internet

A Vicious Cycle

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Wired has officially proclaimed the web to be dead. Not the internet, mind you, but the HTML, browser-driven world of dotcoms this and firefox that. Both us and ‘them’ are to blame, according to Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, but somehow, we’ve come back to the idea of a “curated” internet experience after roundly rejecting AOL and Earthlink less than a decade ago.

But perhaps even more than our willingness to sacrifice control for convenience is the business approach to the web. No longer do we have the frontier mentality, the lawless Wild West where anything went. The top 10 websites accounted for 75% of all web traffic in 2010. But as Anderson reminds us:

This was all inevitable. It is the cycle of capitalism. The story of industrial revolutions, after all, is a story of battles over control. A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others. It happens every time. [Emphasis in original].

Possibly the one upside to the increasing corporate control of our internet experience – and our complicity in that takeover – is that once the internet is locked down, we can finally start asking “what’s next?” Because that, too, is the story of industrial revolutions.

Freedom™: A Review

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This author, with Suarez' duology at a London pub, May 2010.

After cruising through Daemon in about 2 days, Freedom™ was even quicker: I blew through it in about 24 hours (back in May). That’s no knock against it, though; rather, I just couldn’t put it down at all.

This review will be brief, even though it’s taken me almost three months to get around to finishing it. Basically, if Daemon was the end of the beginning, Freedom™ is the beginning of the end. Or at least of the next step. It lays out the climactic struggle much more succinctly, a titanic clash between people and business, corporate and individual. I found this particular passage most instructive:

You, sir, are walking on a privately owned Main Street—permission to trespass revocable at will. Read the plaque on the ground at the entrance if you don’t believe me. These people aren’t citizens of anything, Sergeant. America is just another brand purchased for its goodwill value. For that excellent fucking logo … No conspiracy necessary. It’s a process that’s been happening for thousands of years. Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it. In the Middle Ages it was the Catholic Church. They had a great logo, too. You might have seen it, and they had more branches than Starbucks. Go back before that, and it was Imperial Rome. It’s a natural process as old as humanity.

Of course, overreach leads to retreat and retrenchment, et cetera, et cetera. Even if the message seems a little obvious (and by no means subtly presented), it’s an important one, and it’s framed in an interesting new way. It’s that presentation that makes this not only legible, but well worth your time, if not just to see what the traditional cries of anticonsumerism and Adbusters-type activism look like in the digital age.

John Robb’s ‘holons‘ take some big strides here too; Suarez has done an excellent job of envisioning the resilient community concept, and doing so in a way that makes them seem not only possible, but inevitable. A blueprint for the future? Not necessarily. But at the least, a realistic portrayal of the kind of decentralized communities that we’ll hopefully be migrating to in the future. Thanks to Daniel Suarez, they’re more than just a concept.

So read Daemon and then read Freedom™. Seriously, you won’t be disappointed. And even if you are, ignore the prose and focus on the message – it’s one we sorely need to listen to right now.

Buy Freedom™ at Amazon.com.

Daemon: A Review

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After hearing praise from my various luminaries like John Robb, Shlok Vaidya, and zenpundit, there’s no way I could not read Daniel Suarez’s Daemon. The tagline reads “Michael Crichton for the information age,” and in virtually all aspects the book lives up to such a lofty claim.

It’s hard to really explain the book (I found myself attempting to do just that to a drunk South African, and coming up short), but as simply as I can: super-brilliant computer genius who’s responsible for two of the best-selling MMORPGs of all time dies. He’s left embedded in the internet a program – the titular DAEMON, or Disk And Execution MONitor – that can respond and react to news items (such as said genius’ death, or the abortive raid on his house). Using the interconnectedness of the global economy, the daemon insinuates itself into daily life, capitalism comes up against the resilient community, etc, etc.

Anyways, if it sounds pretty far-fetched…it will certainly seem so at times. The prose is nothing particularly elegant or lofty, but that’s not why you read a book like this. The concepts, technologies, and overall contours of the plot are entirely engaging, and this is really a ‘page-turner’ in the tradition of Clancy or Crichton, though with a clear contemporary bent. While the story may come across as somewhat apocalyptic, that’s sort of the point – and at this point within the realm of comprehension.

In case the technology and concepts of Daemon are a little too mindblowing for the reader, Suarez has handily thought to include a quick rundown of recommended further reading, including John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, P.W. Singer’s Corporate Warriors, and the ubiquitous Jared Diamond’s Collapse. For the more dedicated skeptic, there’s even a compendium of links at the book’s website directing the reader towards further information on the technologies depicted in Daemon. You can even subscribe to “The Daemon Technology RSS Feed,” which is updated infrequently but with an excellent selection of recent technology links.

In addition to being a great read – it’s always nice to take a break from the really dense stuff and read some fiction – Daemon can also help to understand a lot of the terms being thrown around in the 4GW and milblogosphere, especially in a global economic sense. System vulnerability, swarming and nodes, a global elite class, and 3D printer personal manufacturing all hold a prominent place in Daemon‘s world. Its sequel, Freedom™, deals far more heavily with themes of resilient communities and a new system, but that review will wait for another day. In the meantime, read Daemon right now.

Buy Daemon, by Daniel Suarez, at Amazon.

Abdication

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The grim future of a world without net neutrality

The government won’t push for it. The existing near-monopolies have no incentive to change. So who steps up? Google, of course. Google’s plan to offer internet services at the blisteringly-fast speeds of up to 1 GB/s could finally revolutionize the American broadband network. As a bottleneck for innovation, the archaic state of internet infrastructure obviously needs improvement. South Korea leads the world in internet speeds, with a 100 Mbps fiber optic line scheduled to come online nationwide this year. The United States didn’t make the top ten – it was 18th in the world with an average speed of 3.9 Mbps.

But no one will act (even though Google’s been prodding telecom companies), and the government won’t push anyone to act.

The risks of lagging behind are comparable to net neutrality in terms of stifling new developments, which is why it may seem weird to call for more regulation. But the regulation that would help only need set a baseline for acceptable quality and service.

This kind of wide push for faster internet service works on a number of levels:

  1. It allows for new growth, research, and innovation.
  2. It keeps the U.S. on equal footing with the rest of the world.
  3. It allows us to avoid ridiculously hyperbolic nightmare scenarios like the “bandwidth caps” Mark Cuban envisions (and I won’t even begin to take apart his prediction of our computerless-future).
  4. New infrastructure work, especially as part of a comprehensive federal plan, will a) allow/mandate simultaneous rural development, always a must in the expanse of the United States, and something any corporation is loathe to take on of its own volition (the per capita subscription rate really can’t justify it, but thanks to equal representation in the Senate is a necessity nonetheless), and b) create jobs. Let’s also not forget those 93 million Americans without broadband access at all, whom Cuban’s market-based solutions have clearly left behind.

As Google is proving though, the federal government has little interest in sweeping technology improvements across the country. A Reaganesque privatization this is not. The government has merely ceded responsibility to the private sector yet again.

22 Bahman as COIN

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Crossposted at Secure Nation.

So in addition to using their Chinese-made riot trucks and gas attacks on the protesters, the Iranian security forces were able to quell much of the 22 Bahman uprising by simply relying on the weakness of the movement’s organizational structure. Letting the enemy defeat itself; very Art of War. The very lack of hierarchy in the green movement was both a blessing and a curse. From Foreign Policy:

Like many of the green movement activists, Sadeghi’s belief in the protests seems related to their “horizontal organization,” the fact that they were structured without hierarchies. This was supposed to be the great strength of the movement, but it is also an abiding weakness. A horizontal organization can’t clearly delineate different roles to different people according to their strengths; it can’t reward those who participate, or sanction those who hesitate. Facebook enabled many young Iranians to forget these points.

Now obviously the Taliban is not organizing via Facebook, but the principle of decentralization is the same. Avoid having a center of gravity, put together your demonstrations (attacks) at the last possible minute; coordinate, execute, and then melt away into the night. But if the Iranian green movement using the same principles was successfully put down, does this offer us a rubric for approaching insurgencies?

Mir Hossein Mousavi's Facebook page.

The short answer is probably not. The Taliban is not planning its operations through Facebook or tweets. But the reason the Revolutionary Guard so effectively shut down the protests was by blocking access to means of communications; that is to say the internet. No Gmail, no Facebook, no twitter meant that there was no coordination between demonstrators, nor was there a way to quickly spread the word of crackdowns in a particular area. The networks used by the Taliban for communication are more dispersed, making a system-wide shutdown more difficult. Walkie-talkies and satellite phones are the order of the day, and while we can intercept calls, we cannot easily end them. Even if we did, human couriers would merely proliferate further.

Also worth keeping in mind is the psychological element. The pushback given by the Iranian regime was demoralizing and a clear setback for the movement, slowing momentum and further progress. Presumably more than one green movement adherent changed his colors, or at least plans to lay low thanks to the IRG. But when ISAF and the United States attempt to stop the movement (the Taliban), it disperses them without costing the Taliban anything. Most of the Iranian protesters were relatively concentrated – do we need to herd Taliban fighters into a single killing zone? And is the Battle for Marjah a step in that direction?

Unintentional Amusement

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In the wake of Google’s announcement that they would cease collaborating with the PRC:

China heavily censored the news that Google would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in the country.

It’s hard to see how that doesn’t prove a point.

Further Google hijinx: a google.cn image search for Tiananmen Square, and a google.com search for Tiananmen Square. Spot the difference!