SubscribeThe Foresight institute’s Nanodot blog has posted a link to a really interesting discussion from the National Press Club’s meeting about nanotechnology (NanoWorld: Toward a Policy for the Human Future, see here for a press release). Andrew Kimbrell, director of the International Centre for Technology Assessment, gave a speech (from about an hour into the conference) where Nanodot’s blog characterised him as someone who “opposes nanotech”. Just finished listening to his talk (in fact, everyone’s speeches), and I cannot help but feel this characterization to be a terrible misrepresentation of what he was arguing. He did not “oppose nanotech” in so much as he seemed to oppose the non-transparent, corporate and military controlled, profit driven, unregulated, and patented way this technology is being developed, instead wanting to link nanotech development with values, keeping patents within the commons, pushing for transparency etc. I cannot help but agree with much of what he said, probably because he echoed a lot of my own concerns. Here’s a summary of what he spoke about (my apologies if some things aren’t transcribed properly).
More4 (UK) screened a doc on TV the other night entitled “Tank Man”, covering the protestor who stood in front of a line of tanks at Tiannemen Square in 1989. (A homepage for the film can be found at PBS’s Frontline). The most amazing segment (for me, anyway) was when a group of Beijing university students (from one of the capital’s universities that were heavily involved in the protests at the time) were shown the infamous photo of the man against the machines of tyrrany. Not one of the students knew what it represented. China’s mastery over history appears to be complete, bringing George Orwell’s classic statement to life: “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” (Of course, China’s by no means unique; western democracies have learnt how to keep things quiet, too, albeit a bit differently).
The Washington Post recently reported on US war crimes during the Korean War. In 1999, an AP story about refugees being shot by US soldiers at No Gun Ri was investigated by the Pentagon, which concluded it was “an unfortunate tragedy”, and “not a deliberate killing.” But a recently discovered memo from then-US Korean Ambassador John J. Muccio refutes this claim. Addressed to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, it states:
If refugees do appear from north of US lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.
Charming stuff. Wonder if that’ll get into the school history books.
More on Social Hacking with Games
Looks like using computer games to help hack social networks is becoming all the rage these days. Wired is reporting that an Iranian game “designed by schoolchildren belonging to the Union of Islamic Student Societies” is to be released next year:
Rugged veteran Iranian special forces hero “Commander Bahman” will soon be tackling one of his toughest missions, rescuing one of his country’s top atomic scientists captured by U.S. forces in Iraq. […] The Fars news agency said that in the game’s narrative Iranian atomic scientist “Doctor Kousha” goes on a pilgrimage to the Shi’ite Muslim holy city of Kerbala in Iraq where he is seized by U.S. troops.
Arphids: BBC Doc Looks at Corporate Big Brother
Great doc just screened on BBC called Is business the real Big Brother?
“As we move throughout cities, throughout our jobs and lives, there are technologies and devices everywhere which capture our movements, capture our activities, which are then stored on databases as evidence of what we’ve been doing.”
- Dr Kirstie Ball, Open University
You can download it here. (I just started reading Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID. Excellent, expect a review soon, but definitely read this book).
There’s no love lost between the US and Venezuela. The country’s leader, Hugo Chavez, was overthrown by a US-backed military coup which quickly backfired when a populist uprising returned him back into power. Chavez recently kicked out the US-based New Tribes Mission accusing them of being involved in “true imperialist infiltration, the CIA, they take away sensitive, strategic information” and “exploiting the Indians”. The US, for their part, have repeatedly warned against Chavez, with Condolezza Rice accusing him of a “Latin brand of populism that has taken countries down the drain”.
But today comes an interesting story from ZDNet, who says that US gaming company Pandemic Studios’ upcoming game Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is being denounced by Venezuelan lawmakers as “a U.S. government-inspired propaganda campaign against Chavez that could even help lay the psychological groundwork for an actual invasion”:
Wired is reporting that a video game that exists within the online game Second Life is causing a stir - apparantly because it’s mimicking the real world where parents no doubt moan the fact that their kids are online all the time playing games like Second Life.
“People started to complain that Tringo was harming the culture,” says Wagner James Au, the writer who has reported on Second Life as an “embedded” journalist for the last three years. “They felt it was ruining the social nature of the game. People were just showing up to play. They weren’t socializing or buying stuff any more.”
In essence, it was classic libel against video games: That they encourage isolation, with each player staring glassy-eyed at the evil, hypnotic screen. The irony here, of course, is that these complaints were coming from players who themselves were spending hours staring at their own computer screens while they played Second Life. Dig it: People were complaining that a game was ruining the quality of virtual life inside a game.
Of course, this said as much about the nature of Second Life as about Tringo. Second Lifers do not regard their world as a game: It’s a social environment, a chat room on steroids — a platform for an alternate life.
Just goes to show, even alternate realities can’t escape from reality.
New Scientist has an article on ‘Mashup Sites’, sites “created by merging data from two or more websites”. It was this interesting observation that caught my eye:
A hacker could feed false data to a crime location mashup, for example, perhaps to help raise property prices in a particular area by making it appear crime-free. A prankster could create bogus traffic jams on a mashup map, diverting traffic in such a way that queues are actually made worse.
This is simply using the content of the digital electric medium to manipulate people in a way similar to how governments and corporations can manipulate entire societies to go to war or to consume. However, the age old terms of propaganda and advertising are inadequate to explain today’s realities of manipulation and the ability of the “masters of the universe” to create other realities because today’s medium combines not only the old ones of TV, radio, and books into one, but also the actual active, participating minds of its users. I’ll explain this a bit more (I hope) but I’ll refer to this type of technique as “social hacking”. A good example of what I’m referring to (with a business twist) would the popular TV series Lost, which is completely viral new media using The Lost Experience, an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that utilizes fake books and websites to create an immersive world in conjunction with the TV show. It’s no longer just a show, it’s another reality.
As the digital-electric medium as a whole morphs to whatever tomorrow brings, the power to manipulate social groups, cities or countries can belong to sole individuals, which is one reason why governments have such paranoia regarding hackers accessing restricted or sensitive information (or having criminal intent, depending on your outlook or their intent). But tomorrows buzzword will probably be “sockers” and the threat they pose to the civilized world because they will use the content of the medium to manipulate groups of people or societies. A forerunner to what I’m talking about is probably The Yes Men, hacking the business world to expose the WTO for what they are. How is what they do actually possible? Because today’s electronic medium represents the autoamputation of our mind, and tomorrow’s Internet of Things will be the autoamputation of reality. In other words, our minds and reality are becoming the content of the medium itself, and this has profound implications for us.
I’ve mentioned the Government-Private partnership on snooping before, in particular a speech given by Michael Chertoff who was remarkably candid on how the government and the private sector can work together, whereby the private sector can “create a marketplace for the technology and a marketplace for the systems”. He was talking specifically about screening travellers, but they apply equally well to the current NSA scandal. Business Week recently reported that purchasing “commercially collected data allows the government to dodge certain privacy rules”.
Bruce Sterling on Arphids, Spime and the Future
I attended a talk last night by sci-fi author and “futurist” Bruce Sterling at the Space Studios near Bethnal Green in London. (I say “futurist” because, as Bruce pointed out during the evening, futurist isn’t really accurate anymore, being an old term from the 60’s where you could actually do futurist studies). Here’s a brief summary of the topics he spoke about, and some of my own thoughts.