Warring Stories

[Note: Tim Bray is conducting an interesting exercise in public debate over on Google+, testing its commenting capabilities to see how it fares in civil discourse on contentious political topics. His efforts are well worth following. I’m re-posting one of my comments below for posterity – as much for my own benefit as anyone else’s.]

There seems to be a nearly universal preference for narrative over fact in most (if not all) of the US debate over economic policy. People invest the issue with their own biases (a common propensity) then construct or defend the most closely aligned story.

In short, people have been led to believe that the whole situation:

a) makes sense;
b) can be simply expressed; and
c) has a straightforward solution, if only the rest of the world can be made to see it.

This explains not only the refusal even to grant that a debt policy must of necessity consider revenue generation AND reduced spending, but also the tendency to draw the Hayek/Keynes/Friedman debate as a zero-sum argument.

Government, at the best of times, is more a clusterfuck than anything else. It requires a level of opportunism and ideological/ethical/moral compromise that few of us can stomach. Tragically, it breeds people who can stomach it far too easily.

Human society requires narrative in order to make sense of this otherwise senseless situation. (We can’t all be Sartre or Clauswitz – and really, who wants to be?) But its desire for narrative has been cynically abused so consistently and for so long by propaganda that the possibility for civic (not to say civil) discourse has been reduced nearly to zero.

The increasingly (irretrievably?) fictional rhetoric driven by the various camps within the anarchic village that is Washington has made mutual understanding (and therefore compromise) impossible. We can, in other words, no longer talk usefully amongst ourselves.

On Pseudonymity

My friend Skud (yes, Skud) recently had her Google+ account suspended, apparently for not using her ‘real’ name. The section of Google’s privacy policy dealing with the issue of names says only this:

To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.

Audrey Watters at ReadWriteWeb got a little further clarification from a Google spokesperson concerning Google Profiles and the use of real names:

“We are not requiring people to use their ‘real name’, but rather they need their Google profile to include the name they commonly go by in daily life. I know that sounds like the same thing, but there are some differences. For a hypothetical example, Samuel Clemens could choose to be known as ‘Mark Twain,’ although we wouldn’t allow him to go by Authordude88. And for a real life example, 50 Cent is using Google+, after we verified that this is the name he is commonly referred to. More details can be found here.

That page goes on to say that your name should use your first and last names, avoid ‘unusual’ characters (more about this below) and that your profile should represent only one person.

There are numerous problems with this policy which, taken together, make it impossible to implement it consistently or, indeed, objectively. Arguably, this policy would have disallowed some or all of the following:

Jesus Christ: ‘Christ’ is an title, not an actual name
Buddha: It’s really a title, and it’s only one word
Pol Pot, Lenin & Stalin: All noms de guerre, associated with illegal and subversive activities at some point in history.
The Apostle Paul: He was ‘really’ Saul
Socrates: What, no last name?
Ellery Queen: ‘He’ is actually a ‘they‘.
Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell: The Bronte sisters, who hid their identities (and location) to avoid scandal in their community
George Eliot and George Sand: Just a couple of the most notable women who could only be taken seriously after assuming a male identity

I could go on at great length, but suffice it to say that there are problems. You’ll note, by the way, that many of the names listed above refer to individuals who were guilty of subversive and often illegal activities. In many cases, too, there was a point in time where these names were not commonly known, or were disputed (even proscribed) by large segments of society, or by the powers that be.

Let me try to make these apparently silly examples clearer. It’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight to say, “Dude, that’s JESUS. Everybody knows he’s the Christ.” Well, that may be true now, but what about when he was some misfit wandering from town to town, pissing off a lot of Pharisees in the process? And yes, knowing what we know now, maybe we wouldn’t want to give a voice to Pol Pot, Lenin or Stalin. But how would we have felt about them in the early years of the 20th Century?

My question is: Are we on the side of the Pharisees, the Tsars and the Cambodian despots? Because that’s who we’re helping here, metaphorically speaking.

I’m not advocating taking a particular side. I’m suggesting exactly the opposite – not taking sides. That’s why I deliberately included some decidedly contentious figures in the list. (I could just as easily have included the authors of the Federalist Papers.) I just want to know that there’s room in our society for gadflies like Socrates, that it’s okay for some as-yet-unknown literary genius to speak freely and loud.

(And that, yes, even the soon-to-be villains can be captured in the public dialogue. There’s actually an argument to be made for listening to nuts like bin Laden and Breivik, in order that we better understand – and engage – our enemy.)

There are technical problems with any set of rules applying to names. As Patrick McKenzie eloquently demonstrates, just about any rule you think might apply to names actually doesn’t. Furthermore, the rationale that disallowing pseudonyms would have any effect whatsoever on spam and/or civility in public discourse, let alone that it will ‘help people know who they’re talking to,’ is entirely unproven.

But the issue is bigger than just technical. Skud writes that disallowing pseudonymity can be discriminatory and downright dangerous. The fact that her argument isn’t comprehensive makes it all the more compelling.

Throughout history, and for countless reasons, the use of pseudonyms and the appropriation of unofficial names are common, reputable and widely accepted practices,

One of the most common responses to these (and other) objections can be stated succinctly enough: Google’s Service – Google’s Rules. Fair enough, but let’s consider the implications of this. If we as a society allow ourselves to be utterly circumscribed by corporate policies over which we have no control (and which, as here, are pretty much arbitrary in nature), we’re in effect voting ourselves back into feudalism, where the rule of law becomes meaningless – or rather, indistinguishable from fiat.

I know some of you are writhing in your chairs right now, waiting to shout, “Oh come on, Crumb! Lighten up. This is a bloody social network we’re talking about, not some proletarian revolutionary struggle.” Well, no. This is a social network, and if it wants to reflect society then it needs to bloody well reflect it. In many parts of the world, just hanging out with your buddies on a service like this can get you into a lot of trouble.

Identity matters, for political, economical, social and philosophical reasons. The ability to define one’s identity freely is a fundamental human right. Google’s aim is to reduce bad behaviour, and that’s laudable. But if they want to do it right, they should focus on behaviour, not practices that are only tangentially linked to the problem.

If Google really wants their network to reflect society rather than deform it, they need to back off the name issue and look at fostering a culture of respect and civility instead.

The Powerful and the Good

[This review of Wan Smolbag Theatre’s new play, Zero Balans was written for the Vanuatu Daily Post.]

Zero Balans, the new play from Wan Smolbag Theatre, seems to argue that you can be powerful and you can be good, but you can’t be both at once.

This political morality tale recounts the story of Ezekiel. A charismatic, intelligent and powerful man, his weakness and self-indulgence have led him to achieve only notoriety in his years as a cabinet minister. Struck down by an early heart attack and faced with eternal damnation, he demands, cajoles and finally begs the Recording Angels for just a little more time to achieve all the good he intended.

We follow him through flashbacks from his early days in politics. His wildly optimistic promises inflame and inspire the fictional community of Lagoon Saed. The delirium of his first election victory quickly wanes, however; before the celebration is properly over, he is already beset with demands from above and below.

Derek, Ezekiel’s mentor and financier, quickly reminds him where his sympathies had better lie, but not before Ezekiel’s wife and sister have begun to plague him with demands for the family. The community chief, an amiable old rascal, is quickest of all, proclaiming the newly-minted MP’s value to the community even as the voting results are being read.

This is Vanuatu. Everybody needs something, and it’s never something small. In a cutely staged scene, community members literally climb over one another to bend Ezekiel’s ear – and open his wallet. His political masters are happy to keep him flush with cash, but only as long as he toes the party line.

Politicians in Ezekiel’s world seem to have a nodding acquaintance with policy and development, but the ever-present threat of a confidence motion leaves them perpetually scrambling after cash and other emoluments to keep their MPs onside. Happily for them, they do not lack in assistance from outside ‘investors’ willing to grease the wheels of the political machine.

Ezekiel is willing to say anything to avoid damnation. But as events progress, we come to see him as merely human, a man fallen victim to the same desires and temptations as any other man – albeit sometimes two at a time. Beset as he is in a morass of venality, short-sightedness and fickleness, he is, ultimately, no better than he should be.

It’s notable that the play’s purportedly moral and upright citizens come out with very little shine remaining on their respective halos. Playwright Jo Dorras, as she always does, avoids the easy accusations. Refusing the lie that politicians are just amoral rascals sprung sui generis from the ranks of humanity, she shows how the scramble for advancement and advantage afflicts everyone, inside politics and out.

But this is not a society of villains. If Ezekiel’s sister wants more money, it’s to send her children to a better school. The chief comes seeking hundreds of thousands, not for himself but for the local church. Ezekiel protests to the Recording Angels that it was these demands (and not the endless spending on baubles, booze and debauchery) that have driven him into the company of men who are altogether too comfortable in the faithless, venal world of Vanuatu politics.

Given a chance at redemption, however, Ezekiel quickly finds himself bereft of friends and influence. In becoming a good man at last, he is stripped of the influence he once had.

As with all Smolbag productions, Zero Balans avoids polemic and prescription. The play seeks primarily to subvert the common conception that simply changing one’s MP is enough to change the cycle of corruption and callous disregard for the future. It is a mordant indictment of Vanuatu society’s inability to look beyond its immediate needs and desires, to forego quick reward in order to strive for a greater good.

Nobody, it appears, is willing to forebear in order for all to thrive.

The only characters who demonstrate any degree of redemption are those who, like Ezekiel, are at last left with nothing but the clarity of their own vision. The performance of the night was provided by Helen Kailo, who played Lisa on the evening we went. (She shares the role with Florence Taga, another powerful young actor.) Kailo’s fluid, natural and finally heart-breaking rendition of a young woman seduced, discarded and ultimately cast out of her own community was one of the best yet seen onstage in Vanuatu.

But the wisdom of misplaced love and bitter experience isn’t enough to obviate the oppression of society and circumstance. In this world, some forces are too great for any of us.

Director Peter Walker says, “[W]e collude with politicians and it takes a brave person to rock the boat. However the danger is that even if someone does rock the boat it may be too late because some people are beyond the law.”

Zero Balans features some of the most polished and professional performances to grace Wan Smolbag’s stage so far – and certainly its best ensemble effort. It’s testament to the commitment of the husband and wife team of Peter Walker and Jo Dorras that many of Smolbag’s actors have been appearing consistently on stage and screen for years now – some for decades. Their maturity, experience and enduring passion add fluidity and considerable nuance to a complex, demanding script.

Morinda Tari, as the protagonist’s importunate sister Elise, was so consistently powerful and natural that we’re not sure people even realised they were watching a character. She has the power to carry an entire play. We hope to see her in a leading role some day soon.

Noel Aru (who alternates with veteran Titus Joseph as Ezekiel) created a mannered, professional portrayal of a complex, deeply flawed man who quite literally fights for his life from the beginning of the play. He showed the maturity of a seasoned actor, sustaining his presence yet allowing space for others such as Donald Frank, whose smooth, serpent-like self-awareness made Derek, a mephistophelian political leader, at once alluring and repugnant.

Special mention goes to Danny Marcel, who plays two key roles (as the PM and the community’s chief) with such adroitness and flair that we honestly didn’t realise we were watching the same man. His sense of timing and physicality is superb. Aru, Frank and Marcel’s first scene together is a comic gem that competes with the best British political satire.

Zero Balans is performed at 7:00 p.m. every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday evening at Wan Smolbag until June 25th. Tickets are 50 vatu each. Arrive at least an hour early to be guaranteed a seat.

The Wealthy Programmer

In discussion today about programming for money – as opposed to programming for the love of it, or helping to change the shape of modern technology – someone made the following point:

I’d have thought striving to be independently wealthy would be an admirable goal – it’s a lot easier to be a philanthropist when you don’t have to worry about the roof over your head and where your next meal is coming from.

You’d have thought, but you’d have been wrong.

The pursuit and acquisition of wealth generally breeds greater stress and worry rather than less. Granted, there is a level of income below which one struggles constantly to manage even the most basic aspects of daily living.

Having lived on both sides of the divide, I can say with some assurance that living in poverty is debilitating, but so is significant wealth.

The one lesson of any value I’ve learned is that if you’re really serious about helping others (or helping make important things happen), you’re doing it already. Opportunities tend to look for people willing to accept them. You don’t have to be rich or powerful to achieve important things. Most of the time, you’ll find yourself pitted against the rich and powerful – at least you will if what you’re doing represents any sort of change. Even then, there are always influential allies to be found. Put in enough hours, demonstrate – no, prove – your abilities and Good Things do happen.

But here’s the catch. To do so is to accept uncertainty and risk as your constant companions. You are guaranteed to fail more than you succeed. Every victory, save a very choice few, will be temporary or mitigated by compromise. Your own needs and satisfaction will always take second place to those of others. You’ll find yourself – as I do – older, wiser, largely contented, but with very little to guarantee a contented, comfortable retirement.

All of this, of course, runs counter to the American myth of Success, where the sole measure of influence and importance is wealth. Rightly or wongly, it highlights people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, relegating Knuth, Woz, Mohammed Younus and countless other more meritorious figures to the shadows. This is a distortion. It’s not false, but it’s fake.

In rare cases, wealth will accompany accomplishment, but that’s not always the case, and if you let the former stand for the latter, that’s all you’ll have. As a wise man once said to me, ‘If you go into the hills looking for gold, all you’ll find is gold.’

Governance and Goodness

[This column was originally published in the Weekend edition of the Vanuatu Daily Post.]

Just yesterday, Minister Regenvanu was kind enough to respond to my column of last week, in which I expressed more than a little impatience at his silence over the March 4 attack on Marc Neil-Jones. He thanked me for my views and asked, “But who’s done more for good governance and transparency in Vanuatu: you or me?”

It’s a fair question –more than fair, actually– one that bears serious consideration.

My first instinct was to reply, “Your colleague beat the crap out of my friend. I said something about it; you didn’t.” That has the benefit of the truth, and it’s a fairly good summation of how I felt at the time I was composing the column.

But it’s not at all satisfying, nor does it do anything to further the goals that I know Minister Regenvanu shares with me and with an ever-increasing number of voters.

More importantly, tit-for-tat point-scoring rhetoric only contributes to the decline of political dialogue, making enemies and sowing confusion in the very places where clarity and unity should be most easily achieved.

So let’s dig a little deeper and see what more we all could be doing to make things better.

First off, let me state that any man of principle who embarks on a career in politics is a better man than I. (Any woman of principle who does so is probably a better man than any of us.) From the very first step, compromises must be made. As I said in last week’s column, the calculus of power is byzantine and counter-factual.

If you’re looking for easy answers to anything, look elsewhere. If someone promises you easy answers, don’t trust them. They’re either naive or they’re deceiving you. To his credit, Minister Regenvanu made a point of not promising anything but the sweat of his own brow during his election campaign.

In my afternoon convos over kava, I’ve often said that politics is a muddy road, so throwing out a politician for having soiled his feet is silly and wrong. It’s the ones who roll around in the middle of it like pigs in a slough – these are the ones we should be objecting to.

It’s easy for someone like me, who won’t even qualify for citizenship for another two and a half years, to sit on the sidelines and imagine that I could outplay those on the field. So it’s healthy to consider from time to time what things look like from the ground, to understand the pressures and exigencies that impose themselves from minute to minute.

The price is a heavy one. It’s impossible, in politics at least, to have friends without having adversaries. If you don’t have any rivals, that’s because you don’t have any power yet. So every choice, every compromise comes laden with the knowledge that, even if you’ve pleased some people, you’ve upset a few others. Victories are measured in inches and the goal line is often miles away.

The question then –the impossible question– is this: When do you stand and when do you sidestep? Which are the battles that must be fought, and at what cost?

Conventional wisdom has it that, following MP Iauko’s assault on Daily Post publisher Marc Neil-Jones, PM Kilman was handcuffed by the fact that removing Iauko from his portfolio would effectively topple the government. So, like it or not, this marriage of inconvenience had to continue.

To make matters worse, the prospect of a successful prosecution was vanishingly small. There was nothing to indicate that the Public Prosecutor and the Police wouldn’t be just as ineffectual in this instance as they’d been on countless occasions in the past. Not only would a powerful man be given grounds for vengeance, he’d likely have the means and opportunity to exact it, too.

Better, then, to bide one’s time and wait for an opportunity further down the line. Iauko’s rather incendiary rise has not made him a lot of lasting friendships, and anyway, his countless pre-election promises would soon be coming home to roost. Why fight an overt battle, possibly at significant cost, to achieve something that Iauko seemed to be perfectly capable of doing to himself?

Viewed through the lens of political calculus, there’s some merit to this line of reasoning. One could even be so bold as to argue that the baroque architecture of parliamentary rules and precedents that govern behaviour in other nations using the Westminster form of government are neither appropriate nor desirable here in Vanuatu.
But just for the sake of argument, let’s consider what might happen if things played out differently.

What if PM Kilman had required his Minister for Infrastructure and Public Utilities to resign his portfolio, pending a police investigation? He’s shown he’s capable of moving inconvenient Ministers out of the way. At the same time as the Iauko scandal was unfolding, he manoeuvred the Labour party out of power. This in retaliation for having signed an Opposition confidence motion.

In that case, the immediate goal was to remain in power, to live another day in order to achieve the policy goals that comprise the very reasons for governing in the first place.
Let’s apply the same logic to the Iauko debacle.

On the one hand, sharing power with people who care nothing for policy and are willing to fight every minute of every day for a bigger piece of the pie, people who, more to the point, are willing to stop at nothing… well, you have to ask yourself: Are you making things better or worse? On the other hand, you can’t get into government without them, and they know it. More to the point, perhaps it’s better to have them using these tactics against others than against you.

As the author of the Godfather famously put it, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

The problem with this equation is that it allows the worst excesses to continue unchecked. In other words, there will never be a better calibre of MP in this country, because the others either drag them down or elbow them aside. You either learn how to scrap or you don’t play at all.

So how do we improve governance, then? The only way to maintain one’s integrity is to be able to exert enough power over the other players to force them to play nice. And there’s no way to gather that much power, because of the disunity and distrust that’s endemic in Vanuatu’s political landscape.

It would take a grand, unifying goal, something about which the entire population of Vanuatu could agree, to achieve –even momentarily– the kind of unity of purpose and energy that Fr. Walter Lini managed during the first days of the Republic.

What if taking a stand, even allowing a government to fall, were enough to galvanise such a movement? What if it could be made clear to voters that there are certain kinds of behaviour that simply cannot be tolerated, and that this behaviour is the cause of so many of Vanuatu’s afflictions?

That’s not an easy task. Many voters don’t think in terms of policy and long-term reward. Some are willing to choose self-gratification over nation-building every time. Given Vanuatu’s voting districts, you don’t need more than a few hundred of these to get yourself in the running. Pony up a bit of cash to run some stalking-horse candidates and you can split the vote small enough to get in with the support of a single village.

So the risk, then, is that you take a principled stand, try to galvanise the electorate into an unprecedented level of support, only to find yourself standing on the sidelines, come Election Day plus one.

Worse, you could actually succeed in garnering an unprecedented level of the vote, only to discover that you’d been equaled by, and forced to share power with, the very kind of candidate you were elected to turf out.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

I’ll say this again, in all sincerity: A principled man who’s willing to walk that muddy road is a better man than I, because I would always take that principled stand, keep my conscience clear, and fail entirely as a politician.

That may sound back-handed to some. It’s not. Life is a complex and messy thing; there are no simple answers. And sometimes staying pure and principled means staying powerless.

For my part I’m willing to abdicate that power, because once in a while things need to be said at any cost.

It’s easy for me to say this, but I don’t say it lightly. I say it because others can’t:

If a Government Minister resorts to political violence and coercion and the government takes no action to remedy this, that government deserves to fall.

Forget Fear

[Originally published in the weekend edition of the Vanuatu Daily Post]

My name is Dan McGarry. I’ve been using the nom de plume of Graham Crumb since 1995, but today I have decided to draw aside the literary veil. I do so in solidarity with Marc Neil-Jones, publisher of the Daily Post, in order to make it clear that violence and threats have no power to silence the media.

In past columns I’ve dealt with fairly complex topics: technology, society, politics, culture and history. Today’s, however, is a simple one. It can be summed up in a single sentence:

Violence and intimidation only work when we let them.

For reasons that remain unfathomable to me, politics and power always seem to attract those who are most willing to take advantage of others. Vanuatu is no exception. Over the years, we’ve seen a long succession of Ministers and MPs who seem to value personal indulgence over everything else. We’ve seen thievery, deception, coercion and violence used so widely and so often that it’s hard to perceive what moral compass –if any– guides our political leadership.

So when a particularly unscrupulous character such as Harry Iauko arrives on the scene, it’s hard for our political leaders to know what to do. In fairness to the MP, he’s only slightly further beyond the pale than MPs Korman or Vohor, to name only a couple. As a group, it seems our leaders really have come to believe that the rule of law, respect and kastom are nothing more than useful tools, to be picked up and cast aside as convenience dictates.

Let’s be honest with ourselves: There won’t be any criminal prosecution for what Iauko did. There may yet be retribution, but it will be that special political kind that avoids doing any actual harm to anyone.

Iauko will not be punished for doing wrong; he’ll be pushed aside because he’s given his rivals an opening. In political terms, his fault is not that he’s broken the law; his mistake will have been that he overstepped and so exposed himself.

And that is why I find politics both fascinating and repugnant at the same time.

So, unlike some, I’m not going to demand action from this government. I’m simply going to do what journalists do: I’m going to bear witness.

It may be that MPs feel they have some special exemption from the law and kastom. But it is equally true that in a free society, everyone has the right to form –and to state– their own opinion. And the best way that we can do that is to remain informed, to encourage a public dialogue, to confront people with the facts.

Let the MPs think what they want; we retain the right to think what we like about them, and to say so publicly. And these days, it’s not going to be very flattering.

Violence and unlawful conduct don’t persist merely because our politicians do nothing to stop them. They persist because we allow them to. They persist because we’ve accepted the fact that the only time we ever hear police sirens is when some dignitary is being ushered around town. They persist because we allow politicians to separate themselves from us. Because we allow them to seduce us with paltry gifts and promises.

But most of all, it’s because we all –white and black alike– love to have access to the corridors of power.

No sooner are we given a glimpse of this separate, special world than we begin to fall prey to its allure. Witness how even principled members of government like the PM and Minister Regenvanu have suddenly, inexplicably, found themselves at a loss for words.

In the face of a torrent of international condemnation, the best PM Kilman was able to muster was a statement by his spokesman he would let the courts decide Iauko’s fate. No mention of the fact that in most parliamentary democracies, any minister under investigation immediately steps down – at least until the issue is resolved.

From Ralph Regenvanu? Not a peep. This from the man whose election slogan was ‘Inaf!’ Maybe he’ll amend it next time to ‘Klosap inaf. Wet smol.’

In a canny bit of manoeuvring, however, the PM pulled his Minister out of the fire just days later by shuffling him from Lands to Justice, thus enforcing his silence. No matter that this is his third portfolio in about as many months. No matter that actually governing is near-impossible while the Cabinet is playing musical chairs. No matter that, despite all these portfolio changes and all the problems he’s caused, Iauko remains at his post.

And what of the Opposition, whose job it is to challenge and question? Even Iauko’s VP arch-rivals Natapei and Molisa have yet to say a word.

Let’s forget the politicians, then. They’re obviously powerless to act, except according to the byzantine, counter-factual logic of power.

They don’t matter, anyway. They can bluster all they like, but as we’ve seen in recent months, they can’t dominate and control us all the time. Inevitably, the people win. Throughout North Africa and across the Arabian Peninsula, people have demonstrated that strong governments which rely on coercion to enforce their will can be rendered fragile as paper in the wind.

All it takes is for people to leave their fear behind them.

It’s almost comical to see how quickly bullies like Iauko can be deflated when people cease to fear them, or conversely, how police and other state officials can be rendered worse than useless when they allow their fear to cow them.

The staff at the Daily Post –and Marc Neil-Jones in particular– learned years ago that they were free to tell the truth once they left their fear behind. It’s a small act, and a fairly simple one, too. But its effects are immense.

I remember visiting the Daily Post offices a couple of days after Police Commissioner Joshua Bong had sent his thugs around to give Marc a thumping. In spite of the bashed-in nose, cracked ribs and bloody lip, Marc managed a quirky smile and a chuckle when I voiced my concern. “I’ve been deported, jailed and beaten up before,” he said. “This isn’t the worst I’ve seen.”

“I am getting a bit old for this, though,” he added wryly.

I would have thought our ministers of state had matured beyond these schoolyard bully tactics too, but apparently they’re not too old for tantrums.

We should all learn from Marc’s example: We have only to free ourselves from fear and the power of these bullies evaporates in an instant.

My name is Dan McGarry. If you don’t like what I’ve got to say, I’m okay with that. I’m not afraid.

A Novel in Three Links

This + this + this = an opportunity to change the way we communicate, and to change history as well.

The freedom that we experienced on the Internet of the ’90s is waning. Governments and commercial interests take ever-increasing steps to circumscribe people’s ability to communicate digitally. The only way to change this tide from ebb to flood is to fulfill a promise that was first made in the ’90s.

We need to disintermediate the network. It’s an ugly duckling of a word, but cutting out the middle man matters more now than ever.

As long as the cables, wires and frequencies over which we communicate are susceptible to being controlled, curtailed or even disconnected when the things we say -or the way we say them- become upsetting, we will find ourselves increasingly confined.

As I said during an Internet policy session yesterday, if you ask anyone –anyone– whether there should be limits on Behaviour X on the Internet, the answer will always be a resounding Yes. That’s not a problem in and of itself, because X is usually anti-social and contrary to the public good. The problem is that anything capable of curtailing Behaviour X can be brought to bear on Behaviours A through W as well.

The only way out of this is to provide the technical means to do what we have always done in democratic societies: Keep our private discussions private and our public discussions free.

For the former we at last have all the ingredients we need:

Gigabit wifi – We can finally start thinking about getting decent performance out of wireless data transmission, meaning that we can worry a little less about putting a lot of people onto a single wifi network;
Wireless Mesh Networks – Enough with the telcos; we can now start looking at creating ad hoc, self-organising networks, relegating the role of the data carriers to one similar to power and water utilities;
Secure Voice Communications – Security expert Moxie Marlinspike (yeah) and a crew of like-minded individuals have floated a very useful service recently, allowing secure VOIP and SMS communications between phones. By building encryption into the bones of the app, they’ve created software that looks and acts exactly like normal calling and texting. The only difference being that, if the other person is using their RedPhone service, the entire communication remains a secret shared only by the two of you.

The idea behind these things have been floating around for some time (the protocol underlying RedPhone has been with us since 2006), but now they’re all here in usable form.

I’ve said it before: The story of freedom of Internet freedom and online privacy will be the defining social conflict of our generation. As the peoples of the Middle East are discovering, the narrative of freedom is suspenseful, dramatic and exciting in the best and worst ways.

Whoever manages to blend these three technologies together seamlessly and easily enough for anyone to use them will assuredly be one of the main protagonists in this unfolding drama. They may not garner the celebrity of a Jobs or a Gates, but they will have the impact of a Gandhi or a King.

Infowar – A Case Study

[This weekend’s Opinion column in the Daily Post]

The recent decision by the Mubarak regime in Egypt to cut off all Internet access for its citizens is a textbook example of using a silver bullet to shoot oneself in the foot.

The whys and wherefores of how they’ve gone about doing so provide a useful opportunity to understand the paradox of control over the Internet and the costs involved when governments and other actors indulge their desire to dam the torrent of information that flows across their networks.

In order to do that, we need to dispel a rather pesky myth.

Perhaps the most dangerous misconception of the Internet is its survivability. It’s true that, as one information activist put it, the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. But that statement is predicated on the actual presence of an Internet in the first place.

That may sound like a silly statement, but the Internet might not be as enduring as many assume it to be.

While many of the software and communications protocols that define the Internet are, by design, remarkably resistant to outside control, the physical networks through which our data passes are not nearly so robust.

James Cowie, a network analyst from Renesys Corporation, has written excellent analyses of state intervention in national communications both during the post-election strife in Iran and more recently in Egypt. Using forensic evidence gathered in real time, he constructs a vivid scenario: In contrast to Iranian authorities, who elected to use physical choke-points in the communications infrastructure to reduce the flow of information to a trickle, Egyptian authorities appear to have instructed all national Internet Service Providers simply to cut all communications with the outside world.

Starting at midnight (Egyptian time) on the 27th of January 2011, Egypt’s largest ISPs began disappearing from the Internet. Within a period of about 13 minutes, they simply stopped delivering data to and from their customers.

Cowie writes:

“[T]his sequencing looks like people getting phone calls, one at a time, telling them to take themselves off the air. Not an automated system that takes all providers down at once; instead, the incumbent leads and other providers follow meekly one by one until Egypt is silenced.”

How did this happen? Every large ISP participates in a cooperative system called the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. BGP allows them to discover how traffic destined to a remote network should be directed. Simply put, each ISP announces which address blocks it supports. These blocks can represent tens or even hundreds of thousands of individual machine addresses.

Designed for simpler times, BGP is a trust-based protocol. It relies implicitly of the good faith of all participants to continue working. This makes it remarkably vulnerable to the machinations of states or organisations whose interests don’t align with others’. Back in 2008, Pakistan Telecom caused a furore when, for a little over 2 hours, their bungled attempt to use BGP to block YouTube domestically resulted in the site disappearing from much of the Internet.

Just last year, a change to BGP traffic announcements resulted in about 15% of all Internet traffic being routed through networks in China for a brief period. This resulted in breathless speculation that the disruption was not accidental. Some claimed that it amounted to a reconnaissance in force, as it were, a probing of the global Internet to determine its resilience in the face of attack.

Intentional or not, these disruptions to the BGP apparatus make it abundantly clear that choke points exist on the Internet and that they are remarkably easy to subvert.

Debate continues to rage in technical circles about what can be done to mitigate BGP’s innate deficiencies. Changes will doubtless be necessary. But the liability wouldn’t be so grave if our physical communications networks weren’t so hopelessly centralised.

Egypt offers us a particularly vivid example of this. A country of over 80 million people, it has only a half a dozen or so large Internet providers. Only one of them, the Noor Group, initially resisted the demand to drop services. Some have speculated that its continued online presence was due to its extensive list of blue chip clients, including many banks and the Egyptian Stock Exchange.

Ultimately, though, it was a limited victory. Noor advertised only 83 of the roughly 3500 data routes in and out of Egypt. They were eventually forced off the air a week after their IT confrères.

In Iran, population 72 million, there are only 5 significant international links, all of which flow through a single Government-run office. Such centralisation makes it easy for the state to exert its influence.

(One European-owned company, Vodaphone, washed its hands of the decision to cut service to its Egyptian customers, claiming that the Mubarak regime had the legal right to issue the order. This rhetorical line apes the rationale provided by Nokia-Siemens when it was discovered that their equipment enabled Iranian authorities to block most traffic and eavesdrop on the rest.)

The Internet as a principle –that is, the idea of an open network allowing free communication regardless of source or sender– is not as popular as some might believe. It made its way into the commercial world more by stealth than by deliberation. Telcos didn’t really understand the Internet as a service; they just knew they had to offer it in order to compete.

One thing was clear to them: The sum of all services across a global network was clearly more valuable than those offered by a single provider. Equally attractive was the perception that these services came more or less for free with the connection.

But the seductive power of the Net hasn’t changed attitudes entirely.

Telecommunications companies, with a long legacy of market-controlling behaviour, still build and deploy their infrastructure using centralised models. Recently, some of them have begun lobbying for the right to exert control over the data that passes over their networks, potentially penalising services that compete with their own. Comcast, one of the largest ISPs in the US, recently got approval to acquire NBC Universal and its content-creation ecosystem, giving rise to fears that they might leverage their control over the information pipeline to dictate what passes through it.

Put simply, carriers would love nothing better than to go back to the telephone service model, where fees are based on where you are and who you talk to, with no conversation possible unless you’ve paid your toll.

The principle of an end-to-end network –that is, one that allows direct, unmediated connections between two parties– militates strongly in the opposite direction. Its appeal is remarkably seductive, leading most Internet users to view with displeasure the telcos’ (or governments’) desire to mediate communications.

Renesys quite rightly remarks that if cuts to Egypt’s Internet had lasted much longer, the reduction in commercial activity could have been catastrophic for the nation.

Furthermore, Cowie remarks, it wasn’t only Egypt’s pipelines that were at risk:

“[T]he majority of Internet connectivity between Europe and Asia actually passes through Egypt. The Gulf States, in particular, depend critically on the Egyptian fiber-optic corridor for their connectivity to world markets.

“Are the folks at Davos thinking about this? They should be.”

In a perfect world, consumer choice and basic business commonsense would always win. But the problem is that centralised networks not only cost a lot of money (placing their design and construction into the hands of the most powerful), they make a lot of money, too.

In monetary and political terms, the wealth of the network itself tends to pool rather than to flow.

A fundamental change has already overtaken the public’s perception about the value and nature of digital communications. Passive consumption of news through the television is considered passé, or at least diminished in relation to the sharing of photos, videos and words across the Internet.

As individual control over the flow of information rises, central control wanes. And this, obviously, is the crux of the dilemma facing businesses and governments across North Africa and throughout the world. They are belatedly coming to realise that they are fighting a many-headed hydra. As they cut off one avenue of communication, another rears its head.

But that hydra has a body, and the body is the network itself.

As this column goes to press, it appears that Egypt’s decision to cut off the Internet failed in every important regard. One protester is reported to have said, “F*** the internet! I have not seen it since Thursday and I am not missing it.… Go tell Mubarak that the people’s revolution does not need his damn internet!”

I would be amazed, however, if this fact led other governments to act differently, should they find themselves in a similar situation. Indeed, the US Congress is currently considering legislation that would provide the President with an ‘Internet Kill Switch’ for use in case of emergency.

Likewise, I see no evidence that the ultimate futility of attempting to control the flow of information will change attitudes in the board rooms and offices where our increasingly centralised networks are planned. For telcos, the challenge is merely technical.

For the Internet –as it was originally intended– to become fully realised and fully resistant to coercion, the devices and infrastructure through which our data travels will need to reflect the same principle of decentralisation as the software and protocols we use today. That implies the construction of communications devices that are very different from the locked-in, network-centric phones, tablets and computers we’re familiar with. I can think of no short-term scenario in which the development of such products will take place in any significant way.

For some time to come, we will continue to live in a world in which the powerful continue to load silver bullets and take aim squarely at their own feet.

Pavlov's Light Bulb

In a discussion about using small frequency changes in LED light bulbs to transmit data, someone mentioned that companies are already using this technology in supermarkets and other large stores to dynamically change prices on their products.

Which led me to a little though experiment: What if retailers could change the price of a product spontaneously for each shopper? What if they did away with even the pretense of fixed prices and rewarded certain kinds of shopping behaviour in order to guarantee allegiance to their store?

First-time shopper gets ridiculous discounts (maybe even a few freebies) as an enticement;
Long-time shoppers get small but consistent discounts on selected items;
One shopper is publicly penalised with higher prices – retailers (ab)use fear of scapegoating to keep shoppers in line;
Shoppers induced to say or do things they would not normally in order to qualify for perks.

I think there’s a cute but fundamentally plausible (and scary) short story in there….

Menu