Alchemical Musings

Freeculturenyu.org is covering an unfolding story laced with greed and deciept in the pharmaceutical industry. The freeculture angle here is that Lilly will predictably try to control this information by abusing copyright laws.

However, there is another important angle to this story relating to the relationship between anonymity and free speech, especially in a world of omniscient surveillance.

Tor users must remember to install both Tor and Privoxy (instructions). There is also a firefox plugin, torbutton, which makes using Tor a bit easier.

From freenetproject.org’s philosophy section

But why is anonymity necessary? You cannot have freedom of speech without the option to remain anonymous. Most censorship is retrospective, it is generally much easier to curtail free speech by punishing those who exercise it afterward, rather than preventing them from doing it in the first place. The only way to prevent this is to remain anonymous. It is a common misconception that you cannot trust anonymous information. This is not necessarily true, using digital signatures people can create a secure anonymous pseudonym which, in time, people can learn to trust.

Digg It

Filed by jonah at 11:16 am under ethics,fire
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In keeping with the Alchemist’s recent “free” disambuguation theme, here is my latest installment on the OLPC project:

In this essay/story I leave wise ‘ol Plato behind, and tried for a straight up, journalistic take on the project. Except there is no such thing as objectivity in journalism, so in this piece is explicitly infused with subjectivity and ideology. Conversations with Ian Bicking helped convince me that believing in this project is a ultimately a matter of faith, in which case our optimism or cynicism go a long way towards shaping reality. And our perceptions are often shaped by media, so lets start advocating for this project instead of kicking it in the shins.This is one reason I am starting to think that olpcnews should seriously ease up on the project, stop taking cheap swipes and jibes, and start offering more constructive criticism, or even better, apply for some grants so they can fix the project as they see fit.

Happy Holidays!

Filed by jonah at 1:39 am under earth,epistemology,ethics,fire
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Free as in ‘Free of pollutants’, ‘free of politics’, and ‘conducive to human freedom’, not ‘free as in fusion’ or ‘free as in beer’.

On Wednesday night I saw Jeffery Sachs present at the CSSR series. I have seen him talk before, but he is a great orator, so it is a pleasure to listen to reruns. Besides, Gia’s situation continues to deteriorate at such an alarming rate that everytime he speaks I learn how things have gotten worse.

I have been wondering for a while how technology and new media could play a role in saving the world, and I posed this question to Jeff after the talk:

If the situation is as dire and urgent as you depict, people need to start thinking about contingencies in case the traditional forms of political process fail. What lessons can the environmental movement learn from the free software/free culture movements, both tactically and strategically, which faced similarly stiff opposition from the dominant powers of law, policy, and big money?

Tactically, I think the answer is obvious. Advanced communication technologies can play a central role in distributing knowledge, building communities and helping organizations operate more efficiently. Groups like One Northwest have understood this for years, although I think The Earth Institute still has some catching up to do.

Strategically, I stumped myself. What can the environmental movement learn from the “copyleft” approach pioneered by Richard Stallman resulting in the GPL and the Free Software Foundation? In the case of broken copyright and patent systems, they could not wait for the system to heal, so they jury-rigged the system (hacked it) to support their objectives. This framework formed the convention under which the OSI protocols developed, empowering individuals, not states, with the ability to choose to subvert.

One glaring disanalogy in attempting to apply the lessons of the free software movement to the environmental movement is that software, as an information good, does not obey conservation laws and consequently has a marginal cost approaching zero. We are quite a ways off from figuring out exactly how to derive It from Bit, however we may still be able to learn from Stallman’s brilliant maneuver.

Perhaps one of the keys to the success of the free software movement, and now the free culture movement (Creative Commons especially) is how they present choices to individuals, encouraging them to act politically, thereby engaging them in the political questions and discourse. This direct participation in the issue raises awareness and understanding, and for many, becomes the catalyst for idealogical transformation. In turn, these individuals have the will necessary to sustain the pressure required for true reform. If Gore’s movie had one failing it was the lack of ideas for what individuals should do after they left the theater.
Marketers in the corporate sector have understood this idea for a while. They call it creating brand evangelists, best accomplished through participatory engagements (lovemarks?), In a sneaky way this approach adapts the problem we are having with energy back into an information one.

Here is one idea on how we could apply these principles. There are surely others.
Environmental Labeling – simply figure out a set of accounting standards and a symbolic language so that manufactured goods could be labeled with the amount of energy that went into making them. The labeling does not even need to start out as a regulation – in some niche markets it could be seen as a product differentiator and serve as a marketing technique. With these labels in place, some consumers might choose to purchase goods with lower carbon contributions. All that is really missing here is a set of standards and a language of symbols.

Ask yourself the simple question – if you wanted to go on a carbon diet today, or even wanted to determine if your personal carbon demands were increasing, level, or diminishing, how could you find out? How could we develop stabilization wedges for individuals without the kind of transparency that environmental labeling affords? Seriously, I don’t even know if I should be using ceramic cups or plastic ones, rechargeable batteries or disposable ones, etc etc. Transparency can lead to accountability through natural market forces.
As a closing thought, I wonder – can we develop asset of Energy Freedoms analogous to the 4 Software Freedoms?
Free Energy. It’s not just for crackpots anymore.

Filed by jonah at 12:04 pm under earth,ethics
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Well, midterms have come and gone, and somehow I managed to complete my two papers on time, somewhere between San Francisco and PloneCon in Seattle.

In my class on the Social Impact of Mass Media I was really impressed with Peter’s Speaking into the Air, and wanted to revisit the Phaedrus. While reading it I was making connections to read-only/read-write culture, and wanted to explore that connection to Plato’s analysis of writing. Also, his conversation has everything in the world to do with my thinking on the effects of Technology on Epistomology itself, and Memory in particular.

Still, when I sat down to write the paper, I kept getting drawn back into conversations around OLPC, until I realized that’s exactly what I should be writing about!

Plato and the Laptop: Prescribing Educational Technology for Society’s Ills

Filed by jonah at 12:43 am under earth,ethics
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I had an interesting conversation with Brian Taptich, the VP of Business Development at bittorrent.com and gained an insight into the machinations of the industry.

I learned that “Big Media” only now appreciates how good they had it back in Napster days, when every file download was logged and tracked through the central Napster server. Now that they are starting down the barrel of true peer-to-peer networking (which bittorrent — the protocol, not the company — affords), they have the perspective to appreciate in hindsight the benefits that omni-present surveillence provides for them.

You could even speculate that bittorrent.com’s value proposition is to turn the bittorrent protocol, back into Napster. If they become the central clearinghouse of bittorrent seeds, they can (and will) keep records of all of the network activity. What files are being exchanged, and who is exchanging them.

In bittorrent, the seeds are the servers, and technically these seeds can be distributed all across the Internet. I was really surprised to learn that Brian was actually aware of an obscure branch of Austrian code for the PloneMultimedia product which auto-generates bittorrent seeds (which we helped merge into the trunk at the Big Apple Sprint). Apparently, The Lawyers were getting all antsy about the existence of tools which make seeding all too easy. Right now, it takes a degree of technical know how to create these ad-hoc bittorrent servers, but once the auto-generation tools make it out to the premier blog, wiki, and CMS platforms, there won’t be much stopping them.

The delicate balance between the overly concentrated power of centralized services vs. their practical usefulness is a theme I began to explore in my post on Serenity. I have also imagined other contexts (e.g. Creative Commons licensing) where simply landing an important feature in the top dozen authoring tools could really shift the scales in terms of adoption. I continue to actively wonder what features could be introduced to these tools to promote equality, democracy, and social justice.

Someone should tell the lawyers that the cat’s head has already wriggled out of the bag, and when she gets out she is going to teach her peers the same trick.

Filed by jonah at 3:42 am under ethics,water
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I attended wikimania this past weekend, and was encouraged by the philosophers present take a critical stance towards the euphoria surrounding the 21st century agendas – Will Science, Technology, and Rationality necessarily make the world a better place? Didn’t we make the same mistake last century?

This led me to a scary thought regarding the One Laptop Per Child project, which I am generally very excited and optimistic about. The team seems to be asking all the right questions and taking all the right ideological positions with regards to the importance of viewing this project as an educational one (not a tech one), structuring the venture as a non-profit, and deeply understanding the value of free software and free culture.

But there is another freedom at stake here – one I have explored in the past (permanent records) – the freedom to remain anonymous, which is the keystone supporting personal privacy, which I am beginning to believe ought to be a basic human right.

I started thinking about how these laptops could easily become the instruments for an international id program, and for all the reasons that people are concerned about this, OLPC should seriously consider shipping with tools that support anonymous network activity. Tools like TOR, which regrettably the EFF has just had to cut funding for…

If you think this is important, perhaps you might want to chime in, and let laptop people know.

Filed by jonah at 12:28 am under ethics,fire
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I am bummed at the failure of politicians and the media to connect the issue of Net Neutrality to the issue of China’s internet censorship. The issue of internet censorship in China led to congressional hearings where:

“The House International Relations subcommittee’s top Democrat, Tom Lantos, told representatives of the companies that they had accumulated great wealth and power, “but apparently very little social responsibility”.

“Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying.” (bbc news)

Meanwhile, on the home front, we fail to recognize censorship under the guise of its free market counterpart —

“In today’s sausage factory of knowledge production, that is exactly the situation that we face. Dominant groups explain the world through their control of knowledge production. Subordinate groups are excluded, and as a result, subordinate knowledeges are excluded as well. In liberal societies, these knowledge disqualifications are not achieved primarily through the legal authority of censorship. But as Foucault reminds us, these disqualifications are made by the ‘ensemble of the rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power are attached to the true.'” (The Birth of Postpsychiatry, p. 139)

Free and open discourse is under attack, in the homeland. Just ask a ninja: YouTube – Ask A Ninja Special Delivery 4 “Net Neutrality”

and here is something you can do:Save the Net

Filed by jonah at 11:22 pm under earth,ethics
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Originally published on theploneblog.org

How hybrid economies help keep software honest.

Last week’s Plone Conference was truly phenomenal – provocative, intense, and fun (big thanks Jon and ONE/Northwest!).

One of the most amazing things I experienced last week was alluded to in Eben Moglen’s keynote (to be posted soon)- the manner in which this community has managed to bring together people who don’t ordinarily interact.

Throughout the breakout sessions, I continued to question dividing us up according to our respective vertical sectors – Corporate, Non-Profit, Educational, and Government. As I have begun to write about elsewhere, systems like Plone can help balance the flow of communication and power between people in a variety of situations and settings. Content, collaboration, and community are contexts which exist across sectors, and the tools we all need cross over as well (sometimes with slightly different tunings).

In many ways lumping together all the folks involved with education is odd. Universities are microcosms of cities, and their IT needs are as diverse as the the rest of the world. However, there are still structural and social similarities that form the basis for common language and culture. After engaging with my fellow educators a the educational panel session and the BOF session I understood the value of us sharing and strategizing, beyond just commiseration.

But through it all, there was one thing that united all of the different attendees – a piece of general purpose software called ‘Plone’.

It is worth dwelling on this mixture of participants and the varying forces they apply to the software. Lessig and Benkler have both been writing a great deal about hybrid economies lately, trying to understand their rhythms, and how we might be able to design them to succeed. They have been writing generally about the “commercial economy” and the “second economy” (sharing, social production, etc), but the lessons may cross over directly to our community.

I realized in Seattle how beneficial diversity can be for software production.
Most of the consultants using Plone are there strictly for traditional market considerations – to make a profit. They are helping to keep the software honest. Unlike some other open source projects which exclusively service the educational world, Plone is not sheltered from the raw, harsh forces of the commercial market. This means that some of the people using Plone use it because it helps them get their jobs done efficiently. Others have called this “productivity arbitrage“, and it is a concept that may hold the key to designing successful open source projects.

It is challenging to imagine working backwards and trying to design a software ecology which captures the hearts and minds of such a diverse following. No small task.

As Rheingold said “There’s been an
assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant,
therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic
production.” – Is Plone’s ecology an example of one of these new systems, and if so, what are our distinguishing characteristics?

Filed by jonah at 9:26 pm under earth,ethics,plone
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This afternoon I attended a talk given by Bill Gates at Columbia University. The talk was a part of his university tour, probably prompted by the well documented braindrain happening at MS right now (Certain well known competitors seem to be following the strategy outlined in Good to Great – get the smartest people you can find “on the bus”, and then let them drive…).

Here are my raw notes.

I must say that this afternoon’s talk was a bizarre experience. Perhaps its all the theory stuff I have been reading lately, but I was in a very psychoanalytic, read between the lines, kind of mood, trying to pay as much attention to what he didn’t say, as to what he did.

First, he has clearly taken some lessons from Steve Jobs. He presented casually and demoed live software. One big difference – while Jobs enjoys demoing creative authoring tools, Gates spends most of his time demoing tools of consumption. He continues to treat his gadgets as receivers, not transmitters, and this is all getting a bit tiring.

Next, close to all the software contexts he described were business and work related. There was very little talk about socializing or play (save for the xbox, and socializing in that virtual space). It was eerie that when someone asked him what his greatest accomplishments were, he responded how much he loved work (and working at his foundation). All of his examples for the uses of ubiquitous computing were work/consumer related (auto tracking receipts for expense reports, shopping, collecting business cards when traveling, Location info – while in traffic (presumably while commuting)) — this is all summed up with his grand vision of the future smartphone as replacement for wallet.

Isn’t there something else the phone could replace? Could our phones become surrogate brains, man’s best friend, or personal assistants? Can’t we conjure up a better metaphor than wallets for how software will change the world? Will it do anything beyond making us better and more efficient shoppers?

The talk kept getting weirder – Gates played a video, which most of the audience thought was very funny. I will have to save my analysis for my Media and Cultural Theory class (or the comments), but it really threw me off.

Gates never mentioned Google, Firefox, or Linux. Did acknowledge the wikipedia (by name), freebsd, sendmail, and the NSCA browser. He even made two truly surprising statements regarding IP – after demoing that the new XBox 360 will connect to an IPod, an audience member asked if it would be able to play fairplay protected ACC files. Gates responded that it won’t be able to, because Apple won’t let him (Ha!), to which he added “its your music and you paid for it.” He also stated that “studios have gone overboard in protection scheme”, and ” will always have free and commercial software.”

Before the session, they passed around cards with potential questions (I am still not sure if the questioners were plants, reading these cards…).

Here were my, never asked questions:
1) Technology can bend towards good or evil. What can we do to insure that it is used for the Good? What is M$ doing to promote the use of its software for the Good.

2) In the upcoming world of omniscient surveillance, what role will M$ play in insuring individuality, privacy, and anonymity. What is M$ doing to contribute

Filed by jonah at 12:28 am under ethics,fire,metaphysics
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On Friday I had a chance to meet with a group of Artificial Intelligence researchers at Carnegie-Melon university. They demonstrated a working technology, Informedia, which I would have guessed was at least 3-5 years off.

What was most incredible about this demonstration was the vivid observation of the trenches in which the information war is being waged. Like any power, technology can bend towards good or evil, and as this post points out, Social Software can be understood as the purposeful use of technology for the public good.

The surveillance possibilities that machine based processing of video and film affords is mind-boggling and horrifying (for more on this angle, see my bioport papers or the Permanent Records presentation). At the same time, the kinds of research, machine based assistance, and even the ways in which this kind of technology would change journalism, could all be harnessed for the public good.

Is transparency, openness, and free culture our best bet for steering and harnessing these powers productively?

Filed by jonah at 7:43 pm under epistemology,ethics,water
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