Practice

magyar duda this time

i’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with activism in general. maybe a seed was planted in our previous project, but more and more we are seing a pattern in our “activist” guests, so here is a small note on that.

our guests claiming to be:

• human rights/political activists were just looking for a way to be arrogant towards everyone around them
• genderqueer, feminists and what not, were actually just looking for an excuse to be arrogant towards men
• anarchists were actually just looking for a way to impose their point of view over everyone else
• open minded and tolerant turned out to be the most arrogant and self obsessed
• squatters were actually just looking for a way to justify the luxurious way they lived in at home and to show up on tv during eviction
• chefs actually were just looking for a way to never do dishes
• vegetarians and vegans actually were just looking for an excuse not to eat other people’s food

our guests not claiming to be any of this, did the exact opposite:

• republicans, conservative, even shallow, turned out to be extraordinarily polite, tolerant and giving
• capitalists, economics and business majors turned out to be better at reciprocity than all the non profit supporting activists i met
• normal people turned out to be the best at helping, caring and listening
• homeless people turned out to be the best squatters i ever met, squatting places for decades

so what is going on? are we natural born hypocrites and liars?

what i think is going on is that people in the west confuse the superficial aspects with the essential aspects.

this is very obvious in an episode we had at the squat. frequently we would have young teenage punks, dressed in rigor, hanging out. one of the times, we were building a solar panel and one of the guys went down to call the kids. only one came but quickly left and the rest stayed playing cards downstairs, making time until they could get their parents’ lift to go home and post on facebook “just had a wonderful afternoon at the squat”.

what we have here is a confusion between what it is to be “X”. is it wearing the clothes, reading the books and knowing the spiel, or being something that is categorized later?

at work i had a similar case. we do a lot of logistics apps. in fact, we do amazing logistics apps, that allow you to control everything you can imagine, optimize all processes, etc. we had several customers, but here are two distinct cases, lets call them company A and company B.

company A had a problem with theft and a problem with optimizing routes. so they went on and bough many different tools to track everything that the drivers did. stopping, eating, all the way to all doors open, weight changes and so on. in fact, the system was so elaborate, one could reverse engineer all the steps of a task, with such an amazing detail it could be enough to charge someone and/or fire them. so it worked. the problems were solved by spending a lot of money and treating all the symptoms.

company B had a different approach. their accuracy was top line and they had no thefts at all. the manager, in confidence, told me one day: “you know, we don’t have thefts because we provide good job stability, good benefits and treat our employees well. they don’t steal because they are proud of what they do.”. their answer to the millions spent in software packages to optimize routes and deliveries was simple. they had a white board and a highly paid, highly specialized worker.

what is the difference between A and B? in practice, none. they both would be industry leaders. but the way they fixed the problems is radically different. one (A) is treating the symptoms. the other (B) is treating the cause.

more and more i find that we westerners tend to confuse one with the other. we think that by shouting and wearing an anarchist shirt we will become anarchists, when in fact what we are doing is replacing essence with superficiality.

in this video, a somewhat unscientific approach compares west and east. in fact, what we are seeing, is the essence perspective versus the superficial perspective. westerners don’t care if a cylinder is wood or plastic, even though the two materials are dramatically different. easterners, on the other hand, tended to choose substance, which is the strongest common thing between the objects.

to understand deeply what these things are about is essential for distinguishing flair from essence, and in my opinion, what is leading the west into a downwards spiral of unnecessary complexity.

today, i code apps that run in a browser that runs in an operating system that runs in a computer. back in the day, it used to be coding apps that run in a computer. and i expect, again, since we are depth blind in the west, to see this become deeper and deeper. more and more layers of abstraction, to the point that it is completely unintelligible whether we are dealing with a fact of flair.

and when these systems become so complex they can’t be grasped by a single mind, there will be no one that can analyze them properly, and surely they will collapse under their own cognitive weight. not because they are necessarily complex, but because they were unnecessarily built to be complex. this is the essence of business, and this is why i keep my day job. we have made computing into a behemoth that only experts can do. and this is just my tiny slice. many other areas are suffering the same illness. so i’ll end with an interesting question i heard in comparing western and eastern philosophy. if you want to know about pots, who do you consult with? the geologist or the potter? or, more appropriately, if you want to know about bagpipes, who do you consult with? the ethnographer or the bagpipe maker?

we were at the regular bagpiper meetings in lisbon’s downtown area (terreiro do gaiteiro). free entry, cheap booze, and anyone can get up and play anything, anytime, with anyone else. we did some videos, and i got to play some simple tunes with other bagpipers and drummers. it was a privilege to play with some of the people there. so this time here’s just a collection of clips for a change.

on one of them you can see some old dance called “repasseado”. after a while (and some drinks) a lot of people started spontaneously dancing these old dances.

credits on the video to nebulax

some asturian pipes this time.

we are living exceptional times now. i was wrong. most cables being released now are impressive. i can’t wait for the rest. the us funding coups, corruption, corporate terrorism. the good stuff is here. which turns our simplified picture into a richer one. i’m no longer skeptic of wikileaks and its mission. they are showing us the truth we’ve suspected all along, and we’re reading it early enough that we can prosecute the criminals. whether we will be able to, is the big question.

hacking these days says little about what it was initially. hacking is no more than exploiting fragilities of information systems. phreaking on the other hand is the human kind of exploiting of fragilities. for example, you could use some unknown software failure to access some internal website, or you could call the company, emulate some voice tone and professional vocabulary and request the same information. one exploits machines, the other exploits humans.

old school hackers like assange are highly knowledgeable of both. the key aspect of wikileaks is that it isn’t neither humanly nor politically naive. in fact, it follows a very elaborate philosophy, though somewhat lacking in questioning pillars of the establishment.

still, the wikileaks movement might still be phreaked. assange was phreaked because of his own vulnerabilities (narcissism and women). states and secret agencies are very cunning in this kind of hacking, and have spun it very well. then, there is the simple fact that the whole movement might be used as a reichtag event to justify new laws. these will obviously run while the fires are going on, so nobody can see them come through.

i tend to favor incompetence over conspiracies, since they are indistinguishable in practice, and the first seems to be simpler and more in line with human nature. the de facto events tend to be the same, irregardless of whether there is some unseen hand behind it or not. like i was arguing before about planned obsoletion, it happens both by planned decisions and pure managerial incompetence. for the consumer, they are indistinguishable.

so now we are seeing the typical disaster / ransack human reactive mindset. states are reacting any way they can (the same states that preached openness), by trying to spin this nightmare in their favor. they were incredibly incompetent in protecting their secrets, so to protect them they must conjure up any kind of elaborate reaction. if it does come through, it will be indifferent whether this was planned or not. in practice, rights are lost anyway.

meanwhile, the cyber troops are banding up and now we have a real battlefield. the internet empowered the citizens, and anyone can download a ddos software and use it. so damaging big companies is possible (just read about the 16 year old arrested in holland this week for doing ddos attacks). if a state is afraid of children, we can’t even begin to rationalize how this will play out.

something will have to give. on one hand, the naive and suddenly empowered anonymous citizens, with a leader to look up to with clear ideals and philosophy (though little dissent from the mainstream political culture). on the other hand, the status quo, the powerful rulers of the planet, feeling threatened for the first time.

so it can easily go one way or the other. my guess is that there will be strong crackdown on dissidents and we’ll lose some internet rights along the way. only time will tell.

as leaks come and go, for now most are superfluous, shallow comments on international leaders and the good stuff is yet to be seen. by having an action hero portrayed as the savior of the poor, and the state lockdown on it, we have the perfect distraction maneuver.

during this past month, behind the distractions, a lot of internet liberties are being taken away. starting with net neutrality, continuing with the mafiaa is taking down websites via copyright claims (something that wasn’t legal and was completely unseen before), entire countries are blocking websites, google is now filtering results based on copyright claims too. and using wikileaks as an excuse, new laws are being made to outlaw such websites and undermine internet horizontal design. the wikileaks dns company deleted the record via some powerful lobbying (it’s back up in switzerland ), not soon after the amazon cloud hosting service had canceled their account, again after some lobbying.

thanks to wikileaks, we might lose the “free for all” internet like it used to be. online freedom of speech can now be outlawed easily in terms of “national security”. it’s over. it started with people giving away their data to private companies (google, amazon, facebook, twitter), in such high volumes it can be used for high resolution personal analysis. then, with the “great firewalls” of china, australia and some other countries. service providers do packet filtering depending on the protocol being used, effectively stopping certain online activities. now, using the reichtag fire wikileaks, we lose the remaining freedom online. you can be revoked of your online citizenship by arbitrary lobbying. wikileaks.org is gone. their dns record was deleted thanks to some powerful people. soon, probably ip addresses will be seized too, rendering any “dangerous” website useless.

alternatives exist, such as running other dns services, but it would be naive to think it would do anything. we use a private infrastructure to go online (usually owned by the service providers and telecom companies). it’s only a matter of time until this “hacker heaven” becomes outlawed and turns into another television channel. you are still “free” to choose your website, like your channel on tv. out of sight will be the right to broadcast and speak your mind.

it will be interesting to see what countries choose an open, public net and what countries choose a privately held, privately produced, web. my guess? all western countries will go for the private one, and nobody will even notice. after all, youtube is still up, we can still watch our cats flushing the toilet. we’ll slowly boil like a frog in a pot .

this is just a short notice, we are starting a new project (you know how it is, a new one a week). this time, it is devoted to preserving some of the stories we collect. this time, we called it “anonymous and beautiful”. it is about anonymous people we meet, mostly through CS. we are not going to connect it to anyone or sign under anywhere, in fact, one of our ideas is to allow people to add their own interviews. the main point is that the interviewer is not only unknown, but not even heard. our focus is on the people themselves.

the website is http://anonymousandbeautiful.wordpress.com/ and our vimeo channel is http://vimeo.com/user5369722. we have about 20 coming, we produce them faster than we can upload them. that’s one vimeo feature i don’t enjoy. we’ll see if it works out. if it does, we might go pro. we also need better lighting for the night shots. for now, it looks really extremely candid and homemade, we want to keep it that way.

we also gave it a slight esoteric “exuberantist church” tone. that’s where we are headed with the exuberantism thing. it’s neither religious nor spiritual, but structurally and in many of the expressions used, it piggy backs on some of the rights religion has earned along the way. a simple form of “mental phreaking”, like atheists are doing with calling themselves “brights”, or homosexuals did with the word “gay”.