It’s just never going to happen.

The only way these languages—and our cultures and societies—get the respect and support they deserve is when social media networks become our networks. Without ownership of the content and of the management service, we are not masters in our own house.

Technology generally and social media in particular can accurately be described as a (re)colonising force. The imposition of standards, expectations and requirements that are not only foreign and new, but often beyond the capability of a great many people here doesn’t just bring development potential. More to the point, they’re largely impossible to alter to fit the local context.

Technology and social media are just as subversive as they are liberating.

And while our societies are generally better at self-regulation, we’re hardly perfect. The suffering and subjugation of women in the Pacific has always been a matter of concern. Social media adds slut-shaming, stalking, coercive talk and mobbing to their already tremendous burden.

The inexperienced have often been victimised by cons, scams and schemes, but they have only grown in proportion since the advent of the internet and social media.

Decentralisation and federation of social media services doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t provide any guarantees at all. Except one: if we screw it up, it’ll be our screw up, not someone else’s.

And that’s what decolonisation has always been about.

Selling Democracy, Revisited

Why do decentralisation and federation matter, and how do we use them?

My last missive discussed the technical (and to a lesser degree, the social) arguments for a decentralised, federated approach to social media.

It didn’t entirely answer a kind of a big question: Why do we need it?

In a word: Jurisdiction.

There’s no end in sight to Facebook’s 14-year apology tour, and following the announcement that they’re going to take their ball and go home unless Australian news media stop asking for a share of the pyre—er, pie—it’s abundantly clear that something has to happen.

In a conveniently (but not deliberately) timed piece of news, Facebook has shown that it’s willing to take steps to control malicious activity, especially when it comes to state-to-state mis/disinformation operations. Their globe-bestriding status makes it possible for them to analyse and avoid these abuses.

But reach is exactly why their platform is being used for these ops. And lord knows they’ve been effective. Carole Cadwalladr’s exposé of Cambridge Analytica makes it abundantly clear that the platform is a near-ideal factory for weapons-grade propaganda.

I’m counting the hours before the folks at Facebook begin to leverage that power to dig themselves like a tick into our digital landscape. The only thing that keeps them from doing it right now is potential loss of trust among their audience, and the fear that acting in one nation’s favour might prejudice their relationship with another.

In short, they’re still trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Australia’s decision to foist regulation on the company upsets that delicate balance. Now, they have to decide. Publicly at least, Josh Frydenberg has stated that his government won’t respond to Facebook’s extortionate plan to simply turn off all Australian news.

But I expect that if there isn’t a strategic national interest conversation going on right now between the platform and the state, there will be. It’s also highly likely that Facebook will realise that Rupert Murdoch is their adversary, and the Australian Government is simply the hatchet man.

Once it does, all bets are off. Can, as Willie Nelson so coyly put it, old age and treachery beat youth and skill? Not forever. And, I suspect, not this time.

But if Facebook continues to take an antagonistic stance, there will be blood. And they will be subjected to regulation. And it will lead inexorably to more.

AT&T survived its breakup. Microsoft survived the legal sanctions it was burdened with, as well as the commodification of its operating system and software. Despite a balls to the wall rear-guard action against free software, open protocols and interoperability in the nineties and early oughties, it’s still ticking along just fine.

Google will survive as well, because it can argue much more convincingly for the good it does. With a lower evil index, it presents a smaller attack surface for its adversaries. And frankly, it could drop Google News tomorrow and remain the company everyone thinks it is.

But Facebook is a different kettle of fish. Along with its liberating and democratising influence, it brings the potential to quite literally overturn societies, inflict immense damage on personal lives, and oust regimes.

They’re doomed by their own dominance, and damned by their own tacit admission in their threats against Australian media that they actually have market dominance. The one defence a monopoly has is not to abuse that position, and that was the first card they threw away.

That’s why, no matter what play they choose, they’re going to find themselves coping with the perils of interacting with—and accepting liability in—all of the world’s jurisdictions.

It won’t all happen tomorrow, and it won’t all happen because of this stoush with Murdoch. But it will happen.

So if they’re smart, they’ll hive off the risky part, the one the plays an editorial role. They’ll either fragment themselves into a federation of national operations (more or less like every multinational that deals in physical goods), or if they’re really smart, they’ll open up their platform on a pay-for-play basis, and allow other companies to cling remora-like to their data corpus.

That makes for more modest profits, but it wins those profits with next to no accountability.

This is a terrible outcome for some people, of course. The moment you force an information service to work within the constraints of an authoritarian environment, you place people at risk.

The trade-off here is that people would only be at risk from their own authoritarians, and not their strategic rivals and adversaries.

People call this balkanisation. I get it. I don’t like it either, but commercialised and commoditised access to Facebook’s user base is really the only way we preserve anything of worth for a great many people. The stakes are high, and sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good.

And that’s why decentralisation and federation are a good idea for Facebook today.

Three Principles for Digital Journalism

Journalism will only ever be valued if human society places appropriate and equal value on Personal Privacy, Honest Discourse, and Public Openness

What’s wrong with journalism? What happened to trust? 

Maybe those aren’t the right questions. Maybe it’s not what’s wrong with it. Maybe it’s what’s wrong with us. Journalism didn’t change. We did. All of us. We changed the way we think about things, but we didn’t change the way we know them.

Fixing Journalism really means Fixing Us. Us journalists can’t do it for others, but we can’t stand around waiting for the rest of the world to do it for themselves. Maybe there are a few basic principles we can apply ourselves, and trust others to learn and apply them in time.

Journalism is not a thing unto itself. It’s not an externality, existing outside of government, finance, culture and society. It is intrinsic to them all, an answer to one of the key questions in humanity’s perpetual quest for truth.

Sounds highfalutin’, but there it is: The News is what comes out when someone asks, ‘Says who?’

Lies and the Lying Liars who Lie Them (i.e. Us)

From the moment the first hominid used a pre-linguistic vocalisation to cry wolf (or bear, or tiger, or whatever) we’ve been lying to each other.

Many species do. Birds have been taped using false alarm calls to chase competitors away from a kill. Arctic ravens have developed elaborate ruses to draw sled dogs away from their meat long enough for others to slip in and grab a mouthful.

Lying works. Until it no longer does. There’s an all-too-real Tragedy of the Common Tongue that happens when falsehood overwhelms truth, creating radical social harm. Look no further than rumour-driven mob violence, blood libel, pogroms and, God forgive us, the Holocaust to see how devastating falsehoods can become.

This lesson, alas, is as old as humanity itself.

We don’t need truth in every part of our lives. We really don’t want truth in some parts. But we need to know where to find it when we do.

That’s what journalism is.

Honesty, not Trust

Before we can talk about the place of truth in society, we need to make a distinction. Our ultimate goal in establishing a truthful medium of communication is not to create, sustain or enhance trust. Trust is the shim we drive between the very uneven surfaces of credulity and honesty. It may stabilise things in the short term, but there are better ways to compensate for our inability to verify everything always. Trust wears out easily and must often be replaced.

It’s possible to create a complete picture of personal, social and public truth without ever relying outright on trust. That comes when we distinguish between an honest person and an honest statement.

There has never been, nor will there ever be, a person of unalloyed honesty. Even Jesus fibbed a little.

It is possible however for the most dishonest person in the world occasionally to say an honest thing. There’s no need to exercise ourselves unnecessarily over silly things like bias, subjectivity, spin, opinion, perception, and every overcaffeinated wanker ever who asked, ‘But what really is real, man?’

We have only to ask instead, ‘Is this an honest statement?’

Before drench your screen in an indignant spit-take, remember: This isn’t a philosophical treatise. It’s merely an attempt to find a quick and workmanlike framework to begin usefully to determine what the fuck we’re going to do about the death of truth.

Odds are remarkably good that whenever someone questions another person’s honesty, one of them is lying. It is often fairly easy to determine which.

Ignore the wider questions for a moment. Fuck Post-Modernism, and fuck Platonism too. The only question that matters to us is a simple one: Are both participants being equally honest when they claim to be seeking the truth of a particular matter?

That’s not terribly hard to determine, most of the time. Just keep requiring evidence to back their argument. The first person to repeat or run out of it loses. It’s hardly perfect, but it mostly works.

(Yes, there are countless examples of situations where this doesn’t work. Remember: we’re not trying to solve the problem, we’re only trying to combat it. Nor are we suggesting that there’s only One True Answer. There generally ain’t. Which is kind of the point.)

Removing trust is a good thing. A three-legged stool never wobbles. A four legged one almost always does.

The Three-Legged Stool

If honesty is the one leg of the stool, what are the other two, then?

Privacy. Openness.

They’re not contradictory, or even necessarily competitive. And they don’t need to be precisely positioned. As long as we don’t place any of the three legs too close together, the stool will balance well enough.

So where exactly should we place privacy and openness? Before we can answer that, we need to remember what they aren’t.

Privacy is not secrecy. Privacy is something unknown or undiscovered. Secrecy is something hidden. Big difference. One runs the gamut from ignorance to indifference. The other runs the gamut from discretion to deceit.

Retrospectively (and uselessly), privacy is what you didn’t have a right to know; and secrecy is what you did.

In sufficient quantities, both ignorance and indifference can be culpable flaws. But in moderation, they are eminently forgivable, and easily cured.

As long as we never allow either to become a virtue, we just might be okay. Denigrating knowledge is anathema, and people who claim that their own knowledge (or ignorance) is somehow purer and more valuable than another’s are guilty of inexcusable sin.

There can be no private truths. The things we feel individually or in isolated groups are sometimes beautiful, even transcendent. But they are not The Truth. ‘My Truth’ may be philosophically beautiful, affirming, and metaphysically enriching. But private truths are simply a thing we have, alone or together. Not less valuable. Not more. But not Truth.

Likewise, there is no Higher Truth. Not for journalists. There is what is provable, and nothing else. We are, practically speaking, Aristotelian, or we’re not journalists at all. (We’re not telling you how to live; we’re telling you how to work.)

So the things we keep to ourselves, no matter how empirically provable, are of no practical interest to a journalist, except as invaluable and illuminating facets of human experience. Who does your hair? Who dresses you? What side do you sleep on? Who do you sleep beside? Who you sleep with on the side? How do you make your own toes curl? Who’s your spirit guide? All knowable; all pretty cool. But not news.

If it’s not widely shared, there’s no need for it to be known.

If it’s personal, it’s private. It belongs only to those with whom it is willingly shared. This is a rule.

No Secrets

The point at which suppression ceases to be tactful and starts to become malicious is hard to see. Undiscovered crimes are not private; they’re secret. But where do they start happening?

Practically speaking, where does my fist end and your nose start? It’s not a static question, it’s a measure of forces, dynamics. Arguably, your nose started in the space occupied by my fist when I was winding up to belt you. Or in the years of bullying that preceded that. Or in the institutions that led us to assume the other was Other. It’s messy, which is why it has to be approached honestly, which is to say questingly. And fallibly.

Still: What’s personal is private. What’s secret should be shared.

In the early days of the Internet, radical openness was briefly chic–at least among a minority. David Brin’s essays on the topic were not as influential as they might have been if people hadn’t been so busy getting rich off Big Data. But they were pretty neat. In a far-too-tiny nutshell, he argued that all secrets will inevitably be revealed, so better to do without shame than to pretend others don’t know.

He used the Japanese fusuma as his metaphor, the paper wall which magically blocked farts, domestic fracases, sex sounds and countless other private matters. Just pull the door closed and the other room ceases to exist. It’s a nice idea.

A more judicious and more scholarly analysis of the dangerous dynamics of digital disequilibrium came in the Harvard Law Review. In 2013, Neil M Richards wrote about The Dangers of Surveillance. At the heart of his principled cry for what he described as ‘intellectual privacy’ is the contention that it’s not data per se that is dangerous to an individual, but the disparity of access to it.

Our problem, the argument runs, is not that Facebook knows everything about us, but that we know next to nothing about Facebook. What exactly does it know? Who else is it telling? Why is this lie/ad/scam/rumour being shown to me right now? What information about me makes their algo think I’ll be particularly receptive to this so-called ‘sponsored content’?

If we knew the answers to these questions, it would at least make the task of unraveling the untruth a trifle more possible.

As things stand right now, though, Facebook happily and without even the slightest distinction takes money from spivs, salesmen, cranks, crooks, politicians (but I repeat myself), prats and proselytisers, and serves their dross to us in a package that is deliberately made to look allllmost like the truth.

They are breaking all the rules. They are not being honest, they are hiding secrets from us, and they are deliberately collapsing the distance between what is private and personal, and what’s public.

The same is true of every single organisation that controls large amounts of our private information. Every single one. Fight me.

The EU among others has taken often draconian steps to protect what it calls privacy, but without ever adequately defining the word.

In the United States, a small army of high-minded thinkers infused with the sanctity of the First Amendment have threatened cataclysm if even the notion of self-restraint be motivated by anything except individual conscience. In so doing, they inadvertently enable soulless data combines to harvest an entire generation’s privacy and store that seed grain in private silos like Monsantos of the mind.

And this so-called essay, this tendentious half-witted jeremiad, is a comically futile response.

Like an Arial Grande Armee, it will be whittled down to nothing as it traverses the pallid, windblown steppe extending from the VC-studded plains of Silicon Valley to the Ivy League veldt, where the elephants are one by one permitted Into The Room.

Still, We Die

Meanwhile, we journalists die. We are literally killed, or merely criminalised, imprisoned, exiled, doxed, bankrupted, sacked, ground down, denigrated, ridiculed and (miserere dictu) ignored.

It’s because we have no place in this. Human society can’t find where we fit any more.

Because we don’t even know who we are.

We harbour our own secrets. We pimp out our own honesty. We pillage everyone’s privacy and don’t admit that’s what we’re doing.

There’s no point in ascribing motive to all of this. We know why it is. We’re chasing engagement. We’re chasing an audience that’s chasing hot takes. We’re corralling eyeballs, and damn the consequences. The days of the free range consciousness were always numbered. We didn’t start the intellectual range wars. We’re just waging its last campaign.

We’re playing at arbitrage in the attention economy, and losing on nearly every bet.

Even those of us who fight for an open congress of ideas, those who defend the constricting borders of intellectual agnosticism and curiosity as an end in itself… we’re still guilty of thinking of that turf as ours.

(You did, didn’t you? Until you read that.)

There’s no saving us, you know. Nothing will take us back to what we had. No funding, no mandate, no laws will ever return us to the days when Uncle Walter could remove his glasses, turn to the camera, and share his fear that we might not be winning the war.

And thank fucking god for that.

Because that world was rife with secrets. It was rank with dishonesty. The only thing it had in any abundance at all was privacy. Privacy enough to be poor in. To live in. To die in.

Trimming the Legs

A three legged stool may never wobble, but it can be so skewed that it’s an impossible perch. We don’t need perfection, and remember, we’re not seeking solutions. Not here. We only want a framework workable enough to hold us up while we knock out the next thousand words.

Secrecy is the leg that most needs trimming. That can be achieved with a simple realisation: The single greatest expense (measuring time, effort and coin) in journalism is fighting secrecy. National security, the corporate veil, and personal data in public places–every single one of these things has been so solemnised and sanctified that governments and corporations barely make a pretense any more of recognising the public’s right to know.

If it’s data about the public, the public should be able to see it. If it’s public money, the public should be able to see exactly and in detail how it’s spent.

If the data’s not in a presentable form for the public, then we’ve every right to ask why not. If it costs too much to present to the public, well then, just give us what you use, and bind us by the same rules you apply to those who use it. If it can be ethically administered, it can be ethically reported on.

Assuming a journo can distinguish between private and secret, everything should be fine. Sure, domain-specific knowledge comes into it, and technical proficiency, and character tests, and background checks, and lord knows what else. There are processes for all of that.

If we stop thinking about access to our data as a privilege and start accepting it as a right, then it becomes not just possible, but reasonable to find a way to integrate journalism into the functions of a healthy society, not as a cog hanging off the end of the assembly, but as a piston in the motor.

The Secret State

National security has always been an inner circle shibboleth, and as they gain power, the initiated fight to reduce their own numbers. They don’t just want to close the door behind them, they want to kill everyone else in the room. Metaphorically speaking.

This is the age-old affliction of cabalism.

There are few real reasons to hide most information. Most justifications are predicated on security through obscurity. And they endure not because they’re valid, but because discrediting them uncloaks most of the shamanry that populates the upper reaches of power.

There can be no journalism if there’s nothing to do journalism with. Every public organisation owes the world its secrets.

That’s not an absolute. It’s an ideal. And like all good ideals, it’s pretty fucking useless except as a thing to find exceptions to.

The great sin, though, is thinking that you’re winning when you find one.

Data is People! (one one bang bang eleven)

The contention that big data, the algorithms that shepherd it and the profits that derive are all private is bullshit.

The contention that the resources required to acquire data, put some shape on it, and make sense of it all spring up sui generis like mushrooms in Mario World is equally bullshit.

There is absolutely nothing in the world, bar a few private islands worth of wealth, that stops corporations from building their algos publicly, sharing exactly how they were built, down to the slightest minutiae, and still making a very large bundle of dosh. Better still, that bundle of dosh can be amicably and equitably shared among all the contributors to this wealth creation project in amounts commensurate to their contribution.

Socialism! Yes. Just don’t say it like it’s a bad thing.

The ‘how’ of big data algorithms is devilishly hard to understand, and hella expensive. The ‘what’, however is not. And people have a right to know it.

This is not the Secret Sauce. Or maybe it is, but who cares? It’s a secret sauce that can only be spread on a Very Large Dataset using Very Large Resources.

And it’s a Secret Sauce made for use on Us.

If algos and their impacts were public, companies would only have the size and composition of their dataset to compete with. And they would retain the allegiance of that data set (data is people!) by making it worth the data’s while.

That’s how it works right now, only people’s data is kept secret from them. The public don’t have any way to choose who to trust it with, and for what purpose. Those secrets must be revealed. It’s not the end of the world. It won’t bring the data giants crashing down.

It does mean they’d need to compete more, and compete on things we all can see, and measure.

That might be convenience. That might be services tailor-made to order, okay Google? That might be by demonstrably and consistently telling the truth (which would be pretty cool). That may mean straight up profit sharing. Who cares? We’re not prescribing, remember?

(Most) Secrets are Lies…

… and many of those lies are ours.

The majority of the things defined as secret in public sectors everywhere are just facts that might be embarrassing to the government of the day.

Much of the time, they’re embarrassing because we in the media use them to embarrass the government of the day. They are not in and of themselves embarrassing; they are weaponised to commit acts of embarrassment by organisations who are sceptical, cynical, or even inimical to the current posse of elected poseurs.

The ability to embarrass is often crafted by those who want to take (or retake) power. It is always an overtly political process. The moment you put yourself in opposition to whatever power may be, you are committing an act of politics.

To say otherwise is dishonest.

The problem, to return to the beginning, is not whether we can be trusted, but whether we can be honest with each other. Hate the Libs? Own it. Be open about it. Think the Cons are kooks? Good for you!

Now prove it. Be honest. And never forget that to be honest is to be persuadable. It’s as important to be wrong as it is to be right.

None of this Works. Use it well.

This is all useless idealistic claptrap, of course. The slate can’t be cleaned. Our multi-decamillennial legacy of self-deception, tribalism and faith-making can’t be undone by a few well-meaning words.

The Truth is fucked. We’re fucked. We always have been and we always will be.

On the bright side, though, we always have been, and always will be.

This cha/quix/otic ramble across the sere, Goya-esque tableau of Journalism’s Last Stand serves no prescriptive value. It does, though, provide us with a three-legged stool to rest on for a bit. To reflect on what we mean by journalism, to remember that it’s an answer to a problem.

To rethink what the problem is.

Things get better (at least easier to accept) when we reporters apply these questions to our work, and maybe to our lives:

  • Is it private? Yes? Ignore it.
  • Is it honest? Yes? Then share it.
  • Is it secret? Yes? Then expose it.

The triple principle of Personal Privacy, Honest Dialogue, and Public Openness is not an answer. It’s not much of anything at all. But it’s useful.

It’s useful in the same way that Komatsu’s legendary mission statement, ‘Surround Caterpillar’ animated every single action the company took. It’s a mantra, and a good one.

Use it well.
Andy Ayamiseba and his wife in 2014

The long road home

Originally published by the Pacific Institute of Public Policy, this 2013 appreciation of Andy Ayamiseba’s life of activism in exile is one of the few narratives of the compelling story of the Black Brothers and their seminal role the formulation of a modern Melanesian identity, and in keeping the West Papuan independence movement alive in Melanesia.

Andy died a few days ago. While he was loved, admired and supported in Vanuatu, he fought tirelessly to win a home he could return to. He died before the dream was achieved.

In 1983, Andy Ayamiseba and the rest of the Black Brothers band descended from their flight to Port Vila’s Bauerfield airport, to be greeted by the entire cabinet of the newly fledged government of Vanuatu. They were, by Melanesian standards, superstars. They had come to assist Father Walter Lini’s Vanua’aku Pati in its first re-election campaign, and to pass on the message of freedom for West Papua. So began a relationship that would span a lifetime of activism, a liberation dream long deferred, and ultimately, a first glimmer of hope for political legitimacy for the West Papuan liberation movement.

The Black Brothers were already widely known and loved in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Touring PNG in the late 1970s, the band members first met Vanuatu independence figures, including Hilda Lini, Kalkot Mataskelekele and Silas Hakwa. Students at the University of Papua New Guinea at the time, they returned to Vanuatu to play key roles in Vanuatu’s move to independence.

A generation later, it’s hard to imagine the immediacy, the passion and the dynamism of the time. Kalkot Mataskelekele, who would later serve as Solicitor General and on the Supreme Court bench before becoming the republic’s 6th president, was a young firebrand operating a pirate radio service from the bush north of the capital. Hilda Lini, sister to two prime ministers and the first woman elected to Vanuatu’s parliament, was a tireless organiser, working behind the scenes to promote what would become the Vanua’ku Pati.

In hindsight, it seems almost inevitable that the dynamism of this callow young political leadership would mesh and meld with the creative iconoclasm of the Black Brothers. But it had to wait before it reached its full fruition. In 1980 the Indonesian government expelled Ayamiseba and the other band members. Stateless, they sought shelter in the Netherlands. Hilda Lini had contacted them in 1980 during a visit to Europe, but it wasn’t until 1983 that they obtained refugee status and official residency. Finally able to travel again, their first destination was Vanuatu.

It was a triumphal entry. They were welcomed by Father Walter Lini’s government and a large crowd of adoring fans. Likewise, on their first visit to Solomon Islands, the roads were so packed that it took the group two hours to get from the airport into town. Their concert the next day was attended by 28,000 fans.

This week’s [2013] visit to Honiara will be somewhat more low-key, and yet perhaps more epochal than the original Black Brothers crusade. With funding and official support from the government of Vanuatu, independence leaders John Ondawame and Andy Ayamiseba are continuing their tour of Melanesian Spearhead Group members, soliciting support for membership in the sub-regional organisation. The West Papua National Coalition of Liberation, or WPNCL, is an amalgam of two previously divergent wings of the OPM (in English, the Organisation for Papuan Freedom) and a number of political groups advocating for West Papuan independence.

Having met already with the Fijian and Vanuatu prime ministers as well as the incoming chair of the MSG and head of the FLNKS, Andy and John are hopeful that their meetings with Solomon Islands prime minister Darcy Lilo will be equally fruitful. In an interview last week, Ayamiseba explained that he had met and befriended Lilo during his sojourn in Honiara in the mid-90s.

Should Solomon Islands decide to voice its support for WPNCL membership in the MSG, most of the political hurdles will have been cleared for what might prove to be the first crack of light through the doorway of political legitimacy for the cause.
Arguably, the critical opening came weeks before, when Sir Michael Somare voiced the opinion that the MSG is not an intergovernmental organisation, but an organisation of peoples, joined by culture and geography. The statement, made during a celebration of the MSG 25th anniversary, came as a surprise to some. In 2008, it was Somare who flatly blocked a motion to consider West Papuan membership in the MSG. (Admittedly, the motion was ill-timed and ill-prepared. Ayamiseba himself admits that his group had no prior knowledge, and were caught by surprise when it was tabled.)

Political legitimacy for West Papuan independence in the Pacific has long been subject to the vicissitudes of Melanesian politics. While Ayamiseba’s group were the darlings of the Vanua’ku Pati, and by extension the government of Vanuatu, the association came at a price. They were expelled from the country following the party’s schism in 1989, forcing Andy to seek asylum, first in Australia, then in Solomon Islands. His friendship with then-PM Mamaloni notwithstanding, efforts to further the independence movement stalled.

Progress elsewhere in the world was also stymied by realpolitik. In 1986, even nations such as Ghana, which had objected to the manner in which West Papua was brought under Indonesian rule, were less than responsive to overtures by John Ondawame, who had officially joined the independence movement’s leadership following its reunification the year before in Port Vila.

Despite the fact that it clearly flouted international law in its annexation of the territory, no country outside of Melanesia offered significant criticism of Indonesia’s actions in West Papua. Not, at least, until new media and the internet began to break down the wall of silence that had been erected around the territory. But even in the face of clearly documented torture, assassination and political oppression, many nations are still loth to legitimise the independence movement.

In Vanuatu, arguably the home of West Papuan independence, the road to freedom has been a long one, as full of pitfalls and obstacles as Port Vila’s physical thoroughfares – and sometimes, just as poorly managed. When Barak Sope became prime minister in 2000, he brought together nine members of the West Papuan leadership and brokered an accord that would finally bring all independence efforts under one roof. Later that year, his delegation to the UN General Assembly included three West Papuans, two OPM members and one from the Presidium. There, in an alarming example of fervour trumping political savvy, they met with the Cuban delegation.

For all of his energy, support and contributions to Melanesian identity, Barak Sope’s political ineptitude soon brought his government down. His failure even to produce a budget caused significant domestic turmoil, which effectively forced West Papua onto the back burner. It wasn’t until 2003 that foreign affairs minister Serge Vohor welcomed back the Black Brothers, and facilitated the opening of the West Papuan People’s Representative Office, a front for the OPM.

International awareness and support were limited. Vanuatu continued to fumble the issue, balking at formal political support while continuing to express public sympathy and tacit approval. Elsewhere, tribal leader Benny Wenda’s escape from Indonesian custody and flight to the UK opened another front in the campaign. Indonesia did itself no favours when it abused the INTERPOL red list by issuing a warrant for Wenda’s arrest.

For several years, the movement seemed paralysed, unable to organise itself, beset by legal constraints and barely able to manage its own processes. Vanuatu politicians proved fickle, with VP president Edward Natapei voicing support but doing little. Ham Lini, whose personal commitment to the cause remains strong, was unwilling to expend more political capital on the effort after the 2008 MSG debacle. Sato Kilman, the next prime minister in line, wilfully ignored the advice of his own cabinet, supporting Voreqe Bainimarama’s move to allow Indonesia observer status at the organisation.

Quietly persistent, Ayamiseba and Ondawame continued their efforts. Its moral cause made clearer by stark images of torture and brutality circulated by West Papua Media and others, the leadership (under the auspices of the WPNCL) organised an international tour for Benny Wenda, whose travel restrictions were lifted following legal and media campaigns against Indonesia’s INTERPOL warrant. Even Wenda’s rebuff by the New Zealand parliament only fanned the flames of support. His invitation to speak to MPs inside Vanuatu’s parliament was the first of a series of small but significant breakthroughs. Notably, soon-to-be prime minister Moana Carcasses’ attendance at the event was the first public sign of his political break with Kilman.

A naturalised citizen of Tahitian descent, Carcasses perhaps felt the need to placate the nativist inclination common among Ni Vanuatu. Nonetheless, allowing himself to be photographed holding the Morning Star flag (a key symbol of West Papuan independence) symbolised a shift from sympathy to overt political support for the movement. In one of his first acts as prime minister, Carcasses met with Ayamiseba and Ondawame, personally assuring them of his government’s support in their MSG membership bid, and promising the creation of a West Papua desk in the department of foreign affairs.

Arriving as it did on the heels of a surprisingly warm and supportive reception by Bainimarama and other Fiji government officials, the independence movement appeared finally to be seeing the light of day. Outspoken and unambiguous support for membership from the Kanaky leadership was not nearly as surprising; they’ve formally supported independence since the 1990s. Nonetheless, with the FLNKS assuming the group chair shortly, Kanaky support could prove crucial.

At the risk of counting chickens, it seems that the only remaining piece to fall into place is Papua New Guinea. Wenda’s visit to PNG earlier this year did manage to cement some amount of popular support, but achieved few tangible political results. The tea leaves are few and hard to read, but it’s hard to imagine that Somare’s rather startling shift away from outright opposition would have been made were it to cause discomfort in the PNG political establishment.

One of the more popular songs Ayamiseba wrote for the Black Brothers is ‘Liklik Hope Tasol’, a ballad written in Tok Pisin whose title translates to ‘Little Hope At All’. Its narrator lies awake in the early morning hours, the victim of despair. Only the vision of the morning star and the first birds breaking the pre-dawn hush provide the impetus to survive another day. The song, with its clear political imagery and simplistic evocation of strength in adversity, is clearly autobiographical. It is, arguably, the anthem which has animated Ayamiseba’s lifelong pursuit of freedom.
Andy Ayamiseba is old now. While his encroaching frailty complements his unassuming, soft-spoken manner, it masks a dynamism and fervour that only appear after numerous conversations. Once lit, however, that spark provides a glimpse of the man that was, the jazz-funk rebel, walking in his exile hand in hand with equally youthful –and equally naïve– leaders, themselves burdened with defining their respective societies.

What beggars description, though, is the determination required for Ayamiseba and his West Papuan brethren to spend their entire adult lives in pursuit of legitimacy, with only the slightest glint of light to show for that effort. May 1st marks the 50th anniversary of West Papua’s original declaration of independence. Barring any more political missteps or forays into ill-considered revolutionary activity, the coming year might be the one in which its political aspirations begin to be fulfilled. Says Ayamiseba, “You cannot stay blind and deaf for 50 years.”

Post Scriptum. Andy Died February 21 2020. He lived to see the formation of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua, the umbrella organisation representing the chief members of the independence movement. He looked on proudly as its members march triumphantly into the MSG headquarters to lodge their membership application. He was there when Foreign Minister Ralph Regenvanu and Prime Minister Charlot Salwai opened the official ULMWP office in Port Vila.

But he never went home.

HTTPS Everywhere – what is it good for?

There’s a growing chorus of voices in infosec these days, calling for the effective deprecation of unencrypted traffic over the web. The only useful purpose port 80 serves these days, they argue, is to redirect to port 443.

Their arguments tend to run along these lines:

  1. HTTPS is the right way to handle encryption on your website (and other services, too). That’s true. It’s a well-established, well-understood standard that has gone through some awkward moments, but has emerged from the process as a robust and easy-to-use security layer on your web server.
  2. HTTPS protects you from unethical ISPs/states/actors who like to inject your traffic with unwanted ads and other nasties. That’s somewhat true, but requires a little unpacking, because there are some notable edge cases:
    1. Many corporations install their own certificate authority on approved devices, and use their own certificates to intervene in communications between you and other secure sites. This allows them to sit in the middle of your communication with your bank, for example.
    2. Anyone who can get access to either of the end points can simply watch the unencrypted traffic on either end, rendering any security measures in the communications protocol moot.
    3. Setting up and breaking down a secure session is an extremely difficult process that is well-understood by a very few people. The theory is clear enough, but applying it in practice can get hairy. The 2016 WPAD exploit is a prime example. It was demonstrated that you could use a near-obsolete, insecure method of discovering your network’s proxy settings to eavesdrop on secure communications. (Of course, if you could manipulate that setting, you could pretty much do what you want to the browser anyway. The point here is that there are ways for people to eavesdrop on your secure communications and leave you none the wiser, with or without HTTPS.)
    4. Establishing the identity of remote sites is still a bit fraught. It’s better today than it was in the past, but an SSL cert on its own is insufficient in the absence of a broader, systematic web of trust. These things require international cooperation, protocols and standards. Not all parties want the same thing, and few indeed are focused only on what’s best for the end user’s privacy. HTTPS Everywhere doesn’t move the markers in this part of the debate.
    5. Cross-site tracking cookies are a much more pernicious and troubling way for unscrupulous commercial actors to inject themselves into your day to day web traffic.

None of these are arguments against the use of HTTPS. You should use it when you can. Just because the other guy’s going to win doesn’t mean you shouldn’t at least make him work for it. But these are considerations that have to be borne in mind when people start suggesting that a web with HTTPS everywhere is a safer, more private place for everyone.

  1. HTTPS is growing in use. Get on board! That’s an argumentum ad populum. It’s a useful observation—and a Good Thing—but not reason to move in and of itself.
  2. Plain old HTTP is insecure, and untrustworthy. The first part is true, and people should know it. Google Chrome’s recent decision to mark all plain text websites as insecure is a good move. But the question of trust is more a practical than a technical issue. In other words, you can communicate securely with an untrustworthy information source, and you can communicate insecurely with a trustworthy source. Trust between end points needs to be distinguished from trust in the communications medium. Technical experts who advocate for HTTPS everywhere sometimes confuse the two. Non-technical people often do. Which means we have to be extremely circumspect about what we promise when we talk about making things more secure for them.
  3. HTTPS is secure and will protect you from eavesdropping. Yes it is, and no it will not. Yes, the protocol is solid. It’s really easy to do right (which is incredibly important for security), and it works for the purpose intended. But it’s only one part of a much, much bigger picture. As Bruce Schneier is fond of saying, the bad guys only need to find one way to win. Most systems have more than one way in. Many systems allow state-sanctioned eavesdroppers in through the front door.
  4. Encrypting even normal traffic means that you’re protected from state surveillance across the board. If they can’t differentiate your traffic, it makes it harder for them to single out the things they object to. Sad to say, the real world doesn’t work that way.

If a state wants to watch what you’re accessing over the web, they will find a way. At very least, they will know the end points you’re connecting to. If they’ve singled you out for observation, you’re going to face issues even if you use TOR, VPNs and other tools. Between compromised devices, networks and information providers, your options are quite limited if people decide to watch you individually.

If you’re not being singled out, they probably don’t care what you’re looking at. They might care about individual sources, but in cases like that, they’ll just block the site sources.

But wait—what about someone who’s not yet been targeted, and doesn’t want to be? Good question. There’s a marginal case there, but again, using HTTPS Everywhere is probably not going to be the decisive factor. It sure isn’t in China.

There are very good reasons to support the spread of HTTPS. Anybody who tells you otherwise is just… wrong. You should use it when you’re doing anything that involves your personal information. That includes everything from chatting with friends about what movies are good to transferring millions into your superyacht fund.

But to conclude from this that ‘the only purpose for port 80 these days is to redirect to HTTPS’ is a bit naïve, sad to say. It assumes that there are technical solutions to social/political problems. That’s not necessarily true:

  1. We’d be vastly better off with regulatory/legislative intervention to stop ISPs and others from messing with your web traffic. The reason for this is that removing the mandate to inject gunk into your web traffic is a far more effective way of circumscribing what ISPs are allowed to do. Let’s call it (part of) Net Neutrality. With or without HTTPS, we still need this regulation. Politically, cynical ISPs can point to HTTPS Everywhere and use it as an argument against net neutrality regulation. It’s not entirely rational, but that’s not to say the argument would be ineffective.
  2. When changing collective behaviour, it’s often better to proscribe the behaviour rather than prescribe the technical cure. People will always seek ways to fulfil the letter of the law and still achieve their own selfish ends. So an emphasis on better law is generally more effective than emphasising better tech.
  3. State actors and other surveillance groups generally don’t care that you’re looking at public access websites. When they do care, they just block the site at the ISP level. Yes, there are edge cases where you can get in before they know it matters, but that’s true with and without HTTPS. Encryption does add a slight advantage when it comes to internet whack-a-mole, but it’s only slight. And it’s likely to be ephemeral.
  4. If someone really wants to track you, they will compromise your end points, not the network layer. This is what China does. They just sit people inside the offices of the main online services. Law enforcement and signals intelligence agencies do much the same thing. They’ll either compromise your devices, or they’ll compromise the other end-point, often with the assistance of the service provider. The FBI attempted this with TOR, with partial success.
  5. HTTPS is easy, yes, but easy is not the same as simple. Just because you’ve got your cert properly set up doesn’t mean you’re safe. Focusing on HTTPS to the exclusion of other considerations or overselling its benefits could create a false sense of security. It’s far easier to designate something ‘untrusted’ than it is to determine that the same thing is ‘trusted’. We need to be careful about what we’re selling when we say that HTTPS Everywhere makes us more secure.

Widespread use of HTTPS is a Good Thing, and should be encouraged. But mandating its use everywhere is of limited additional utility where your practical security is concerned.

In a nutshell, universal HTTPS alone is insufficient to change or curb malicious human behaviour; and the additional measures that are necessary don’t require HTTPS everywhere to succeed.

HTTPS everywhere would achieve only a marginal and possibly ephemeral gain. In practical terms, people who are most vulnerable to unwanted collective or individual surveillance by state actors gain very little from this.

But let’s keep perspective: Opposing HTTPS Everywhere is a foolish waste of time and effort. We should encourage its spread. What we should NOT do, though, is pretend that the end of port 80 is the end of our privacy concerns, or even a particularly notable win. It’s a marginal improvement at best.

My beef is with people who think this is a big win for privacy. It’s emphatically not.

Living with depression is better than the alternative. Until it’s not.

Preface: People need to understand that, for a lot of us, no amount of affirmation is going to change how we feel. Depression is treatable in many cases, but not necessarily curable in any case. This means that sentimentalising the problem is emphatically the wrong approach.

It is for me, at least. It drives me up the fucking wall to have to listen to people tell me how good I am, how much better the world is with me in it, how if I just stick with it a little longer, things will get better.

Because here’s the thing: They may get better for you, but for me they don’t.

I cope better on some days than others. I’ve had a lot of practice. I find ways to experience joy in the midst of overwhelming sorrow. But that doesn’t mean the sorrow goes away. You may have trouble grasping this—lord knows I do—but you can feel good about yourself and be the same worthless person you were when you woke up this morning. There is no contradiction there.

People think that when we say, ‘it’s all in your head’ it’s therefore transient, ephemeral and mutable. It’s not. You can change what you think about it, but you cannot change the thing itself.

So if, in the course of reading this, you find yourself wishing me well… don’t. I’m not well. I never have been, and I never will be. But I have a life. It’s a good one, and I’m not stupid enough to fail to recognise that. So kindly refrain from reminding me.

Now, on to my confession…. Continue reading →

SHAME

People’s attitudes toward women are ruining lives, and it’s sickening

A few days ago, I heard news about someone whom I’ve known for almost as long as I’ve been in Vanuatu. She was tied by her hair to a post and beaten senseless by her partner.

Save your anger. I don’t want to hear it. Your outrage is meaningless to me.
You did this. Every single one of you.

Admit it: you loved it when they posted a false report that a local woman had been arrested for prostitution. She was framed and shamed simply because she’d had more than one partner. And you automatically believed she was guilty.

You loved it when a local man was wrongly accused of sexual assault and consorting with prostitutes. He was outed because he refused to lie about someone else. The threat could only work because you were willing to believe the woman was a whore.

You downloaded and shared copies of the intimate photos taken of a young professional who was tricked into sharing them with a man who swore that he was single. His wife takes him back, and the woman he lied to is the one who’s punished. Every time she walks into a meeting, she has to ask herself, ‘have they seen them?’

Yes, she was naïve. Do you think that justifies years of anguish?

You blamed her. You blamed her for being treated cruelly by others.

Blame yourself. You heard your neighbours fighting. You heard that woman cry out. You saw her tears.

You. Not someone else. Not someone down the road or in the next yard.

You’re reading this and thinking I’m talking about everyone else. I am talking about you.

For months, you did nothing after your neighbour buried his wife under a nakatambol tree. You didn’t even ask where she was.

You let a girl jump to her death from a moving bus. You let her death go unpunished. And then to add insult to injury, you warned young women not to travel at night.

You didn’t lift a finger when that faith healer groped and sexually assaulted your daughter. Just changed churches and warned your daughter to look after herself. You were the one who sent her to him.

You let a pastor—a pastor—beat a woman in broad daylight in the main street of town, and you did nothing but stand around gawping.

Stop shifting the blame. Stop pretending that it’s not all men. Because it is all men. It’s all of us. Every single one of us. Yes, me too.

And you.

Not the other readers: YOU

When is it going to dawn on you that the way we treat our women is our national shame? What is it going to take?

My shame is real. I’ve known this woman for over a decade, and when we were neighbours, I made sure nothing happened to her. But I moved on and she didn’t. And I said nothing last week when she showed up with a black eye. I didn’t want her to feel bad. Now this happens, and I’m ashamed of my cowardice. I did nothing to support her.

No longer.

But anything I do won’t make one bit of difference if the rest of you continue being the callous, uncaring people that you’ve been. Don’t deny it. There is not an adult in Vanuatu who hasn’t turned a blind eye toward abuse. If you think you’re not part of the problem, then you’re a bigger part of it than you know.

You read that clickbait smear. You read that post, and you believed it. Even now, you’re twisting around, trying to find a way to defend your prejudice. You can’t. It was a pack of lies.

But you believed it because that’s what you think women are like.

I can’t even bring myself to care whether I’ve changed your mind any more. All I have to say is shame. Shame on me for letting a friend hurt so much. For letting so many suffer. Shame on me for letting you get away with it.

I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight. But to my shame, I know I will.
And shame on you. It could all change tomorrow. But it won’t. Because of you.

If you really are sincere about wanting to make things better, read this again, and accept in your heart of hearts that I am talking about you. And for once in your life, feel a bit of shame for your role in this suffering.

Then do something about it. Every day. Until the job is done, and the shame is gone.

Coates is not wrong

Posting this here because Twitter doesn’t always lend itself to nuance. (I know! I was gobsmacked too!)

Ta Nehisi Coates gets a lot of pushback from all sides for his polemical stance. It is abundantly true that his view, while popular among intellectuals, is not widely shared. Few people see through his lens on American history with quite the same acuity as he does.

That’s not entirely his fault. Just because you agree with someone’s premises doesn’t that you necessarily have to accept all of their conclusions. His Case for Reparations is a classic example. The line of logic is nearly inescapable. It is possible to quibble around the edges, to thicken the mix by introducing other variables, but the essay stands on its own.

Like the statue in the park, it endures despite the pigeon shit and graffiti.

But I still consider actual reparations a political pipe dream.

I have read Coates more deeply than widely, so if I miss something obvious here, please forgive me. But people who object to The First White President seem to do so because of his insistence of seeing the entire Trump presidency in terms of race. They accuse him, in fact, of buying into the very world-view he abjures. In today’s New York Times, Thomas Chatterton Williams overlays the German idea of Sonderweg, or ‘special path’ on Coates’ narrative of blackness.

That’s neither kind nor accurate. Coates is not advocating a view of history defined by race; he is admonishing people to accept that America’s history is defined by a particular view of race. Or, if you prefer the more modest argument: Black American’s history is defined not by how they saw themselves, but how others saw them.

If this is sonderweg, it’s through a glass, darkly.

The difference between those two statements seems to escape many. The discourse around Coates’ writing is happening almost exclusively among the intelligentsia—which is only natural, of course; that’s who he is speaking to. These are the people to whom his arguments apply the least.

That last paragraph is a mea culpa. I’m as guilty as any in that regard. But I can offer two observations that support his thesis:

Everything I have seen of local politics—the way that people impose their world view on their immediate surroundings—in the American South supports what Coates says. From road works to mental health services to store hours to zoning by-laws, prejudice and race are baked inextricably into its formulations.

Back during the Dot-Com Boom, I explored the idea of moving to the States to work. I had a lot of American clients, they paid well, and offered some really ambitious opportunities. But I was constantly confronted with the realisation that buying the American Dream meant buying into this nightmare too, at least implicitly.

Even in San Francisco, that bastion of liberalism, the divisions run deep. Lost in the city while searching for a store, I was stopped by a cop. He told me he would escort me back to my car. “You’re gonna turn it around, and never come back here,” he told me, explaining, “The natives are restless.”

I did turn around. And I’ve never been back to San Francisco.

Is just one racist cop enough to convince me that Coates’ depiction of race as a guiding vision is valid? Of course not. That was just the most vivid example.

My second point—and historians might have a field day with this one:

Isn’t America the only nation in history to have fought a bloody civil war over slavery—in which the enslaved were the object, but not the subject, of the effort?

An entire nation ripped itself apart on behalf of the victims of monumental injustice, and neglected actually to enfranchise, or meaningfully involve, those it fought to free.

The United States of America is unique. Its history is defined, if not driven, by a peculiar and distinct view of race. And yes, Donald Trump is the First White President. It would be foolish to deny it.

That’s not all he is, of course, but it is what he is. And Coates is right: it’s useful and productive to look at him in that light.