An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mark Zuckerberg:

What’s up, bro?  Just kidding; trying to keep things light.  I’m not exactly writing you about games or privacy settings… well, not really, but it’s a close call.  I’m writing you about electronic/cyber warfare on your network.   

Not to be cliché, but we leave in a postmodern world.  In that world, time and space collapse.  The effects of our innovations and actions in a world of exponentially increasing interconnections (as you well know) are often spatially and chronologically disparate from their causal roots.  You, for instance, likely didn’t expect to have a Hollywood movie produced about your experimentation in college…. Word choice, I know; but that is what the creation of theFacebook was to you at the time, right?

You personally listed “openness, breaking things, revolutions…” and a couple others (“information flow, minimalism, making things, eliminating desire for all that really doesn’t matter”) as interests on your own profile. Now I’m not making an accusation of complicity or ignorance, but I do want to bring to your attention that the early part of that list just so happens to be a big part of what the CIA does.  They leak selective facts, break up old regimes, and instigate revolutions.  I am not going to use this space to decry their mission or ethics.  I have a political science background.  I am speaking purely in descriptive (as opposed to normative) discourse here.  I hope to remain ambiguous as to those former distinctions—at least in this letter.  But I want to suggest an improvement to Facebook, not by task, but by goal.

Either by fate, design, or sheer luck, your service has become the chosen social network of the world, and as such connects the masses across continents (BTW: thanks for inventing the medium where I found Die Antwoord).  As your first major investor and board member (also creator of PayPal), Pete Thiel told David Kirpatrick:

The most important investment theme for the first half of the twenty-first century will be the question of how globalization happens… If globalization doesn’t happen, then there is no future for the world.  The way it doesn’t happen is that you have escalating conflicts and wars, and given where the technology is today, it blows up the world.  There’s no way to invest in a world where globalization fails.

The same article that features this quote also references the Un Milion de Voces Contra las FARC.  The group started on January 4^th, 2008 by Oscar A. Morales (whose background is in “civil engineering”), now a “Visiting fellow in Human Freedom at George W. Bush Presidential Center.”  Major Craic C. Collucci of the U.S. Army wrote an article entitled Shaping Colombia’s Stability through Strategic Communication: Evaluating U.S. Effectiveness in May of 2009.  The report focuses on one key issue:

 In essence, strategic communication shapes the environment so that the FARC‘s isolation is a longterm [sic] consequence. U.S. efforts must empower the Colombians to achieve this end, and effective strategic communication is a requirement for success.

 The Arab Spring (the collection of revolutionary anti-fascist movements that took place this year across North Africa and the Middle East) adds more examples, that are suspicious to me simply because so many of the (now deposed or embattled) dictators were the unwanted allies, both economic and military, of the West.   I want to believe (with the idealism of Mulder from X-Files) that these movements were truly ‘by the people, for the people.’  But we know from the wealth of data the world has (for the first time) finally been given to us by WikiLeaks, that media coverage and the framing of world events is not always what it seems.

Again, this is not an accusation, just wanted to point out some disturbing ideas.  The experimental First Earth Battalion (of Men Who Stare at Goats fame) lists a particular strategy of note in their handbook, under the section “high commanding.”  “The Conspiracy of the Sparkling Eyes” involves two phases: first, get a group of operatives to call local DJ’s and manipulate social constructions of reality to a desired effect (in this case, with the reports of people’s eyes sparkling, which increases “intensity of eye contact” in the population).  In Phase II, the operatives “call back two weeks later in greater intervals and report” that they have finally found a way to tell which members of the population had them first—“they can be spotted because they’re the ones who automatically hug you upon greeting… etc… etc.”

As Al Jazeera begins pointedly asking “How much of a threat does electronic warfare pose to governments and individuals around the world”, DARPA already has the power to manipulate search algorithms to bury unwanted data (Total Information Awareness).  It’s not quite censorship, but it’s not quite liberty.  SocialBots are stealing your user’s data.  Let me repeat that, SocialBots are stealing your user’s data.  With the recent phone-hacking scandal at News of the World, it has crossed my mind that potentially Murdock owned Myspace.com never changed the “glitch” that allowed page customization for more than freedom of choice—it also allowed malignant code injection in a simplified version of the SocialBots that now attack your network.

My request is simple—provide capital to WikiLeaks in exchange for some of their encryption software and expertise.  If you really love breaking things, break ties with the American Empire, before they ever hold your site back.  I left Myspace and will not move to Google+ for security reasons.  If you really love revolutions, then revolutionize the meaning of privacy and transparency at the same time—then watch the real party get started.  I won’t flatter you, but you’re too smart to have never thought about this.  So let’s get this right.  Before it all goes wrong.

Sincerely,

Charles Schoch

@LocalMedia: In Wichita and on Twitter

To start off with, this is not, by any means, an academic analysis.  I've spent maybe a week or so watching these feeds: @kwch12 @KSNNews @KNSSRadio @KakeNews @KansasDotCom (the Wichita Eagle) @KMUW (local NPR affiliate) @KPTS (our local PBS affiliate) @NakedCityBlog (a local magazine).  I also watched out for posts by journalists and staff from these organizations, as well: @KWCH_KimW (reporter, Kim Wilhelm), @Hnytka12 (weekend anchor and reporter, Denise Hnytka), @KWCH_JBarret (general manager at KWCH), @Stewart_matthew (storm chaser and producer at KNSS).  But just because I wouldn't turn in this analysis to a professor of quantitative or qualitative research methods, doesn't mean I didn't discover a good deal.

First off, organizational feeds are not sufficient for local media.  KWCH seems to try the hardest for the tweetosphere media segment, with varied results.  Their domination of this "local media" feed, as I named it, cut both ways.  Yes, they are at the top of my feed constantly.  Unfortunately, the amount of tweets they produce per day is obscene!  I will end up un-following the organization.  What's really sad is that they also have the most news-team members with individual accounts that advertise where they work!  It seems this could be avoided.  On a more positive note, KWCH is the most focused on user engagement, asking citizen journalists to discuss stories with their tweets and also posting user content, in their "shot of the day" tweet.  But sometimes in hopes of getting me to look at their content, I get directed to interesting but non-local news ("Pizza rivalry ends in arson..." is a good example, as it was from Lakeside, FL).  But sadly, the amount of time I've spent on KWCH here isn't some critique; it's because they are doing the best job of tying social media to traditional media via twitter, despite all these issues.

In the next paragraph, I will give coverage to all of the other organization's feeds, proportionate to the amount of content that was there compared to KWCH-12... as you can guess, they aren't keeping up with channel 12.  KSN focuses it's lens more locally, but has far less posts.  Same goes for KAKE, with the exception that the one story that totally drew me in (Islamic Center damaged in fire, potential arson/hate crime) had a fair amount of quality issues.  NPR is literally NPR on Twitter--anyone who actually listens to NPR, like me, knows what I mean: interesting stuff if I'm just driving and don't feel like playing sing-along with the Alpine.  But unfortunately, even though NPR has one of the oldest organizational histories referencing the Internet of all the media organizations viewed, I;m not in my car.  So stories like "How soda caps are killing birds," just don't engage me from my desk as a blog post like they do in the radio--blame distractions and my generation, if you will.  Kansas.com could have used a few more posts in their feed--they are barely present on Twitter as an organization.

Essentially, anyone that wants to run a newspaper and can put together a decent headline and use hyperlinks to any significant effect can forgo a million dollar printing press or telecommunications satellite and reach the same quantity of people.  The question here is, can those organizations that have already sunk money in that technology adapt?  Some will, some won't--evolution has a sneaky way of working its way into economics and journalism like that.  But one thing's for sure--when storm season hits, I'll be paying a lot more attention to the Twitter feeds operated by organizations with Doppler Radar then individuals with something witty to say!  That social role is secure... for now.

A Review of P.W. Singer's Wired for War, Social Media Style

I actually planned to finish graduate school a while ago, as in Summer 2011.  Funny story: a home break-in, a police report, a new laptop, and a complete redesign of my thesis’s quant.-focused triangulation methodology into a rhetorical criticism later, I’m just now getting ready to defend… as in Fall 2011.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s all 2011.  But that doesn’t mean I didn’t get sweet swag for sending out announcements (which all received thank you notes), even if the announcements were premature.  One good gift was a Barnes & Noble gift card.  So when a store in Wichita decided to go out of business I went on a media raid.  One book I got out of the deal was P.W. Singer’s, Wired for War.  The book is on defense and intelligence applications of digital technology, mostly remote and autonomous systems, but also a few others.  But when I read this book, all I see is a wealth of networked social media regulating interpersonal communications, blurring the line between what is media and what is un-mediated.

A. Hugh Jackman foolishly teaching a robot for combat in the most recent pop-culture depiction of robots, Real Steel.  Interesting reasoning as to why you can’t just program a robot to box.

First off, let me mention, Singer and I have a great deal in common.  Both of us were products of a military family that cherished service and duty, but chose to walk different paths than the generations of men and women whom proceeded us.  Both of us are sci-fi nerds (to use the latter term positively) that straddle the fence between awe and fear of robots.  Both of us take the ethical implications of what we write about as a responsibility.  I emailed him about it early on.  He actually responded and was pretty cool about giving tips on how to get published.  The guy really is brilliant for packaging his book as part of a larger, digital package found free online.  Not that I really need it, but this would make doing a standard high school ‘book report,’ just covering the contents of Singer’s work, beyond easy.  But to cover that portion real quick, I identified six key themes that wove the larger story Singer was trying to tell.

1.      Technology is key to contemporary military hegemony (not exactly a brain-buster for any history student).

2.       Electronic and digital technologies are greatly changing the battlefield, while the battlefield has historically been a catalyst for technological change in the civilian sector. 

3.       Human factors are now the technological limits, thus the urge to use unmanned or automated systems.

4.       Remotely controlled and artificially intelligent technologies are operational at present, not things of the future. (If you aren’t sufficiently creeped out by robots, Singer’s online videos will accomplish this).

5.       Art predicting future reality becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; real-life invention imitates art as art imitates life, both real and imagined.  (Marshall McLuhan could have spent a decade in studious hermitage if he had ever read this book.)

6.       These new tech. require a rethinking of ethics, international law, and the identity of soldiers—but this process is nothing new. 

Singer does a great job of pointing out the historical roots of the term robot.  I’ve always been an etymology nerd, too, so add that similarity to the pile.  Singer alerted me to the playwright Karel Čapek’s adaptation of the Czech prefix for forced labor:

 

Robota, drudgery, peasant work;

Robotnik, peasant, serf

And they all spur from: Rabota, slave

Not exactly promising that the person whom imagined the archetype for autonomous machines had this on his mind.  There was actually a humanist social critique in all of it.  Which was lost (probably in translation) when the show (R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots) became a hit on Broadway in the mid-Twenties.  Karel Čapek died of pneumonia in 1938 when Nazi-Germany invaded Czechoslovakia; had he survived the winter, he likely would have been sent to Bergen-Belsen like his brother.  Never a communist and a fervent pacifist, Karel Čapek was listed as the Nazi Gestapo’s second most-wanted Czechoslovakian, simply because of his plays and political writings.  (On a side note, open pitch to James Cameron: T4: Nazi Robots, subtitled, “The SkyNet conspiracy goes deeper than you knew.”  Robots go back in time to hunt down Čapek, weave into historical narrative.  Think Inglorious Bastards meets Terminator.  Let’s go nuts.  Call me.)

So from this basic idea of Čapek’s imagination, we get the creations of James Cameron (Terminator), Isaac Asimov (iRobots and the three laws of robotics), Arthur C. Clarke (HAL 9000), and Wolverine Hugh Jackman teaching a robot to box in the latest Hollywood film, Real Steel.  This is also where engineers can trace back their conceptual work on robots to.  But here’s where it gets weird: It’s not just robots.  For instance, Singer points out that two American archetypes were born in the same Van Nuys Factory: 

 In 1944, army photographer David Conover was sent to this factory for a magazine shoot about women contributing to the war effort.  He spotted a buxom woman spraying the drones with fire retardant.  It was not the most sexy of settings but he thought this woman had potential as a model and sent his photos on to a friend at a model agency.  Norma Jeane Dougherty soon dyed her mousy brown hair to platinum blond and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.  After [World War II], the Northrop company bought out Denny [the original U.S. unmanned drone manufacturer], meaning that the icon of the blonde bombshell and the Global Hawk drone both were born in the same place. (2009, p. 50)

And let’s not forget about how all the robots, drones, and soldiers whom depend on them talk to each other and receive their orders from commanders: the Internet.  A guy named Marshall McLuhan actually published the following prediction, shortly before the first Internet connection was used to send a message between computer networks at UCLA and Stanford in 1969:

“The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind” (McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 1962)

The computer scientists whom made that connection possible conceptualized their venture in 1962 as “The Intergalactic Computer Network.”  Just want to point out: you can’t find a more obvious understanding of Gutenberg Galaxy than the previous allusion displays.  Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) provided massive funding in 1963, in addition to the exorbitant sums spent by the National Science Foundation.  Just another note: this would inherently signify that the Internet is not the product of a free market, but rather the product of big government investment.  The first message sent was “LO”, which was initially meant to be “login,” but I think anyone reading this now understands as the Internet laughing (“lol” for short) at the first people trying to make it work. (“LO—CRASH”).  Singer also talks about the first “bugs” in computers and the long technological road that has lead to what is possible in unmanned systems today.

The picture painted for the reader is one where hundreds of remote systems may drop data (in the form of actionable information) into the lap of commanders and their subordinates in the rear echelon.  This can result in serious data overload and already has resulted in the Army Officers in charge of drone requisition logistics to come up with some interesting protocol that sounds more like a chat room: no flaming (all caps) and no emoticons.  Or even funnier, a story Singer tells of soldiers using Google chat to coordinate missions ends with a full-bird Colonel representing himself with the avatar of a random and buxom female cartoon figure.  But the real problem is the aforementioned data overload.

“As systems get more and more capable, there is a bit of a paradox going on with user interface.  In the words of a sergeant just back from Iraq, sometimes there is just ‘too much technology… it can be overwhelming.’  The major problem is the ever-growing amount of data that a robot can send a user.” (p. 68)

The problem is that the computer systems and AI programs cannot distinguish an apple from a tomato and react.  This is no metaphor: a major challenge for computers is sensing subtle or contextual differences in their environment and reacting accordingly.  A tomato and an apple are both spherical, both red, but their physical and internal structure is very different.  So how does an engineer get a farmhand robot to do both tasks?  So humans have to stay “in the loop” with their robotic creations, providing mediated levels of automation and intelligence.  This puts a huge workload on the individuals who operate unmanned systems for military organizations.  Other than smarter AI, the only way a human can handle this amount of information would be cybernetic enhancement.  This doesn’t scare me so much, my brother is technically a cyborg—his total deafness has been alleviated with a cybernetic implant to his cochlea, or inner ear.  The “Neuromancer Brain Jack,” popularized first in cyberpunk graphic novels, but later by the Matrix trilogy, is already a reality.  But just as all scifi nerds and psychologists know, the brain is just a computer that can still be overloaded and made to explode with too much data.  So even cybernetic enhancement is not a real solution.  The only answer is acculturating robots and socializing them with humans, so that they may understand our social constructions embedded in language and culture.  We must teach our robots, just like Hugh Jackman in Real Steel.  Robots can be programmed to hit each other, but an entertaining fight requires more than just a program, it requires creativity and a teacher.  This is the same reason why the world’s smartest computer, WATSON, created by Microsoft, could annihilate its competitors in Jeopardy, yet still answer the following question with the following answer, in the category “US Cities”: 

Trebek: “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero, its second largest for a World War II battle.”

WATSON: “What is Toronto?????”

B. Oh, WATSON.  We humans are silly, but we still call you 'dumb.'

This was more likely than Chicago by a 3% confidence interval.  The reason is because WATSON learns, and WATSON learned that categories are not real.  One blogger explained, “It has learned through exhaustive statistical analysis that many clues do not jibe with categories.”  For example, “US Novelists” may contain a question about J.D. Salinger (a novelist) but the answer does not fit the category “What is Catcher in the Rye (a novel).  So the natural noisiness of humans works against computers, even if it is that extra noise that makes us human beings, not robots.

So do we actually need to sit down with robots and give tutoring lessons?  Or should we just plug a cable into our brain stems and let them download us?  The answer, is actually in-between.  The intended and unintended communications of social media and Web2.0 will be the most pragmatic mode of automaton pedagogy.  In the older HTML based language, form, content, and function are separate and must be specified for all data displayed.  In XML, form, content and function are combined because of how we link, encode, tag, and retrofit data into the Web.  In short, SEO/SMO may be the only thing stopping any future self-aware, SkyNet-esque robot enemy to destroy us, simply because of the irrationality of our memes!  But on a more positive note, our usage is structuring a mediated reality that mirrors our unmediated reality.

After reading Wired for War, I was left asking: What isn’t social media and what isn’t a military application?  Hezbollah creates a videogame or cartoons for kids to collaborate with the digital intifada.  The Tamil Tigers hack and hijack empty satellite bandwidth to create a broadcast channel for the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka that beams across the world.  Robots are embedded with so much emotion, young soldiers give them pet names and cry at their destruction in battle, as if they were human.  Petraeus chooses to keep tweeting even if it’s a security risk.  WikiLeaks creating the ultimate real politik of information.  Or UAVs as social media: the data is created by everyone underneath, and the data they get from the network is quite deadly.  This has created an interesting unity among those terrorized by unmanned systems, as one Lebanese moderate explained:

“The use of [drones] was ‘spurring mass identity politics… The new combination of Islamist, Arab nationalist and resistance mentality is seen as an antidote to the technology discrepancy […] it is enhancing the spirit of defiance’ […] both the Hezbollah fighters in the field and the broader Lebanese populace saw that ‘the enemy is using machines to fight from afar.  Your defiance in the face of it shows your heroism, your humanity’ […] As an Arab moderate, Khouri was not happy about such reactions.  But then again, he was also not happy about having spent the last few weeks watching UAVs fly over as his city was bombed.”  (Rami Khouri, Director, Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs, American University of Beirut; As cited in Singer, 2011, pp. 308-309)

If the use of drones doesn’t scare you, simply because you are American and believe that it could never happen to you, know that Hezbollah has successfully deployed drones against Israel and terror suspect was arrested in New York that had actually acquired drones and planned to use them as explosives.  Autonomous sea scouts, UAVs, packbots, throwbots, birdbots, bugbots, fishbots; it is all startlingly real.  If it’s on that list, it’s either in production or the final stages of developments.  Robots are already in space (satellites use non-linear mathematics and AI to stay in place).

So I’d like to end with a final thought I had while reading the final chapters of Wired for War, which introduces the next level of thought: What is our ethical role as communicators and citizens (netizens) in this new world?  If we are to coexist in a world wired for war, as Singer describes, then we must look at the way we interact, not only in unmediated settings, but in the virtual reality of social networking, because the creations of futurists and robotic engineers may not always behave in the manner intended.  They may learn more than they were intended, they may in fact go haywire.  But their basic means for learning how to interact with humans, is mimicry of the interpersonal interactions they can understand.  Our social networks do not always present the most social part of our humanity.  Humanity’s fate may well depend on this, and that is no science fiction.  Ultimately, we are the authors of the science non-fiction, or our techno-cultural future.  Will we end up friends, like in Real Steel?  Or perpetually hunted like Sarah and John Connor?  We decide, based on the example we are currently setting for our mechanical friends.