Digifesto

October 9, 2012

telecom security and technonationalism

EDIT: This excellent article by Farhad Manjoo has changed my mind or at least my attitude about this issue. Except for the last paragraph, which I believe is a convergent truth.

Reading this report about the U.S. blocking Huawei telecom components in government networks is a bit chilling.

The U.S. invests a lot of money into research of anti-censorship technology that would, among other things, disrupt the autocratic control China maintains over its own network infrastructure.

So from the perspective of the military, telecommunications technology is a battlefield.

I think rightly so. The opacity and centrality of telecommunications and the difficulty of tracing cyber-security breaches make these into risky decisions.

The Economist’s line is:

So what is needed most is an international effort to develop standards governing the integrity and security of telecoms networks. Sadly, the House Intelligence Committee isn’t smart enough to see this.

That’s smug and doesn’t address the real security concerns, or the immense difficulty of establishing international standards on telecom security, let alone guaranteeing the implementation of those standards.

However, an easier solution than waiting for agreement among a standards body would be to develop an open hardware specification for the components that met the security standards and a system for verifying them. That would encourage a free market on secure telecom hardware, which Huawei and others could participate in if they liked.

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October 7, 2012

a thoroughly academic dispute about the nature of “information”

I had an interesting conversation with Ashwin Matthew, a colleague in my department. Among other things, we were talking about the construction of the modern concept of information. You might expect that at a School of Information we’d have this issue thoroughly ironed out by now, but in fact, the opposite.

Doing my best to characterize the debate, it’s this: information seems to be very important. Why is that? Is it because a bunch of institutions and/or social powers have an interest in promoting a concept of information that reinforces their power? Or is it because there is a real thing, which we call information, which is out there in the world and influential whether we understand it or not? To put it another way: is “information” an ideological construct or does it pick out something real in the world?

Ashwin calls the social order that depends on the information ideology the Information Society, which passes the Wikipedia test for ‘is it real?’. So does information per se.

I want to call the view that “information” is an ideological construct information antirealism. An argument for information antirealism comes from Geoffrey Nunberg’s “Farewell to the Information Age”, which notes that the modern usage of “information” is historically recent and asserts that this usage is the result of a confusion (either intentional or otherwise) of other meanings. I want to call the view that information is a real thing in the world that we should be paying attention to like scientists information realism.

I would say that I am an information realist. However, if there was ever somebody thoroughly embedded in the information society, it would be me. So, naturally, I would believe the ideology of that society, which is information realism. Ashwin, I believe, would rather bracket the term “information” out so as to be able to critique the Information Society. That seems like a worthy endeavor to me.

But I got to say that I think “information” as a concept has more going for it than its ideological role in supporting the information society. Rather, I think it supports the information society because it reflects a truth about the universe. Just because there is a lot of hype around something doesn’t make it unreal. The Bronze Age was pretty psyched about bronze (I’m guessing). There was certainly a class of people who benefited from bronzeworking. But what made them so powerful wasn’t “bronze” as an ideological construct, but rather their mastery of a part of reality, bronze.

By way of analogy, I’ve been reading Piaget’s “The Child’s Conception of Time” for a class. In it, Piaget describes the cognitive evolution of the concept of time. Piaget relates that as toddlers, children confuse time and space, thinking that something that has traveled greater distance must have taken more time (not understanding how velocity plays a mediating role). Later, children develop “articulate intuitions” of things like succession and duration, but these do not fall into any kind of ‘operational order’. By this Piaget means that when we discuss timing and aging with children at this stage, they will articulate statements about succession and duration but what they say will seem to be full of contradictions or naivete. For example, they will believe that over time, their age will “catch up” with adults. At the last stage, the child achieves an “operational synthesis” and discovers or constructs a sense of time that is homogenous and uniform and the sort of thing that allows you to effectively use clocks.

So, here’s a proposal: that the modern concept of information is an “operational synthesis” of other, more naive “articulate intuitions” about information that have occurred historically.

What is an “operational synthesis”? Well, it’s constructed. But it’s a construct that gets a lot done. You might say that a good operational synthesis is true in at the very least a pragmatist sense.

So, maybe our modern understanding of “information” is as legitimate as the modern understanding of “time”. Which is to say: resistance is useless, prepare to be assimilated into the Information Society.

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October 4, 2012

Follow the money back to the media

I once cared passionately about the impact of money in politics. I’ve blogged about it here a lot. Long ago I campaigned for fair elections. I went to work at a place where I thought I could work on tools to promote government transparency and electoral reform. This presidential election, I got excited about Rootstrikers. I vocally supported Buddy Roemer. Of course, the impact of any of these groups is totally marginal, and my impact within them even more so. Over the summer, I volunteered at a Super PAC, partly to see if there was any way the system could be improved from the inside. I found nothing.

I give up. I don’t believe there’s a way to change the system. I’m going to stop complaining about it and just accept the fact that democracy is a means of balancing different streams of money and power, full stop.

There is silver lining to the cloud. The tools for tracking where campaign donations are coming from are getting better and better. MapLight, for example, seems to do great work. So now we can know which interests are represented in politics. We can sympathize with some and condemn others. We can cheer for our team. Great.

But something that’s often omitted in analysis of money in politics is: where does it go?

So far the most thorough report I’ve been able to find on this (read: first viable google hit) was this PBS News Hour. It breaks it down pretty much as you would expect. The money goes to:

Television ads. Since airtime is limited, this means that political ads were being aired very early on.
Political consultants who specialize in election tactics.
Paid canvassers, knocking door-to-door or making phone calls to engage voters.

Interesting that so much of the money flows to media outlets, who presumably raise prices for advertising when candidates are competing for it with deep pockets. So… the mainstream media benefits hugely from boundless campaign spending.

Come to think of it, it must be that the media benefits much more than politicians or donors from the current financing system. Why is that? A campaign is a zero-sum game. Financially backing a candidate is taking a risk on their loss, and in a tight race one is likely to face fierce competition from other donors. But the outlets that candidates compete over for airtime and the consultants who have “mastered” the political system get to absorb all that funding without needing any particular stake in the outcome of the election. (Once in office, can a politician afford to upset the media?)

Who else benefits from campaign spending? Maybe the telecom industry, since all the political messaging has to run over it.

Maybe this analysis has something to do with why generating political momentum around campaign finance reform is a grueling uphill battle. Because the more centralized and powerful a media outlet, the more it has to gain from expensive campaign battling. It can play gatekeeper and sell passage to the highest bidder.

Taking it one step farther: since the media, through its selection of news items, can heavily influence voters’ perception of candidates, it is in their power to calibrate their news in a way that necessitates further spending by candidates.

Suppose a candidate is popular enough to win an election by a landslide. It would be in the interests of media outlets to start portraying that candidate badly, highlighting their gaffes or declaring them to be weak or whatever else, to force the candidate to spend money on advertising to reshape the public perception of them.

What a racket.

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September 28, 2012

dreams of reason

Begin insomniac academic blogging:

Dave Lester has explained his strategy in graduate school as “living agily”, a reference to agile software development.

In trying to navigate the academic world, I find myself sniffing the air through conversations, email exchanges, tweets. Since this feels like part of my full time job, I have been approaching the task with gusto and believe I am learning rapidly.

Intellectual fashions shift quickly. A year ago I first heard the term “digital humanities”. At the time, it appeared to be controversial but on the rise. Now, it seems like something people are either disillusioned with or pissed about. (What’s this based on? A couple conversations this week, a few tweets. Is that sufficient grounds to reify a ‘trend’?)

I have no dog in that race yet. I can’t claim to understand what “digital humanities” means. But from what I gather, it represents a serious attempt to approach text in its quantitative/qualitative duality.

It seems that such a research program would: (a) fall short of traditional humanities methods at first, due to the primitive nature of the tools available, (b) become more insightful as the tools develop, and so (c) be both disgusting and threatening to humanities scholars who would prefer that their industry not be disrupted.

I was reminded through an exchange with some Facebook Marxists that Hegel wrote about the relationship between the quantitative and the qualitative. I forget if quantity was a moment in transition to quality, or the other way around, or if they bear some mutual relationship, for Hegel.

I’m both exhausted about and excited that in order to understand the evolution of the environment I’m in, and make strategic choices about how to apply myself, I have to (re?)read some Hegel. I believe the relevant sections are this and this from his Science of Logic.

This just in! Information about why people are outraged by digital humanities!

My lovely students today expressed incredulity and even outrage when I told them about Digital Humanities.

— Dan Hassler-Forest (@DanHF) September 28, 2012

@sbenthall The existence of exorbitantly funded research projects like this: http://t.co/NoR9rh17

— Dan Hassler-Forest (@DanHF) September 28, 2012

There we have it. Confirmation that outrage at digital humanities is against the funding of research based on the assumption that “that formal characteristics of a text may also be of importance in calling a fictional text literary or non-literary, and good or bad”–i.e., that some aspects of literary quality may be reducible to quantitative properties of the text.

A lot of progress has been made in psychology by assuming that psychological properties–manifestly qualitative–supervene on quantitatively articulated properties of physical reality. The study of neurocomputation, for example, depends on this. This leads to all sorts of cool new technology, like prosthetic limbs and hearing aids and combat drones controlled by dreaming children (potentially).

So, is it safe to say that if you’re against digital humanities, you are against the unremitting march of technical progress? I suppose I could see why one would be, but I think that’s something we have to take a gamble on, steering it as we go.

In related news, I am getting a lot out of my course on statistical learning theory. Looking up something I wanted to include in this post just now about what I’ve been learning, I found this funny picture:

One thing that’s great about this picture is how it makes explicit how, in a model of the mind adopted by statistical cognitive science theorists, The World is understood by us through a mentally internal Estimator whose parameters are strictly speaking quantitative. They are quantitative because they are posited to instantiate certain algorithms, such as those derived by statistical learning theorists. These algorithmic functions presumably supervene on a neurocomputational substrate.

But that’s a digression. What I wanted to say is how exciting belief propagation algorithms for computing marginal probabilities on probabilistic graphical models are!

What’s exciting about them is the promise they hold for the convergence of opinion onto correct belief based on a simple algorithm. Each node in a network of variables listens to all of its neighbors. Occasionally (on a schedule whose parameters are free for optimization to context) the node will synthesize the state of all of its neighbors except one, then push that “message” to its neighbor, who is listening…

…and so on, recursively. This algorithm has nice mathematically guaranteed convergence properties when the underlying graph has no cycles. Meaning, the algorithm finds the truth about the marginal probabilities of the nodes in a guaranteed amount of time.

It also has some nice empirically determined properties when the underlying graph has cycles.

The metaphor is loose, at this point. If I could dream my thesis into being at this moment, it would be a theoretical reduction of discourse on the internet (as a special case of discourse in general) to belief propagation on probabilistic graphical models. Ideally, it would have to account for adversarial agents within the system (i.e. it would have to be analyzed for its security properties), and support design recommendations for technology that catalyzed the process.

I think it’s possible. Not done alone, of course, but what projects are ever really undertaken alone?

Would it be good for the world? I’m not sure. Maybe if done right.

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September 20, 2012

several words, all in a row, some about numbers

I am getting increasingly bewildered by number of different paradigms available in academic research. Naively, I had thought I had a pretty good handle on this sort of thing coming into it. After trying to tackle the subject head on this semester, I feel like my head will explode.

I’m going to try to break down the options.

Nobody likes positivism, which went out of style when Wittgenstein refuted his own Tractatus.
Postpositivists say, “Sure, there isn’t really observer-independent inquiry, but we can still approximate that through rigorous methods.” The goal is an accurate description of the subject matter. I suppose this fits into a vision of science being about prediction and control of the environment, so generalizability of results would be considered important. I’d argue that this is also consistent with American pragmatism. I think “postpositivist” is a terrible name and would rather talk/think about pragmatism.
Interpretivism, which seems to be a more fashionable term than antipositivism, is associated with Weber and Frankfurt school thinkers, as well as a feminist critique. The goal is for one reader (or scholarly community?) to understand another. “Understanding” here is understood intersubjectively–“I get you”. Interpretivists are skeptical of prediction and control as provided by a causal understanding. At times, this skepticism is expressed as a belief that causal understanding (of people) is impossible; other times it is expressed as a belief that causal understanding is nefarious.

Both teams share a common intellectual ancestor in Immanuel Kant, who few people bother to read.

Habermas has room in his overarching theory for multiple kinds of inquiry–technical, intersubjective, and emancipatory/dramaturgical–but winds up getting mobilized by the interpretivists. I suspect this is the case because research aimed at prediction and control is better funded, because it is more instrumental to power. And if you’ve got funding there’s little incentive to look to Habermas for validation.

It’s worth noting that mathematicians still basically run their own game. You can’t beat pure reason at the research game. Much computer science research falls into this category. Pragmatists will take advantage of mathematical reasoning. I think interpretivists find mathematics a bit threatening because it seems like the only way to “interpet” mathematicians is by learning the math that they are talking about. When intersubjective understanding requires understanding verbatim, that suggests the subject matter is more objectively true than not.

The gradual expansion of computer science towards the social science through “big data” analysis can be seen as a gradual expansion of what can be considered under mathematical closure.

Physicists still want to mathematize their descriptions of the universe. Some psychologists want to mathematize their descriptions. Some political scientists, sociologists, etc. want to mathematize their descriptions. Anthropologists don’t want to mathematize their descriptions. Mathematization is at the heart of the quantitative/qualitative dispute.

It’s worth noting that there are non-mathematized predictive theories, as well as mathematized theories that pretty much fail to predict anything.

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September 20, 2012

digital qualities: some meditations on methodology

Text is a kind of data that is both qualitative (interpretable for the qualities it conveys) and qualitative (characterized by certain amounts of certain abstract tokens arranged in a specific order).

Statistical learning techniques are able to extract qualitative distinctions from quantitative data, through clustering processes for example. Non-parametric statistical methods allow qualitative distinctions to be extracted from quantitative data without specifying particular structure or features up front.

Many cognitive scientists and computational neuroscientists believe that this is more or less how perception works. The neurons in our eyes (for example) provide a certain kind of data to downstream neurons, which activate according to quantifiable regularities in neuron activation. A qualitative difference that we perceive is due to a statistical aggregation of these inputs in the context of a prior, physically definite, field of neural connectivity.

A source of debate in the social sciences is the relationship between qualitative and quantitative research methods. As heirs to the methods of harder sciences whose success is indubitable, quantitative research is often assumed to be credible up to the profound limits of its method. A significant amount of ink has been spilled distinguishing qualitative research from quantitative research and justifying it in the face of skeptical quantitative types.

Qualitative researchers, as a rule, work with text. This is trivially true due to the fact that a limiting condition of qualitative research appears to be the creation of a document explicating the research conclusions. But if we are to believe several instructional manuals on qualitative research, then the work of an e.g. ethnographer involves jottings, field notes, interview transcripts, media transcripts, coding of notes, axial coding of notes, theoretical coding of notes, or, more broadly, the noting of narratives (often written down), the interpreting of text, a hermeneutic exposition of hermeneutic expositions ad infinitum down an endless semiotic staircase.

Computer assisted qualitative data analysis software passes the Wikipedia test for “does it exist”.

Data processed by computers is necessarily quantitative. Hence, qualitative data is necessarily quantitative. This is unsurprising, since so much qualitative data is text. (See above).

We might ask: what makes the work qualitative researchers do qualitative as opposed to quantitative, if the data they work with with quantitative? We could answer: it’s their conclusions that are qualitative.

But so are the conclusions of a quantitative researcher. A hypothesis is, generally speaking, a qualitative assessment, that is then operationalized into a prediction whose correspondence with data can be captured quantitatively through a statistical model. The statistical apparatus is meant to guide our expectations of the generalizability of results.

Maybe the qualitative researcher isn’t trying to get generalized results. Maybe they are just reporting a specific instance. Maybe generalizations are up to the individual interpreter. Maybe social scientific research can only apply and elaborate on an ideal type, tell a good story. All further insight is beyond the purview of the social sciences.

Hey, I don’t mean to be insensitive about this, but I’ve got two practical considerations: first, do you expect anyone to pay you for research that is literally ungeneralizable? That has no predictive or informative impact on the future? Second, if you believe that, aren’t you basically giving up all ground on social prediction to economists? Do you really want that?

Then there’s the mixed methods researcher. Or, the researcher who in principle admits that mixed methods are possible. Sure, the quantitative folks are cool. We’d just rather be interviewing people because we don’t like math.

That’s alright. Math isn’t for everybody. It would be nice if computers did it for us. (See above)

What some people say is: qualitative research generates hypotheses, quantitative research tests hypotheses.

Listen: that is totally buying into the hegemony of quantitative methods by relegating qualitative methods to an auxiliary role with no authority.

Let’s accept that hegemony as an assumption for a second, just to see where it goes. All authority comes from a quantitatively supported judgment. This includes the assessment of the qualitative researcher.

We might ask, “Where are the missing scientists?” about qualitative research, if it is to have any authority at all, even in its auxiliary role.

What would Bruno Latour do?

We could locate the missing scientists in the technological artifacts that qualitative researchers engage with. The missing scientists may lie within the computer assisted qualitative data analysis software, which dutifully treats qualitative data as numbers, and tests the data experimentally and in a controlled way. The user interface is the software’s experimental instrument, through which it elicits “qualitative” judgments from its users. Of course, to the software, the qualitative judgments are quantitative data about the cognitive systems of the software’s users, black boxes that nevertheless have a mysterious regularity to them. The better the coding of the qualitative data, the better the mysteries of the black box users are consolidated into regularities. From the perspective of the computer assisted qualitative data analysis software, the whole world, including its users, is quantitative. By delegating quantitative effort to this software, we conserve the total mass of science in the universe. The missing mass is in the software. Or, maybe, in the visual system of the qualitative researchers, which performs non-parametric statistical inference on the available sensory data as delivered by photo-transmitters in the eye.

I’m sorry. I have to stop. Did you enjoy that? Did my Latourian analysis convince you of the primacy or at least irreducibility of the quantitative element within the social sciences?

I have a confession. Everything I’ve ever read by Latour smells like bullshit to me. If writing that here and now means I will never be employed in a university, then may God have mercy on the soul of academe, because its mind is rotten and its body dissolute. He is obviously a brilliant man but as far as I can tell nothing he writes is true. That said, if you are inclined to disagree, I challenge you to refute my Latourian analysis above, else weep before the might of quantification, which will forever dominate the process of inquiry, if not in man, then in our robot overlords and the unconscious neurological processes that prefigure them.

This is all absurd, of course. Simultaneously accepting the hegemony of quantitative methods
and Latourian analysis has provided us with a reductio ad absurdum that compels us to negate some assumptions. If we discard Latourian analysis, then our quantitative “hegemony” dissolves as more and more quantitative work is performed by unthinking technology. All research becomes qualitative, a scholarly consideration of the poetry outputted by our software and instruments.

Nope, that’s not it either. Because somebody is building that software and those instruments, and that requires generalizability of knowledge, which so far qualitative methods have given up a precise claim to.

I’m going to skip some steps and cut to the chase:

I think the quantitative/qualitative distinction in social scientific research, and in research in general, is dumb.

I think researchers should recognize the fungibility of quantity and quality in text and other kinds of data. I think ethnographers and statistical learning theorists should warmly embrace each other and experience the bliss that is finding ones complement.

Goodnight.

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August 22, 2012

Web “Atrocity” Tourism

Just learned from Joe Paul about a web site that used to exist called Portal of Evil. This site specialized in “web atrocity tourism”–linking to and commenting on the weirdest and scariest corners of the internet.

The most comprehensive account I can find of the site is on a Furry community wiki. It was apparently not primarily a troll community, but a hobby sport for tourists aware of their impact on the ecosystem:

Contrary to popular belief, the great majority of PoE members did not organize attacks on the websites listed on PoE. Rule #1 of the PoE forum rules, also known as the Prime Directive (or PD for short), stated: “Do not contact the site listed. Do not email the site owner. Do not post in their guestbooks. Do not post in their forums. If the site owners want to interact with visitors from PoE they can come to these forums.” PoE members were to keep their criticisms of the site to the PoE forums, even if the site owners posted to PoE of their own accord.

The site was taken down last year after five years of dormancy. One user laments that archives of the site have been actively discouraged, pointing out that that’s a shame, since it was a valuable trove of research and curation of the early web.

Which is totally right and totally frustrating. But apparently digital records of it still exist and there are spin-off communities. People can be tracked down and interviewed. So, all is not lost.

Fundamentally, it’s a really beautiful thing about the Internet that assists people who want to build communities around the ways that they are strange or perhaps crazy. Sure, a tiny percentage of it is morally objectionable, but most of it is just really funny.

And, think about it: today’s weirdos on the Internet are tomorrow’s identity groups asking for civil social treatment. While these groups will no doubt have plenty of their own records of their early history, contemporaneous ‘objective’ or critical perspectives will be important to them and maybe others as well. They are probably demanding civil treatment as I write this, only their struggle for social equality is so obscure that I have never had a reason to care.

Like a lot of white guys who were picked on sometimes as kids, I’ve got an abstract kind of solidarity with those folks that isn’t rooted in much personal experience of oppression. Call it compassion, if you want. I’m going to go ahead and let that be my dominant attitude on the matter until I hear about the specifics of some of those communities and maybe become revolted out of some taboo mentality or, more likely, bored. You should get on board with this if you aren’t already. It costs you nothing and can give you something to talk about, like Great Ape Personhood.

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August 8, 2012

on courage in the face of failure developing bluestocking

It would be easy to be discouraged by early experiments with bluestocking.

sb@lebenswelt:~/dev/bluestocking$ python factchecker.py "Courage is what makes us. Courage is what divides us. Courage is what drives us. Courage is what stops us. Courage creates news. Courage demands more. Courage creates blame. Courage brings shame. Courage shows in school. Courage determines the cool. Courage divides the weak. Courage pours out like a leak. Courage puts us on a knee. Courage makes us free. Courage makes us plea. Courage helps us flee. Corey Fauchon" Looking up Fauchon Lookup failed Looking up shame Looking up news Looking up puts Lookup failed Looking up leak Lookup failed Looking up stops Lookup failed Looking up Courage Looking up helps Lookup failed Looking up divides Lookup failed Looking up shows Lookup failed Looking up demands Lookup failed Looking up pours Lookup failed Looking up brings Lookup failed Looking up weak Lookup failed Looking up drives Lookup failed Looking up free Looking up blame Lookup failed Looking up Corey Lookup failed Looking up plea Lookup failed Looking up knee Looking up flee Lookup failed Looking up cool Looking up school Looking up determines Lookup failed Looking up like Looking up us Lookup failed Looking up creates Lookup failed Looking up makes Lookup failed Building knowledge base Querying knowledge base with original document Consistency: 0 Contradictions: [] Supported: [] Novel: [(True, 'helps', 'flee'), (True, 'helps', 'us'), (True, 'determines', 'cool'), (True, 'like', 'leak'), (True, 'puts', 'knee'), (True, 'puts', 'us'), (True, 'pours', 'leak'), (True, 'pours', 'like'), (True, 'brings', 'shame'), (True, 'drives', 'us'), (True, 'stops', 'us'), (True, 'creates', 'blame'), (True, 'creates', 'news'), (True, 'Courage', 'shame'), (True, 'Courage', 'news'), (True, 'Courage', 'puts'), (True, 'Courage', 'leak'), (True, 'Courage', 'stops'), (True, 'Courage', 'helps'), (True, 'Courage', 'divides'), (True, 'Courage', 'shows'), (True, 'Courage', 'demands'), (True, 'Courage', 'pours'), (True, 'Courage', 'brings'), (True, 'Courage', 'weak'), (True, 'Courage', 'drives'), (True, 'Courage', 'free'), (True, 'Courage', 'blame'), (True, 'Courage', 'plea'), (True, 'Courage', 'knee'), (True, 'Courage', 'flee'), (True, 'Courage', 'cool'), (True, 'Courage', 'school'), (True, 'Courage', 'determines'), (True, 'Courage', 'like'), (True, 'Courage', 'us'), (True, 'Courage', 'creates'), (True, 'Courage', 'makes'), (True, 'us', 'knee'), (True, 'us', 'flee'), (True, 'us', 'plea'), (True, 'us', 'free'), (True, 'Corey', 'Fauchon'), (True, 'makes', 'plea'), (True, 'makes', 'free'), (True, 'makes', 'us'), (True, 'divides', 'weak'), (True, 'divides', 'us'), (True, 'shows', 'school')]

But, then again, our ambitions are outlandish. Nevertheless, there is a silver lining:

sb@lebenswelt:~/dev/bluestocking$ python factchecker.py "The sky is not blue." Looking up blue Looking up sky Building knowledge base Querying knowledge base with original document Consistency: -1 Contradictions: [(True, 'sky', 'blue')] Supported: [] Novel: []

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August 8, 2012

averting the techno-apocalypse

I was worried when I wrote this that I was exaggerating the phenomenon of literati denouncing technical progress. Then I happened upon this post by a pseudonymous Mr. Teacup, which echoes themes from Morozov’s review.

(At a company Christmas party, we exchanged Secret Santa gifts drawn from each other’s Amazon wish lists. I received Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, and was asked by the Ivy-League educated hacker founder what the book was about. I explained that the book’s lost cause was Enlightenment values, and he was totally shocked by this because he had never heard that they were even in doubt – a typical example of hackers’ ignorance of intellectual trends outside their narrow fields of engineering expertise. But this naivety may explain why some parts of the public finds Silicon Valley’s pseudo-revolutionary marketing message so compelling – their hostility to the humanities has, for good or ill, spared them the influence of postmodernity, so that they are the only segment of society that unselfconsciously adopts universal-emancipatory rhetoric. Admittedly, this rhetoric is misleading and conceals a primarily capitalist agenda. Nonetheless, the public’s misrecognition of Silicon Valley’s potential to liberate also contains a moment of truth.)

All of this is true. But it’s also a matter of perspective. The “narrow fields of engineering expertise” require, to some extent, an embrace of Enlightenment values and universal-emancipatory rhetoric. Meanwhile, the humanities, which have adopted a kind of universal-problematic rhetoric (in which intellectual victory is achieved by labeling something as ‘problematic’), are themselves insulated. Can it be truthfully said that such rhetoric is an ‘intellectual trend’ outside of the narrow fields of high brow wordslinging?

I wouldn’t know, as I’ve been exposed enough to both sides to have gotten both bugs. And, I’d guess, so has Mr. Teacup, who writes in what I believe is an hyperintellectualized parody:

The reader will find in these pages a repository of chronologically-arranged personal writings on topics at turns varied and repetitious, circulating around certain themes: the Internet and the problematics of New Media; Capitalism; Anti-Capitalism; Psychoanalysis; Film; the works of Žižek, Lacan and others; etc.

…while the author is in fact a web professional living in this century.

I think Mr. Teacup does a good job of diagnosing some of the roots of technophobia. The technophobe denies that the technologists are in fact transforming society because they believe change is possible and are terrified that it will occur, while the technologist is happy to say that Things are Changing–but just as they Always Have, though perhaps much more significantly in their era. (Isn’t the rate of technological change “increasing”? Isn’t that a natural consequence of Moore’s law?)

Those who domesticate social change are telling us that nothing is going to happen: “Yes, things will change, but don’t worry about it! Society will adjust and everything will go back to normal.” This is true conservatism. But some are afraid, because they believe change can really happen. (For example, the Tea Party is the only political group that believes in socialism, while progressives continually deny that it is a possibility.)

What if the converse is also true: those who believe in change are afraid, and this is not the same as opposing it. The technophobic nightmare scenarios of machines spinning out of control is not a delusional fantasy. On the contrary, it gives us an extremely accurate psychological representation of what genuine social change entails. The radical step is to simply endorse it. From the standpoint of the old ways, the birth of the New must be subjectively experienced as an apocalyptic event.

So, Morozov‘s loathing of the Hybrid Reality Institute is due to what again? A legitimate fear that technological change will usher in an autocratic regime that is run by technocratic industrialists without democratic consent. Mr. Teacup writes:

This reveals the general problem with deconstructing the human-technology binary: it frequently undermines legitimate grievances about the coercive uses of technology. People are not that stupid, they don’t oppose technology because they don’t realize they are always-already technologically mediated. They oppose technology because they do realize it – this is what makes it a crucial site of political resistance.

The problem, though, is that technophobia, however entertainingly it is articulated, will do nothing to stop technical change, because (as it’s already been conceded) the people responsible for technical change don’t bother reading expansive critiques informed by the intellectual trends in the humanities. Rather, it seems that technologists are developing their own intellectual tradition based on theories of the Singularity and individual rationality. A more mathematized, libertarian, and pragmatic great-grandchild of Enlightenment thought.

The question for those concerned with the death of democratic politics or the rise of technocolonialism, then, has got to be: how do you do better than whining? Given that technological change is going to happen, how can it be better steered towards less “problematic” ends?

The difficulty with this question is that it is deeply sociotechnical. Meaning, it’s a question where social and technical problems are interleaved so densely that it requires expertise from both sides of the aisle. Which means that the literati and digerati are going to have to respectfully talk to each other.

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