The Vast Jeff Wing Conspiracy

Once again, I have done more effort to blog on someone else’s site than on my own. Over on I Should Be Sleeping, a discussion on Chinese Internet usage and governmental control led to the following comment to Brian. Cross-posting here, comments shut off so we can keep discussion all in one place on Brian’s site.

Comment follows:

If “Great Firewall of China” is a new term to you, I strongly recommend you waste an evening Googling articles about the Chinese Internet — the combination of the Internet, hundreds of millions of Chinese users, and an authoritarian state makes for some fascinating reading.

In brief, though, it’s definitely true that you’ll see things on the Chinese Internet that you wouldn’t expect to see. The fact is that most Westerners never see them — and that’s due to what I think is an amazing aspect of the Internet: almost all US observers assume that the English segment of the Internet is “the” Internet, and completely ignore the vast swaths of it that they can’t read. Hence, the world’s largest social networking sites, online MMORPGs, and blog forums are completely invisible. This does not occur in the opposite direction; there is a large plurality of non-native English speakers on the Internet who have some English facility. (And, of course, major English properties are frequently translated.)

A few thoughts to get you started on your reading:

1) one of the interesting aspects of China’s Internet policy is that everything gets read by the government. At first, China threw huge resources at reading everything that was posted internally — estimates of over 100,000 government viewers were made — so that no subversive thought could go unpunished. Today, the job is mostly done electronically, with things such as keyword filtering, text analysis, and cameras at public Internet cafes. China’s internal routers are designed to allow for this to occur at the IP level, so you don’t need to post in a public forum to attract governmental attention.

I strongly encourage you to read more about what has happened in China and elsewhere on this front, because it informs my opinions about the ease of creating such a totalitarian state here. To date, American advances in this regard include the ISP filters watching domestic Internet traffic, the ECHELON and other transnational systems that review all incoming and outbound phone and Internet international traffic, individuals being increasingly tracked by the government through cameras and data mining, and the moves by the TSA to put dissenters on terrorist watch lists. (Did you catch the news that, to fly without ID, you need to provide the government with details of your past addresses? I.e., what you say at the airport is checked against their pre-existing databases on you.)

We are completely in agreement that today we have much freer expression than people in other countries; my fear is that this is a temporary situation, thanks to lack of concern about how we nibble at the edges of free speech. It’s a fairly simple tautology: a) future terrorist attacks and threats will induce a greater clampdown on American freedoms; b) future terrorist attacks and threats are largely assumed to be inevitable. Ergo, it’s a question of when, not if, we will lose more of our current civil liberties.

2) in authoritarian states, there is a complicated pax de deus whereby the government signals its people what things may be discussed and what may not. Generally, this is far more subtle than having a presidential aide tell the country that they have to watch what they say. What you’re seeing on the Chinese Internet is a result of all communication which have already passed through these internal filters. I don’t think it’s particularly heartening that dissent about Chinese management is online; history proves that such dissent exists in all authoritarian states. What you see online is, by and large, only the approved dissent, which is up there with “free speech zones” in the realm of inherently contradictory concepts.

That said, what I find much more heartening is the potential of technology to provide ways to bypass government filters in repressive regimes. Encryption and proxy servers can go a long way towards giving authoritarian government headaches; authoritarian governments respond by making such technologies themselves illegal.

Hence, I would argue that the affordances of such technology are highly political: people who have access to such technologies and frequently use them are likely to enjoy greater civil liberties, and are likely to continue enjoying these liberties. Put another way, a polity that currently enjoys a high level of civil liberty is likely to stanch the authoritarian impulse in their governments by making it nontrivial for them to casually review their communications, and to make it more difficult for them to casually impose new restrictions and monitoring.

In short, once the question is asked, “What do you have to hide?”, the presumption that you have to choose what is hidden is already made for you. Likewise, if your answer is “I have nothing to hide”, then your lack of concern makes it more likely that this will cease to be a choice, but rather a regular state of existence.

Which is why I think it would be excellent if more Americans paid regular attention to what it is like to live in China. America in 2008 bears political features which we despised in the 1988 Soviet Union, and this transition has occurred organically. It seems to me that if we do not wish to live in a Chinese-style environment in 2028, we should pay attention to the current sociological demonstrations of such cultures that we have available to us.

Hidden paparazzi shot this picture of TidBITS editor Adam Engst, in training in the Danger Room East at Castle Rhuddlan, site of a recent battle against Dr. Doom:

Engst’s mutant powers are unrevealed at press time, but are rumored to include superhuman endurance, the ability to withstand inhuman terrain and weather conditions at his secret base in Ithaca, and the Bondi Blue Beam o’ Correct Punctuation.

In the dream I was having when I woke up this morning, I was making plans to go see a movie called “The Xeriactive Chrondriac”. Piecing together Greek and Latin roots, this appears to mean “the man with an extremely dry stomach.”

I infer that this movie is a foreign import, translated into English by a crack team of Oxbridge linguists, with estimated opening weekend box office receipts of $24. I’m also somewhat relieved that I woke up before actually seeing the movie.

It has just come to my attention that, over on PaperbackSwap, the “users who want this book also want” suggestion for a particular title are:

Perhaps if I had been shelved in that section, I’d have had a second printing.

In related news, with the discovery that there is a web site which will give you my book for free, we have broken all previous pricing records. The new record is expected to stand until another web site decides to actually pay you to take their copy.

Switching gears for a serious comment:

It occurs to me that it’s been 12 years since my book was published. There were 6,000 copies, total. Of which I just found 61 copies still available for sale on the Internet. Plus 84 copies in libraries, ranging from the Library of Congress to Singapore. I find this amazingly cool.

Okay, here’s a question that’s puzzling me. From Brian Greene’s talk on superstring theory, a frame showing the usual means of picturing the general theory of relativity:

In the center, you’ve got the Earth warping three-dimensional space, depicted here as the two-dimensional plane in which the Moon orbits. (Actually, it’s depicted as the plane one lunar radius below the orbital plane, as the Moon appears to be rolling.) The Moon is pulled by the Earth in the same way that a marble would roll down a similar incline. Simple enough.

Here’s the question: in which direction is space warped? That is, to depict the warping of a 2-dimensional plane, you need three dimensions; we use depth here to show the inclination of the moon to head back into the Pacific basin from whence it came. Therefore, since it’s actually 3-dimensional space that’s being warped, presumably the direction of the warp must be into a fourth spatial dimension.

The obvious answer is that the direction of the warp is an artifact of the depiction: 3-dimensional space doesn’t need a direction to warp, any more than you need three dimensions to stretch out a flat sheet of pizza dough. But if that’s the case, if we’re talking about a warped three-dimensional space, don’t we need an external 3-dimensional frame of reference against which to measure the changes to our own space? And if so, is that a purely mathematical construct, or is there a physical analogue?

I have a gut feeling that this question is either blindingly brilliant or blindingly obvious. Probably the latter.

I’m two years behind on this image, which was brought to my attention by Carolyn Porco’s TED presentation:

Not visible in this resized version, but clearly evident in the original, is Saturn’s moon Epimethus, whose gas jet from its south pole is responsible for the thin ring outside the main body. If you’re wondering why a saturnine moon has a gas jet, Porco discusses the theory that it’s caused by internal high temperatures and pressures acting on a subsurface body of water, vented through fissures in the surface. These are ideal conditions for the creation and eventual discovery of life.

Which is perhaps not so surprising, as the only known body in the solar system which has life on it also makes a cameo appearance. In this excerpt, you can see Earth (normally occluded by solar light), waving hello.

Via The Daily WTF, this is my new favorite error message of all time:

I’m crossposting a comment I made in the ongoing thread over at Brian Greenberg’s ISBS, mainly because I think it’s a fine bit of writing that I don’t mind showcasing here. Secondly because it’s a bit far afield from our original topic. Thirdly because I’m reasonably sure I still have readers who think I have my head firmly lodged up my ass on matters military and geopolitical, and I’d like to hear them tell me why.

That said, while comments here are welcome, you’re invited first to click over and join us on Brian’s site.

Finally, there are edits made to this excerpt, primarily because what I thought flowed well as part of a comment reply looked too much like an ad hominem phrasing when lifted out of context. Brian and I disagree on a great many things, but fundamentally, if I’ve gotten heated in my debates with him over the years, it’s because I can never understand how a fine mind and great heart like his can see things so differently. It concerned me that my original text would give the opposite impression here, so I took the liberty of making minor changes.

Excerpt follows:

You seem to be saying that, regardless of what the political objectives are of the war, or whether the war can be judged a success on various terms, that there is a value imbued to the effort by the sacrifices made and pride taken by the participants. You call this nobility.

You might be surprised to hear that I agree. I think it is noble to risk dying for one’s country or one’s beliefs. Ideally, an American soldier going into combat would feel the moral force of both behind him or her. What I find exceptionally noble is that, for many soldiers — and I expect the true numbers here are impossible to quantify — they no longer believe that the war was for country or American values, but they continue to fight for their comrades in arms. To have only that remaining, to have lost the notion that there’s a greater meaning behind the sacrifices they’re asked to make, makes what is going on all the more poignant.

Put another way: you and I both know that the way we shape our military, it really doesn’t matter how badly clusterfucked a military operation becomes. Our forces will fight for each other when nothing else remains. I think this makes it exceptionally important that our leadership and our citizens should be exceedingly stringent and miserly before we decide that it’s time to open up the can of American whoop-ass.

I expect you to reply now that for most of our troops, perhaps the majority, perhaps the overwhelming majority, this is not what they are fighting for — that they remain convinced that this effort is for country and American values, and that this justifies their continued sacrifice.

And this brings us to the million-casualty question. If it is inherently noble to die for your country or your beliefs, then are the Iraqi insurgents imbued with nobility? Were the 9/11 hijackers? Palestinian suicide bombers? Timothy McVeigh?

If the answer is no, then you cannot argue that such actions are inherently noble. You have to argue that the specifics of your country or your values are what imbue that nobility to dying for your cause. Which leads to only two possible conclusions regarding the assumption of nobility for American forces dying overseas:

1) The death of American soldiers is inherently noble because America is the Great Exception; alone among all nations, causes, and beliefs in the world, we are touched by God, or have some other similarly irrevocable status by dint of being American.

2) The death of American soldiers is causally noble because Americans fight for what we deem to be decent, honorable, and right, and because America has acted for over two centuries as a beacon disseminating our notions of these values to the world, much to the betterment of humankind.

Personally, I’m a fervent believer in the second formulation, and I equally believe that, in this time and in this case, we have eschewed too much of our own morality to continue to believe this of ourselves. We have invaded nations which did us no harms to justify war, in the manner of our worst historical enemies. We have killed, tortured, and imprisoned the innocent, and we have continually lied to ourselves and to the world about the worst of our excesses and the worst of our actions.

Then, to justify ourselves, we wrap ourselves in the undeserved nobility that we ascribe to the poor bastards we ship overseas to fight and die, in that remaining scrap of the best of ourselves. The more we believe in the indomitable nobility of the American soldier, the more we can believe in the indomitable nobility of America, regardless of how much we shit upon our cherished beliefs.

Yes, the American soldier does maintain this nobility, because they continue to die for their country, or their beliefs, or their friends. But we do not deserve to bask in any dim reflection of their sacrifice.

Which leads me to the last of what you said, which I see as the dying gasp of American triumphalism to which we cling, that Tony Snow and by extension America’s leadership “likely knew more about what it’s like in Iraq than either of us ever will”. Because we desperately want to believe that our leaders are wise, and informed, and will act in the best interests of the nation.

Unfortunately, there is ample evidence and history that this simply has not been true. Our leaders have ignored what they could have known, rejected what they did not want to hear, lied continuously, and have broken faith consistently with both the American people and the American soldier. They could have chosen otherwise; they had the resources and the tools to be informed and act wisely, and they chose instead to act on gut instinct and a near-messianic belief in their own rightness and closeness to God.

This is why I think we all should have been terrified when we heard administration officials refer to their opponents as the “reality-based community.” Those who supported the Bush administration, the neoconservatives, and the warmongers collectively made our horror into a national joke. The price we’re paying now is precisely because if America deserves the mantle of righteousness, it is because we have had for two centuries a partial track record of being right. Of being correct. Of seeing the world for what it is and speaking of what it could be.

You can’t be right if you don’t know of whence you speak. And that is why I can’t mourn the death of the spokesman for those who have been so catastrophically, blindly, blisteringly, painfully wrong, and who spoke in America’s name as they were doing so.

Via Boing Boing, Scientific American interviews the author of Becoming Batman, due out in October.

Over on I Should Be Sleeping, Brian and I are having an interesting discussion on what’s appropriate following the death of a perhaps-controversial celebrity. By all means, join us if you care to make my opinions sound less inappropriate (or more so).

Speaking of inappropriate, I swear to God, when I saw this screenshot on another blog:

What I thought I saw was this:

According to Wikipedia, Max Headroom [1985] “presents a dystopic look at a run-down near-future dominated by television and large corporations.” Interesting time for that image to pop up, subconsciously or not.