Sunshine Recorder

Everyone may be famous for 15 minutes, but online those minutes can last a lifetime.

A friend’s lens captures a tipsy top-shot revealing too much flesh. Or the camera catches the vacant stare of a bro’s pickled pupils, and the picture taker might mockingly pronounce, “I’ll save this when you run for office!” The joke, playfully cynical, drifts dangerously close to a cliff of paranoia. That much of what we digitally compose remains permanently archived, and that we only vaguely recognize the consequences of this, plays neatly into the narrative peddled by some in Silicon Valley—that privacy no longer exists. Zuckerberg’s Law, a convenient trend-as-truth whereby we volunteer evermore information about our intimate livings yearns to become an ethical imperative. The act of revealing rushes with unceasing momentum, unmooring our reservations of exposure. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written, “The fear of disclosure has been stifled by the joy of being noticed.”

By now we’ve been trained to record only those behaviors that reflect well on ourselves, lest our employers interpret our cocktail-crushing prowess the wrong way. But Facebook’s privacy settings are clumsy and easy to circumvent. Elsewhere, blog posts, life-tracking data, consumer preferences, and check-in beacons can just as easily be ripped from their context and misdirected to an unintended audience – and meanwhile, the social networks, publishing platforms and shopping hubs just keep multiplying. For those young people interested in running for office, this poses considerable danger.

To some, the Facebook timeline reads as an explicit chronology of illicit behavior. For most, these personality museums are masterfully curated, conveying an exuberance tamed by professionalism, edginess blunted by responsibility. While we are generally aware of the risks involved in divulging personal information, the popular conception is that our norms of exposure will change. Through mass-unveiling, salacious behavior will become bland.

Our society will learn to forgive youth-frozen-in-documentation. We will be more affirming of eccentric conduct and peculiar passions. Whereas candidate Clinton said that he didn’t inhale and he didn’t like it, Obama could say he inhaled often because that was the point. As our social mores relax to accommodate the radical honesty of blogs and the overshare impulse of Instagram, our aspiring candidates will be resilient to ad feminam attacks. This would be so precisely because we’d all be vulnerable to them, or at least familiar with them. (Few background checks are as rigorous as those for public servants, but the population at large will grow accustomed to informal and undisclosed reputation screenings in their personal and professional life.)

In Julie Cohen’s Configuring the Networked Self, the legal scholar reveals how much of our thinking on privacy is stifled by the language of authenticity and illusory control. She begins by reminding us that many of the corporate and political actors who favor strong protection for trade secrets share an economic interest with those who lobby for weaker privacy protection. What connects these two is the desire to commodify information and to harness “infrastructures that render individual activity transparent to third party observers.” Companies want to sell us targeted ads, but they don’t want to reveal how they construct their targeting system. Couched in favorable market language, we’re offered an enhanced, personalized experience, discounts and entertainment, social freedom – in exchange for our participation in an all-enveloping apparatus for market research. Still, we aren’t exactly sure what we’re giving up.

Meet Nick Bilton, lead writer for the New York Times’ Bits Blog and host of a now-famous dinner party last fall, at which several of his companions were prominent members of the Technorati. He and his dinner guests numbered 16 in all, but there were many uninvited persons that night who were privy to the soirée. As Bilton tells us, “a few days later, on a work-related call, someone else — who has never stepped foot in my house — told me how much he ‘just loved’ the lamps hanging above my kitchen table.” While the blogger was busy hosting, his guests were flexing their thumbs: a pair checked in on Foursquare, six tweets chirped away (presumably providing specifics of Bilton’s abode and bounty), seven photos were pasted on Path and six pics filtered through Instragram. Factoring in the total follower count of his company that evening, Bilton reckoned that these privileged details went out to a potential three million people. Aside from this being a self-aware #humblebrag, the post is parable: The sense of power we think we have to represent ourselves is diminished within and across networks.

This kind of exposure was innocent enough. But Cohen considers cases where the outcomes would be harmful. Contrary to the language and ethos of popular social networking sites, our identities are not fixed and singular. Our “authentic selves” or “essential attributes” cannot be articulated on a single profile like a Pokémon card. Thinkers have long disputed the idea of a static identity, since such a notion would ignore how we associate in different contexts, the way our speech changes depending on our speaking partner, how varied environments shape our growth, and all the ways in which we experiment and imagine, pretend and explore.

Google, Twitter, Facebook and the new global battle over the future of free speech.

A year ago this month, Stanford Law School hosted a little-noticed meeting that may help decide the future of free speech online. It took place in the faculty lounge, where participants were sustained in their deliberations by bagels and fruit platters. Among the roughly two-dozen attendees, the most important were a group of fresh-faced tech executives, some of them in t-shirts and unusual footwear, who are in charge of their companies’ content policies. Their positions give these young people more power over who gets heard around the globe than any politician or bureaucrat—more power, in fact, than any president or judge. 

Collectively, the tech leaders assembled that day in Palo Alto might be called “the Deciders,” in a tribute to Nicole Wong, the legal director of Twitter, whose former colleagues affectionately bestowed on her the singular version of that nickname while she was deputy general counsel at Google. At the dawn of the Internet age, some of the nascent industry’s biggest players staked out an ardently hands-off position on hate speech; Wong was part of the generation that discovered firsthand how untenable this extreme libertarian position was. In one representative incident, she clashed with the Turkish government over its demands that YouTube take down videos posted by Greek soccer fans claiming that Kemal Ataturk was gay. Wong and her colleagues at Google agreed to block access to the clips in Turkey, where insulting the country’s founder is illegal, but Turkish authorities—who insisted on a worldwide ban—responded by denying their citizens access to the whole site for two years. “I’m taking my best guess at what will allow our products to move forward in a country,” she told me in 2008. The other Deciders, who don’t always have Wong’s legal training, have had to make their own guesses, each with ramifications for their company’s bottom line.

The session at Stanford concluded with the attendees passing a resolution for the formation of an “Anti-Cyberhate Working Group,” then heading over to Facebook’s headquarters to drink white wine out of plastic cups at a festive reception. But despite the generally laid-back vibe, the meeting, part of a series of discussions dating back more than a year, had a serious agenda. Because of my work on the First Amendment, I was asked to join the conversations, along with other academics, civil libertarians, and policymakers from the United States and abroad. Although I can’t identify all the participants by name, I am at liberty, according to the ground rules of our meetings, to describe the general thrust of the discussions, which are bringing together the Deciders at a pivotal time.

As online communication proliferates—and the ethical and financial costs of misjudgments rise—the Internet giants are grappling with the challenge of enforcing their community guidelines for free speech. Some Deciders see a solution in limiting the nuance involved in their protocols, so that only truly dangerous content is removed from circulation. But other parties have very different ideas about what’s best for the Web. Increasingly, some of the Deciders have become convinced that the greatest threats to free speech during the next decade will come not just from authoritarian countries like China, Russia, and Iran, who practice political censorship and have been pushing the United Nations to empower more of it, but also from a less obvious place: European democracies contemplating broad new laws that would require Internet companies to remove posts that offend the dignity of an individual, group, or religion. The Deciders are right to be concerned about the balkanization of the Internet. There is, moreover, a bold way to respond to that threat. The urgent question is whether the Deciders will embrace it.

On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was under house arrest in rural UK at the time and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Also in attendance was Jared Cohen, a former Secretary of State advisor to Hillary Clinton, Scott Malcomson, Director of Speechwriting for Ambassador Susan Rice at the US State Department and current Communications Director of the International Crisis Group, and Lisa Shields, Vice President of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting, they said, to discuss ideas for “The New Digital World”, their forthcoming book to be published on April 23, 2013.

We provide here a verbatim transcript of the majority of the meeting; a close reading, particularly of the latter half, is revealing.

….

JA: Let me first frame this. I looked at something that I had seen going on with the world. Which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts.

ES: OK.

JA: And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts. And one can sort of say, well what are your philosophical axioms for this? And I say I do not need to consider them. This is simply my temperament. And it is an axiom because it is that way. And so that avoids, then, getting into further unhelpful discussions about why you want to do something. It is enough that I do. So in considering how unjust acts are caused and what tends to promote them and what promotes just acts I saw that human beings are basically invariant. That is that their inclinations and biological temperament haven’t changed much over thousands of years and so therefore the only playing field left is: what do they have? And what do they know? And “have” is something that is fairly hard to influence, so that is what resources do they have at their disposal? And how much energy they can harness, and what are the supplies and so on. But what they know can be affected in a nonlnear way because when one person conveys information to another they can convey on to another and another and so on in a way that nonlinear and so you can affect a lot of people with a small amount of information. And therefore you can change the behaviour of many people with a small amount of information. So the question then arises as to what kinds of information will produce behaviour which is just? And disincentivise behaviour which is unjust? So all around the world there are people observing different parts of what is happening to them locally. And there are other people that are receiving information that they haven’t observed first hand. And in the middle there are people who are involved in moving information from the observers to the people who will act on information. These are three separate problems that are all coupled together. I felt that there was a difficulty in taking observations and putting them in an efficient way into a distribution system which could then get this information to people who could act upon it. And so you can argue that companies like Google are involved, for example, in this “middle” business of taking… of moving information from people who have it to people who want it. The problem I saw was that this first step was crippled. And often the last step as well when it came to information that governments were inclined to censor. We can look at this whole process as the Fourth Estate. Or just as produced by the Fourth Estate. And so you have some kind of… pipeline… and… So I have this description which is… which is partly derived from my experiences in quantum mechanics about looking at the flow of particular types of information which will effect some change in the end. The bottleneck to me appeared to me to be primarily in the acquisition of information that would go on to produce changes that were just. In a Fourth Estate context the people who acquire information are sources. People who work information and distribute it are journalists and publishers. And people who act on it… is everyone. So that’s a high level construct, but of course it then comes down to practically how do you engineer a system that solves that problem? And not just a technical system, but a total system. So WikiLeaks was and is an attempt - although still very young - at a total system.

ES: For all three phases?

JA: To deal with… not for all three phases but for the political component, the philosophical component and the engineering component in pushing out first component. Politically that means anonymizing and protecting… Sorry. Technically that means anonymizing and protecting sources in a wide variety of ways. Politically that also means protecting them politically, and incentivizing them in a political manner. Saying that their work is valuable, and encouraging people to take it up. And then there is also a legal aspect. What are the best laws that can be created in the best jurisdictions to operate this sort of stuff from? And practical everyday legal defense. On the technical front, our first prototype was engineered for a very adverse situation where publishing would be extremely difficult and our only effective defense in publishing would be anonymity. Where sourcing is difficult. As it still currently is for the national security sector. And where internally we had a very small and completely trusted team.

ES: So publishing means the question of the site itself? And making the material public?

JA: Yeah. Making the primary source material public. That is what I mean by publishing.

ES: So the first step was to make that correctly.

JA: It was clear to me that all over the world publishing is a problem. And… Whether that is through self censorship or overt censorship.

ES: Sorry, just you’re gonna have to… is that because of fear of retribution by the governments, you know? Or all…

JA: It’s mostly self censorship. In fact I would say it’s probably the most significant one, historically, has been economic censorship. Where it is simply not profitable to publish something. There is no market for it. That is I describe as a censorship pyramid. It’s quite interesting. So, on the top of the pyramid there are the murders of journalists and publishers. And the next level there is political attacks on journalists and publishers. So you think, what is a legal attack? A legal attack is simply a delayed use of coercive force.

ES: Sure.

JA: Which doesn’t necessarily result in murder but may result in incarceration or asset seizure. So the next level down, and remember the volume… the area of the pyramid…. volume of the pyramid! The volume of the pyramid increases significantly as you go down from the peak. And in this example that means that the number of acts of censorship also increases as you go down. So there are very few people who are murdered, there are a few people who suffer legal… there is a few number of public legal attacks on individuals and corporations, and then at the next level there is a tremendous amount of self censorship, and this self censorship occurs in part because people don’t want to move up into the upper parts of the pyramid. They don’t want to come to legal attacks or uses of coercive force. But they also don’t want to be killed.

ES: Right. I see.

JA: So that discourages people from behaving… and then there are other forms of self censorship that are concerned about missing out on business deals, missing out on promotions and those are even more significant because they are lower down the pyramid. At the very bottom - which is the largest volume - is all those people who cannot read, do not have access to print, do not have access to fast communications or where there is no profitable industry in providing that. Okay. So we decided to deal with the top of this censorship pyramid. The top two sections: the threats of violence, and the delayed threats of violence that are represented by the legal system. In some ways that is the hardest case. In some ways it is the easiest case. It is the easiest case because it is clear cut when things are being censored there, or not. It is also the easiest because the volume of censorship is relatively small, even if the per event significance is very high. So in… Before WikiLeaks had… although of course I had some previous political connections of my own from other activities, we didn’t have that many friends. We didn’t have significant political allies. And we didn’t have a worldwide audience that was looking to see how we were doing. So we took the position that we would need to have a publishing system whose only defense was anonymity. That is it had no financial defense, it had no legal defense, and it had no political defense. Its defenses were purely technical. So that meant a system that was distributed at its front with many domain names and a fast ability to change those domain names. A caching system, and at the back tunnelling through the Tor network to hidden servers…

“Future Perfect:
 The Case for Progress in a Networked Age” by Steven Johnson. Riverhead, 233 pp., $26.95

There are two ways to be wrong about the Internet. One is to embrace cyber-utopianism and treat the Internet as inherently democratizing. Just leave it alone, the argument goes, and the Internet will destroy dictatorships, undermine religious fundamentalism, and make up for failures of institutions.¹

Another, more insidious way is to succumb to Internet-centrism. Internet-centrists happily concede that digital tools do not always work as intended and are often used by enemies of democracy. What the Internet does is only of secondary importance to them; they are most interested in what the Internet means. Its hidden meanings have already been deciphered: decentralization beats centralization, networks are superior to hierarchies, crowds outperform experts. To fully absorb the lessons of the Internet, urge the Internet-centrists, we need to reshape our political and social institutions in its image. 

They arrive at this reform agenda in a rather circuitous way. First, they assume that the Internet has a logic that is currently at work re-shaping a bevy of digital platforms and industries. Here is how Clay Shirky—the thinker who has done the most to popularize the McLuhanesque idea that the Internet has a coherent logic—explains why we are so worried about privacy and Facebook: “Facebook is … our current target for our worries about privacy in exactly the same way that the music industry obsessed about Napster [and] the newspaper industry obsessed about Craigslist, which is to say: the logic of Facebook, the logic that Facebook is exposing, is, in many ways, the logic that is implicit in the Internet itself; Facebook just happens to be its current corporate avatar.”

Once the elusive logic of the Internet has been located, it is not uncommon to see Internet-centrists move to deflate its actual novelty. Thus, Yochai Benkler, a Harvard legal scholar and an exquisite purveyor of Internet-centrism, can marvel at the worlds of Wikipedia, open-source software, and file-sharing—which he, too, takes to represent the logic of the Internet—and then proceed to weave them into a larger narrative about human nature. For Benkler, the Internet proves that humans are collaborative, well-meaning creatures, and that our political institutions, shaped in accordance with a much darker Hobbesian view of human nature, have never been adequate for facilitating meaningful social interaction.

Benkler does not view the Internet as a tool so much as an idea that proves (and disproves) philosophical theories about how the world works. The Internet, for him, reveals only what has been true—that humans love to collaborate—all along. Not surprisingly, the Internet occupies just a few chapters of Benkler’s most recent book; the rest is him deploying the latest research in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and experimental economics to find the spirit of the Internet in the worlds of Toyota and lobster fishermen, of Spanish farmers and Obama’s 2008 campaign.

This attempt to rediscover reality in terms and categories of a supposedly coherent Internet culture is the crucial idea behind Internet-centrism. In defining what is knowable, on what terms, and to what purposes, Internet-centrism produces a novel epistemology of its own. Analytically, it is similar to anthropocentrism—only it worships a different deity. Most adherents of Internet-centrism have traditionally kept quiet about their quasi-religion. But with the publication of Steven Johnson’s Future Perfect, they finally have a briskly written manifesto that distills all the major tenets of their worldview—and adds quite a few blinkers of its own.

[…] For all his talk about political philosophy, Johnson makes no effort to ask even basic philosophical questions. What if some limits to democratic participation in the pre-Wikipedia era were not just a consequence of high communication costs but stemmed from a deliberate effort to root out populism, prevent cooptation, or protect expert decision making? ³ In other words, if some public institutions eschewed wider participation for reasons that have nothing to do with the ease of connectivity, isn’t the Internet a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist?

Better systems for aggregating and dispensing knowledge can certainly help to solve many problems, but those are problems of a very peculiar nature. Can Washington’s reluctance to intervene in Syria—to take just an extreme example—be blamed on a deficit of knowledge? Or does it stem, rather, from a deficit of will, or of principle? Would extending the participatory logic of Kickstarter to the work of the National Endowment for Democracy or to the State Department’s Policy Planning staff lead to better policy on democracy promotion? Or will it result in more populist calls to search for Joseph Kony? ⁴ Can’t the lowering of barriers to participation also paralyze the system, as some would argue is the case with the proliferation of ballot initiatives in California?

How it feels to be stalked.

… In practical terms then, I was unharmed by this latest strike. But by this stage, I was in more danger from the psychological effects of Nasreen’s campaign than any practical damage she may have inflicted.

She had been sending me hate mail now for almost a year. On the advice of the police, lawyers, and friends, I’d refrained from blocking it—not that this would have been easy to do, since she continually set up new e-mail addresses.

If her aim as a “verbal terrorist” was to replicate the conditions of the nation at large inside my head, with its panics and dreads, its droning monomania, she succeeded triumphantly. Possibly the monomania was the worst of these effects: the increasing difficulty of thinking about anything other than Nasreen. In this respect her obsession with me achieved perfect symmetry: I became just as obsessed with her. I couldn’t write, read, play with my kids, do almost anything without drifting off into morbid speculation about what new mischief she might be getting up to.

Then there was the paranoia. This manifested itself in a number of ways, but the source of them all lay in Nasreen’s uncanny ability to orchestrate other people, or at least the illusion of other people, into her attacks. Paranoia requires a social context, and Nasreen’s incorporation of my personal and professional associates into her campaign supplied that very efficiently. It also requires a constantly shifting boundary between what one knows for a fact and what one can only imagine, and this too Nasreen supplied. All she had to do was introduce the concept of smearing my name and furnish a few concrete examples of having done so, and my anxious self-interest could be relied on to expand the process indefinitely.

The calculus was simple: If a person is prepared to falsely assert X about you, then why would they not also falsely assert Y? Why, in fact, would they not assert every terrible thing under the sun? And if that person has already demonstrably reported those terrible things to your agent, your boss, your colleagues, then why might they not also be in the process of reporting them to your neighbors, your friends, or indeed (as in due course she did) your local police station?

I fell prey to the worst imaginings—suspecting increasingly that everyone I spoke to on the phone or ran into in town had heard Nasreen’s allegations about me, either directly from her or in the form of rumors set off by some Web posting of hers, and that they were secretly harboring the thought that the soft-spoken Englishman in their midst might be some kind of monster.

The fact that I had written a novel several years earlier, The Horned Man, in which a college instructor believes he is being framed for a series of sex crimes, gave the situation a piquancy that didn’t escape me, although I was in no condition to enjoy it. (“How I had managed to lay myself open to an act of such preposterously elaborate vindictiveness,” my hero reflects with a pertinence I struggle to find purely coincidental, “how or why such an intricate engine of destruction could have docked at my life, was still unfathomable.”)

On rare occasions when I was able to persuade myself that this really was all a case of my own worst imaginings, Nasreen would invariably deliver some dismaying new evidence to the contrary. I remember at one point wondering if my sudden interest in honor, name, and reputation was all a bit fanciful. But in February of 2008, a volley of e-mails arrived in which Nasreen explicitly singled out those entities, plucking the words, it seemed, straight out of my own mind.

Your reputation is ass runs the inimitably phrased heading of the first e-mail in this volley. “You think you’re clever but your name is tarnished” goes a line in the next. Never mind that my real self was innocent of everything had she accused me of; out there in cyberspace a larger, more vivid version of myself—Nasreen’s version: the thief, the racist, the sexual predator—had been engendered and was rapidly (so I felt) supplanting me in the minds of other people.

On the printing press, the Internet & the impact of duplication.

Technological revolutions are far less obvious than political revolutions to the generations that live through them. This is true even as new tools, for better and worse, shift human history more than new regimes do. Innovations offer silent coups. We rarely appreciate the changes they bring until they are brought. Whether or not we become the primitives of a new culture, as the Futurist Umberto Boccioni observed, most of us still live behind the times and are content to do so. We expect the machines of the present to fulfill the needs of the past even as they deliver us into a future of unknowns.

World-changing inventions almost always create new roles rather than fill old ones. It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one? was the classic response to the telephone, variously attributed to Ulysses S. Grant or Rutherford B. Hayes but probably said by neither of them. Life-altering technologies often start as minor curiosities and evolve into major necessities with little reflection on how they reform our perceptions or even how they came to be.

In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke could see the significance of the French Revolution while observing its developments in real time. Yet “in the sixteenth century men had no clue to the nature and effects of the printed word,” writes Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy, his 1962 book on the printing revolution and the dawning of the electronic age. It wasn’t until nearly 200 years on that Francis Bacon located the printing press alongside gunpowder and the compass as changing “the whole face and state of things throughout the world.” Writing in his 1620 book Novum Organum (“New Instrument”), Bacon maintained that “no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.” In the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo called the invention of printing the “greatest event in history” and the “mother of revolution.” Political revolution began in this technological upheaval.

An argument can be made, and so I will make it here, that the invention of the Internet is the under-recognized revolution of our time. The world-changing technology of the Internet, of course, is already apparent and barely needs retelling. The Internet is more significant than the telephone, the television, the transistor, or the personal computer because it subsumes all these prior inventions into a new accumulation that is greater than the sum of its parts. As the network of networks—the “inter-network”—the Internet is a revolution of revolutions.

Yet while we appreciate the Internet’s technological wonders, the cultural landscape it leads to is less explored. We acknowledge the Internet’s effect on information but are less considering of its influence on us. Even as we use its resources, most of us have no understanding of its mechanics or any notion of the ideas, powers, and people that led to its creation.

One way to situate the Internet is to see it as inaugurating the next stage of copy culture—the way we duplicate, spread, and store information—and to compare it to the print era we are leaving behind. New technologies in their early development often mimic the obsolete systems they are replacing, and the Internet has been no different. Terms like “ebook” and “online publishing” offer up approximations of print technology while revealing little of the new technology’s intrinsic nature.

Just as the written word changed the spoken word and the printed word changed the written word, so too will the digital word change the printed word, supplementing but not replacing the earlier forms of information technology. Speaking and writing both survived the print revolution, and print will survive the Internet revolution. The difference is that the Internet, with its ability to duplicate and transmit information to an infinite number of destinations, will increasingly influence the culture of the copy.

A visit to the online world of flesh-eaters.

While it was shut down with a Denial of Service attack by the German authorities in late 2002, the website for the Cannibal Café can still be viewed online thanks to the Wayback Machine. Nine years is an eternity when it comes to the Internet and, suspended there in history, the website is a time capsule of early website-design features and flourishes, down to a .gif of dripping blood and the flashing “WARNING” sign. Its forum messages also carry the whiff of a different era; written at a time when people, unaware and unafraid of consequences, were more open with their identities online.

On the Café’s forums were men looking for men, men looking for women (the ideal: short, buxom, thin redheads) and women looking for men—very few posts, if any, were for women looking for women. There were people who wanted to be eaten and people who wanted to do the eating. There were stories, artwork and users seeking advice on the best to way to cook someone. “I am ready!” announced that the poster was prepared for slaughter. Entire threads were devoted to “human meat for sale fresh frozen.” Email addresses were freely exchanged, with posters using handles like “Pigslut” and “Masochist Mr. Waye.”

Here is how one notable, but still typical, conversation at the Café ran. The creatively titled “your next meal” wrote, “if anyone wants to eat an 18 yr old gorgeous male by any means you wish, then just tell me how you would feel whilst devouring my horny flesh into ur belly and i will reply to you so we can discuss real arrangements, please eat me!” A few hours later, a response: “Hi, i am Franky from Germany, i will eat you,” followed by an e-mail address.

Perro Loco started the Cannibal Café in 1994—and when, in 2002, one of its posters, that same “Franky from Germany,” was arrested for killing and eating another man, the Cannibal Café was shut down.

“Perro Loco” is a pseudonym, of course, one Loco uses for all of his online activity. I spoke to him over the phone last week from his home in California. He described himself as an “average looking guy” who is “well spoken and fairly well educated.” Now semi-retired, he worked for many years as an EMT before going to work at a fly-fishing store. On the phone, he speaks slowly and with confidence. Given his history I expected some measure of paranoia, but found little. Although he tries to keep a private lifestyle, anyone wishing to know him will face no difficulties, which is why it wasn’t hard for me to contact him.

Even before the notoriety the Meiwes-Jürgen case brought him, Loco already enjoyed some celebrity in certain corners of the Internet. In the ’90s, he began to post the work of Dolcett, the mysterious artists famous for his depictions of bondage, torture and cannibalism. Today Loco refers to himself as “the Mayor of Dolcett” and claims he was “the first person to scan any Dolcett stuff.” Dolcett’s work grew more popular and, when Loco asked for no financial compensation, the artist was so pleased he gave Loco full permission to post his material online and even the rights to make money on it. Loco asserts that he was “probably the guy who popularized the whole concept of Dolcett-ism… as I used to say at the time, at the One Holy Church of Dolcett, I was the One True Prophet.”

But Loco’s online celebrity would really spread in December 2002, when Armin Meiwes was arrested for eating a man named Bernd Jürgen Brandes.

Provocative essay compares software pirates to seafaring pirates. “The decaying corpses of executed pirates were chained to trading posts from Ghana to Virginia as warnings to others. Brutal examples were set. And so it goes today.”

Once the heroes of nations, pirates went from being state-sponsored champions to tolerated annoyances to the basest sort of criminals. Henry Morgan was knighted after plundering Panama in 1674; fifty years later hundreds of pirates were dangling from the gibbet at remote trading posts along Africa’s Gold Coast.

What changed?

The change wasn’t so much what pirates did as the context in which they found themselves: a global market economy with England at its head. England went from a plucky backwater to a capitalist empire in a century, and as its fortunes changed – or more specifically, as the way it made its fortunes changed – so, too, did the way the state treated piracy.

It was one thing when looted Spanish gold filled the Queen’s meager treasury; it was quite another when pirates threatened to disrupt the increasingly disciplined circulatory system of 
the Atlantic Ocean, which had become the center of the British economy. Sugar, tobacco, slaves – these commodities needed to move and be exchanged as smoothly as possible. Pirates represented a dual threat to the Atlantic Ocean factory of early capitalism. They were not only thieves; they were also free.

Being a sailor has never been easy, and it was particularly tough in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To maximize profits, sailors were forced to eat rotten food and bunk in cramped quarters, and were paid on credit – you didn’t collect until you had completed your one-, two-, or three-year bid. And even then, you might not collect. You could die, of course. Or you might be pressed into military service, or forced to work an extra few years on another ship, or forfeit your wages as a punishment for insolence. It wasn’t uncommon for sailors to go a decade without seeing a shilling. Ship captains had absolute authority over their crews in order to enforce discipline. Any complaining or shirking could be deemed “mutinous,” and punishment could range from whipping to hanging to being dangled over the side of the ship to have your brains bashed in.

Pirate ships were different – they were under democratic worker control. Captains weren’t absolute rulers, but elected leaders who commanded only during battle. Day-to-day operations were handled democratically by the entire crew. Loot was divided equally and immediately, and pirates ate – and drank – better than their law-abiding contemporaries. This was the major reason pirates were feared: it was easy to convince exploited sailors to join up with them. And join up they did.

Pirate crews were a polyglot, multiracial multitude (this isn’t Hardt and Negri; this was the word used at the time) that included oppressed Irishmen, escaped slaves, French heretics, and members of Caribbean indigenous groups. Pirates hailed from all over the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and included a high proportion of blacks and mulattos, who often had leadership roles. Marcus Rediker notes in Villains of All Nations that sixty members of Blackbeard’s crew of one hundred were black.

Pirates didn’t just plunder ships; they enforced their own brand of justice across the Atlantic. Upon boarding a ship, pirates interviewed the crew to determine how their captain commanded. If he were said by his crew to be cruel, the pirates might beat or execute him; if he were fair, they treated him well and sometimes they sent him off with a bit of money of his own. Sometimes their justice was poetic, such as when pirates commandeered a slaver, armed the captured Africans with knives, then sent the hapless captain back on his merry way. Pirates also held grudges, assaulting trading posts and towns where authorities had executed their comrades. After a fellow pirate captain was executed at a Portuguese slave fortress, Walter Kennedy stormed the castle, captured it, and burned it to the ground. Not for nothing did so many pirate vessels contain the word “Revenge” in their names.

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Media piracy, the now-mundane practice of streaming a TV show or downloading an mp3, seems a far cry from the life-or-death struggles of buccaneers on the high seas. But the history of media piracy in the US is similar to that of seafaring pirates. In the early days of the republic, lacking international copyright treaties, the US government encouraged pirating of British literary classics in order to promote literacy. Authors like Charles Dickens complained to no avail; not until American literature caught up in quality and appeal could authors like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe persuade the US government to enforce copyright. By their time the US had become a scientific and cultural powerhouse in its own right, and it sought to protect its advantage by enforcing property rights more strictly than it had before. The book publishers who once flooded the continent with cheap copies of the great works of literature had to go legit.

About a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

(Source: sunrec)

“We believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people… This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us.”  

Last week’s widely reverberating meditations on the meaning of life by cultural icons like Charles Bukowski, Annie Dillard, Arthur C. Clarke, and John Cage reminded me of a passage from the altogether sublime The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (public library) — the same tome that gave us this poignant reflection on why emotional excess is essential to creativity.

In an entry from May 1946, Anaïs Ninonce again challenges our presentism bias by thinking deeply and timelessly about issues we tend to believe we’re brushing up against for the very first time, from the pitfalls of always-on communication technology to the pace of modern life to the venom of procrastination.

Even more interesting than the striking similarity between what Nin admonishes against and the present dynamics of the internet is the fact that she essentially describes Marshall McLuhan’s seminal concept of the global village… a decade and a half before he coined it.

The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters. meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked. This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.

For more on Nin’s timeless insights on life, see Lisa Congdon’s stunning hand-lettered diary quotes.

In 1902, the caustic American satirist Ambrose Bierce – who once reviewed a book by observing that its covers were “too far apart” – proposed a new social convention. Modern life, he complained, involved being introduced to far too many people: you’d meet a friend in the street, then a friend of his would stroll by, and before you knew it you’d have a new, unasked-for acquaintance, with all the obligations that entailed. Bierce blamed the democratic spirit of the 20th century: in the older, more formal days, stricter rules governed who could form acquaintanceships with whom. “It is to be wished,” Bierce wrote, “that some great social force, say a billionaire, would set up a system of disintroductions.” He imagined a generous gent, a Mr White, resolving to disintroduce two friends of his, Mr Black and Mr Green. “Mr Black,” he might say, “knowing the low esteem in which you hold each other, I have the honour to disintroduce you from Mr Green.” Mr Black (bowing): “Sir, I have long desired your unacquaintance.” Mr Green: “Charmed to unmeet you, sir.” Mr White: “I’m sure you will become very good strangers.”

It’s probably best, for Bierce’s sake, that he never lived to seeFacebook’s People You May Know. Ever since the widespread adoption of email in the 1990s, in fact, the phenomenon he bemoaned has reached a scale he could never have imagined. Technology exposes us to vastly more opportunities for making social connections, and far more effortlessly than even a stroll down the street and a handshake. Yet an etiquette for terminating those links, should they outlive their mutual benefit – if they ever had any – remains as absent as ever. Even “unfriending” someone on Facebook, the closest equivalent to Bierce’s proposal, feels like delivering a slap in the face (and not even a well-timed slap, since you can’t be sure when they’ll find out). Facebook itself hates unfriending, for commercial reasons, and thus makes it easy to hide updates from tiresome contacts without their knowing – a deeply unsatisfactory arrangement that leaves you at constant risk of meeting someone face-to-face who assumes you must already know they’ve got engaged, or had another baby, or been dumped, or fired, or widowed.

The result – at least for anyone who can still recall friendship before the social media age – can be an awkward hodgepodge. There are Facebook friends with whom you want to share everything, those you’ve grown apart from, and those you’ve barely heard of. (You can assign them to different lists, but then you’ve introduced a whole new layer of decisions: who belongs where? What qualifies someone to be switched from one list to another? And so on.) There are Twitter followers with whom your acquaintance is strictly professional, those you know from school, but didn’t necessarily like, and those who are your dad. Not long ago, I realised, with a feeling of dismay, that I’d started to think of some of these contacts – not most of them, but some – as clutter.

If that sounds a heartless way to think about other people, consider the parallels. Physical clutter, as a widespread problem, is only as old as modern consumerism: before the availability of cheap gadgets, clothes and self-assembly furniture, it wasn’t an option for most people to accumulate basements full of unwanted exercise bikes, games consoles or broken Ikea bookshelves. We think we want this stuff, but, once it becomes clutter, it exerts a subtle psychological tug. It weighs us down. The notion of purging it begins to strike as us appealing, and dumping all the crap into bin bags feels like a liberation. “Friend clutter”, likewise, accumulates because it’s effortless to accumulate it: before the internet, the only bonds you’d retain were the ones you actively cultivated, by travel or letter-writing or phone calls, or those with the handful of people you saw every day. Friend clutter exerts a similar psychological pull. The difference, as Bierce understood, comes with the decluttering part: exercise bikes and PlayStations don’t get offended when you get rid of them. People do. So we let the clutter accumulate.

Europe’s digital library Europeana has been described as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the sprawling web estate of EU institutions.

It aggregates digitised books, paintings, photographs, recordings and films from over 2,200 contributing cultural heritage organisations across Europe - including major national bodies such as the British Library, the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum.

Today Europeana is opening up data about all 20 million of the items it holds under the CC0 rights waiver. This means that anyone can reuse the data for any purpose - whether using it to build applications to bring cultural content to new audiences in new ways, or analysing it to improve our understanding of Europe’s cultural and intellectual history.

This is a coup d’etat for advocates of open cultural data. The data is being released after a grueling and unenviable internal negotiation process that has lasted over a year - involving countless meetings, workshops, and white papers presenting arguments and evidence for the benefits of openness.

Why does this matter? For one thing it will open the door for better discovery mechanisms for cultural content.

Currently information about digital images of, for example, Max Ernst’s etchings, Kafka’s manuscripts, Henry Fox Talbot’s catotypes, or Etruscan sarcophagi is scattered across numerous institutions, organisations and companies. Getting an accurate overview of where to find (digitised) cultural artefacts by a given artist or on a given topic is often a non-trivial process.

To complicate things even further, many public institutions actively prohibit the redistribution of information in their catalogues (as they sell it to - or are locked into restrictive agreements with - third party companies). This means it is not easy to join the dots to see which items live where across multiple online and offline collections.

Opening up data about these items will enable more collaboration and innovation around the discovery process.

Paul Miller, writer of The Verge, tells us about the experience of being offline for three months now.

It’s all anybody asks me. I tell them I’m not using the internet for a year, and they just need to know: “How’s it going?”

“It’s going great,” I say.

“Yeah?” they say, dubiously. Their eyes glaze over: they’re trying to imagine what it would be like for them to leave the internet for any span of time. They probably read some article recently that made them feel bad about their Facebook habit. “I don’t think I could do it,” they admit.

“Well, it’s not actually a realistic thing to do,” I assure them. “I’m just really lucky and blessed that my work is supporting me… the weird thing is that writing about technology turns out to be the one profession where I can actually do this and get paid for it.”

“Wait, they’re still paying you?”

Crazy, isn’t it? Vox Media, the burgeoning online magazine empire that owns The Verge, cuts me a check twice a month — my full time salary — to write about not using the internet. They’ve been doing it for three months.

And it is going great. The experiment, that is.

The first two weeks were a zen-like blur. I’ve never felt so calm and happy in my life. Never. And then I started actually getting stuff done. I bought copies of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, and Aeschylus. I was writing at an amazing pace. For the first time ever I seemed to be outpacing my editors.

Without the internet, everything seemed new to me. Every untweeted observation of daily life was more sacred. Every conversation was face to face or a phone call, and filled with a hundred fresh nuances. The air smelled better. My sentences seemed less convoluted. I lost a bit of weight.

Three months later, I don’t miss the internet at all. It doesn’t factor into my daily life. I don’t say to myself, “ugh, I wish I could just use the internet to do that.” It’s more like it doesn’t exist for me. I still say “ugh, I have to do that” — it’s just not the internet’s fault.

But now that not having internet is no longer new, just normal, the zen calm is gone. I don’t wake with the sunrise while chirping birds pull back the covers. I still have a job. I feel pressure and stress and frustration. I get lonely and bored. My articles aren’t always submitted on time. Sometimes my sentences aren’t good.

I’m just stock Paul Miller. No more Not-Using-The-Internet custom skin; I’m just myself. And it’s not all sunshine and epiphanies.

I know I’m not the first person to recognize this, but much of the charm in “taking a break from the internet” is that you end up viewing the real world through the prism of “I’m taking a break from the internet right now,” and then you get back on the internet to tell everybody about what a good time you had. A face-to-face coffee date is very different than Facebook flirting, and a really great use of time, but it’s easiest to see the novelty and value of it when you have a Facebook to compare it to. “Disconnecting” and “disconnected” are two very different things, as I’m discovering.

People ask me if I recommend taking a break from the internet. I do, but I don’t think there’s a rubber stamp-able routine. A lot of the people I know would be risking their livelihoods to take an entire evening off from email. And ultimately, it matters more whyyou take time off than how you do it. It’s not about taking an hour long break from Twitter; it’s about what you want to do during that hour that requires you to avoid Twitter. The novelty of cutting the cord only has so much mileage on its own.