Shouldn't there be a pillar of *political engagement* where people get off the couch and out of their ergonomic chairs as a product of normative/cognitive et al effects -- that is somewhat to the side of what we generally think of as "legal/legislative" or "normative" effects but belongs in its own category as social movement smudging into civil unrest or asymmetrical actions?
In the age of the "empowered individual" where the NSA is going to the expense of tens of billions in US dollars to track the actions of individuals engaged -- in theory -- in this kind of activity, it seems a mistake to disregard this kind of activity. We have also the NSA cursing that "Tor Stinks," the FBI tracking pacifist groups by mistakenly smacking their sites as terrorist cells, the five eyes hunting journalism couriers -- isn't this the very beating *heart* of liberation technology? The chilling effects against organizing nonviolently that are being woven into the very fabric of our culture and society are tactile. But certainly they shouldn't be overlooked here. We can not rely on elites to fight out these issues in the capitals, in the courts or in the rarified airs of the net or ivory towers. Eventually this has to be brought to the people of our modern democracies -- I believe that is what the Chinese water torture of these leaks is about, vs the tarball of Collateral Murder which made little impact on the collective popular conscience, or six years of Binney and company's pleading for attention hoping for attention from elites to elites while preserving the dignity of the corps. Further, I'd postulate that this is not fully about internet or other privacy -- even I can't say that. Privacy is collateral damage. This is about tens of billions of US dollars in black line budgets gone to cyberwarfare in the military industrial complex that is plainly under minimal oversight -- up to six hours a week of congressional committee time when Congress is in session, under the chair of a rubberstamp at least in the Senate, for seventeen agencies doing surveillance work -- a mechanism designed for oversight when surveillance work was intimate, and top secret clearances didn't involve .5% of the US population and the NSA alone wasn't the largest employer in the state of Maryland. As is true in most major political trainwrecks in DC, this is about power, money and influence on a grand scale. During the Bush administration, W's director of national security was Mike McConnell. W's dad was longtime hardcore head of the CIA before he had been president, so intel was a family business. Mike convinced W that cyberwarfare was the direction for the beltway, and W approved it. Mike went on to create a major initiative to help businesses on the beltway transition away from aerospace and so on to cyberwarfare, pushed bills in Congress, and then took the revolving door to become a major executive at Booz Allen Hamilton -- making him Snowden's boss a couple times removed. This entire affair is President/General Eisenhower's warning regarding the political potential of the military industrial complex come to roost. http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-military-expansion-50-years-later I'd invite you to consider that people do not spy without incentive, they do not grab power without incentive. Follow the money. Track power. Consider motivation. Don't villify people in cardboard ways. This is a game of thrones -- history doesn't end in history books. People are still motivated by power, money and influence. They are not "bad" people usually -- truly psychotic people are rarely stable enough to hold positions of leadership. But they are venal, greedy, power hungry, and highly directed in their goals. Psychologists tell us that 4% of the population are sociopaths, and 20-25% of CEOs are sociopaths -- by their definitions, a sociopath is someone who feels no inherent remorse or inhibition in breaking social norms to achieve a goal. Recently I've been discussing this with my own therapist. I suspect that psychology is missing something, being a person with a cogsci background. The hypothalamus inhibits social behavior by giving us signals of shame and submission when we break social norms as social mammals -- I suspect it has a lot to do with sociopathy. But I also suspect it has a lot to do with social reformers, who break social norms for altruistic ends, or law enforcement or military people who break social norms to protect and serve. A sociopath-for-good is a post-conventional thinker working for social change -- this would be a great many readers of this list. Foxes, hounds, sheepdogs -- we are those who work at a metalevel above the herd. But there is a herd. It's neurochemical and taboo to talk about it. Most people don't want to be seen as sticking their heads up. They don't want to take risks. They don't want to be part of a movement. They just want comfort and to be part of a well-kept social system. Their hypothalamus is well ordered as social mammals. Increasingly neuromarketing -- which is not only used by marketers but also by political campaigns and entertainment groups -- is working to integrate knowledge of brain science into their various campaigns. Since around the Clinton administration (and I used to be State Democratic Committeewoman for Oregon, worked on the Dean Campaign, been a lobbyist in DC, done oppo research for others, and ran a mayoral campaign for Portland OR, so I've had some privileged conversations here and there...) more and more campaigns have been run on marketing models more or less rather than issues -- issues provide plausible deniability. Transmedia would be a better model these days -- and more bluntly, one might call it a convergence of reality engineering among marketing, entertainment, and politics in terms of technology. What we are looking at, increasingly, is infowar, as a transition from cold war, on our own people, on everyone. Morlocks and ooloi. I position myself as an anti-obscurantist in this war, although I wonder if that's a welcome position to anyone involved. "We don't have to be sheep!" is rarely a welcome message. yrs, On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 10:40 AM, Nick <[email protected]> wrote: > Quoth Joseph Lorenzo Hall: > > Are there other kinds of normative/cultural/meme-worthy things we can > > collectively try to instill in folks? > > I do think "safety" is a word we should use more often. > > I really like how Schneier in the last few years has been talking > more about how people under surveillance tend to act more > normatively, which is crap at a societal level, but I'm not sure > whether that could be turned into one memorable sentence. It sucks > that we have to try and 'win' with slogans, but that's how people > are used to political 'debate' these days. Grumble grumble... > -- > Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations > of list guidelines will get you moderated: > https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. > Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at > [email protected]. > -- Shava Nerad [email protected]
-- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected].
