Tag: technology

A misguided manifesto

Nearly 20 years ago, the national media was abuzz with the publication of the Unabomber’s manifesto. The editors at the St. Paul Pioneer Press wanted someone to read and analyze it, but the task proved to be beyond the ability of its columnists and journalists. Then the Technology Editor had the bright idea of having their twenty-something games columnist have a look at it, thereby resulting in the only time my name appeared on the Pioneer Press Op/Ed page.

I found this when I was digging through some of my old game review columns that I’ve been gradually scanning and putting up at Recommend. I thought perhaps it might be of interest to the sort of hardcore readers who will swing by today as well as those who used to read my WND column to see how my thought processes have been fairly consistent over the years.

Unabomber misses how technology aids freedom
St. Paul Pioneer Press
October 4, 1995

While the Washington Post’s publication of the Unabomber’s treatise, “Industrial Society and its Future,” has attracted much attention and commentary, it is unfortunate that most of the discussion has revolved around the question of publication rather than the manifesto itself.

The publication issue is not only of little interest to anyone outside the newsrooms, but also will resolve itself soon, as Unabomber imitators will either begin to crawl out from under their rocks, or they will not.

But the treatise is not worthy of attention so much for the macabre means through which it reached the mainstream media as for the concepts it contains. The Unabomber’s discussion of modern leftist psychology is not only thought-provoking but insightful, while his indictment of the evils brought about by industrial society carry more weight than the critiques put forth by latter-day Marxists. Nevertheless, when it comes to the issue of technology and human freedom, the Unabomber goes astray.

The manifesto traces many of the psycho-social problems of modern society to the Industrial Revolution. Since technology has made it unnecessary or impossible for humans to support themselves independently, it prevents them from exercising the natural Power Process of goal setting and attainment. (The “Power Process” is a concept that psychologists say is necessary for human mental health. The “Power Process” is the natural need of humans to exert some degree of control over their own destiny.) This inability to exercise the Power Process leads inevitably to the loss of dignity and human autonomy. The central point of the treatise thus revolves around the inherent conflict between technological development and individual freedom.

The Unabomber sees the seductive nature of technology as a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. While each new technology appears desirable by itself, the totality of societal-technological advance slowly envelops us, whether we actively choose to accept it or not. As we become dependent on the new technologies, government steps in and regulates access to them, removing even limited opportunity to exercise the Power Process and eventually resulting in the reduction of human beings to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.

What this theory ignores is that technology is a double-edged sword. Far from being the inevitable tool of government repression, technology has historically shown itself to be a primary force in providing freedom and power to the people. The monopolistic power of the medieval Catholic Church could not have been broken without the printing press, just as the omnipresent television cameras recently helped Boris Yeltsin and the infant Russian democracy movement survive the last reaction of the Soviet hardliners.

Governments and other would-be oppressors may use technology, but they are also afraid of it in the people’s hands. Witness our own government’s fear of high-level encryption software and its tawdry attempts to force the Clipper encryption chip on us. The Clipper chip would have allowed the FBI and other government agencies to read any data supposedly encrypted by the public. God forbid that we should send e-mail without the FBI being able to read it!

And the Chinese government has a tiger by the tail as it learns how difficult it is to allow free technological development and still keep the masses under control. The point is that technology can be a force for freedom as well as a weapon against it.

To prevent us from being turned into cogs in the techno-industrial machine, the Unabomber’s manifesto prescribes a return to a more natural state where our time would be spent exercising the Power Process by surviving via primitive methods, so we would no longer need to find surrogate means of exercising the Process. By “surrogate means,” he meant art, science, sports and anything not immediately related to survival. One wonders where the dignity and autonomy are to be found in the primitive life that Hobbes once characterized as nasty, brutish and short.

This regressive longing for a return to the natural state is nothing new. At the very least it echoes back 200 years to Rousseau. But human nature is very much a part of nature too, and like the Left he disdains, the Unabomber argues his way into the totalitarian corner of making choices for people in order to preserve their freedom to choose. George Orwell would have been proud.

But truly autonomous freedom, the freedom to choose and to exercise the Power Process also means the freedom to choose poorly. If Americans are working harder and longer than before, it is not because technology forces them to do so, but because many of us have decided to work more in order to pursue the larger TV, the BMW or the second home. These decisions to pursue things we do not need may well be foolish, but they are not the Unabomber’s to make. They are ours.

Day writes a Sunday technology column for the Pioneer Press.

More collateral than damage

Like it or not, the US is clearly guilty of large-scale terrorism:

The drones came for Ayman Zawahiri on 13 January 2006, hovering over a village in Pakistan called Damadola. Ten months later, they came again for the man who would become al-Qaida’s leader, this time in Bajaur.

Eight years later, Zawahiri is still alive. Seventy-six children and 29 adults, according to reports after the two strikes, are not.

However many Americans know who Zawahiri is, far fewer are familiar with Qari Hussain. Hussain was a deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group aligned with al-Qaida that trained the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, before his unsuccessful 2010 attack. The drones first came for Hussain years before, on 29 January 2008. Then they came on 23 June 2009, 15 January 2010, 2 October 2010 and 7 October 2010.

Finally, on 15 October 2010, Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator or Reaper drone killed Hussain, the Pakistani Taliban later confirmed. For the death of a man whom practically no American can name, the US killed 128 people, 13 of them children, none of whom it meant to harm.

A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals – the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls “targeted killing” – they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.

I’m not entirely sure such indifference to collateral damage is correctly described as not meaning to harm anyone except the targeted individual. Regardless, it’s become abundantly clear there is no such thing as “targeted killing” that doesn’t involve soldiers on the ground pulling the trigger. And I suspect in less than ten years, cheap DIY drone technology will drive US politicians almost entirely underground as they become the targets of those they have so ineffectively targeted.

Unless, of course, cheap, but powerful ground-to-air laser technology renders drone technology completely useless.

Fumigating the Firefox, redux

I’m reposting this since Mozilla’s decision to place ads in Firefox has even more people moving to Pale Moon. Fortunately, it is trivially simple to turn this off and cause the browser to correctly report itself as PaleMoon.

    Create a new tab.
    Type “about:config” into the Address Bar as if it were an internet site (URL).
    Type “compatMode” into the Search box that will appear right below the Address Bar.
    On the line general.useragent.compatMode.firefox there are three settings: user set, boolean, true. Click on “true” and it will change to false.
    Close the tab.

That’s it. Web sites will no longer incorrectly attribute your pageviews to Firefox. This is important, because Firefox’s only real value is in its brand, and as the number of reported Firefox users continues to fall, Google’s rationale for propping up Mozilla is reduced as well.

Mozilla slashes its own throat

If you haven’t migrated to Pale Moon yet, you’re going to want to do so soon:

The Firefox browser, lagging its well-heeled rivals, will soon be serving up an array of ads to one and all. Mozilla, the nonprofit group that develops and updates the popular Internet browser, said Thursday that it will begin placing ads where thumbnails of your frequently visited websites would normally be found when you open a new tab. While many of those thumbnails, which Firefox calls “Enhanced Tiles,” will remain as quick links to your favorite sites, some will feature sponsored logos or other promoted images.

The decision comes after a year-long experiment testing the receptivity of the ads among a small group of users.

The ads are a way for Mountain View, Calif.-based Mozilla to stay relevant at a time when more people are making use of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s Chrome when browsing the Web. Mozilla hopes the sponsored tiles will help influence powerful advertising groups while not compromising its nonprofit values. The ads also represent a potential new revenue stream for Mozilla, which gets most of its funding from Google through a deal in which it is the default search engine.

“We see this as a meaningful contributor to Mozilla’s revenue,” Darren Herman, vice president of content services for Mozilla and the man behind the tile ads, said in an interview. “We’re using ourselves to demonstrate that it’s possible to advertise at a scale nobody else can.”

The initiative comes as Firefox continues to lose ground to its
rivals. According to Net Applications, which measures individual users’
daily Internet activity, IE is the top PC browser, with a 58 percent
share, followed by Chrome at 21 percent and Firefox at 14 percent. Mozilla
plans to ramp up the ads over time, but even once that’s in full swing,
Herman said Mozilla will tread carefully with how it places those ads…. Among the first ads shown will be anti-tobacco messages and promotions for the new Edward Snowden biopic, “Citizenfour.”

Once you go full SJW, there is no going back. It’s not going to be long before Firefox is below 10 percent. And once that happens, they may as well shut it down.

SpaceShip Two down

The right stuff returns. You have to respect the courage of the men flying private test rockets into space:

Virgin Galactic’s suborbital commercial spacecraft SpaceShipTwo has crashed during a test flight in the Mojave Desert about 95 miles north of Los Angeles, according to NBC affiliate KGET. The California Highway Patrol has confirmed that one of the two pilots aboard the vehicle is dead; and the other is in critical condition.

On the topic of Firearms

This should make for an interesting discussion. At Recommend, they need to determine the appropriate topics and sub-topics where recos will be categorized. Obviously, Firearms is too broad to cover everything from optics to 3D printing, so what are the most important subtopics. For example, I immediately thought of the following:

Firearms: rifles
Firearms: handguns
Firearms: shotguns
Firearms: ammo
Firearms: optics
Firearms: customizing
Firearms: tactical shooting
Firearms: gunsmithing
Firearms: 3D printing

What else am I missing? And I can tell you right now that there will not be a Firearms: sexual orientation subtopic devoted to the discussion of 9mm Glocks.

Also, I’ve got a specific list set up with all of my book recos. 24 so far, and I expect I’ll have the entire 2014 reading list in by the end of the week.

Recommending books

First of all, thanks to the nearly 100 Ilk who went to Recommend and set up accounts there. I’ve already personally found it to be useful, as I picked up a copy of Battle Academy 2 on Kool Moe Dee’s strong recommendation of The Campaign Series from Matrix Games. It was also nice to see the strong recommendations for A Throne of Bones by David Jirovec and even for this blog by Aquila Aquilonis.

One reason you may be interested in following along, even if you’re not initially interested in recommending anything yourself, is that I am methodically working my way through my reading list and making recommendations on the various books I have read this year. So, if you’d like to know my actual opinion of those books, you can join up and read them there. Here are four examples of my recently posted book recos:


FAIR: The Elephant Vanishes and Other Stories by Haruki Murakami occasionally shows the award-winning author at his diffident best. Not all the stories will be new to the longtime reader; the original version of The Wind-Up Bird is here, and frankly, it is more appealing in many ways than the novel it subsequently turned into. The title story is arguably the most interesting, as who but a Murakami character would become fascinated with an aged elephant and his equally decrepit keeper? But the most insightful and most troubling is probably the story of a woman who loses the ability to sleep, and in doing so, also loses her connection to her humanity. As is often the case with his longer works, Murakami seldom provides the answers to his mysteries, but then, it is the journey rather than the destination that is to be most savored here.

DISAPPOINTING: Although Eco is easily my favorite writer and he demonstrates both his
esoteric expertise and his customary attention to detail in this book,
The Prague Cemetery simply isn’t very absorbing. It’s an origin story
for “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”, but the mercenary
protagonist is neither sympathetic nor interesting, a strange identity
device is utilized that is neither relevant nor even remotely
convincing, and the extended detour into the Risorgimento seems forced.
Still worth reading, because, after all, even a lesser Eco book is
better than most books by other authors, but it’s not Eco at his best.

BAD:  Despite the title, the religious need not fear this book. A Manual for Creating Atheists,
by Peter Boghossian, is far less likely to turn theists into atheists
than it is to turn atheists into agnostics out of sheer intellectual
embarrassment. A more accurate title would have been Atheism: Begging the Question.
Boghossian’s entire manual can be reduced to three simple steps: 1. Beg
the question. 2. Redefine any commonly understood dictionary term to
mean something completely different. 3. Declare victory. There are
perfectly rational arguments for atheism to be made, but none of them
are to be found in this particular book. Peter Boghossian would very
much like to replace the late Christopher Hitchens as the Fourth
Horseman of Atheism, but it is no wonder that Messrs. Dawkins, Dennett,
and Harris are disinclined to admit him to their ranks.

AWESOME: Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers, is a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, and as such, is a good book worth reading. But it is more than that. By setting it at the site of her old academic haunts, Sayers also presents us with a vivid portrait of bygone times. The portrayal of female academics at Oxford in the early 20th century is keenly historical, for all that it is fiction, written by a literary master who was actually there at the time. The mystery itself is almost secondary to the fascinating interplay of old rivalries and lingering jealousies that remain active among a group of exceptional women. Sayers always had unusual insight into the human condition, and Gaudy Night is perhaps her novel that most clearly demonstrates this.

If you think “Awesome” is a bit much for the Sayer’s novel, you’re absolutely correct. The four-rating system is a little limiting and Recommend will go to the six-rating system that I personally prefer in November. Two negative ratings, HORRIBLE and DISAPPOINTING, will go with FAIR, GOOD, EXCELLENT, and AWESOME. The idea is that the EXCELLENT rating should be sufficiently superlative to encourage users to actually distinguish between something that is legitimately AWESOME, such as The Lord of the Rings, and something that is more reasonably described as EXCELLENT, such as Gaudy Night or A Game of Thrones. And, of course, I will bump up The Elephant Vanishes to GOOD once the new system is active.

A new project

A few weeks ago, I had an idea for a general review site with certain specific features that all the various review sites are lacking. Then, at a recent technology conference, I saw a French guy presenting a cross-platform review system that rather cleverly combined a scraping technology with a Twitter-like interface. I realized that he’d already done 75 percent of the work my idea would require, found him later, and told him that I thought we should work together, to which he quite naturally responded: “who are you?”

After I explained my ideas, we had lunch, discovered that our visions were entirely compatible. So, instead of another game design, I’m dabbling in technology design again, and I have to say that this is considerably easier than trying to figure out how to manufacture 18-button mice in China. Of course, it’s all just interface in the end, and there are more similarities between game design and this sort of app design than you might think.

The system is called Recommend. The site and iPhone app is live already, you can see it at re.co or via the App Store. There you can also see my first 12+ recommendations, which range from an AWESOME for Advanced Squad Leader to DISAPPOINTING for Disturbed’s Asylum. I will also soon be one of their Experts in the Game and Book categories. It’s a very clever system that automatically adds a picture scooped from the Internet, and it only takes two or three minutes to create and write-up a complete recommendation.

The reason the system is of great interest to experts and influencers is that it permits the linking back to whatever link the reco-writer wishes. So, for example, my reco (as they call it) of John Wright’s THE GOLDEN AGE links to Scooter’s review of the book on the Castalia House blog. There will eventually be considerably more to the system than this, as I am presently designing a gamefication system that will allow Recommend users to build up their influence as the first of at least three new systems that will help turn Recommend into something considerably more advanced and useful than Yelp. Note that it is very much in development at the moment, but even in its early state, it is already informative and useful.

I would love to see a hundred or more Dread Ilk become influential via this system, so if you’d like to help out, there are two ways you can do so right now. The first is very simple. Just go to Recommend, sign up, follow me, and start creating your own recos. I’ll follow you in return and soon we’ll have a dynamic intra-Ilk recommendation system in operation. Right now they only have four ratings, from Horrible to Awesome, but that will be increased to six in the near future. And if you happen to like one of the things I’m recommending, click on the Recommend box to co-recommend it.

The second way to help is a little more complex. One of the things I’ve been asked to do is to find and vet bona fide experts in various fields. So, if you happen to be a legitimate expert in something and are willing to commit to doing 20 recos per month, sign up, write a reco or three as an example and to see how much work in involved, then shoot me an email with EXPERT in the subject. I’ll check them out and then get in touch with you. The field can be literally anything, from astrophysics to video production, and you can recommend anything, from audio software to zoos.

And simply because someone will ask the question, no, this does not change anything at all with regards to Alpenwolf and Castalia House. I usually have between 4 and 5 projects going at once, and since I recently finished two other projects, this is only number three at present. I seldom talk about those other projects, but in this case, since it is a social media project which the Ilk can most certainly assist, it makes sense to do so.

A failure in tech support

Spacebunny has an amusing encounter with Adobe’s fascinating approach to technical support.

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
I have a new focus for my battle. @Adobe they are the reason I can’t print…..

Adobe Customer Care ‏@AdobeCare
@Spacebunnyday Hi there, can you provide more detail on your printing issue? Which Adobe app are you using? ^M

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
@AdobeCare Reader – document could not be printed, no pages selected message. Uninstalled XI reinstalled version 8 and it works.

Adobe Customer Care ‏@AdobeCare
@Spacebunnyday Glad it has been sorted- thanks for letting us know! ^M

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
I like the fact that you don’t CARE that your newest version doesn’t work….

Full points to Adobe Customer Care for being proactive and trawling Twitter in search of customer problems to attack. That’s great. But we really do have to subtract a few points for reading comprehension. And their subsequent response is not exactly confidence inspiring.

Technology making life better

For bankers, anyhow. And don’t think this payment technology won’t eventually be applied to medical systems:

Auto loans to borrowers considered subprime, those with credit scores at or below 640, have spiked in the last five years. The jump has been driven in large part by the demand among investors for securities backed by the loans, which offer high returns at a time of low interest rates. Roughly 25 percent of all new auto loans made last year were subprime, and the volume of subprime auto loans reached more than $145 billion in the first three months of this year.

But before they can drive off the lot, many subprime borrowers like Ms. Bolender must have their car outfitted with a so-called starter interrupt device, which allows lenders to remotely disable the ignition. Using the GPS technology on the devices, the lenders can also track the cars’ location and movements.

The devices, which have been installed in about two million vehicles, are helping feed the subprime boom by enabling more high-risk borrowers to get loans. But there is a big catch. By simply clicking a mouse or tapping a smartphone, lenders retain the ultimate control. Borrowers must stay current with their payments, or lose access to their vehicle…. Now used in about one-quarter of subprime auto loans nationwide, the
devices are reshaping the dynamics of auto lending by making timely
payments as vital to driving a car as gasoline.

Brave New World indeed. They’re really squeezing every last drop of credit out of the economy.