From Asturias.

Not long ago I praised Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature for its clarity and as one of the sources for how I frame my general sense of optimism. At the same time, I repressed a feeling of uneasiness stemmed by the numbers that were put forward.

There was, indeed, something strange lurking in the numbers. Initially I attributed it to my reactions to his harsh words on tribal and indigenous cultures, assigning higher rates of violent conflict versus our civilisational environments, which suffer from more existential forms of violence. I also thought it was merely because he sided with Hobbes in the Hobbes/Rousseau debate, and being on Rousseau’s side in this dichotomy, it also disturbed me.

But cases for all these criticisms have been voiced enough. Instead, I became interested in the metrics themselves. In social sciences, the trend towards quantitative and mathematical formulations has always interested me, first as an active participant, then as a sceptic. More concretely, the way mathematical language has infiltrated thought as a purveyor of truth. If calculations are correct and someone else can verify them, then the theory where math was used must be somehow true by osmosis.

This becomes particularly glaring when the variables and metrics used are squishy and ambiguous. While the measurement of weight or charge for example (despite their relative values to an arbitrary collectively decided measuring stick) entail numbers that include little room for doubt as to where they mean anything and can therefore be fed to mathematical formulas and output meaningful numbers, the variables used to measure anything relating to human activity are much more contentious and it is hard to say what basic algebra means when variables contain lives, concepts and cultural phenomena.

Some of these calculations are used extensively in Pinker’s book. He does a good job of shielding himself from naive mathematical analysis with murky data by selecting the closest to a physical measurement possible: murders, assaults, as reported and recorded by authorities. While there’s a whole lot to say about that, this is not what I’m looking into. Instead, let’s accept the idea that the total number of murders per capita, for example, is a good metric. It’s indeed fair to say we can tell a dead person from a living person, and with some degree of confidence whether a death was a murder. Consider now, this hypothetical data set from two groups of human beings:

Group	Total Population	Violent Murders	Rate of violent murders (%)
A	100	20	20%
B	1000	40	4 %

There are two types of numbers in this table. One type is a measurable quantity, population or number of violent murders are natural numbers—one murder means one individual died. It is not clear at all what half one would be. But for me, the interesting number here is the rate per capita, which was used extensively in Pinker’s book. In my example, the total number of violent murders doubled, but the murder rate was one fifth. Depending on the point we are trying to make, one might say ‘the murders doubled in group B!’ while others might say ‘the murders per capita declined tremendously in group B.’

This is just numbers being instrumentalised to prove a point. Not something new at all. Instead, I’m interested in another, slightly less intuitive property of using ratios as a comparison.

First, using a ratio is perfectly fine for ballpark estimates and thinking clearly, but it is important to understand that a ratio is always meaningless without at least one of the values used. If I say murder rate is 5%, that number can mean 5 people (100 people in a group) or it can mean 5000 (100000 people in a group.)

In both cases the ratio is the same: 5%. The totals, however, are drastically different. When we compare ratios without using the base values we used, we lose the sense of scale, i.e., 5 people dead or 5000 dead become morally equivalent if our comparisons are done exclusively in terms of ratios.

Looking again at the first example, by saying there was moral progress from group A to group B due to a 5 fold decrease in murder rates we are, implicitly, creating a moral equivalence between 20 dead in group A and 40 dead in group B. Each dead person in group B is effectively worth less than one in group A. If we consider each one of those individuals lived a full life and their death was an immeasurable and indivisible tragedy, we realise immediately that I could kill someone in group B and they would only count as half a person in group A. To what extent can we create these equivalences? I tend to think it’s tricky business to say a 4% death rate is better than a 20% death rate if the absolute values are so drastically different.

This implied moral equivalence is what disturbed me about these calculations. 2 dead in group B are 1 dead in group A. The metric doesn’t reveal the true scale of crime, only the relative scale of crime, which for me creates a problematic situation where to increase the number of murders without increasing the murder rate one only needs to increase the population. If what we look at are ratios per capita, we can effectively kill more people while making the murder ratio go down. This is what I concluded was the driving factor for my uneasiness with the book.

This idea that mathematical calculations in social and political sciences create moral equivalences is not new. There’s one big elephant in the room when it comes to creating moral equivalences based on numbers—money. While we frequently might discuss this in the political sciences, it is not uncommon that the use of mathematical language creates its own problems and ends up creating moral equivalence problems like money does.

To discuss rates is to implicitly create an equivalence between the quantities in numerators and denominators, between 5 dead and 50 dead, 50 dead and 500 dead. Since rates alone don’t carry scale, it is simply too easy to simplify and accidentally legitimise big crimes because their relative weight has decreased. I have a hard time saying 50 dead are the same as 5 dead, and reading it as a main thesis disturbs me a great deal.

Speaking of people, societies or collectives in quantities and averages using the mathematics we have today reflects little more than a need to add some mathematical weight to an otherwise subjective theory. Thing is, as we say in computer science, garbage in, garbage out. No matter how good your calculations are, if your starting metrics are subjective, then mathematics is little more than a masturbatory exercise to wow those that have less mathematical knowledge. A bit like illusionism, flashing a nice equation is like misdirection—it allows the theorist to get away with points that would otherwise not survive scrutiny.

This week I cycled to the smokestacks of Sydney Park and spilled a beer for S, whom I lost to the health hazards of crust punk hedonism. The bit of life I shared with him was so full of unexpected events I had to write some down. I can’t remember exactly when I met him, but I do remember where.

I think I was about 16 when I first plugged in to IRC. My awkward monochromatic choice for clothing colours made me gravitate towards goth, punk, industrial and anarchist chats from the get go. It was through connections I made in these chat rooms that I found where to hang out. Over the years one of the other big IRC clusters, the one revolving around punk, would gather outside whichever was the unofficial punk bar of the day. As many other bohemian quarters of big cities, that might mean one bar one week and another the next.

When the punk hang out was Boca do Inferno, which curiously had also been a neo-nazi hangout at times, I’d often sit outside drinking cheap beer and have long winded conversations with whoever would be there at the time. The crowd was a mix of computer literate punk identifying youths from punk IRC channels and crust punks. There was little segregation—all of them just wanted a few drinks, some tunes and the occasional bar fight. It was during those times that I met S.

The events are scattered along many years since at all times our interactions happened under severe or less severe intoxication. Whichever the drink of the day, S would be there, with a big smile and twinkly eyes, bumming around and chatting to randoms. It didn’t get aggro ever, we were all just hanging out doing nothing, which is good in itself. Quite often me and S would have weird conversations. He wasn’t like any other of the street punks around. He was crazy. Like, mentally disturbed crazy.

Quite commonly the crust and street punks revert to the basics: alcoholism, heroin, crack, abusive relationships, squatting, busking, begging and stealing. Nothing new there. But one of the things I always loved about the hedonism and immediacy of the lifestyle is how brilliant a lot of them were. Most of the street punks I interacted with were incredibly smart people that lived through violent and abusive situations from a young age. I always enjoyed a good chat with whoever was around and S was always up for a chat, a hug or a sip of my beer. But he had the most insane stories of anyone hanging out there. His insanity would drop by late in the night, when the alcohol hit his diabetic threshold. He would tell me about how he didn’t have a cellphone because aliens were listening. He would tell me about government mind control rays. He would tell me about his past in Brazil bashing up cops and living the ‘No Future’ life. His loving and warm gaze would shift into a paranoid glare and his stare would go right through me. I think to this day, he struggled with mental health but kept it mostly to himself, since the crust punk scene isn’t really known for deep conversations that might reveal paranoid delusions like his.

For me, a sheltered privileged white engineering student, his mental states were fun and intriguing, but didn’t really affect me too much. His diabetic driven collapses after getting wasted didn’t either. He was pretty much the coolest crust punk I knew precisely because he was so past beyond fucked up and owning it so well.

We would see each other over the years and share a beer here and there. It wasn’t until I started escotilha that our lives became irreparably interwoven. Part of this story is already in the book, so I won’t dig too deep on that bit.

One of the guys that hung out at my place heard S and L had been evicted from where they were squatting and I offered them a space. S came in and I recognised him instantly. We got along great, and if there was one thing S had was the capacity to express his gratitude for anything nice done for him.

Over the time he stuck around, I fed him and he got healthier. Don’t get me wrong. S was a crackhead ever since I first met him, and any spare change he’d make on the streets would turn into crack and more paranoia. But once we started sharing meals and time together, he grew a bit more meat on his bones and started telling me more about his past. Instead of paranoid delusions about mind control, he started telling me about his youth in Brazil.

Turns out S had a troubled past. His dad was a cop and he was a punk bashing up cops. One day he ended up in jail after severely bashing one. The big irony is that his dad bailed him out of a big prison sentence. I never figured out whether he did time. I did figure out, however, he also had a family he abandoned. I can’t exactly remember if it was just one son or more. I do know he cried on my shoulder a lot, usually after a good meal, about how his son hated him and didn’t want to see him. Truth was S abandoned his family to live the punk lifestyle. His son was brought up by S’s dad, and had serious contempt for him. S would often tell me that his son was training to be a cop because of him, and that broke his heart.

I never really knew what to say to this. S would cry and show all this psychological pain, but he also lacked the tools to do anything about it. Instead, he’d just continue deeper into the drug and alcohol cycle.

Living with us had its benefits, and besides getting pudgier, he also started smoking less crack. At times he’d pull me aside in the kitchen and say that he was so happy he didn’t need as much crack. It made me think he could really get better if he wanted.

A lot of this improvement was thanks to L. L, a lovely artsy young lady from Austria, was squatting with S when they got evicted. She took great care of him even though they had little vocabulary in common. If there’s one thing S had in excess it was charm, particularly with blonde blue eyed German speaking women. Even without much of a common language, S and L had an incredible relationship, full of love, good times, playfulness and the occasional fight. I think L always knew a different side of him, perhaps a bit less dark than what I knew. In L’s own words, she loved bad boys. S was definitely bad—the old school kind of bad. A past of delinquency and irresponsibility and a heart of gold.

E, who kindly let me know of his passing, also met S at escotilha. E, S and L became inseparable in a strangely conventional emotional triangle. I mean, for street punks, they were surprisingly heteronormative. Maybe because S was definitely old school. I remember him commenting that ‘he’d love to, but L wouldn’t let it happen’. Maybe it did. I wasn’t really in the loop in those days—I was just providing the space. S lived in pure delight thanks to the attention of these two beautiful young women, especially since he’d be past his mid thirties at this time (if my estimate is correct).

The life of bumming around had the upside of keeping us going out and exploring the derelict corners of the city. That’s how we eventually found a place to squat. S moved in and we lived together for a while. He’s all over the documentary as well.

During this time, his exotic good looks, tattoos and piercings were the delight of travellers staying with us. After all, what is a squat without the quintessential street punk hunk? S delivered this masterfully with his beautiful smile, warm and kind spirit, and talent for hedonism.

Once eviction hit us, S had to move on. I didn’t see him for quite a while, especially since the new squat most of the punks had moved to was basically a crack and heroin den. I visited that place once and ran out within the first couple of minutes.

My life in Lisbon became quite mundane after the squat days. I’d commute on train and metro for hours carrying my folding bike around. One afternoon, coming out of the metro in Cais do Sodré, I heard a loud, angry scream ‘ACORDEM! ESTÃO TODOS MORTOS!’ (‘WAKE UP! YOU ARE ALL DEAD!’). I knew that voice—it was S, delirious and angry, shouting at everyone around him. He was staggering around in despair, shouting at all the commuters going by him. They paced and looked away, trying to avoid hearing his harsh truth. I walked toward him faster, pulling my folding bike behind me, and screamed ‘S!’, touching his shoulder as if preparing for a hug.

His dazed paranoid glare fixated me for a couple of seconds. His eyes were twinkling as if they had hardened to shiny dull porcelain. His angry wrinkled face slowly softened, his angry look morphing into helplessness and love. ‘João?’ His eyes slowly lost the glaze and deepened again. He was here with me now. ‘Is that your chair?’ He thought my folded bike was a wheelchair. It did look like one, and given his past, he definitely was more acquainted with those. ‘Nah, it’s my bike, look!’ I unfolded the bike then folded it again. We laughed. Then his despair came back, this time with slumped shoulders and teary eyes. He collapsed on the floor, crying, sitting against one of the metro tunnel walls. I sat beside him and hugged him. I asked about how he was doing, he said he wasn’t doing well. No surprise, he hadn’t found a nice group of people to hang out with and was back on his vice loop. ‘Tens trocos para uma cerveja?’ (‘Got change for a beer?’) he asked me. I gave him some spare change. ‘Tu és gente boa João’ (‘You’re a good guy João’) he said. We hugged and off I went to my bagpipe class. I could still hear him scream at a distance. Screams of surprising sanity during a rush hour that seems far more inhuman than the things S was going through. I didn’t know, but this would be the last time I saw S.

His story, however, did not end here. After I moved to Sydney, I got the news from Lisbon punks that S had been deported. S had averted deportations for years so this was quite surprising. He was sent back to his home town in Brazil. Brazil has cheap crack, so he fell deeper and deeper into his bad habits.

I shared the first place I lived in down under with a few other people, including E, my former guest that met S and L in Lisboa. E and L were planning a big adventure in South America to find S wherever he might be. They started a social media campaign, printed t-shirts, got in touch with many people and through it, they eventually found him. Their dedication for S was incredible, especially when you think most of us will never even elicit one transcontinental flight from a friend, never mind two.

Once they found him, the harsh truths of hedonism hit E and L in the face. S was a wreck. His diabetes and drug habits had made his foot deteriorate badly and his mental health and spirit had decayed past recognition. E and L made an effort to fix him by getting in touch with his family and getting one of his relatives to let S move in with them. S did move in, but instead of looking for treatment he robbed their place clean and spent the money on crack. E and L saw their hopeful and beautiful campaign collapse right in front of their eyes. S stole from them and they left. S’s loving soul was gone, eaten away by drugs, alcohol and disease. E and L scattered through the planet again with the realisation that the S they loved dearly was gone and all that was left was decaying vessel enslaved by substance abuse.

E messaged me yesterday—S had died during surgery on his foot. His heart stopped during an induced coma. We were all sad, but we weren’t shocked. We had lost S a long time ago, but for me, his wonderful story remains. How a street punk from Brazil met an Austrian and an Australian in my home town, how they weaved their life lines through my own, and built a friendship that spanned continents and language barriers.

May S rest in peace in Crust Punk heaven, in Love and Anarchy.

A surprising gaita adaptation.

For a long time I’ve struggled with the apparent contradiction of my political ideology and my trade.

The inherently relativist and subjective attitude that Anarchism brought into my personal political beliefs always seemed to clash with my engineering degree and a job that demands absolutely correct logic and objectivity.

The more I read about politics, philosophy and science the more they seemed to be at odds with each other: my engineering skills were funded and developed to oppress, to arm and to destroy, and the good that came of it was little more than opiate for the masses. The systems engineering I learned came from the study of ballistics—how to make a bomb hit the right place at the right time.

Computing, the apparently democratising and liberating force of the last couple of decades, was originally developed to make the said calculations faster and to decipher encrypted messages. That was Turing’s job—the scientific institutions of his day could care less about his wondrous vision for computing and artificial intelligence. Instead, they valued his insights into the Enigma ciphers and locked him up for being a homosexual.

The internet, which has been responsible for my personal success as a professional, was originally developed by a military institution, and is still owned by a US organisation (ICANN, though that might change soon). It is no surprise that this same infrastructure ended up serving a military purpose—mass surveillance of innocent civilians and theft of intellectual property from competing states. The fact that it lets us communicate to each other seems to, again, be a mere side effect of an otherwise government owned, government controlled, authoritarian and oppressive endeavour.

This has always been the most common criticism that I endured in political environments—that I, as an engineer, somehow represented the capitalist hegemony simply because I had a practical and objective attitude towards most problems, and often tried to use scientific methods to approach them.

While I’d say this is a bit unfair in the broad sense—my solar panels work after all—in a more specific sense they are true. I did, indeed, study the deadly arts of the hegemony, and the fact that I used that knowledge against it at times is little more than a curiosity. My pay check is, after all, part of the great capitalist machine.

But recently I had an a-ha moment, perhaps thanks to cognitive dissonance or simply the liberating evaporation of this contradiction. While listening to a Radio National show on a couple of Australian Intellectuals I found myself in a strange intellectual harmony—her account of being mere object at the hands (or jaws) of a crocodile made me understand (or finally articulate) how I always somehow felt there was no contradiction between engineering and anarchism, or more broadly, between technical and scientific approaches and anti-authoritarian values.

I have written often about entropy—the ever eroding, destroying force of our world. While it is an important physical concept, I never really understood the full depth of what objective reality really means. The more I got into feminist writing and anarchist writing (and I have to say my feminism is a part of the broad over-arching story of struggle of the oppressed), the more I saw what objectification really meant—and what so many political philosophers were articulating in different ways. But while objectification has always been articulated in terms of a subjective objectifier—an agent, a human being with a subjective world that decides to use another agent as a means or simply as an object to their reality—I feel there is a greater objectifier in the picture and we tend to overlook it.

Isn’t nature itself the greatest objectifier of all? Isn’t nature the most ruthless, mindless, inconsiderate agent of all? Aren’t the laws of physics themselves an expression of an authority we cannot escape?

Laws of physics apply themselves ruthlessly to every physical entity, with no consideration for their impact in that physical entity’s existence. While we tend to not empathise with a comet as it hits a star and evaporates, perhaps because we do not perceive sentience or agency in it, one could argue that the way the laws of physics ignore everything but the physical properties of objects represents the purest form of objectification: I don’t care where you have been, where you are going or the uniqueness of your trajectory, I care only about your mass and chemical composition.

Though a bit surreal, this analogy strikes closer to home when we look at anything remotely alive. What is life but a constant defiance of the objective authority of the laws of physics? When a cell uses its ion pump, perpetually pushing a chemical imbalance that without its constant effort would quickly resume chemical equilibrium, isn’t it expressing a primitive form of systemic criticism?

The idea that life is itself a climb up a ramp that has no end—a surreal attempt to reverse entropy locally when the metabolic systems used to do it contain in their very own definition the obliteration of the agent itself. What could possibly be more tragic? That a system, the natural world, would somehow have a totality that includes in it a defiance that could never succeed—life might show signs that it can redefine its surroundings, but it can never win in the long run.

I can’t help but see the parallel between the laws of physics, and how they treat everything and everyone as a mere object with no consideration to their subjectivity, and the laws of man as they exploit one another.

Consider now human beings, or perhaps other beings with the capacity for subjectivity and intersubjectivity, that is, at least capable of acknowledging another agent’s subjectivity and negotiate possible courses of action using ethics and political discussion. Isn’t our relationship to the physical world one of pure oppression, where the laws of physics override every possible opinion we might have? Isn’t it that our desire to fly, to visit the far reaches of the cosmos, dive deep into our oceans, completely ignored by the laws of physics? What is sadder than the fact that gravity always drags everything down?

I realised that Nature enacts one of the purest forms of objectification—in that to it there is no possible discussion as to whether things could happen any other way. Things go the way they go, and Nature does not care about your subjective well being. Natural laws progress and will overrun any possible attempt at subverting them.

This is where I realised that mankind’s technical ability had something interesting about it—isn’t it a form of defiance of this totality that envelops it? Isn’t it an incredible act of heroism when an entire species decides to reshape its environment to live out abstract, subjective ideas? Isn’t technology an incredible testament to anti-authoritarianism? That our planes fly us because we were given no wings, that our communication technology allows us to defy the speeds available to our own legs?

Most importantly, what could possibly be more objectifying than being given a body, a birthplace, a family, a genetic heritage prone to certain ailments, with no consideration to whether we desire it or deserve it? There is a fundamental unfairness in not choosing our birthplace, our social class, our families, our attractiveness or health. Ask anyone born with a male spirit in a female body, or anyone born with any kind of disease that causes pain, discomfort or simply prevents someone’s spirit to engage reality to the full extent that it desires, how they feel about their luck. To play on Rousseau’s words, man is born in shackles yet everywhere he touts his freedom. The shackles are our physical body, which despite being capable of tremendous intellectual feats, can do little when faced with the heavy hand of Nature, with its disasters and complete disregard for human subjectivity. A supernova does not care, it simply is what it is, and in its path it will annihilate anything in its path—no matter how cultured or beautiful.

In this sense, I managed to find a place where Anarchism and Engineering meet—the point where we choose to defy the laws of physics, not in an absolute sense, but in a locally contextualised sense, by engaging our reality proactively, fighting the lost battle against a hopeless objectified existence to which all physical things are doomed at birth. What is more defiant than to willingly face the cold death of the universe in our own terms? A cosmos that despite the odds, dares to spawn beauty and complexity?

Last weekend I got to see these guys. They were incredible.

I’ve been wanting to try OpenCV for a while. I did some Computer Vision work back in Uni and had a great time at it, and recently realised I had a cool fun project I could do to save me some time.

If you ever played TCGs (Trading Card Games), you know collections quickly become unmanageable, taking hours on end of inventory tracking if you’re serious about it. In my case, when I was playing TCGs here in Sydney (mostly MtG), I had the discipline to type in every new card, but every now and then at a big tournament I’d lose track of what was in. As the new cards piled up, the time it takes to type them in increased so much I gave up. I also stopped playing a while back, but that box is still there, rotting away.

One of the uses for that big box I have in my closet is that it can be sold—most of the cards I own are worth money. But if I am to sell them off, I need an inventory first. Hence this project.

Typing in a card name takes me about half a minute, but the strain is the worst. Typing is exhausting. So instead I coded a detector in python that grabs the card name and puts it in the clipboard or an output file while making a rewarding ‘beep’ sound (kid you not, I love that feature so much it’s on by default). Here is the detector running in clipboard mode. As it is now, it takes about 12s to detect a card, the minimum I’ve seen was about 3s and there is no maximum (it can sit there until it figures it out).

The principle is simple: instead of trying to find out where the card is, it shows the user where it is looking. Once the user puts the card in the right place, it will attempt to figure out which card it is.

I tried other OCR ideas, like training Tesseract with the MtG font and card names. After all that, I decided to keep it simple and go with the default Tesseract detector with only a-zA-Z characters. This way card names are just a single word with no spaces. From there, I use the Hunspell spell checker with a custom dictionary to spell check these ‘words’ and give me the most likely candidate. Once the system is confident enough that it found a match, it will output data in whichever format was selected.

The results are incredibly good (and fast) considering my rig is a $10 Kmart cam, a jar, some wire and a white sheet of paper. One of the cool things I’ll be looking into is how to make a nicer rig that has a ‘place’ for the card, so I can drop it straight in and it will be properly lit and in the right detection place. Maybe once my Peachy Printer arrives I can add some OpenSCAD to the project.

My scanning setup

The GPLv3 source code is up on my GitHub. It is true, I finally gave up and joined GitHub until I can run my own git server (which, depending on my budget, may or may not be soon). This is my first ‘official’ public open source project!

Some gaita again.

Little makes systemic forces more clear than the way we interact with our computers and each other online. Interfaces and systems we didn’t design modulate the way we interact and digitise ourselves, and changing them is frequently beyond our control.

In a recent and fairly interesting decision, my favourite punching bag Facebook (FB) decided to change the way they represent gender in their interface (funny enough, it is only available to US users for now). While I have written about this before and about how I feel about it, this post is about something else.

There is a common phrase among the Cypher crowd: ‘Architecture is Politics’. This is frequently said when referring to architectures of networked systems and other digital infrastructures. For example, the fact that the internet was designed to have no central authority is a political decision and its implementation is what we have today. Here’s an accidental quote from Jake:

Well, with architecture… I mean, one of the fundamental things the Cypher Punks recognised is that the architecture actually defines the political situation, so if you have a centralised architecture even if the best people in the world are in control of it, is it attracts arseholes and those arseholes do things with their power that the original designers would not do, and it’s important to know that that goes for money…

But these arseholes wouldn’t be able to exert that power without the actual physical infrastructure. While architecture might define potential loopholes—like http uses plain text readable by everyone along the way, acting on the loopholes requires that architecture to be implemented and turned into an infrastructure. If I run a server in a home network (insulated from the world let’s say), I can use http without worrying about someone listening in—my infrastructure is entirely under my control and since I don’t want to take advantage of that loophole, I can simply not listen to http traffic and read it.

With modern day internet apps things get a bit trickier. While the internet is meant to be decentralised, the infrastructure it sits upon is controlled by a handful of corporations and private entities—it’s no wonder it was so easy for government agencies to access people’s communications on the Internet. And while this happens at a lower level, the same phenomenon happens with FB.

The architecture of FB—a social network—isn’t new and has been implemented several times over the years (hello, MySpace, IRC, BBSes, etc). The political idea behind it—that it is good to be connected, to share and so on, isn’t new either. Even the advocates for radical absence of privacy precede this particular website. What FB has, instead, is a massive server and corporate infrastructure which it uses to exert its power. Its popularity has made millions dependent on its servers and applications (let’s remember a server is an actual physical machine, consuming electricity somewhere), but its servers are privately owned by FB. This is the crux of the matter. Once FB decided internally to change the gender definitions for the United States, it didn’t need democratic approval at all—not from government, not from the majority of users. It autocratically implemented it (not that I’m against it). This is the perfect example of how controlling the infrastructure (even without controlling the architecture) allows a select group of individuals to exert power over the masses (in this case, of FB users). An architecture might be well intended from the beginning, but the few arseholes that know how to rig it in their favour will ultimately profit from it (and often, send their propaganda along with it).

What is the ideological propaganda attached to this decision? Note that FB’s business is targeted advertising. The more granular its options are, the better advertisers can focus their offers. This is a massive utopian agenda that FB has promoted from day 1—a capitalist dream where businesses and individuals find perfect matches for each other. Imagine being a salesman for a health clinic specialising in sex changes—being able to access a massive pool of users that are potential clients is an incredible business opportunity.

When we fill in yet another field in FB, we are making that exact category we filled in into a category for directed marketing. We are instantly objectifying those categories and with it commodifying ourselves. FB’s business depends entirely on our own voluntary categorisation into potential target markets. Whether you identify as male, female or anything else, it shouldn’t be FB that mediates that process of identification at all, because FB owns the infrastructure and the categories you can fill in. If it changed once, it can change again, and while the spirit of the time is to be queer friendly, if the bottom line is business, then there is no guarantee it won’t change into something completely opposite to what it’s saying now—if the profit margins so dictate.

Participating in infrastructures that are owned by private entities means the architecture of the system becomes irrelevant—politics is nothing without power to enact ideology, and technological architectures are nothing without infrastructure. Until we own the infrastructure—the means of production and consumption of information—we will forever be under the dictates of the data autocrats. Today they changed the gender box, tomorrow who knows. Maybe they’ll require you to say what political party you vote for. Until we own the lines and the servers, we are the product, and we are being traded as cattle. And even queer-friendly cattle still ends up in patties for the Capitalists to munch on.

Comic from Geek and Poke