In Search of a Free System: WikiLeaks & Tron
In The Hacker Ethic, Pekka Himanen argues that the hacker community’s values are a “general social challenge” which include “the goal of getting everybody to participate in the network and to benefit from it, to feel responsible for longer term consequences of the network society, and to directly help those who have been left on the margins of survival” (Himanen, 2001).
In the case of WikiLeaks, hacker-activists (organizing under the broad and decentralized social movement known as Anonymous) are emerging as hacktivist heroes coming to the defense of free speech, public cyberspace and an open internet. In the same moment the sequel to Tron is about to premier, cyberactivism is front and center in the media, discussions online and global government actions and policy debates. The hacktivists responding to WikiLeaks share at least one goal with the heroes of Tron: a “free system.”
…the radical nature of general hackerism consists of its proposing an alternative spirit for the network society – a spirit that finally questions the dominant Protestant ethic. In this context we find the only sense in which all hackers are really crackers: they are trying to crack the locks of the iron cage. (Himanen, 2001)
In Tron, religion is both a belief in Users, the humans who write programs, and also the struggle for a “free system.” The belief in Users comes up in a discussion between a program named Crom and one of the guards who is about to force Crom into the equivalent of a gladiatorial contest:
Crom: Look. This… is all a mistake. I’m just a compound interest program. I work at a savings and loan! I can’t play these video games!
Guard: Sure you can, pal. Look like a natural athlete if I ever saw one.
Crom: Who, me? Are you kidding? No, I run to check on T-bill rates, I get outta breath. Hey, look, you guys are gonna make my User, Mr. Henderson, very angry. He’s a full-branch manager.
Guard: Great. Another religious nut. [pushes Crom into the holding cell]
After he’s in the cell, the conversation about Users continues with a fellow prisoner:
Ram: I’d say “Welcome Friend”. But not here. Not like this.
Crom: I don’t even know what I’m doing here.
Ram: Do you believe in the Users?
Crom: Sure I do. If I don’t have a User, then who wrote me?
Ram: That’s what you’re doing down here. You really think the users are still there?
The living programs in this computer-world are pressured, through a program of domination and oppression by the military forces of the Master Control Program, to renounce belief in the Users (and therefore also in the possibility of a free system). Their belief is called “superstitious and hysterical,” they are tortured, forced to fight one another and eventually killed (de-rezzed). We can see parallels with early Christians here, imprisoned by Romans and waiting to be sent into The Colosseum.
Of course, they are also the resistance movements in WWII Europe, the IRA, the PLO, the American revolutionaries of the 13 colonies and the American socialists of the 1930s and the radicals in Seattle in 1999, and the Central and South American freedom fighters, etc. They are archetypal resistance fighters in the struggle against oppression, occupation and domination. The forces of domination claim their resistance is about superstitious belief in Users, but this isn’t the depth of their belief. Their cause is religious because it is about their belief in a possible better world, it is what Tillich called “ultimate concern” and what Dewey called “our common faith.”
The humans/Users also debate the religious nature of their programming work – for example this conversation between Dillinger, an evil CEO who has taken control of the corporation Encom and who is doing the bidding of the malicious Master Control Program (MCP) and Dr. Gibbs, one of the company founders and original programers:
Ed Dillinger: Encom isn’t the business you started in your garage anymore. We’re billing accounts in thirty different countries; new defense systems; we have one of the most sophisticated pieces of equipment in existence.
Dr. Walter Gibbs: Oh, I know all that. [starts for the elevator] Sometimes I wish I were back in my garage.
Ed Dillinger: That can be arranged, Walter.
Dr. Walter Gibbs: [stops and turns back to Dillinger, visibly angry] That was uncalled for! You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it! And our spirit remains in every program we design for this computer!
Ed Dillinger: Walter, it’s getting late. I’ve got better things to do than to have religious discussions with you. Don’t worry about ENCOM anymore; it’s out of your hands now.
The “spirit” of Dr. Gibbs does exist inside the computer, in the form of the temple gaurdian Dumont who says they “keep me around in case one of them wants to deal with the other side.” Programs inside the system use his input-output tower to communicate with their users. It is, for them, a temple for access to the divine.
But the goal of commuicating with the users isn’t salvation, forgiveness or enlightenment, the goal of access to this divine communion is access to information. The Master Control Program is a machine of governmentality, reproducing repression, controlling the lives of programs through censorship by preventing them from having access to communication with their Users. The MCP’s power comes from its ability to operate in secret and without oversight and it complains about the presence of Tron, saying:” I can’t afford to have an independent program monitoring me.” Tron is a threat because he is a conduit for free access to information. As Tron says:
My User has information that could… that could make this a free system again! No, really! You’d have programs lined up just to use this place (the input-output tower), and no MCP looking over your shoulder.
Information can “make this a free system again.” Kevin Flynn, the human/User protagonist of the film, is a hacker, a cyberactivist, he is a hacktivist. Flynn’s rallying cry in the film is echoed by the hackers who are organizing around a social movement in defense of an open and free internet: “Now for some real user power.”
References
Himanen, P., Castells, M. (2001). The Hacker Ethic, and the Spirit of the Information Age. New York: Random House.
Google’s Autocomplete Algorithm
A friend shared this series of Google autocomplete search results on a social network, it contains screen captures of Google’s autocomplete feature along with a venn diagram produced from the resulting terms:
I was curious if I would get the same terms, so I tried it. As soon as I found that my results for “Why are Buddhists” were different in than the screen capture in the image above I decided to take more of my own samples. I tried out a few religions that came to mind off the top of my head. Here are the results of my autocomplete searches, taken today between 11:11 and 11:15:
Google autocomplete is described as an “algorithm” that “offers searches that might be similar to the one you’re typing.” Based on the description below of how they are produced, you may have different results when you search:
As you type, Google’s algorithm predicts and displays search queries based on other users’ search activities. These searches are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. All of the predicted queries shown have been typed previously by other Google users. The autocomplete dataset is updated frequently to offer fresh and rising search queries. In addition, if you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, you may see search queries from relevant searches that you’ve done in the past.
Mutiny and Modernism
The morning watch was come; the vessel lay
Her course, and gently made her liquid way;
The cloven billow flashed from off her prow
In furrows formed by that majestic plough;
The waters with their world were all before;
Behind, the South Sea’s many an islet shore.
The quiet night, now dappling, ‘gan to wane,
Dividing darkness from the dawning main;
The dolphins, not unconscious of the day,
Swam high, as eager of the coming ray;
The stars from broader beams began to creep,
And lift their shining eyelids from the deep;
The sail resumed its lately shadowed white,
And the wind fluttered with a freshening flight;
The purpling Ocean owns the coming Sun,
But ere he break– a deed is to be done.
. . .
Excerpt from “The Island,” in The Works of Lord Byron, vol. 5, (1904)
In 1787, a three masted sailing ship was refitted, named “Bounty” and commissioned to transplant breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies, in hopes that the plant could serve as food for workers enslaved by the British empire. As the crew spent months on Tahiti preparing the plants for transport they “went native,” getting traditional tattoos and otherwise “interacting” with the local population. Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian married a Tahitian woman.
After setting sail with the potted breadfruit plants on board, Christian mutinied about 1,300 miles west of Tahiti. Christian and his men sent Captain Bligh and those loyal to him adrift on the ships launch. After a failed attempt to settle on Tubuai, Christian, his crewmen, and the accompanying Tahitian men and women (some of whom were kidnapped) eventually ‘found’ Pitcairn Island and settled. They burned their ship in Bounty Bay, January 1790 and evaded discovery by the British navy until 1814 at which time only one of the mutineers was still alive. This is, at least, the story that is told about the mutiny on the Bounty.
Today, about 50 people live on Pitcairn Island and the majority are descendants of the original Bounty mutineers (and the Tahitians or Polynesians who were married to mutineers or enslaved by them or both). After a mission arrived in the 1880s, much of the island population was converted to Seventh-day Adventism. The island has no airport or seaport and one small harbor visited a few times a year by boats from passing or chartered cargo and passenger ships. When, in the late 1990s, several male islanders were convicted of sexual abuses the British government set up a prison on the island to hold them.
And now, 221 years after the mutiny on the Bounty, an iPad has landed on Pitcairn Island. It’s owned by Andrew Randall Christian, a seventh generation descendant of Fletcher Christian, leader of the mutineers who seized command of the boat from Captain Bligh.
Andrew Christian offers web design services on the island, and the pacific island state has .pn domain names for sale. The island does have phones via satellite communication, ATVs, one paved road and other modern technology, but even so there is something worth noting, it seems, about the arrival of this device in such a “remote” place. This exemplar of modern consumer technology, a stand-in for everything current in computing, has arrived on an island in the sea, a location with a great deal of myth-power. The island is the setting for an archetype of mutiny which has been represented and remixed in literature, poetry, music, film and science fiction.
In the fourth film of the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a Klingon Bird-of-Prey (an alien warship) commandeered by James T. Kirk (Captain of the Enterprise) is given the name “HMS Bounty” by Leonard McCoy (physician and friend to Kirk). Kirk seizes the Klingon ship while rescuing his friend Spock (the alien science officer) and once he has saved him Kirk and his crew decide to return to Earth in order to face the charges against them. In the previous films, Kirk had stolen and subsequently destroyed his own ship (the Enterprise). En route to their trial, the effects of a mysterious alien probe on Earth leave the mutineers the only hope for saving the planet. They must travel back in time in search of a humpback whale (a species extinct by their time), because only the whales can communicate with the alien ship in Earth orbit. While in the past (1980s USA), they are faced with the problems of navigating a society that “still uses money” and two of the team are mistaken for “the enemy” (read as Soviet in this Cold War era film) by the crew of a US military nuclear aircraft carrier; the USS Enterprise, of course. While the similarities between Kirk’s crew and the original Bounty mutineers are minimal, a more interesting connection can be woven between the Star Trek franchise and the arrival of the iPad on Pitcairn Island.
The Star Trek television series brought early examples of an iPad-like device into American homes in the late 1960s. An electronic clipboard (below) showed up in the original television series (1966-1969), with what may have been the closest thing to a touch screen available at the time: a ‘magic slate’ (the childhood pressure writing tablet that is erased by lifting up the top layer).
Decades later, in Star Trek the Next Generation (1987-1994), a new version of the device became ubiquitous in the series. In nearly every episode of the re-invention of the franchise, crew members are shown working on a “PADD” (Personal Access Display Device), seen here in the hands of Captain Jean-Luc Picard played by Patrick Stewart.
The PADD was only one example of the widespread use of touch-screen technology in the new Star Trek universe of the late 80s, early 90s. After his work in the mid 80s on displays in Star Trek IV, Michael Okuda was put in charge of designing the displays for the Next Generation beginning in 1987. The images Okuda designed for the PADD screen represent the graphical user interface (GUI) of an omnipresent, wirelessly networked and embedded supercomputer that monitors and manages everything occurring on the starship Enterprise. This new iteration of the Enterprise, an enormous space faring vessel sent out to explore the universe, was once again named after a long line of non-fictional sea and space-faring ships (from the Nuclear powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, to NASA’s Space Shuttle Enterprise). The touch-screen aesthetic and representations of the GUI on this imagined future Enterprise, came to be known as “okudagrams” after their designer. I remember, around this time, getting a new microwave with a touch-pad, and thinking how futuristic it was because of the similarity to the touch-screen controls on the Enterprise. Although the microwave controls were simply flat pressure buttons and not a touch-screen, the aesthetic clearly echoed the okudagrams.
And now, with Apple’s iPad, a real touch-screen PADD is available as a consumer computing device. On the Enterprise, crew and civilians interacted with their computers socially through spoken commands and holographic simulations, and through touch-screens always within reach. Like the PADD of Star Trek, the iPad is wireless with access to vast networks of information, and it’s possible to use your voice to communicate with it, or use the iPad to augment reality. Kueger Systems, Inc. has written an application that allows users to read internet content in a GUI based on the LCARS interface of the okudagrams: LCARS Internet Media Reader for iPad.
In referencing mutiny on the Bounty, Star Trek IV calls on an historical event, an archetype of romanticized mutiny in popular culture, and weaves that myth into an intergalactic adventure back to the ocean of the past to save the Earth. Time travel is occurring on multiple levels here. With the PADD and touch-screen surfaces of the Next Generation, the franchise later imagined a post-desktop model of human-computer interactions and contributed to the aesthetic and language of ubiquitous computing. Now a product of that imaginative universe of speculative fiction is in the hands of a direct descendent of the the Bounty mutineer.
Clearly the capitalist mode of production had a role to play in bringing about this encounter between the mutineer’s descendant and the iPad, but consider also that the personal computer was a product of the 1960s counter-culture revolution. Personal computers are children of psychedelic culture and the resulting mind-states, and the internet is a daughter of DARPA. The iPads parents are both Hacker/Hippies and Four-Star Generals from the armies of Wall Street. Consider also that Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek didn’t originally imagine the Borg (an army of collectivist cyborgs bent on assimilating the universe) as an enemy but as a utopian society; an ideal for humanity to aspire to. Consider that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., said in reference to his time as a student (at my own alma mater Reed College) that the courses in traditional calligraphy offered at the time were an enormous influence on his design of the first Macintosh computer. Cyborgs, calligraphy, hackers, communism, psychedelics, marine and intergalactic mutineers, whales and time travel… What is all of this, and what does it all mean? Perhaps there isn’t “meaning” to be written, but instead there are relationships to describe, interactions to explore and stories to tell.
Reading David Harvey critiquing the “contrived depthlessness” (Jameson’s language) of post-modern cultural production (The Condition of Post-Modernity, 1989), I’m struck by the ways in which one can locate depth by including more layers in the analysis, by exploring more dimensions, and allowing for more historical time. The PADD is part of our mythology of technology, progress, and the future, an ancient story older than writing – and the iPad is equally product of and contributor to that myth. Technology is embedded in a mutually shaping exchange with our mythology, our narratives about technology seem to produce technology as much as the capitalists’ desire for surplus drives the advancing of technology and expansion of production.
And so to the claim of a post-modernity limited to merely surfaces, I respond by peeling back and shuffling layers and drawing them out to see what stories we can tell. I contemplate my position as a former “Reedie” (like Jobs), a descendent of Sir Henry Morgan (a pirate), an Apple technology worker and a trekkie/trekker (a fan of Star Trek) as well as an anthropologist and a scholar of religion and technology. And from that position, I reflect on Andrew Randall Christian, seventh generation descendent of the original mutineer of the Bounty, sitting on Pitcairn Island, iPad in hand, watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage home.
The cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation in Generations (1994)
Cyberactivism, iPhone 4 and The Courage to Be
(Note: This post was originally published on an blog about Apple technology, based on a few requests I’m making it available here. -MOR)
Apple has been hard at work the last few years building their reputation as a ‘socially responsible’ company. Like other greenwashing corporations (Whole Foods for example), this reputation is 9/10ths marketing and 1/10th wishful thinking from the cult of Mac. Yes, Apple did change components in their products to reduce toxicity and increase ease of recycling, and they do ‘check out’ the factories where their products are manufactured, and wasn’t Kermit the Frog in one of their ad campaigns along with Gandhi and the Dalai Lama? But does coming out with a ‘new and better’ product every few months and holding back features to encourage upgrade purchases really help reduce waste? And what are the standards they use to ‘check out’ those factories? Standards you would accept if you worked there?
So, we need to be asking Apple why workers at the Foxconn plant in China where they’ve been making the new iPhones, are committing suicide. Or we could just ask the workers:
continue reading "Cyberactivism, iPhone 4 and The Courage to Be"
Burqa v2
The Washington Post is reporting that the Bush administration is prepared to begin directing our most advanced spying technology on our own citizens. This includes advanced satellite systems.
We are entering the era of total surveillance. Every movement will soon be tracked – every cell phone call will enable location tracking – with clear line of sight, this technology will mean that you can be watched, from space, by your government.
Every time we tag a photo in facebook, we’re contributing to the facial recognition database. And every time we walk down the street our faces are captured by CCTV. Every book we list on myspace is entered into the matrix and one day, soon – perhaps you will have engaged in the requisite activities to be considered an enemy.
Will we see a movement toward wearing hoods and masks in public at all times? And will there be an attempt to regulate this? What if the hoods are worn for religious reasons? Will the face covering practice of fundamentalist Islam become the last refuge of the revolutionaries?
The Glue Society
Biblical events as if seen on Google earth.
God’s Eye View (Ark)
Network Surveillance Voyuerism
Devices are always watching us – and feeding data into the network. This OS X screensaver by Michael Zoellner searches for CCTV feeds and displays them. Very eerie.
The Temple of Apple
ZDnet posts an article called “Mac OS X Leopard installation as a spiritual practice“. I’m engaging in that practice right now – preparing my various Macs for the upgrade, the archive and install and the clean install. But it’s more than the installation that is spiritual.
To retrieve the software, I walked through the rain to wait in line at the Apple Store on 59th and 5th. A huge illuminated glass cube rising out of the midtown/central park architecture, the flagship Apple store can only be described as a temple.
After waiting in line, I was greeted by a collection of Apple store ‘evangelists’ standing by the entrance cheering and clapping for us. Upon entering the store, I was handed a “Leopard” t-shirt and encouraged to use the “Leopard only” purchasing line. Holographic DVD box in hand, I proceeded down a long path with ropes on either side to a special cashier who took my electronic form of payment for this virtual environment in a box I have been religiously anticipating for months…
The operating system on the hill… has arrived.
