Your social computing is no good here

Another day, another police raid. I have lost count of them - by this point, my reaction upon hearing about them is a shrug and a tired acknowledgement that it happened. It's no longer a thing out of the ordinary, but more and more a part of the digital status quo.

This time it has happened to undertexter.se [subtitles.se], a page where those who so wishes could find subtitles to movies. Swedish subtitles, translated by the fans, for the fans. Not the movies as such, mind you, but the files that contains the translated subtitles to these movies. That is to say, text files containing the translated transcripts of the dialogue within these movies.

We have therefore taken another step up the ladder of abstraction when it comes to internet related crimes. We know from the Pirate Bay-trial that it is de jure illegal to provide a bulletin board (physical or digital) that contains information as to where the files are. That is to say, to in any way, shape or form assist the accessories of the crime in question - be it in the form of a link, a word or a pointed finger. This has now been extended to things that might in any way, shape or form be related to the assisting of these accessories. Such as fansubbing.

This is not a step in the right direction. For three reasons.

First off, the general vagueness of this legal situation is very detrimental to the social stability. If handling things that are peripherally related to piracy is criminalized to the point where police in the mood for a raid can show up at any time, then there's a very present incentive for ordinary people to start thinking like criminals. Because they are, in the eyes of the law. And, moreover, there's an incentive to start to raidproof one's home, workplace or digital hideouts - the police might after all show up at any moment, and if they find something suspicious, they both can and will use it against you.

Under such conditions, applied paranoia pays off.

Secondly, this stifles innovation. Things that might be seen as creative and innovative leap when it comes to collaborative computing, might also be seen as organized crime. Or as facilitating said organized crime. Which, quite straightforwardly, makes it rational to be hesitant when it comes to innovate in these areas - especially when these innovations includes the sharing of information. Those policemen are not kidding around once they get into their raiding gear.

To slightly paraphrase a famous phrase: any sufficiently advanced application of collaborative computing is indistinguishable from piracy.

Thirdly, this is a direct and unmistakable message to the digital business community. Or, rather, it's two messages, one domestic and one international. The domestic message is this: don't mess with computers. The international message is this: don't come here if you are a company that messes with computers. Since every action that in any way, shape or form relates to collaborative computing can be interpreted as abetting organized criminality, and since actions undertaken on a commercial scale are always punished harder than those undertaken on a hobby basis - just don't do it. Stay out. It's not worth the hassle and the legal fees. Keep your business elsewhere.

It goes without saying that this is quite the opposite of conducive to a prospering digital business community.

There are two ways to react to this. The one way is to shrug and keep on keeping on, as if this is the way things are supposed to be. The other way is to get mad. To get out of your chairs, open your windows to the internet and yell: this legislation kills innovation, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!

It's your choice. Don't let the threat of the next police raid leave you too unaffected.

Originally published July 10 2013

I am a criminal

I sometimes shock my fellow human being by telling them that I am a criminal.

One might suspect this is done in order to stir up a conversation among and with my fellow human beings. It is. But more than that, it is done in order to inform them that I am indeed a criminal.

You may or may not find the reason I'm a criminal laughable. The reason is that I'm a file sharer. Which might not seem like such big deal - there are worse things to be guilty of, after all, and in the grander scheme of things it's not that big of a deal. When they wrote the seven deadly sins, copying computer files was not among them. You may or may not approve of it, but when compared to murder, rape or large scale financial fraud, there's not too much doubt about which one is the worst. Which one will send you to hell, and which one will at the most give you time in purgatory.

There is a qualitative difference between the one in the other.  When push comes to shove, misdemeanor and hard core criminality are two different things, and should be treated differently.

The crux here is that in the eyes of the law, this difference does not exist. According to the law, I am as likely to go to jail for the one as the other, and if I ever become the target of a legal process, I am as guilty as charged. And I both can and will go to prison for it, as sure as if I did something of the worse order.

The reason I tell people I'm a criminal is that in the eyes of the law, I am a criminal. Not of the hardcore life of organized crime kind - but the kind that goes to jail anyway.

The disconnect between being a criminal and being a criminal is the prime reason I tell my fellow beings about my criminal being. Because it is not just me - it's just about everyone that is younger than me who's used a computer. There's a whole generation of criminals out there, living their life in the shadow of their possible prison sentences. Living their life in preparation for a police investigation - or a police raid - that may or may not ever come.

Living lives of crime. Becoming used to thinking like criminals. Without ever committing something most people would consider criminal. In the common sense use of the word.

This does not have to be.

The uninteresting stories we don't tell

There are times when I feel I have nothing to tell. No stories, no jokes, no things. I'm just a collection of known factors, old jokes and unoriginal retweets.

Then I think back on all the crazy stunts I've pulled.

Like that time when I, on a whim, decided to take the sixteen hour long haul night train from the south of Sweden to the far north of it. Without bothering to arrange anything in the way of tickets, on a full train where everyone either had a reserved seat or no seat at all.

And got away with it. All the way.

Or that time when I went to Brussels, and some sort of snafu left me alone out on the lukewarm city streets all night, without anywhere to sleep, go or phone. When I roamed the streets and saw the nocturnal sights until I found a convenient but oh so cold hiding hole to await the morning in.

The morning in which I took an exhausted emergency nap in the office of Teirdes. Inside the European Parliament.

Or that time when I had a brand new bike, a brand new month of time off, and the brand new thought that:"hey, Stockholm is just 200 kilometers from here, let's go there! On the bike!"

And the day after I arrived, when I slept, ate, turned the bike around and went home again.

There are times when I feel I have nothing to tell. Then I think back, and give myself a very self-centered mental slap.

It is easy to get too close to oneself, and to forget that things are not as familiar to others as one is to the one self that was there. That the tired old same old is brand new to those who have not heard it before.

There's a lot of uninteresting stories we don't tell.

A brutally political vision of a better tomorrow

There are two kinds of politics. The first is the I have a dream kind - the formulating and propagating of ideas about how the world should and ought to be. Dreams, visions, utopias, better tomorrows - all the good stuff.

And then there's the policy document kind.

Something that most people are either blissfully unaware or all too aware of is the difference between these two kinds. Those who are so lucky as to be unaware can spend oh so many joyous hours in the company of better tomorrows - those tomorrows that follow after the Revolution, the Rapture, the Realization of the Free Market or any other Singularity you might imagine.

Those of the unlucky persuasion are stuck with either the writing, reading or unhealthily close interpretations of policy documents. Which can be just as interesting, boring and hellishly narrowly focused as it sounds - depending on the particular circumstances of who, what, why, and how much money it would cost.

These two kinds are related. But not as a direct line from the one to the other, but rather as a long circuitous series of indirect routes and Chinese whispers. Which, as you may or may not know, means that the intentions that enter into the one end does not necessarily translate into the intended consequences at the other end.

To formulate it in a soundbite: all political visions must survive being translated into policy documents.

Not just a policy document, but many of them. Not just once in order to enunciate and expound the vision for a better tomorrow, but at least once for every institution that is expected to make this better tomorrow happen. At least once in order to make it clear that this particular institution is indeed involved in this betterment, and then an innumerable number of times in order to make it clear exactly how this betterment is supposed to be done.

The easiest way to visualize this is to think from the top down. First word must pass from the top of the hierarchy to the level below it, and then from that level to the level below it - and so forth until we reach the proverbial man on the street, the ordinary people.

Which means that a whole lot of translating, misunderstanding and office politics will have meddled in the political vision by the time it reaches those who are supposed to make it happen. And, unsurpisingly, means that it is harder than it looks to change the ways institutions work, even when the vision of the better world is perfectly clear at the top level. (Be that at the level of central government or the level of theory.)

This difference between the two different kinds of politics tends to be what makes people bitter, cynical and apathetic. On the one hand, the better tomorrow is a better place. On the other hand, the inertia and general indirectness of actually existing political institutions is enough to make even the most bravehearted of idealists lose heart. Nothing ever changes!

The thing is - they do. They are nudged, budged and ever so imperceptibly moved in this direction and that. It's not a big blob of inert political matter that envelopes the lands in a permanent status quo, but rather a vast collection of interconnected and mutually affecting social contexts. Changes in one place has consequences in another, which has consequences in yet another, and so on - and the key to making change happen is to nudge, budge and wiggle at as many of these places as possible at the same time.

Legislation is one of these places. But when it comes to making social change happen, it is not by any means the only place that matters. It is an important place, to be sure, but not the only place. But if you treat it as the only place that matters, you miss out on all that nudging and budging, and all the associated opportunities to affect change.

All political visions must survive the translation into policy documents. And you can help that translation - at all levels. Wherever and whoever you are.

That's a vision for a better tomorrow if there ever was one.

There's no vision at work here

Among all the stupid political goals that exists, the goal to "create more jobs" is among the more stupid ones. Furthermore, it is one of the least visionary, least reality based and least relevant goals that can be set for a society like ours.

The simple truth is that there are a certain number of things that has to be done in order for society to function. Things beyond discussion - keeping the infrastructure working, getting food to people, power generation and such things. Then there are things that makes society better for being done - social work, healthcare, optimization of administration and so on. And then there's all those things that really can't be said to be necessary in any way, but that gets done anyway - public relations, high end insurance ponzi schemes , frivolous entertainment jippos and suchlike.

And then we've run out of things to do. Those things that needs to be done are done, those things that ought to be done are also done, and there's such an oversaturation of those things that really don't either need or ought to be done that we can't even begin to comprehend what to do with it all. After all of that - nothing, zero, null.

There's no recourse to the argument that more things needs to be done. It's already being done. There's also no recourse to the argument that more things ought to be done - same story. And we can't well take recourse to the argument that we need to make more things we don't need - that is a self-contradiction if there ever was one.

To make a long story short: the goal to create more jobs is undermined by the fact that we really don't need, desire or even want more of what jobs bring us. Under these circumstances, to portray job creation as the highest - not to say only - political goal worth having -

Well.

It's an insult to any and all intelligent beings you care to associate with.

People need to eat, sleep and be sheltered from the elements. They desire community, meaning and worthy things to do. And they need and desire these things regardless of their status on the ever shrinking job market. A market that shows every imaginable sign of neither wanting nor needing more people.

It may not be not be visionary to want a society where people can eat, sleep and feel safe in their continued beings. But compared to the main competing vision, it is an all the more realistic one.

Give people what they need, not what an outmoded political system wants.

Originally published June 28, 2012

Sometimes, said and done are the same thing

I recently read the last book in the Wheel of Time series. I won't spoil, comment or say anything about anything in it. Just quote one particular line, by virtue of its particular quotiness.

"Knotai?" Knotai said.

This line, in and of itself, does not tell us anything. In context, however, it does literary magic. In several ways.

The context is that one of the characters all of a sudden is given a new name. Very literally, brutally and suddenly. Up to that point, the character had all through the series been referred to as something else. As readers, we could reasonably expect that this name would stick around to the end. And then, suddenly -

Your name is now Knotai.

Two things happens in our quoted line. The first (and most obvious) thing is that the question "what in the name of Hunter S Thompson kind of name is Knotai?" gets asked. Which is a valid question - absolutely nothing up to this point in any of the preceding thirteen books gives any hints whatsoever that this will happen, and no explanation is given. At all. We are left in bafflement, confusion and general flabbergastedness at what just happened. Much like Knotai.

The second thing that happens is that the new name is established as a fait accompli by virtue of that one quoted line. Notice who it is that's wondering about the new name - it is, indeed, Knotai, the bearer of the new name. The name change happened, and it happened. All through the rest of the segment, Knotai is Knotai - and no two ways about it.

All of this happens in just three words. Said and done.

As if by magic.

Hacking all the things

For some reason, the notion that hacking is something done on and with computers has taken a very firm hold on the popular imagination. The reasons for this are many and interesting, and I might very well return to them in the future. Right now, though, I just want to turn your attention to the fact that you can hack pretty much everything that has sufficient complexity to be hackable.

Tautologies. Love 'em.

One example of this, which is on my mind due to it being in the local media at this moment, is the tax code. In particular the tax code regarding the construction and renovation of houses. As you might imagine, these can be rather expensive propositions, and as a means to get people to (re)build things anyway, a deduction was introduced. The short, easy to grasp version is that you can deduce costs relating to labor, and only labor.

This can be hacked, if you put your mind to it.

The way to go about this is to say - okay, labor is deductable, material items are not. How do I make sure that I can get the most out of these particular circumstances?

By transferring costs from material items to labor. Or, in more concrete terms: by selling the material items on the cheap, and then charging loads and loads of money for the work of turning these items into buildings. In a manner such as this:
Big hulking machine: $5
Installing the big hulking machine: $7000/hour

By manipulating the numbers in this way, you can maximize the deduction while at the same time still charging the same price for it. (Or less, should you want to compete with someone else.) Which translates into profits, all legal and proper.

This, dear readers, is an act of hacking. And it is not quite as related to computers as one might imagine hacking to be. Rather, it takes advantage of the complexity of a system. Not a computer system, but a system in general.

All systems are hackable. All systems have parts that can be bent in certain ways to produce an outcome that is something other than the intended one. All you have to do is to put your mind to it and say - okay, this is such, that is thus. How can the working of the one affect the working of the other?

As the players of computer games are so wont of saying:

Good luck, have fun!