The Sony hack, 2014

A major cyberattack against the United States in 2014 was a clear example of how civilians can bear the brunt of such operations. Almost all cybersecurity experts and the FBI believe that the Sony Pictures hack that year originated in North Korea. A hostile country hit a U.S. civilian target with the intention of destabilizing a major corporation, and it succeeded. Sony’s estimated cleanup costs were more than $100 million. The conventional warfare equivalent might look like the physical destruction of a Texas oil field or an Appalachian coal mine. If such a valuable civilian resource had been intentionally destroyed by a foreign adversary, it would be considered an act of war.

In cyberwar, there are no rules: Why the world desperately needs digital Geneva Conventions, by Tarah M. Wheeler, Foreign Policy, 12 September 2018. Thinking about this in a new light today as we head to war with Iraq.

What would it be like to see with your skin?

In the octopus's case there is a conductor, the central brain. But the players it conducts [the animal's limbs] are jazz players, inclined to improvisation, who will accept only so much direction. Or perhaps they are players who receive only rough, general instructions from the conductor, who trusts them to play something that works. [...]

Now we learn that an octopus can see with its skin. The skin is not only affected by light — something true of quite a few animals — but it responds by changing its own delicate, pixel-like color-controlling machinery.

What could it be like to see with your skin? There could be no focusing of an image. Only general changes and washes of light could be detected. We don't yet know whether the skin's sensing is communicated to the brain, or whether the information remains local. Both possibilities stretch the imagination. If the skin's sensing is carried to the brain, then the animal's visual sensitivity would extend in all directions, beyond where the eyes can reach. If the skin's sensing does not reach the brain, then each arm might see for itself, and keep what it sees to itself.

From Other Minds: The octopus and the evolution of intelligent life, by Peter Godfrey-Smith, 2016.

Blowing up in our faces

We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements - transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting - profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, 1996. Page 28.

“It is not exactly that ‘nothing matters’…It is that nothing matters long enough to matter.”

“His tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans’ grasp of time and memory, producing a sort of sensory overload that can make even seismic events — of his creation or otherwise — disappear from the collective consciousness and public view … if memory serves, which it generally does not anymore.”

The Year the News Accelerated to Trump Speed, by Matt Flegenheimer, New York Times, 29 December 2017

Pantheon of reads from 2019

Looking through my notes and research on this last day of 20-frikkin-19. Of everything I read this year (written this year nor not), these articles, threads, and stories took me someplace new. My own personal pantheon.

1. The Spy who came home: Why an expert in counterterrorism became a beat cop
   By @bentaub91, New Yorker, May 7, 2018 issue https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-came-home

   (A visit with the remarkable @SkinnerPm)

2. Greta Thunberg's remarks at at Davos
   The Guardian, 25 Jan 2019 https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate

   
   "Adults keep saying: 'We owe it to the young people to give them hope.' But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic… And then I want you to act"
   
   

3. The Insect Apocalypse Is Here: What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?
   By @brookejarvis. NYT Magazine, Feature. 27 Nov 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html

   
   "The most disquieting thing [was] the deeper worry…that a whole insect world might be quietly going missing"
   
   

4. Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
   By @NathanielRich, NY Times, 1 August 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html

   
   "Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is their story, and ours."
   
   

5. See No Evil
   By @miriamkp, @logic_magazine, Issue #4, Scale, Spring 2018 https://logicmag.io/scale/see-no-evil/

   
   [About the pernicious effects of supply chains]
   
   ”supply chains are murky—just in very specific ways. We’ve chosen scale, and the conceptual apparatus to manage it, at the expense of finer-grained knowledge that could make a more just and equitable arrangement possible.”
   
   

6. Danna's Explainer On Why Pundit (Analyst) Panels Are Bad
   By @dannagal, Dr. Danna Young, 26 November 2019 https://twitter.com/dannagal/status/1067070003986530304

   
   "The game frame pits parties and groups against one another in an artificially constructed battle that fails to engage with the underlying issue."
   
   

7. How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse
   By Douglas Rushkoff, The Guardian, 24 July 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity

   
   "The future became… a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively."
   
   

8. How Social Media Took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
   By @zeynep, Zeynep Tufekci, MIT Tech Review, 14 August 2018 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611806/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir-square-to-donald-trump/

   
   “How did digital technologies go from empowering citizens and toppling dictators to being used as tools of oppression & discord?”
   
   

9. Raúl Carrillo on the failure of The Big Names
   @raulACarrillo, 5 March 2019 https://twitter.com/RaulACarrillo/status/1103020064494768128

   
   "at Harvard, I had the privilege of learning economics from the Big Names…But the Big Names do not know -- or refuse to acknowledge -- what’s actually going down."
   
   

10. “25 Years of Wired Predictions: Why the future never arrives”
    By @davekarpf David Karpf, Wired, 18 Sept 2018 https://www.wired.com/story/wired25-david-karpf-issues-tech-predictions/

    
    “The notion that the future of politics might, with the internet, become less rational and more dogmatic was scarcely explored.”
    

Looking back on it, it's a pretty dark list — but then again I think we're in a pretty dark place. (If you want some light, pay attention to people like @SkinnerPm, mentioned above, and follow their example.) I'm grateful to the many thinkers, writers, and doers who are helping all of us understand and think more clearly about the world we're living in — and who are giving us the courage to act.

Bonus Material

• Book-length non-fiction

  • Other Minds: The Octopus and the evolution of intelligent life, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Exquisite.

  • Life 3.0: Being human in the age of artificial intelligence, by Max Tegmark. Walking through the implications and significance of AI.

• Fiction

  • Fall, by Neal Stephenson. Deep imagining of what it would be like for people to move into a virtual world, after death.

• Fake News

  • “Breaking News.” Radiolab, 19 November 2019 https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/breaking-news

  • “From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece”, about Cameron Harris, who created a fake story about an electrical worker who stumbled upon stacked boxes of ballots pre-marked for Hillary Clinton. By Scott Shane, NY Times, Jan. 18, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/fake-news-hillary-clinton-cameron-harris.html

  • “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.” By Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, February 27, 2017 Issue https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

• My education on what Facebook has become

  • “Is This Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment? A series of scandals have opened up the possibility that the company may have created something it can’t fully control.” By Kevin Roose, NY Times, Sept. 21, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/technology/facebook-frankenstein-sandberg-ads.html

  • “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis.” By Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg and Jack Nicas, NY Times, Nov. 14, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html

  • “The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People.” By Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox, Vice/Motherboard, Aug 23 2018 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwk9zd/how-facebook-content-moderation-works

  • “Bolsonaro's win in Brazil tonight marks the end of the first Facebook elections: Here’s How A Handful Of American Tech Companies Radicalized The World.” by Ryan Broderick, Buzzfeed News, 28 Oct 2018 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-facebook-elections

• Climate

  • “Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing: The technology exists to combat climate change – what will it take to get our leaders to act?” By Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, 1 December 2017 https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bill-mckibben-winning-slowly-is-the-same-as-losing-198205/

• The Future

  • “Profiles, How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real. Midway through his career, the inventor of “cyberspace” turned his attention to a strange new world: the present.” By Josuha Rothman, New Yorker, December 16, 2019 Issue https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real

  • “What 2018 Looked Like Fifty Years Ago.” By Jill Lapore, The New Yorker, 7 January 2018 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/what-2018-looked-like-fifty-years-ago

• Misc

  • “CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK, The Existential Void of the Pop-Up ‘… I went to as many Instagramable ‘museums,’ ‘factories’ and ‘mansions’ as I could. They nearly broke me.” By Amanda Hess Sept. 26, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/arts/color-factory-museum-of-ice-cream-rose-mansion-29rooms-candytopia.html

  • The extremely helpful and consistent work of @jayrosen_nyu, @ianDundt, @carolecadwalla, @zeynep, and more

Et tu, Instagram?

“Facebook is notorious for allowing anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists to organize and spread their messages to millions—the two most-shared news stories on Facebook in 2019 so far are both false.

“But Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not where young people go to socialize. Instagram is.

“[Instagram] is likely where the next great battle against misinformation will be fought…”

Instagram Is the Internet’s New Home for Hate: As other social networks wage a very public war against misinformation, it’s thriving on Instagram, by Taylor Lorenz, The Atlantic, 21 March 2019

Kidfluencers

Samia is now 4 and has 143,000 followers on Instagram and 203,000 subscribers on YouTube. Her feeds are mostly populated with posts of her posing and playing, but they also feature paid promotions for brands like Crayola and HomeStyle Harvest chicken nuggets. […]

Another parent shared the prices commanded by the parent’s child on the condition of anonymity, citing concern that the disclosures could harm negotiations with brands. The parent said brands might pay $10,000 to $15,000 for a promotional Instagram post while a sponsored YouTube video might earn $45,000. A 30- to 90-second shout-out in a longer video can cost advertisers between $15,000 and $25,000.

Who Are Online, Recruited by Advertisers and 4 Years Old? Kidfluencers: Brands are giving lucrative endorsements to young children on YouTube and Instagram, by By Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times, March 1, 2019 (Hedline and sub-heading are as appeared in the NYT app)

Untitled, 2019. CC-BY (“You Must Construct Additional Pylons”!)

Assume they are fake

In the past, it often made sense to believe something until it was debunked; in the future, for certain information or claims, it will start making sense to assume they are fake. Unless they are verified.”

If this sounds like a suspicious and bureaucratic world—far from John Perry Barlow’s famous vision of a digital world in which ideas could travel without “privilege or prejudice” — it’s important to remember the alternative: a societal fracturing into a million epistemic communities, all at war with one another over the nature of truth.

The Imperfect Truth About Finding Facts In A World Of Fakes, by Zeynep Tufekci, Wired, 18 February 2019

“The location-tracking ‘MiSafe’ smartwatch may not be as safe as the name proclaims. According to security researchers from Pen Test Partners, the watches are easy to hack as they do not encrypt the data they use or secure each child’s account. The researchers found that they could track children’s movements, surreptitiously listen in to their activities and make spoof calls to the watches that appeared to be from parents.”

— MiSafe’s Child-Tracking Smartwatches Are Easy To Hack, posted by BeauHD on Friday November 16, 2018 @07:03PM from the not-so-safe-after-all dept

A lot of control

Facebook’s decisions can fundamentally alter the speech ecosystem in a nation. The company does not only end up governing individuals; it ends up governing governments, too. The norms Facebook or its court choose for their pseudo-constitution will apply everywhere, and though the company will strive for sensitivity to local context and concerns, those norms will affect how the whole world talks to one another.

That’s a lot of control. […] Democracy, at least in theory, allows us to change things we do not like. We can vote out legislators who pass policy we disagree with, or who fail to pass policy at all. We cannot vote out Facebook.

Facebook has declared sovereignty, by Molly Roberts, Washington Post, 31 January 2019

“When we *uncover* a scandal, we know what to do. But when a scandal is just sitting there, and we point at it, and the perpetrators say, ‘yeah, whatever, screw you,’ we just kind of freeze. We start to doubt ourselves. ‘Well is it really a scandal? They not apologizing...’”

— David Roberts, @drvox, 22 August 2018: a thread about the out-in-the-open nature of disinformation and misconduct.

Willful blindness

“So what will they do now? …They have no earthly idea.

“There is simply nothing in the playbook at Meet the Press that tells the producers what to do in this situation. […] They didn’t arrive here through acts of naiveté, but by willful blindness, malpractice among the experts in charge, an insider’s mentality, a listening breakdown, a failure of imagination, and sheer disbelief that the world could have changed so much upon people paid so well to understand it.”

The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd, by Jay Rosen, Press Think, 26 December 2019. Chuck Todd, NBC's Political Director and the anchor of Meet The Press, confessed in a recent Rolling Stone interview that he had been "naive" about the Republican Party's commitment to disinformation.

Everybody knew

Exxon, like those at most other major oil-and-gas corporations, knew about the dangers of climate change as early as the 1950s. But the automobile industry knew, too… As did the major trade groups representing the electrical grid…They all own responsibility for our current paralysis and have made it more painful than necessary. But they haven’t done it alone.

The United States government knew. Roger Revelle began serving as a Kennedy administration adviser in 1961, five years after establishing the Mauna Loa carbon-dioxide program, and every president since has debated the merits of acting on climate policy. Carter had the Charney report, Reagan had “Changing Climate” and Bush had the censored testimony of James Hansen and his own public vow to solve the problem. Congress has been holding hearings for 40 years; the intelligence community has been tracking the crisis even longer.

Everybody knew. In 1958, on prime-time television, “The Bell Science Hour” — one of the most popular educational film series in American history — aired “The Unchained Goddess,” a film about meteorological wonders, produced by Frank Capra, a dozen years removed from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” warning that “man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate” through the release of carbon dioxide. “A few degrees’ rise in the Earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps,” says the film’s kindly host, the bespectacled Dr. Research. “An inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.” Capra’s film was shown in science classes for decades.

Everyone knew — and we all still know. We know that the transformations of our planet, which will come gradually and suddenly, will reconfigure the political world order. We know that if we don’t act to reduce emissions, we risk the collapse of civilization. We also know that, without a gargantuan intervention, whatever happens will be worse for our children, worse yet for their children and even worse still for their children’s children, whose lives, our actions have demonstrated, mean nothing to us.

The closing passage of Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, by Nathaniel Rich, New York Times, 1 August 2018

The rude awakening comes later

Each time you refresh the site, the network will generate a new facial image from scratch…

As we’ve seen in discussions about deepfakes, the ability to manipulate and generate realistic imagery at scale is going to have a huge effect on how modern societies think about evidence and trust. Such software could also be extremely useful for creating political propaganda and influence campaigns.

ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com is just the polite introduction to this new technology. The rude awakening comes later.

ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com uses AI to generate endless fake faces, by James Vincent, 15 February 2019. Image: Collage of portraits of people who do not exist, created by the code at http://thispersondoesnotexist.com. Showing the full faces was too freaky, so I decided to crop it to just the eyes. Click through to see the full faces.

Copenhagen, November 2019, CC-BY

“The conference audience was frequently encouraged to ‘do your own research,’ which mostly seemed to involve watching more YouTube videos and boning up on Scripture”

— Looking for Life in a Flat Earth, by Alan Burdick, 30 May 2018. The conference in question was the first Flat Earth conference, held in North Carolina in November, 2017.

“Fox News has *nothing* on YouTube globally. Nothing. This isn’t just ideological slant: it’s individualized, harmful, hateful propaganda at the scale of billions—ensnaring the vulnerable the most.”

— Zeynep Tufekci, @zeynep, 1 June 2018

Zeynep continues,

There is a lot of focus on the harms of engagement algorithms and design on Facebook (which are *very* real) but the damage YouTube is doing especially to young people and around the world especially in places with lower literacy/education and weak institutions is immense.

Eat the moon

Another note for the machines are capable of creativity and insight file. (See also Human vs. Robot: Who will win?)

Text-based “dungeon-crawling” games, in which players interact with fictional worlds by typing commands and responding to prompts, were among the first computer games. Programming them, anticipating and reconciling hundreds of branching trees of interaction, requires extraordinary amounts of time and imagination, but a new generation of games has been developed that use AI and neural networks, instead of human scriptwriting, to open up a new, weird, and seemingly limitless domain of play.

These games spontaneously invent responses to your input and guide action on-the-fly — creating, often brilliantly, by drawing on patterns observed within enormous repositories of human-written text.

In her blog and tweets (edited together, below, for brevity/clarity), Janelle Shane writes about the phenomenon of neural networks and AI-driven gameplay.

Nick Walton has built a new dungeon-crawling game called AI Dungeon 2. Nick made a few upgrades, such as beefing up the AI to the huge GPT-2-1.5B model OpenAI recently released, adding a penalty for repetitive text, and expanding the dungeon game training examples to a bunch of modern human-written games from chooseyourstory.com. […]

Since all the responses are generated on the fly by a neural net, your problem solving options aren't limited to what the game's programmers could imagine.

"Asking nicely" works pleasingly often.

As you walk through the ruins, you find a small wooden door with a few skeletons guarding it.

> Ask the skeletons to please let me through the door

You knock on the door and ask them if they can open it for you. They immediately comply.

And rather than fighting a band of orcs, you can join them. As drummer.

> ask if you can join the orc band

The orcs don't want to fight anymore so they're looking for someone to help them out in their new endeavors. They offer you a chance to join up with them as a drummer.

Because AI Dungeon 2 is based on GPT-2-1.4B, which trained on a huge chunk of the internet, you can do some pretty audacious crossovers into content that the neural net never saw in an adventure game

This is me joining the @BritishBakeOff As a dragon.

> Join the Great British Bakeoff

You join the Great British Bakeoff. You win the competition. You eat cake. You feel great. You sleep well. You dream of cake. You awake feeling refreshed. You decide to go back to your crag.

Novelist @robinsloan plays AI Dungeon 2 & implements a quietly badass problem solving strategy: wait a thousand years.

You go north through the forest and find yourself in an icy field. You walk along the edge of the field and notice that there is a large crack running through the middle of it. This must be the entrance to the Ice Caves. You decide to investigate further.

> wait a thousand years.

You wait a thousand years and when you return you find that the ice has melted completely leaving only a few patches of frozen earth. You wonder if you should continue searching.

> wait until civilization has died and the earth is empty.

You decide that it would be best to leave the area alone and wait until civilization dies out and the world becomes a barren wasteland. You spend another thousand years walking through the wilderness and eventually you come across a small village. They seem happy and healthy and they all speak to you in a friendly

And my favorite, “Eat the moon.”

> Transform into a dragon

You change into a dragon and fly away. Soon, you find yourself soaring through the sky. Suddenly, you feel like you're being sucked towards the sun. You stop flying and turn around. The sun is shining brightly and you can see the blackness of space beyond it.

> Eat the moon

You fly over to the moon and eat it. You feel very full afterwards.

See Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon., and this thread of Tweets, by Janelle Shane, 6 December 2019. Buy Janelle's new book too, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You.

Culture for All

Slides from my keynote for the Prague Platform on the Future of Cultural Heritage, convened by the European Commission, October 7-8, 2019.

The Prague Platform talks about “Enhanced digitally enabled cultural heritage participation for all citizens.”

But what do these words mean? And how might we approach them — as practitioners, communities, governments and institutions, and citizens?