On Tuesday, I attended a Q&A session hosted by Blackwell books at the School of Oriental and African Studies’ Brunei Gallery. The speaker for the evening was journalist, author, and documentary film-maker John Pilger (he has his own website at www.johnpilger.com and a blog at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free website). The topic for discussion was his new book Freedom Next Time, where historian and author Mark Curtis, when reviewing the book for the Guardian, said “the voiceless” are “given a voice”. Johann Hari of the Independent was less flattering but still complimentary, trying to “stand between … admiring [Pilger’s] great skills and exposés but weeping over his occassional follies”. “Freedom Next Time mostly showcases Pilger at his best,” he said, but “flaws can be spotted”, concluding that “when Pilger is good, he is great, but when Pilger is bad, he reeks.”

Not having read the book myself, I was interested to hear what Mr. Pilger had to say. I’ve read and seen some of his previous works (The New Rulers of The World being a particularly favourite of mine), and agreed with many of his observations from time to time, so I knew what to expect. I was also particularly interested in his thoughts on South Africa, where I come from, and his observations regarding Nelson Mandela. Twelve A5 pages of hand-scribbled notes later, here is a summary of his talk, and the Q&A session that followed, along with some of my own thoughts. I’ll split this into two parts, one for his outline, and the other for the Q&A session, to cut down on the overall length. [And, to clarify: all links used in the article are not meant to reflect sources that Pilger himself may or may not have used to substantiate his comments, I simply searched the Net to try find out more, and linked to relevant pieces.]

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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).

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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).

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.

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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”.

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It seems the NSA snooping scandal has taken a little twist. ABC News journalists Brian Ross and Richard Esposito have claimed that a federal source told them “the government is tracking the phone numbers we … call in an effort to root out confidential sources.”

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One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups�??and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it’s all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And�??cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another.

From Philip K. Dick’s work, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978

Ever since watching the films Powaqqatsi and Koyaanisqatsi, I was turned towards director Godfrey Reggio�??s ideas about technology as environment, that “it�??s no longer something we use, but something we live. The popular myth of neutrality, that technology is �??neutral�?� and it�??s the use or misuse of it that determines its value, I think is woefully inadequate.”

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“Out the box” is one of my worst business catch-phrases ever since I worked for a guy who was a walking catch-phrase dictionary. He couldn’t seem to talk without some abbreviation or acronym coming out his mouth. Regardless, the description suits this case because it’s good to see someone talking about new business models when it comes to music, file sharing, and copyright. The company in question is Nettwerk, run by a Terry McBride, and the model is something he calls “behavioural marketing”.

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The Guardian has a damn interesting article about the new Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology about to hit consumers with HD and Blu-Ray: The Advanced Access Content System backed and co-developed by Sony, Toshiba, Intel, IBM, Panasonic, Microsoft, Warner Brothers and Disney. This quote from Mike Evangelist of HD Boycott puts it in perspective:

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