The Breaking Time

The need for an infrastructure army

I wish I knew the photographer on this one. If y'all do, I'll happily add it.

Hurricane Sandy's struck, and while the devastation isn't as bad as a Katrina-level catastrophe (partly thanks to vastly superior emergency response), it's still estimated in the billions. With climate change and decaying infrastructure, this is going to happen again; the Onion has it nailed.

There are some things centralized institutions like governments are actually really good at, and marshaling massive resources (more than any locality could generate) to build big, useful things or deal with emergencies is one of them. Things like Sandy are going to happen more often, and that makes infrastructure and disaster response more important than ever.

I remember people complaining when the Deepwater Horizon spill happened that BP was in charge of fixing it, instead of the government. Some of them took this as an example of collusion or incompetence, and there was certainly plenty of that going around leading. But the truth was more mundane: there simply wasn't a well-equipped naval unit ready to stop that kind of disaster. 

After Sandy left, I wondered again why that is. Why don't we take some of that pile of cash being wasted on crap like the F-35 or the Crusader and spend it on elite disaster-response units and infrastructure building? After all, disasters (man-made or otherwise) are capable of causing as much damage in terms of lives and economic loss as a terrorist attack, and the military is already intertwined with disaster response. Militaries are also quite good at creating pressure-cooker cultures to deal with specific, dangerous tasks.

We can talk about things like decentralizing electric power or making communities more resilient, but anyone facing a sizable catastrophe knows that it's simply beyond the ability of any local area to handle. This is one area where "send in the army" actually makes sense.

Open government can survive a resignation

Apparently, open government is dying. So declares a column from Vivek Wadhwa in yesterday's Washington Post:

Vivek Kundra’s resignation last week from his post as the nation’s Chief Information Officer is an ominous event.

Kundra’s goal was to set government data free via an expansive Internet effort called Data.gov, and encourage innovation with government-collected data through the Open Government Initiative. He had hoped to slash tens of billions of dollars from the government information technology (I.T.) budget by democratizing who and which types of companies can deliver I.T. solutions to the government. The most radical part of his program was to make public data available to entrepreneurs, allowing them to build new applications that solved problems for the government and their communities.

The program was off to a great start, with hundreds of thousands of data sets becoming available, and entrepreneurs building thousands of innovative applications. Then the ill-considered race to slash the Federal deficit started. The Obama Administration agreed to cut e-government initiative funding from $35 million to $8 million. Never mind that Kundra’s programs had already saved taxpayers $3 billion over the past two years.

Not surprisingly, Kundra resigned. Why preside over a portfolio of shuttered initiatives? In a phone interview, Kundra acknowledged that he is worried about the program’s funding, but told me that he believes that the open data initiative has so much momentum that it is unstoppable, echoing the sentiment issued in his formal statement that he is “confident progress will continue.”

The observation is understandable, if wrong. For all the smarts and individual experience involved, the Gov 2.0/open gov movement remains relatively new to politics, at least compared to other causes that measure their tenure in decades. I've noticed, since 2009, the worrying impression that open government depends on a narrow political window, specifically around the Obama administration's directives and appointments.

An alliance between sympathetic government officials and technologists has remained a hallmark of the Gov 2.0 push since Carl Malamud's work opening up the SEC in 1993. Advocates understandably place a lot of emphasis on that relationship, and I remember the focus at the first Gov 2.0 conference on getting "top people" from the federal government on board.

Kundra's appointment as the nation's first CIO was a big deal for these advocates, and they've invested a lot of effort in rightly defending the programs he's shepherded from shortsighted cuts. He's had an impressive record of accomplishments and his resignation at a time when the early momentum of the federal open government movement is being sorely tested can be disheartening.

Still, I figured something like this would happen, if not with a resignation, with some other setback.

Here, for me, is the rub in Wadhwa's analysis:

But, with Kundra gone, I am not optimistic about the program. Whenever a program loses its key evangelist, it normally dies. The Open Government Initiative is likely to suffer a slow, inevitable death.

No.

Capable evangelists certainly help, but history and experience both teach a very different lesson. Any political cause (and open government is one) throwing all its chips on one person will fail.

Look, we have politics not because we agree, but because we don't. On many things, we won't ever. To many involved, open government is a cause. I respect that and, on many levels, I agree.

But it will never be that way to everyone. For some people it will just be a bargaining chip, one interest among many or something thoroughly expendable when cutting times come.

Securing open government in the face of that requires a succession of leaders, multiple organizations and enough constituencies on board that even those who don't personally care have to take their combined influence into account.

Budget cuts, setbacks and resignations are all part of politics. Every cause suffers them, and the ones that endure do so because they can take the damage and keep on going. The ability to do so depends not on a single person but on the depth of support and the strength of advocates to carry on.

Is that staying power there? That's a good question. The rebuttals to Wadhwa's piece (here's a good one) started cropping up almost as soon as it was published. While still far from a political third rail, open government has certainly expanded, on some fronts, since I began writing on it.

But Kundra's resignation is a good time to look at how open government can grow more resilient in the political fray.

This is big: censorship-cracking "internet in a suitcase"

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's a tech innovation legitimately worth getting excited about:

In response to the government suppression of Internet access during the Arab Spring, "Internet in a Suitcase" will allow citizens to bypass censors and help them reconnect in times of government imposed shutdown. A "suitcase" can be transported to dissidents in a repressive country and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet, thus undermining the despotic governing powers. To track the project, you can follow the Open Technology Initiative on Twitter @newamericaoti.

In accordance with the United Nations decision that Internet access should not be denied to anyone, this project is the Obama administration's attempt at harboring democracy in these repressive countries while exercising a push at furthered free speech practices.The project is funded by a $2 million grant from the State Department.

This is huge. While people get far too excited over apps or augmented reality, this is the exact kind of durable infection that stands a chance of furthering actual, substantial change: reliable, easy to replicate and fulfilling a basic need, in this case communicating in the face of repression.

This segment from Al-Jazeera has more information:

Credit where it's due: for all the terrible government-funded things, this one is really beneficial. Of course, like the AK-47, this is going to spread far beyond the control of the government that started it. These tools need to be widespread, in the first world as well as the third, in slums, countryside and rust belts too. The more of them there are, the more resilient future social movements will be against attempts to totally shut down communication.

Mark my words, these suitcases will inevitably end up used against repressive governments of many stripes, including ones the US supports. That's for the good, and with this development, I think the ability to bring the hammer down on online communication just suffered a major setback.

Spinning down superpower: An interview with Quinn Norton

Quinn Norton leads an interesting life, to say the least. She's written for publications from Wired to the Guardian, taken aim at the tech elite's class bubbles and still found time to get a magnetic implant. Currently, she's among the adjunct faculty at NYU, teaching courses on body and self, among other matters.

Recently, we sat down (virtually) for an interview/conversation that used the digital divide as a starting point. It ended up going into upheaval, political lock-in, labor strife, infrastructure, the Romans, the difficulties of spinning down a superpower and how community remains the most profound prosthetic human beings have ever invented. Also; Thomas Jefferson was apparently the first psychohistorian (you heard it here first).

So, in what I hope is the finest Breaking Time tradition, it ended up militantly eclectic. My own questions are in bold. Enjoy, there's plenty of food for thought here.

What are some of the biggest mis-impressions popularly about the digital divide, or lack thereof?

You have to scope it, because the digital divide is a really different matter in the US than it is internationally. Have you heard the statement that “after dark, Twitter is black”? 

Twitter, unlike most of the social networks, actually overrepresents African-Americans compared to percentage of population, and there's a black Twitter-sphere that looks very different from the white Twitter-sphere. After night, you see a lot of social grooming and a lot less of the broadcast branding that many of the white Twitterers do. So at night, after work, you can look at the trending topics and see ones — like things my boyfriend or girlfriend says — that don't seem to relate to the “normal” trending topics. If you go and look, the people tweeting them will often be black; it's a whole different type of tweets.

Yes, to some degree I've seen that happening in my own city. Essentially, different times of the day, different social groups use Twitter. If you can't go on Twitter at work, which tends to happen when you have a desk job, you'll go on at night.

You mentioned that scope differs. How is it different between the U.S. and internationally?

I don't know if you've followed Danah Boyd's research, it's really interesting. She researches youth and social networks. You remember when MySpace was the old Facebook? It was huge. What Danah identified that it was actually white flight to Facebook. You don't have that kind of divide with Twitter, but you do have an emerging phenomenon of racial homophily on the internet.

I don't know what exactly to make of that. I think we're in a situation where there's less of a big digital divide than there used to be and many, many more small digital divides than there used to be. So you have the internet being used by different groups for social grooming in a way it didn't used to be, but social grooming along a lot of race and class lines.

At the same time you do have a really profound destruction of the local going on, so homophilies are replacing local in kind of a mindshare.

This is one reason why local news coverage has a really big problem on its hands, because that's just not as strong of an identity marker anymore, not when you can find a lot of other people that are like you online. It's an opportunity/cost issue; paying attention to the particulars of the place you are in takes away from time to pay attention to the particulars of people who are like you.

Versailles 2.0: the "new global elite" and its discontents

Chrystia Freeland's Atlantic piece on the rise of the new global elite is getting some notice, and for good reason. Here's the central premise:

the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

The piece then chronicles the nature of this apparently new elite, including the world of conferences, resorts and urban cores than constitutes its nation. In this world, to quote one executive, "Beijing has a lot in common with New York, London, or Mumbai. You see the same people, you eat in the same restaurants, you stay in the same hotels.”

Freeland's conclusion about the stateless nature of the elite is extremely perceptive, but the way she gets there is flawed, and what she leaves out points to a situation even more dangerous than this article suggests.

ID'd: Why should you trust Silicon Valley?

Well, this couldn't go wrong at all:

To help solve the modern nightmare of trying to control your online identity and keep track your passwords, the government came to Silicon Valley Friday and said it was here to help.

But rather than propose a big government initiative, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke and the White House cyber czar Howard Schmidt made clear the feds want the private sector to take the lead.

“Just to be clear: We’re not talking about a national ID card,” Secretary Locke said in a speech at Stanford University. “We are not talking about a government-controlled system, but we are talking about enhancing online security and reducing the need to remember a dozen passwords.”

---

The government’s proposed solution is what the administration calls a “trusted-identity ecosystem.” The idea is to create an environment with a wide choice of trusted-identity providers that individuals can use to log in to a wide range of websites, including ones that handle sensitive data, using a single login.

Smart people have written a number of good pieces on this topic already, so I won't repeat too many of their points. In short, it's not hard to see this creating a very limited number of gateways to the biggest online services. Something like a Google ID could, by stumbling steps, become a required form of verification much like a Social Security number.

Here's another wrinkle: to put it nicely, Silicon Valley's record on privacy isn't stainless. From Facebook to Apple, the default response seems to see users' info as a tool for profit and their own as untouchable. Its biggest players generally act much the same way large, amoral corporations in any industry do.

The recent events of the Wikileaks battles don't bode well either. With no formal charges filed, major online companies happily shut down accounts, turned over information and failed to challenge gag orders. Twitter alone showed some spine in this department.

So there's precious little confidence when these entities are set to cooperate with government on something as volatile as identification. If these plans advance, the backlash will be like nothing Silicon Valley's faced before.

Imagine the following scenario: online identification for most major services is shuttled into a few trusted providers, who profit heavily off their role in the "ecosystem." Given their relative power, said companies could then exploit much of that data as they saw fit. Sure, tech-savvy people will figure ways around, but most people aren't tech-savvy. 

Furthermore, the government (or a company) could simply have that trusted identification turned off, regardless of whether the person in questions has been convicted — or even charged — with anything. 

Don't think that's likely? Look how drastically asset forfeiture is misused. If history is any lesson, the incentives here are not on the side of the angels.

Then, of course, all this is a boon for the very hackers and spies it's supposed to deter. Even if it's better guarded, now only one stolen identity is needed to open up a treasure trove of connected information. Hell, a smart thief won't even need any particular expertise; just bribe a low-level employee.

To avoid violating this blog's motto, I should note that "Silicon Valley" is not a monolithic entity. Plenty within its ranks differ widely in philosophy and practice. But the major actors are primarily out for their own gain.

Should you trust them to handle a matter this ripe for abuse? I don't.

The WikiWar

Anonymous' call to arms here

I lead with Anonymous' plea for volunteers to fight for Julian Assange/Wikileaks because it uses a rhetoric that represents an important crossing point in the emerging brawl between the network of leakers and a number of nation-states.

Anonymous speaks of war.

No, it's not war in the traditional sense of guns and bloodied limbs, but in broken secrets, encrypted "insurance" files, arrest warrants, censorship, financial seizures and even calls for blood, it's taking on all the dimensions of a go-for-broke struggle between two rapidly evolving sides.

For those of us who aren't pro-wikileaks but are also, in the interest of a free, open society, anti-anti-Wikileaks, the dimensions of the conflict seem alarming. I, for one, can see both the wisdom in the Guardian's defense of media using the cables and in Democracy in America's argument that stable institutions play a role in a free society.

But, however chaotic, the "infowar" is not incomprehensible. Technology may have changed drastically, but the basics of human conflict have not.

The fight is evolving by the hour, as Wikileaks morphs to adapt to its attackers and various parts of the international political and business communities pile on the pressure. What follows is an attempt to understand the sides, the struggle and the dynamics, in the hopes that the rest of us may learn what the hell's emerging from the maelstrom.

NoCon

$6,000 a head, just to listen and talk. Disconnected doesn't even begin to cover it.

Wading back into the mental fray after my much-needed vacation, brain brimming with ideas, I end up stumbling on this dispatch, about of all things, events based around ideas. In this case, Paul Carr gets a barb in at TED as a "celeb-filled mutual handjob" and (kind of) endorses PopTech as a (kind of) more egalitarian alternative.

After all, TED costs $6,000 a ticket while PopTech costs...

A mere $3,000.

Yes. For those of us who don't quite make that much in a month, this might, however brilliant the attendees or atmosphere, seem like one group of the gentry are grousing about how another group just simply isn't in touch with reality anymore, because they're lining their mansions with platinum instead of common gold.

Yeah, there are a fair number of brilliant speakers at TED and similar conferences. I enjoy the talks and I've posted several here before on topics that struck my fancy. The local TEDx events (because they're often cheap or free), can be a great venue to get local innovators together and promote public dialogue, provided they don't descend into the same circular onanism as their forebear.

Call me crazy, but I'd love to see more catcalls, boos and arguments at TED-style events. Ideas aren't always pretty and the important ones, horror of horrors, tend to actually get people upset.

It also tends increases the perception that world-changing ideas are exclusively the province of the rich, due to the fact that paying $3-6,000 to eat, drink and talk to people is not exactly something most people will ever be able to afford. Sarah Lacy has a good rant on how TED's class structure goes even further than that. Gawker, not exactly fans of the event, managed to get ahold of the secret 2008 guest list, which is a pretty revealing document.

But what I've thought about most recently is the conference price tag. PopTech had 600 attendees, at $3,000 a pop, totaling $1.8 million in ticket sales alone. That's a lot of money, and it got me thinking about what such funds might do if applied more to action than socializing. I wondered what $1.8 million could do for the starving or under-educated. How many people could get a full scholarship to a good college on that money? How many families could get their heating bills paid, needed medical care, or access to technology to help bridge the digital divide just a bit? It could provide no small amount of clean water or vaccines and a staggering number of microloans. If you want to get more aggressive, it would provide a sizable bounty for a war criminal that's escaped justice.

So, let me propose something, we'll call it NoCon. Forget fancy dinners or parties. Forget big-name talks. Use that internet TED-style luminaries are talking about all the time and communicate that way, throwing in some old-fashioned phone conversations if need be.

Everyone who would otherwise chuck $3,000 just for a damn ticket can instead invest that money (hell, let's go lower and say $2,000) into a fund to "attend" NoCon. Over the course of a month or so, the "attendees" share their presentations for how this money should be spent and why. NoCon decides, by vote, which project gets the funds and set some verifiable metric for "success" in that area (x number of people provided with food, said war criminal dead or captured).

NoCon could hold just enough funds aside to pay for a drink for every attendee, wherever they are in the world, if the year's project meets that measure of success. It would probably taste pretty damn delicious, because some definite good had been accomplished with money that — I'll say it — would otherwise go to waste.

That's an approach which would put teeth into some good ideas and all it would require is some of the higher-priced con attendees willing to forgo over-priced events in favor of putting their money where their mouths are. I won't hold my breath.

P.S.- Full disclosure: I went to Gov 2.0, where elites were out in force, in 2009 on a steeply discounted invite. While I had my gripes (and the need for more diversity was a big one), there were vying audience reactions and genuine criticism. O'Reilly Media, to their credit, actually had the guts to put a live Twitter feed up behind the speakers and responded to the critiques to a degree that pleasantly surprised me.

Of revolts and social media

By this point Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece Small Change, with its bound-to-be provocative subtitle Why the revolution will not be tweeted has gotten plenty of the desired attention. Much of it ironically (and no doubt intentionally) on Twitter itself.

Gladwell jumps around from topic to topic to build a case, essentially that "social media can't provide what social change has always required;" that new media is no replacement for old-style organization and activism. In fact, he goes further, attempting to debunk the so-called Twitter Revolutions (in Moldavia and Iran) and assert that the medium is in fact, not inherently revolutionary. The crux goes something like this:

Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Many of the responses, as one might guess, have been critical, sometimes scathingly so.

Honestly, I think both Gladwell's view and that of the "slacktivism" (not a term I like, but it'll do) advocates could use a strong dose of reality. Both dismiss too readily in favor of their own already-decided-upon stories (new media has changed everything/no, it's damaging something good that was already there). There is a lot ignored in online activism and several of Gladwell's critiques are absolutely on point, but there are some real new, useful tools here, and his piece does ignore some real uses.

More, below the cut.

Transparency is an ammo dump

Which means you actually have to load and fire the damn things. And hit.

Oh my, but this has been a huge topic lately, hasn't it? With the massive Wikileaks dump of documents relating to the Afghanistan war earlier this week, the issues come up, with various observers saying that this changes everything, that this really changes everything and that this changes nothing. Of course, in the midst of all this, a favorite topic has re-emerged: transparency.

One of the best summations, Wikileaks: No Substitute for Transparency, was written by Quinn Norton shortly after the leak broke. It summed up the ongoing debate well, and linked to a number of articles that have wondered if transparency is all it's cracked up to be. She gets to the heart of the matter fairly well, I think: 

My least favorite argument about transparency is that it breeds complacency. This is an argument from a position of tremendous privilege that comes from forgetting why we fight corruption in the first place. It is always the case that corruption costs; right now it is taking a terrible price on a real and growing segment of the population which the corrupt entity is meant to serve. You can only forget the proximate hurt if you’re someone in a position to forget it, someone with money, health insurance, the right travel options. Someone with good schools, and probably, it’s easiest to forget the day to day cost of corruption in America as someone with white skin. Without transparency threatened populations have to take up common myths about why they are in the situation they are in. In short, they blame themselves. Not only are they the victims of corruption, but when it’s not discussed, they’re the victims of believing they’ve brought the situation on themselves. If you want a complacent population, ruining their lives and then getting them to believe they did it themselves is a pretty good way to start.

That's (mostly) it, at least about the consequences of not being transparent. The problem with corruption is that it means someone's getting screwed and something isn't working the way it's supposed to. In the long run it eats away at the heart of government: legitimacy. People being what they are, though, many won't go the victim route and will begin turning to other methods to get things accomplished, be it the black market, vigilantism or, eventually, outright revolt.

Transparency, sometimes, can act as a check on that, because it essentially serves as the body politic's ammo dump, with all those revealing bits of secrets and information the individual bullets. Together, as Norton writes, all that forms a mindset.

If it's used.