Posts Tagged ‘power’
“Never call an accountant a credit to his profession; a good accountant is a debit to his profession.”*…
The estimable Henry Farrell on accountancy as a lens on the hidden systems of the world…
When reading Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, The Bezzle [which your correspondent highly recommends], I kept on thinking about another recent book, Bruce Schneier’s A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules and How to Bend Them Back [ditto]. Cory’s book is fiction, and Bruce’s non-fiction, but they are clearly examples of the same broad genre (the ‘pre-apocalyptic systems thriller’?). Both are about hackers, but tell us to pay attention to other things than computers and traditional information systems. We need to go beneath the glossy surfaces of cyberpunk and look closely at the messy, complex systems of power beneath them. And these systems – like those described in the very early cyberpunk of William Gibson and others – are all about money and power.
What Bruce says:
In my story, hacking isn’t just something bored teenagers or rival governments do to computer systems … It isn’t countercultural misbehavior by the less powerful. A hacker is more likely to be working for a hedge fund, finding a loophole in financial regulations that lets her siphon extra profits out of the system. He’s more likely in a corporate office. Or an elected official. Hacking is integral to the job of every government lobbyist. It’s how social media systems keep us on our platform.
Bruce’s prime example of hacking is Peter Thiel using a Roth IRA to stash his Paypal shares and turn them into $5 billion, tax free.
This underscores his four key points. First, hacking isn’t just about computers. It’s about finding the loopholes; figuring out how to make complex system of rules do things that they aren’t supposed to. Second, it isn’t countercultural. Most of the hacking you might care about is done by boring seeming people in boring seeming clothes (I’m reminded of Sam Anthony’s anecdote about how the costume designer of the film Hackers visited with people at a 2600 conference for background research, but decided that they “were a bunch of boring nerds and went and took pictures of club kids on St. Marks instead”). Third, hacking tends to reinforce power symmetries rather than undermine them. The rich have far more resources to figure out how to gimmick the rules. Fourth, we should mostly identify ourselves not with the hackers but the hacked. Because that is who, in fact, we mostly are….
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… Still, there are things you can do to fight back. One of the major themes of The Bezzle is that prison is now a profit model. Tyler Cowen, the economist, used to talk a lot about “markets in everything.” I occasionally responded by pointing to “captive markets in everything.” And there isn’t any market that is more literally captive than prisoners. As for-profit corporations (and venal authorities) came to realize this, they started to systematically remake the rules and hack the gaps in the regulatory system to squeeze prisoners and their relatives for as much money as possible, charging extortionate amounts for mail, for phone calls, for books that could only be accessed through proprietary electronic tablets.
That’s changing, in part thanks to ingenious counter hacking. The Appeal published a piece last week on how Securus, “the nation’s largest prison and jail telecom corporation,” had to effectively default on nearly a billion dollars of debt. Part of the reason for the company’s travails is that activists have figured out how to use the system against it…
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… In other sectors, where companies doing sketchy things have publicly traded shares, activists have started getting motions passed at shareholder meetings, to challenge their policies. However, the companies have begun in turn to sue, using the legal system in unconventional ways to try to prevent these unconventional tactics. Again, as both Bruce and Cory suggest, the preponderance of hacking muscle is owned by the powerful, not those challenging them.
Even so, the more that ordinary people understand the complexities of the system, the more that they will be able to push back. Perhaps the most magnificent example of this is Max Schrems, an Austrian law student who successfully bollocksed-up the entire system of EU-US data transfers by spotting loopholes and incoherencies and weaponizing them in EU courts. Cory’s Martin Hench books seem to me to purpose-designed to inspire a thousand Max Schrems – people who are probably past their teenage years, have some grounding in the relevant professions, and really want to see things change.
And in this, the books return to some of the original ambitions of ‘cyberpunk,’ a somewhat ungainly and contested term that has come to emphasize the literary movement’s countercultural cool over its actual intentions…
One word that never appears in Neuromancer, and for good reason: “Internet.” When it was written, the Internet was just one among many information networks, and there was no reason to suspect that it would defeat and devour its rivals, subordinating them to its own logic. Before cyberspace and the Internet became entangled, Gibson’s term was a synecdoche for a much broader set of phenomena. What cyberspace actually referred to back then was more ‘capitalism’ than ‘computerized information.’
So, in a very important sense, The Bezzle returns to the original mission statement – understanding how the hacker mythos is entwined with capitalism. To actually understand hacking, we need to understand the complex systems of finance and how they work. If you really want to penetrate the system, you need to really grasp what money is and what it does. That, I think, is what Cory is trying to tell us. And so too Bruce. The nexus between accountancy and hacking is not a literary trick or artifice. It is an important fact about the world, which both fiction and non-fiction writers need to pay attention to…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Today’s hackers wear green eyeshades, not mirrorshades,” from @henryfarrell in his invaluable newsletter Programmable Mutter.
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As we ponder power, we might recall that on this date in 1927, a “counter-hacker” in a different domain, Mae West, was sentenced to jail for obscenity.
Her first starring role on Broadway was in a 1926 play entitled Sex, which she wrote, produced, and directed. Although conservative critics panned the show, ticket sales were strong. The production did not go over well with city officials, who had received complaints from some religious groups, and the theater was raided and West arrested along with the cast. She was taken to the Jefferson Market Court House (now Jefferson Market Library), where she was prosecuted on morals charges, and on April 19, 1927, was sentenced to 10 days for “corrupting the morals of youth.” Though West could have paid a fine and been let off, she chose the jail sentence for the publicity it would garner. While incarcerated on Welfare Island (now known as Roosevelt Island), she dined with the warden and his wife; she told reporters that she had worn her silk panties while serving time, in lieu of the “burlap” the other girls had to wear. West got great mileage from this jail stint. She served eight days with two days off for “good behavior”.
Wikipedia
“A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.”
As AI, clean tech, climate response, and other uses grow, concerns are rising that the U.S. and the world are going to run out of electricity (and here). As John Ellis reports, there’s a controversial potential answer closer to hand than many had thought…
Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade.
Britain’s First Light Fusion announced last week that it had broken the world record for pressure at the Sandia National Laboratories in the US, pushing the boundary to 1.85 terapascal, five times the pressure at the core of the Earth.
Days earlier, a clutch of peer-reviewed papers confirmed that Commonwealth Fusion Systems near Boston had broken the world record for a large-scale magnet with a field strength of 20 tesla using the latest high-temperature super-conducting technology. This exceeds the threshold necessary for producing net energy, or a “Q factor”, above 1.0.
“Overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40,” said Professor Dennis Whyte, plasma doyen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The March edition of the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity published six papers ratifying different aspects of the technology.
A poll at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s forum in London found that 65 percent of insiders think fusion will generate electricity for the grid at viable cost by 2035, and 90 percent by 2040.
The Washington-based Fusion Industry Association says four of its members think they can do it by 2030. If the industry is anywhere close to being right, we need to rethink all our energy assumptions…
firstlightfusion.com, cfs.energy, telegraph.co.uk, web.mit.edu, ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp
From New Items (@EllisItems)
For a series of less-optimistic takes on the prospect of power from fusion: “Why are nuclear fusion reactors difficult?
* Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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As we ponder power, we might spare a thought for Irène Joliot-Curie; she died on this date in 1956. A chemist and physicist, she followed in the footsteps of her mother (Marie Curie), sharing the Nobel prize in Chemistry (in 1935, with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie) for their discovery of induced radioactivity, making them the second-ever married couple (after her parents) to win the Nobel Prize, and making her and her mother the first (and so far only) mother–daughter pair to have won Nobels.
Sadly, Irène also shared her mother’s fate: she died of leukemia resulting from radiation exposure during research.
“People overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years”*…
This is especially true, argue Sam Butler-Sloss and Kingsmill Bond of the Rocky Mountain Institute, when it comes to assessing our progress in addressing the challenges of climate change with renewable energy solutions…
The renewable revolution is advancing at remarkable speed. In fact, the speed of the renewable revolution has defied many leading energy commentators who have continuously underestimated its true trajectory. They have suffered from what statisticians call a systematic bias, that is, an error that consistently skews in one direction. Noise, or a random error, is inherent to forecasting; bias, however, requires a deeper explanation.
So why do so many intelligent people undersell the pace and dynamism of the renewable revolution? Leaving aside the inherent bias of those seeking to prop up the fossil fuel system in order to enjoy the largesse of its annual $2 trillion in rents, we identify eight deadly sins of the energy transition.
Whether intentional or unwitting, these eight general errors of perspective are holding back understanding, wasting time and capital, and fueling unproductive climate pessimism…
The renewable revolution is plainly gaining speed and impact. Read on to learn why are so many analysts so wrong about the pace and scale of innovation: “The Eight Deadly Sins of Analyzing the Energy Transition,” from @SamButl3r and @KingsmillBond at @RockyMtnInst. (TotH to friend MZ)
See also: “When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics.”
* Bill Gates
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As we contemplate compounding, we might recall that it was on this date in 1896 that Nikola Tesla and Westinghouse Electric achieved the first long-distance transmission of hydroelectricity: from the Niagara Falls Power Company to Buffalo, N.Y., 26 miles away.
“The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.”*…
Social media could have been a boon to journalism and the fourth estate; it hasn’t turned out that way. Charlie Warzel‘s thoughts on why that is and where things might go…
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley has learned that news is a messy, expensive, low-margin business—the kind that, if you’re not careful, can turn a milquetoast CEO into an international villain and get you dragged in front of Congress.
No surprise, then, that Big Tech has decided it’s done with the enterprise altogether. After the 2016 election, news became a bug rather than a feature, a burdensome responsibility of truth arbitration that no executive particularly wanted to deal with. Slowly, and then not so slowly, companies divested from news. Facebook reduced its visibility in users’ feeds. Both Meta and Google restricted the distribution of news content in Canada. Meta’s head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, noted that its newest social network, Threads, wouldn’t go out of its way to amplify news content. Elon Musk destroyed Twitter, apparently as part of a reactionary political project against the press, and made a number of decisions that resulted in its replacement, X, being flooded with garbage. As The New York Times declared recently, “The major online platforms are breaking up with news.”
This is correct, but the narrative is missing something. Journalists tend to fixate on how our work is or isn’t distributed. Doing so allows us to believe that algorithms and shortsighted, mercurial tech executives are fully to blame when our work isn’t consumed. Fair enough: Platforms, especially Facebook, have encouraged news organizations to redefine their publishing strategies in the past, including through disastrous pivots to video, only to change directions with an algorithm update or the falsification of key metrics. They’ve also allowed their platforms to be used for dangerous propaganda that crowds out legitimate information. But there is also a less convenient and perhaps more existential side to tech’s divestiture of news. It’s not just the platforms: Readers are breaking up with traditional news, too.
Last week, the Pew Research Center published a new study showing that fewer adults on average said they regularly followed the news in 2021 or 2022 than in any other year surveyed. (Pew started asking the question in 2016.) There’s some shakiness when you break down the demographics, but overall, 38 percent of American adults are following the news closely, versus a high of 52 percent in 2018. This tracks: In 2022, Axios compiled data from different web-traffic-monitoring companies that showed news consumption took a “nosedive” after 2020 and, despite January 6, the war in Ukraine, and other major events, engagement across all news media—news sites, news apps, cable news, and social media—was in decline.
The struggles of legacy news organizations have no simple explanation. Trust in the media has fallen sharply in the past two decades, and especially the past several years, though much more so among Republicans. Some of this is self-inflicted, the result of news organizations getting stories wrong and the fact that these mistakes are more visible, and therefore subject to both legitimate and bad-faith criticism, than ever before. A great deal of the blame also comes from efforts on the right to delegitimize mainstream media. Local-news outlets have died a slow death at the hands of hedge funds. A generational shift is at play as well: Millions of younger people look to influencers and creators on Instagram and especially TikTok, along with podcast hosts, as trusted sources of news. In these contexts, consumer trust is not necessarily based on the quality of reporting or the prestige and history of the brand, but on strong parasocial relationships.
You can see how public opinion has shifted in surveys covering the 2010s. In 2014—squarely in the halcyon days of social news—75 percent of adults surveyed by Pew said that the internet and social media helped them feel more informed about national news. But by 2020, the conventional wisdom had shifted. That year, a Pew survey of more than 10,000 people found that “U.S. adults who mainly get their political news through social media tend to be less engaged with news” and, notably, less knowledgeable about current events and politics…
[Warzel traces the history of news and its relatioship to social media from 2013…]
It would be wrong to suggest that news—and especially commentary about the news— will vanish. But the future might very well look like slivers of the present, where individual influencers command large audiences, and social networking and text-based media take a back seat to video platforms with recommendation-forward algorithms, like TikTok’s. This seems likely to coincide with news organizations’ continued loss of cultural power and influence.
In a recent New York essay, John Herrman suggested that the 2024 presidential campaign might be “the first modern election in the United States without a minimum viable media” to shape broad political narratives. This might not be a bad development, but it’s likely to be, at the very least, disorienting and powered by ever more opaque algorithms. And although it is obviously self-serving of me to suggest that a decline in traditional media might have corrosive effects on journalism, our understanding of the world, and public discourse, it is worth noting that a creator-economy approach to news shifts trust from organizations with standards and practices to individuals with their own sets of incentives and influences.
Should this era of informational free-for-all come about, there will be an element of tragedy—or at the very least irony—to its birth. The frictionless access and prodigious distribution of social media should have been a perfect partner for news, the very type of relationship that might bolster trust in institutions and cultivate a durable shared reality. None of that came to pass. Social media brought out the worst in the news business, and news, in turn, brought out the worst in a lot of social media…
Speaking as a scenario planner (an explorer of plausible futures), your correspondent would suggest that while there are other potential futures, Warzel’s is entirely possible.
One facet of the kind of Warzel’s future that he doesn’t explore is worth mentioning. Stewart Brand is famously remembered for suggesting that “information wants to be free.” What he actually said (to paraphrase slightly) is that “information wants to be free or very expensive.” In a future like the one Warzel describes, journalism of the “what’s actually going on and what might it entail” variety– information that has a very real economic and political value– will surely survive… for those who can afford to pay for it. In a future like this, that kind of “insider info” becomes (yet another) force leading to an oligopolist landscape and the kind of social, economic, and political inequality that entails.
Lest we passively conspire in that future, we should all support the public media institutions that remain dedicated to democratizing “real news.”
Big Tech’s relationship with journalism is much more complicated than it appears: “The Great Social Media–News Collapse,” (gift article) from @cwarzel in @TheAtlantic.
* Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
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As we get informed, we might recall that on this date in 1918 newspapers around the world carried the headline that the armistice signed by Allies and Germany ending World War I had come into effect.
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, the First World War came to an end. The armistice… meant total victory for the Allies and the collapse of Germany. The armistice was not a formal surrender – this would come later with the Treaty of Versailles – but it ended all the active fighting. Celebrations occurred across the world after its announcement as the “war to end all wars” had finally come to an end…
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“Energy is essential for development, and sustainable energy is essential for sustainable development”*…
Adam Tooze on the challenges of a transition to clean energy…
As far as we are currently able to judge, our best chance to halt the further escalation of the climate crisis through decarbonization of the economy depends on electricity and electrification. Given the current horizon of technological expectations, electric power and electric technology offer us the best chance of reconciling the insatiable desire for energy with the stretched and frayed environmental envelope.
Electricity today is still a major driver of environmental disaster. This is because it is overwhelmingly generated by burning fossil fuels and coal in particular. It is in fact, the largest single source of pollution, more than fossil-fueled powered transport or agriculture. Not only do they contribute to climate change, emissions from coal-fired power stations around the world are so toxic that they kill millions of people annually. But electricity is one form of energy that we do know how to generate without CO2 emissions, most obviously by solar, wind, hydro or nuclear generation. So, the path to a low-carbon future depends on greening the electricity generation system and at the same time expanding the total volume of electric power generated so that we can apply clean electric power to more purposes than we currently do.
This will involve accelerating and redirecting the process of electrification that has proceeded unevenly across the globe for one hundred and forty years…
“Repowering the world- the challenge of electrification,” from @adam_tooze in his newsletter Chartbook.
See also Electrify- An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future, by Saul Griffith (@GriffithSaul) and “Mapped: Asia’s Biggest Sources of Electricity by Country.”
* Tim Wirth
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As we plug in, we might spare a thought for Hans Christian Ørsted; he died on this date in 1851. A physicist and chemist, he discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields– the first connection found between electricity and magnetism… the foundation on which electric motors operate. Considered the “father of electromagnetism,” Oersted’s law and the oersted unit (Oe) are named after him.
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