Nothing Is Written, Even In Code
Catching up on Ross this morning after writing yesterday’s account at Pomocon of how technology really threatens (small-l) liberalism was a nice synergy, if by no means a destiny. For Ross has excerpted a fascinating but awful mental exercise, by a particularly futurist David Gelernter, that shows even better than I could hint what loomed behind the themes of my own, closer-to-the-ground account.
For the sake of conversation, I will limit myself to five points:
1. Gelernter’s cheery fatalism on the private machines-vs-Cloud debate unnerves me greatly. It’s not that I hope for, or would fight for, a world without clouds. But I do hope for, and might even fight for, a world without a Cloud.
2. The Cloud problem is itself merely a symptom of Gelernter’s insistence on seeing the internet as a single, universal System — driven, as I suggested at Pomocon, by a captivation with the vast possibilities unleashed by treating the internet as a System. This element of geek psychology is a serious problem — less because the field of human possibilities can and should be dramatically reduced, and more because I detect, paradoxically, a failure of the imagination among geeks who gravitate with such pubescent enthusiasm to technological unitarian universalism. I’m profoundly unconvinced that the possibility-maximizing framework is, and must be, the unitary and universalist one.
3. This is to leave aside the whole issue of the inadequacy of our theory of possibility itself. Gelernter is hard on today’s internet for greatly increasing the quantity of information and transactions without increasing their quality. For some, quantity IS quality, or is quality’s main ingredient; Gelernter would therefore seem not to be one of these people, but his relentless fantasizing about our uni-uni System Destiny seems to me to undermine our confidence that this is the case. There are imported assumptions about what a possibility IS that need to be, in the parlance of our times, ‘unpacked’ and ‘interrogated’.
4. The revealing characteristic about the fantasy that there can be a singularity — the point at which the uni-uni System Destiny is consummated or realized — is its apparent inability to theorize possibility outside the frame of destiny itself. We are told repeatedly, and I think exclusively, that the singularity can exist only because it must. Any causal theory of omnipossibility that requires destiny already fails, doesn’t it? What’s more, any theory of possibility that imagines it even possible for all possibilities to be contained within a single system depends on the logically defective assumption that no possibility requires system plurality, or at least binarity. At least some possibilities are being excluded from any uni-uni System that contains even all the possibilities that an open-ended number of human beings can experience ever.
5. This implies that our experience as human beings points to the realization that the scope of experience is of necessity narrower than the scope of possibility. Though this realization has fueled secular unitarian universalist projects since Saint-Simon, Comte, and Hegel — if possibility must be limited even when it functions for us as infinite, then why not opt for the System? — there are well-known problems that re-present them in this post-internet context. The model for a unitary universal system of dramatically limited possibility is, of course, Biblical creation and the Biblical God. The attempt to escape the good judgment of God — both as a consequence of our being and its cause — leaves us with two choices: the judgment of particular humans and the judgment of the System. The destiny theory of singularity ultimately fails because it claims that the System Destiny has already escaped the good judgment of the particular humans who have created the system — in other words, that the singularity has already happened in the future, has come back to the present from the future to make itself happen. Whose standard of good judgment would ratify this as our best point of departure for figuring out what to do with the internet?
That’s odd: I understand all these words individually, but put together like this they seem to make no sens at all. Perhaps a concrete example might help.
— Jay W · Mar 16, 03:03 PM · #
Bob Ross rests easy in his grave knowing you refuse to fight clouds.
— turnbuckle · Mar 16, 04:19 PM · #
I understand all these words individually, but put together like this they seem to make no sens at all.
I’d love to read something by James in this space that isn’t accompanied by these identical complaints about book-learnin’ and fancy-pants words.
— Freddie · Mar 16, 04:50 PM · #
I thought the futurist dude had some pretty interesting things to say.
About Cloud computing I think he is right. That is where it is trending, that is a step towards the pemanently connected individual where regular life is impossible without being connected to the web. And this also has a potential for being a very bad thing. Govs, corporations, individuals will have potential access to and control over all you important information and funcitons, all with an impersonal click of a mouse.
The soloution though is multiple identites. In a digital world, identity is digital: a set of numbers. It is easy to have differnt sets of numbers. Smart people (or paranoid people) will have work identies, play identities, public communications identities, finncial identities. They will keep their physical identites private. We can see the beginings of that now. Here at TAS I am cw. I have email accounts for buying stuff, for work, for personal communications.
Multiple identites are going to be necessary to maintain personal security in a world where all your important crap is accessable by any computer anywhere in the world by anyone with the right permissions.
— cw · Mar 16, 05:56 PM · #
There’s one simple way to opt out of the System/Cloud: buy and use an old-fashioned daily planner. No one will know your schedule, unless they actually lay hands on it.
— Mark in Houston · Mar 17, 12:45 AM · #
This isn’t book-larnin’ and ten-dollar words that fly over the heads of us hayseeds. This is just total nonsense, period. Like “colorless green ideas”, it’s an assembly of words in proper grammar that nonetheless does not communicate any meaning. “Uni-uni System Destiny”? Come the fuck on, Poulos!
— Chet · Mar 17, 05:43 AM · #
Two comments:
1) The “cloud” seems to have turned into a bogey of conservatives: Rod Dreher recently posted about it as well. As someone who actually works with the technology, I find this puzzling. Cloud computing merely means buying computer power the way we already buy electricity and natural gas: as a commodity from a supplier who pipes it into our houses, businesses, and other places. Cloud computing does not mean everyone has to use the same servers, any more than we all have to watch the same TV station, or buy electricity from the same supplier. When you keep your data in the cloud, you may not know exactly which server hosts your data, any more than you know where the gas which heats your house came from, but you have a contractual relationship with a supplier whom you can hold accountable. I expect people will vary in the amount of information they want to commit to cloud servers, for a great many reasons, of which the price of a high-speed connection versus the price of local storage will probably come first. But it seems very odd that people who can live with car license plates, credit cards, social security numbers, airport security procedures, microchip implants for dogs and cats, cell phones, individual phone numbers, regular Internet addresses and URLs suddenly see echoes of some dire metaphysical hazard in cloud computing.
2) I find Unitarian Universalism a highly imprecise metaphor for the teleology you attribute to programmers and technologists generally. Unitarian Universalism has many publicly perceived aspects with differing meanings, any of which could apply to some aspect or perception of information technology and technologists. This makes it impossible to determine the meaning of the metaphor within degree of uncertainty which would, in my judgment, make the meaning of the whole comment clear. So far as I do understand them, I find the arguments here lacking: for me, computer technology has spiritual value insofar as it helps us to discern the truth, an integral part of living the truth. I define lived truth as the cardinal virtue more commonly referred to as justice. But I have no illusion that computers will lead us to an ultimate point of perfect knowledge; indeed, the mathematical rock that computing science stands on, the theoretical work of Alan Turing on the halting problem, starts with the perception that we cannot hope to achieve perfect knowledge.
— John Spragge · Mar 17, 10:55 PM · #
Imprecise or not, I find Unitarian Universalism a very interesting metaphor for internet teleology. It’s a metaphor that connects the current stage of techno-optimism with the 18th century Enlightenment.
Unitarianism attempts to rationalize Christianity by eliminating the paradox of the Trinity and collapsing the three figures of the godhead into one.
In the brave new world of social media, the distinction between public and private personas is eliminated. It becomes more difficult to maintain paradoxes in one’s life, to be one way in private and another in public. One is under increased pressure to collapse one’s personality into a streamlined, rational, internally-consistent whole.
It’s easy to make the case that this is a good thing. Who isn’t opposed to hypocrisy? It’s harder to argue that you lose something important when you lose the ability to tolerate paradox, whether you’re talking about God or man. And yet…
— Andy · Mar 18, 12:51 AM · #
Here at The American Scene, we colocate money and mouths. The site is hosted by a scrappy upstart of the cloud computing world.
— Matt Frost · Mar 18, 03:12 AM · #
“The “cloud” seems to have turned into a bogey of conservatives: Rod Dreher recently posted about it as well. As someone who actually works with the technology, I find this puzzling.”
Privacy could be said to be about control. In a world with strong privacy I can control access to my property both real and finacial, control who reads my letters, control who observes my actions, ect… Cloud computing asks that I give up physical control of personal data.
Beyond that, as I said above, it is one more step towards a world where everything that can be digitized is digitized and living off the net is so impractical as to be impossible. There is very very little prospect of privacy (control) in that world.
“In the brave new world of social media, the distinction between public and private personas is eliminated.”
It seems to me that the situation is exactly opposite.
— cw · Mar 18, 04:55 AM · #
@cw: exactly what personal data do you think you “physically control” now that you won’t with cloud computing? The banks already keep the information about every purchase, every investment, pay cheque and loan in a computer on servers they operate, and which you control even less than cloud computers. Your personal contacts? Disabuse yourself. Each email you send gets stored and forwarded, and unless you take precautions to avoid it, the body of your email gets stored in plain text. You cannot send email headers encrypted, and a cursory examination of the header of most emails permits a safe guess at whether or not the address came from an address book or not. Even if you take elaborate precautions to use a proxy email server, that proxy lives in the same cloud; to use email or the web, you have to trust somebody. Ideally, if you use cloud computing you can at least make some conscious choices about whom you trust with your information, and on what terms. As for the argument that the cloud means we will digitize everything, can you cite an example of an application in the cloud that we would not use on a local computer?
— John Spragge · Mar 18, 02:17 PM · #
“@cw: exactly what personal data do you think you “physically control” now that you won’t with cloud computing?”
I keep all the financial records of my drug smuggling operation on a portable hard drive that I hide under the floorboards in the barn, along with my collection of photographs of politicians in compromising positions, plus my treasure maps.
The point is that all that info is already compromised. Cloud computing would be just one more compromise. With our current computer/communcations infrastructure it is possible to know a persons complete health, financial, educational, residential, legal history along with monitoring every phone and email conversation. In addition, via a cell phone, you can actually track someone’s location in real time. And if we were in England, there is a good chance that there would be video of us going about our daily lives. With cloud computing I add to that all my personal documents, photographs and if I use applications from the cloud, potentially every key stroke. That’s actually possible now with computer viruses, but the cloud model makes it much easier. Some of this information was available before, but it was much harder to get and therefor the average dude had a much higher expectation of anonymity. Digitizing everything make the information much easier to get, plus makes all kinds of new types of information available. Becasue it is much easier to access it is much more likely to be accessed. As you point out, we have every little expectation of anonymity now.
And I think it is obvious how the Cloud model is step towards total digitization.
— cw · Mar 18, 05:55 PM · #
cw:
Multiple identities might feel sneaky, but linking them is a trivial task for anyone with access to more than one of the services you use.
— Matt Frost · Mar 18, 06:27 PM · #
@cw: something like 90% of the applications I use, both free software and proprietary, include functions to install updates on the fly, so I already trust servers in the “cloud” not to install monitoring software. If you use popular software and hardware, I can only assume you do the same. If anything, assuming large scale server storage of personal files happens (a comparison of the cost of bandwidth with the cost of disk space shows why it probably won’t) individual privacy may actually improve, both because cloud servers can support strongly encrypted storage, and businesses that want to go into the business of storing personal information will probably have to offer guarantees of security, backed up by strong encryption and other effective security measures.
And since you say you believe the cloud model of computing moves us toward “total digitization”, you should have no trouble coming up with an example of something we might “digitize” for use with the cloud computing model we would not otherwise choose to store in digital format.
— John Spragge · Mar 18, 07:10 PM · #
MAtt Frost,
I know there are some bugs to this idea, but If you can send out different IP adresses through some sort of cumputer skullduggarary then it seems somewhat possible. Can’t you do that already?
Plus I’m not talking about now, I’m talking about in the possible future when everything—all infromation, all transactions, all communications are on the net—and the pressure is on to escape what is esentially the perfect surveliance state. If some dude in China can hack into google, people can figure out how to create viable fake identities. I think it would be necessary and become customary.
“businesses that want to go into the business of storing personal information will probably have to offer guarantees of security, backed up by strong encryption and other effective security measures.”
That was a part of “Cryptonomicron” by (I think) Neil Stephenson. They had a data safe on an island somehwere. It was like a swiss bank. Very, very expensive. Not something you or I could use.
This actually gives me an idea for story about a society where private possesion of hard drives is forbidden. “What do you have to hide, Citizen?” I’ll call it 2084.
“you should have no trouble coming up with an example of something we might “digitize” for use with the cloud computing model we would not otherwise choose to store in digital format.”
My treasure maps, the financial records of my drug business, my plans to over-throw the government, my design for anti-gravity boots, my yearbook photo…. Anything I don’t want anyone else to see. That’s what privacy is: control of personal information.
“What do you have to hide, Citizen?”
— cw · Mar 18, 08:58 PM · #
John Spragge
Wait a minute. When I re-read this I am still not sure if I understood what you were asking in your last paragraph. Can you rephrase it?
— cw · Mar 18, 09:04 PM · #
PPS,
Do you fly a Piper PA-28 Cherokee (N4571X)? I could track this planes flights in real time but I have to register at this stupid site and I don’t like doing that.
— cw · Mar 18, 09:25 PM · #
@cw: Mr. Stephenson has every right to put any plot points he wants in a story, but in the real world, we all have quite effective access to strong cryptography, and servers that everyone uses have a strong incentive to offer it. As for your suggestion that governments might ban the use of private hard drives, that may have some interest as a dystopian fantasy, but it doesn’t reflect any particular risk of cloud computing in the here and now.
The word digitize has a specific meaning: it means translating information from analog form into digital data, almost always for use on a computer system. When you speak of “digitizing everything”, that implies a trend towards employing computer technology in areas where we generally did not do so before. The ubiquitous GPS units for aviation, driving, and cycling depend on the digitization of navigational data. If you perceive a specific connection between the growth of digital data and the phenomenon of cloud computing, please explain it. From my perspective, these trends raise separate concerns.
I haven’t flown 71X for a while, but I put my status as a pilot in my .sig, and if you want to track that plane, go ahead. The availability of aviation data has nothing to do with the question of cloud computing.
— John Spragge · Mar 19, 01:03 PM · #
I think you are way too blithe about the kinds of things governments tend to do. We can just look at the history of the past 100 years and see plenty of examples of governments using control of information as a tool to control their citizens. What uses do you think the former soviet union or communist east germany would make of our current internet if it existed at that time, or Nazi germany for that matter. There are all kinds of thing a government in control of an internet can do to control their citizens. Just one thing I was thinking about last night was censorship. If all infromation is digitized and accessable only on line and if a government or buisness or a political party had control of that internet, then they could easily ban all kind of books, movies, whatever. The internet and the digitizing of everything make high levels of control by authority a potetiality.
Of course, the internet may be too much for any entity to control. It certainly is now. But if you just have a little imagination and a know a bit of history about authoritarian governments, the idea of all information, all transactions, all communications on the internet can be a little worrying.
I guess the point about the plane was how easy it was to find out you had a plane, it’s type and number, where it was located, etc… That is information that in certain times in the past would have been very valuable to people wishing to do you harm. It not crazy to think that it is possible for similar situations to arise again. And it does realate to cloud computing via the fact that cloud computing is another step to putting everything that can be digitized on the internet. I know what digitizing means.
I guess this is probably your line of work. That is helpful to the discussion becasue you have expertise that others don’t, but it could also be a hinderence becasue you may have an interest in cloud computing: emotional, financial, intellectual, whatever.
— cw · Mar 20, 02:31 AM · #
The use of computer technology involves risks, including economic and political risks. And a transition to cloud computing, to the extent that it takes place, will entail certain risks. But the current discussion of cloud computing seriously overstates these risks, while ignoring or understating other risks. Some of the most serious threats to free speech and freedom generally in the digital world come out of a security effort called the “trusted computing initiative” that would have potentially imposed such stringent controls on documents that a repressive government could delete a “subversive” document on all computers.
A more prosaic but present threat from the technology involves the tendency of computer to impose social distance, so that we implement social policies by setting software options, instead of having them take form in the way we deal with other people.
Cloud computing, by contrast, merely moves the storage of (some) documents and files from local systems to remote servers, and a corresponding shifting of programs and processing power. As computing risks go, the risks posed by cloud computing should prove quite manageable. These risks do not, in my view, justify the tone of the comments that have raised alarms about cloud computing. I have to assess these concerns as the product of a meme, rather than the result of a serious risk analysis.
— John Spragge · Mar 21, 12:16 PM · #
I agree that there are already plenty of risk in our current internet set up. I see cloud computing as another step down the road we are already traveling. You seem to think it is a minor step. I think it is a somewhat major step for all the reasons I listed above. But I the comcerns it presents certainly deserve to be taken more seriously than to call them the product of an uninformed meme. You say the risks are manageable becasue we can encrypt all our important data, but if the risk we are worring about is authoritarian governments then all they have to do is make encryption illegal. It is already illegal in some countries and if I remember correctly there was an attempt to make strong encryption illegal in this country.
All this is academic. I think some form of wide spread cloud computing is inevitable, and that eventually we will all be totally internet invested. All I have been trying to say is that there is a possibility that this might not be such a great thing. The internet represents a huge change in the organization and process of human life. Huge. We ought to think seriously about what it might mean rather than jsut blindly following the technology forward. Not that I think we will.
— cw · Mar 22, 01:20 AM · #
We can choose to employ computers in a manner that enhances freedom or one that serves tyranny. That holds for all technologies, from metalworking through aviation, and certainly includes computing and information technology. And some technologies, in computing and elsewhere, carry intrinsic hazards. I don’t agree that holds especially true for cloud computing. Assessing the risk of any technology involves keeping a sense of proportion, and the alarm about cloud computing summed up in the title of this post, “nothing is written, even in code” does not strike me as justified.
You mentioned the backpack hard drive you keep under a floorboard in your barn. OK, let’s consider that. Do you really think that hard drive will stay hidden if ten men from the heimat sicherheits abteilung show up armed with a search warrant, metal detector, and satellite photos of you visiting your barn? Conversely, if you keep your data in encrypted files on servers in Switzerland or Roumania, the warrant won’t stretch that far. In a world where authority in most things stops at national boundaries, cloud computing offers at least as much privacy as it takes away.
As for the digitization of everything, computers, whether local or in the cloud or both, will deal only with digital data. Unless cloud computing will deal with new fields of application, something I consider unlikely, I see no way that cloud computing will lead to the digitization of items not already in digital form. That said, some trends, particularly in social networking, do alarm me somewhat.
I do not want anyone to get complacent about the risks of computer technology. I just want the risks assessed reasonably, and set in the proper perspective. The concept of teenagers carrying on relationships completely on line disturbs me. The thought of a corporation moving its servers offshore into the “cloud” disturbs me considerably less.
— John Spragge · Mar 22, 07:05 PM · #
@Freddie
I have book learnin’ which is why I know that obscurantism is not a sign of intelligence. In fact by choosing to flaunt supposed superiority in lieu of communication James displays an interminable arrogance.
As Schopenhauer said of Hegel:
“a colossal piece of mystification, which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage”
— Narwhal Pants · Mar 23, 12:02 AM · #
That was a good reply. THe fact that my date safe could be in Switserland is reassuring. On the other hand, have you read about Google in china? Here is an excerpt from today’s Times.
‘“We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision,[to route visitors to the hong kong site, because they are shutting down serivces in china due to censorship requirements]” Mr. Drummond said, “though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services.” Some Western analysts say Chinese regulators could retaliate against Google by blocking its Hong Kong or American search engines entirely, just as it blocks YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.’
— cw · Mar 23, 01:50 AM · #
As James Fallows among others has pointed out, the Great Firewall of China has plenty of holes, but that gives us no real reason for complacency. No technology, existing or possible, can replace the need for vigilance in defence of freedom.
Still, assessing the risks in any technology involves two steps: first, assessing the susceptibility of the technology to the kind of control that would undermine freedom, second, the extent to which government could make a persuasive argument against freedom. Ross Anderson made a very persuasive argument against the so-called “trusted computing” initiative (which Fritz Hollings tried to mandate in the US with his CBDTPA, or consume but don’t try programming anything bill). First, as Anderson pointed out, “trusted computing” technology has as its explicit purpose the control of documents on all computers from the get-go, which biases it against freedom. Secondly, governments have their pick of unpopular documents to suppress; Ross uses the example of a pornographic picture of a child, which governments could order deleted to near universal applause. Then, once governments and courts had established a precedent, more and more documents, from libel to trade secret, could end up on revocation lists, meaning “trusted” software would refuse to open them. Governments and people would cross the line from free to controlled speech without realizing it.
I don’t totally endorse Dr. Anderson’s view of “trusted computing” technology as all powerful, but he does lay out a persuasive set of steps between “trusted computing” technology and the eventual use of that technology to police speech. Contrast this with cloud computing. The whole concept of the cloud starts with decentralized computing on diverse, and dynamically selected servers. You can access your data, but you don’t have to know where it resides, and more importantly, neither does the government. Any attempt by the government to restrict Americans to using servers run by a politically compliant corporation (say Lockheed Martin) would contradict the basic premise of cloud computing. That would force the authorities to defend government control of information as an intrinsic good: a hard sell at any time, and nearly impossible in the technical community.
This does not make authoritarian government impossible, even in a technical age. The Chinese government has gotten away with it, so far. It does not remove the need for the defence of freedom. But it does explain why I do not consider any hazards of cloud computing justify the intensity of the fears recently expressed about it.
— John Spragge · Mar 23, 11:57 PM · #
Maybe it’s counter-intuitive, but I think instict tell us that keeping physical control of our information is safer, more private, than sending it off who knows where. I definitely am keeping my treasure maps in the barn. But I do like the idea of hiding stuff somehwere obscure out there in the world.
Here’s another fear. Will it be safe in transit. What if the gov insists all phone companies put gov designed routers in strategic places so that all info flows through at least one? THen the use data mining to look for stuff they don’t like. Isn’t that something like what the NSA did under the bush admin.
— cw · Mar 24, 01:41 AM · #
PS. Your points about gov initiatives with bad consequences, either intended or unintended, is a good one.
— cw · Mar 24, 01:45 AM · #
The net certainly has multiple vulnerabilities. Encryption of sensitive data and signed servers certainly address some but not all of these concerns; so do virtual private networks. But to the extent that people switch to cloud computing, exploiting these vulnerabilities gets exponentially more difficult. If the cloud computing develops into the main means of document access, Internet traffic will expand by several orders of magnitude, and messages will grow both more numerous and more difficult to classify. In this expanded Internet world, sending all or even most traffic through just a few gates will prove difficult if not impossible. Picking encrypted data out of the torrents of data flowing through these gates will also prove very difficult.
Again, that doesn’t mean hazards don’t exist, or that governments which want control will not find ingenious ways to spy on people. I don’t deny that cloud computing has risks. I only claim that the relative risks it poses do not justify the level of concern I have seen expressed here and elsewhere.
— John Spragge · Mar 24, 06:38 PM · #