Quotulatiousness

January 20, 2014

Sounding the alarm over the endarkenment

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:55

I must not have been paying attention, but according to Jamie Bartlett, we should be terrified of a “dark enlightenment” that is sweeping the internet:

Since 2012 a sophisticated but bizarre online neo-fascist movement has been growing fast. It’s called “The Dark Enlightenment”. Its modus operandi is well suited to today’s world. Supporters are dotted all over the world, connected via a handful of blogs and chat rooms. Its adherents are clever, angry white men patiently awaiting the collapse of civilisation, and a return to some kind of futuristic, ethno-centric feudalism.

It started, suitably enough, with two blogs. Mencius Moldbug, a prolific blogger and computer whizz from San Francisco, and Nick Land, an eccentric British philosopher (previously co-founder of Warwick University’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) who in 2012 wrote the eponymous “The Dark Enlightenment”, as a series of posts on his site. You can find them all here.

The philosophy, difficult to pin down exactly, is a loose collection of neo-reactionary ideas, meaning a rejection of most modern thinking: democracy, liberty, and equality. Particular contempt is reserved for democracy, which Land believes “systematically consolidate[s] and exacerbate[es] private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption.”

So, according to this report, we should be terrified of a bunch of basement-dwelling maladjusted would-be techno-feudalists. The question that immediately springs to mind is “why?” We’re told that they’re “neo-reactionary”, “racist”, and “sexist”. We need to be afraid of them because they have the power to … well, nothing. He’s sounding the tocsin of alarm because he’s discovered that there are people who are wrong on the internet!

Update, 3 February: Scharlach created an affinity diagram of the Dark Enlightenment movement, grouped according to their major themes.

Click to see the original post.

Click to see the original post.

Update, 4 February: ESR‘s take on the affinity diagram linked above.

Just looking at the map, someone unfamiliar with the players would be justified in wondering if there’s really any coherence there at all. And that’s a fair question. Some of the people the map sweeps in don’t think of themselves as “Dark Enlightenment” at all. This is notably true of the light green cluster marked “Techno-Commercialists/Futurists” at the top, and the “Economists” connected to it in yellow.

If I belonged on this map, that’s where I’d be. I know Eliezer Yudkowsky; the idea that he and the Less Wrong crowd and Robin Hanson feel significant affinity with most of the rest of that map is pretty ludicrous.

Note, however, that one of only two links to the rest is “Nick Land”. This is a clue, because Nick Land is probably the single most successful booster of the “Dark Enlightenment” meme. It’s in his interest to make the movement look as big and various as he can manage, and I think this map is partly in the nature of a successful con job or dezinformatsiya.

In this, Land is abetted by people outside the movement who are well served by making it look like the Dark Enlightenment is as big and scary as possible. Some of those people lump in the techno-futurist/economist group out of dislike for that group’s broadly libertarian politics – which though very different from the reactionary ideas of the core Dark Enlightenment, is also in revolt against conventional wisdom. Others lump them in out of sheer ignorance.

So, my first contention is that Nick Land has pulled a fast one. That said, I think there is a core Dark Enlightenment – mostly identifiable with the purple “Political Philosophy” group, but with some crossover into HBD and Masculinity and (possibly) the other groups at the bottom of the map.

For the record, I don’t think I’ve got a dog in this fight … I only recognize the names of nine of the linked sites, and most of those are of the recognize-the-name sense, not the familiar-with-the-content sense.

January 18, 2014

The view from the “loser” demographic and the rise of “anti-success” sentiments

Filed under: Economics, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:50

Scott Adams thinks he’s identified a trend, and it’s a troubling one if he’s right:

I have been seeing a pattern in the past several years that makes me wonder if a sizeable portion of the public has become anti-success. The media has pitted the general public against the one-percenters for several years, so that might be a factor. And the bottom-feeders on the Internet (Gawker, Jezebel, etc.) have business models that involve taking celebrity quotes out of context to demonize them. So it would be no surprise if the public disliked successful people more than ever.

But I have also lately observed people who seem to reject their own best paths to success in favor of paths that are clearly bad. Let’s call those choices “loser choices” because any rational and objective observer would see it that way. I wondered if I was seeing an emerging pattern or an illusion.

And in a follow-up post:

The other day I asked aloud in this blog if there might be some sort of anti-success trend emerging in society. I think I found it.

Some folks emailed me directly to say they believe it is a waste of time to pursue success because it is a zero-sum game. In other words, they believe they can only be successful by making someone else less successful, on the theory that there isn’t enough success in the universe for everyone to get a meaningful slice. They tell me it would be “wrong” on some level to pick the pockets of strangers for self-enrichment.

And there it is.

I doubt that sort of thinking would have existed before the massive media campaign against the “top 1%.” The power of the top 1% story is in the false impression that rich people stole the money from the poor and middle class, and therefore it would only be fair to give most of it back.

Clearly some of the financial titans are doing little more than picking pockets. But those are the exceptions. Most one-percenters are growing the economy and creating jobs. That’s obvious to people who were born in the “rising tide lifts all boats” era. And it’s obvious to anyone with a bit of economics education.

But if you are in your twenties, with no deep understanding of economics, wouldn’t you believe success is evil? That’s the dominant story of their generation.

January 14, 2014

Megan McArdle on discussing sexism

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:55

She wrote a column on this topic last week, and the resulting discussion with commenters has her back at the keyboard:

Last week, I wrote an essay on women on the Internet in which I argued that the real problem is not the sexualized remarks and threats of violence that people tend to focus on. I’ve now been blogging for more than a dozen years, and for all the threats and the comments, they have never resulted in so much as a light shove or a pushy pass in the real world. No, the real problem, to me, is that women attract an undue amount of nonsexual rage and denigration from people who don’t like the opinions they hold. People are ruder, angrier, more condescending and more dismissive with women who make arguments they don’t like.

I tried to make it clear what I was not saying: “Men, you need to clean up your act.” This is not just something men do. It is not just something conservatives, or liberals, or nonfeminists do. It is a general rule about how people of all genders and political ideologies interact with women who assert their right to have strong opinions about important issues. I was not issuing dicta; I was trying to start a conversation about how people view women. Most people can see the outsized abuse that the women on their own side of an argument get; I hoped that maybe the next time they got similarly outraged at a woman on the other side, a few of them would think, “Wait, am I angry at her for being stupid and disingenuous, or am I angry at her for being a woman who disagrees with me?”

[…]

I believe that three things are true:

  1. It is quite possible to vehemently disagree with a woman for reasons that have nothing to do with her gender.
  2. Subtle sexism is nonetheless quite widespread.
  3. Therefore, it is generally helpful to discuss sexist patterns in human behavior. However, unless the offense is really quite blatant, it is generally unhelpful in the extreme to accuse specific people, or actions, of being sexist. I mean, if someone says something like “I just don’t think women should have opinions on politics because they’re too stupid and overemotional to think clearly about anything,” then go to town. Otherwise, discretion is the better part of valor.

When you talk about generalities, you’re having a conversation. When you talk about specific people, you’re making an accusation. And that makes it very hard to have a rational discussion.

January 11, 2014

February 11th 2014 is The Day We Fight Back Against Mass Surveillance

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

It may be only a token gesture, but mark 11 February on your calendar:

DEAR USERS OF THE INTERNET,

In January 2012 we defeated the SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation with the largest Internet protest in history. A year ago this month one of that movement’s leaders, Aaron Swartz, tragically passed away.

Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance.

If Aaron were alive, he’d be on the front lines, fighting against a world in which governments observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action.

Now, on the eve of the anniversary of Aaron’s passing, and in celebration of the win against SOPA and PIPA that he helped make possible, we are announcing a day of protest against mass surveillance, to take place this February 11th.

[…]

Anti-surveillance banner preview

We’re creating embeddable banners and widgets that you’ll be able to add to your site to encourage visitors to participate in the day of action. The photo above is just a draft — the final design is yet to come.

January 4, 2014

Tim Bray wants you to go “content-free”

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Tim Bray despises the word “content”:

I’m thinking about successful new communication channels, and how we talk about what’s in them. On Twitter, we say tweets. In the blogosphere and on Facebook, posts; also rants, reviews, and flames. Facebook has likes and now everything has links.

But I note the entire absence of “content”; the word, I mean. Yay! I’ve loathed it ever since its first powerpoint-pitch appearance, meaning “shit we don’t actually care about but will attract eyeballs and make people click on ads”. Except for they don’t say “people”, they say “users”, a symptom of another attitude problem.

With every year that passes, it’s increasingly clear that the appearance of “content” in any business plan is a symptom of (likely fatal) infection by cluelessness; and a good predictor of failure.

H/T to Charles Stross for the link.

December 31, 2013

Blog traffic, 2013

Filed under: Administrivia, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:43

While the blogging “revolution” may be over, I think that providing links and interesting posts that generated nearly 1.5 million unique visits shows there’s still a bit of life in the blogging world:

Quotulatiousness 2013 traffic

Quotulatiousness visits and hits 2010-2013

As I took these screenshots at about 10:30 in the morning, the final numbers for 2013 will be 2,000-2,500 higher than shown.

Social networking – your weak contacts may be the most valuable ones

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

Tim Harford explains why your friends and family are not the most valuable members of your extended social network … at least when it comes to looking for jobs:

This dispiriting stuff reminded me of Mark Granovetter’s work on “the strength of weak ties”, published in 1973. Granovetter, a sociologist, brought together two disparate strands of work: a survey of how people with professional or managerial jobs had found those jobs; and a theoretical analysis of the structure of social networks.

Start with the theoretical observation first: the most irreplaceable social connections, paradoxically, are often rather weak or distant ones. A family group or clique of close friends all tend to know each other and know similar things at similar times. Their social ties are strong but also redundant, in the sense that there are many different paths through which information could pass from one member of that group to another.

By contrast, “weak ties” between one social cluster and another are valuable precisely because the social contact is unusual. Information passed along a weak tie will often be totally new — and if it doesn’t arrive through the weak tie, it is unlikely to arrive at all.

Granovetter then supplemented this theoretical idea with his survey, showing that it was very common for people to find jobs — especially managerial jobs and jobs with which they were satisfied — through personal contacts. The old saw is true: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Or as Granovetter put it in his book Finding a Job, what matters most is “one’s position in a social network”.

But this is not because of crude nepotism: the key contacts who helped jobseekers find jobs were typically distant rather than close friends — old college contacts, perhaps, or former colleagues. Granovetter’s analysis made this finding make sense: it’s the more peripheral contacts who tell you things you don’t already know.

This observation has certainly been true for many of my jobs: colleagues from a decade or more in the past suddenly pop up with an interesting position or business opportunity (such contacts are all the more interesting because they’re completely unexpected).

2013 in review

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

I nearly ran Steve Chapman‘s wonderful little squib as a QotD entry: “The course of freedom and democracy in the world is an evolutionary process, though sometimes it proceeds in the wrong direction. Wines have good years and bad years. If 2013 were a wine, you’d use it to kill weeds.”

Looking ahead to 2014, Radley Balko has some Dire Civil Liberties Predictions to ring in the new year:

As we come to the end of a year that saw revelations about massive government spying programs, horrifying stories of police abuse, and brazen violations of the Fourth Amendment, I thought I might offer my own grim predictions about where civil liberties are headed in the coming year. Sure, some of these may seem outlandish. But to borrow from H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the grade and lubriciousness of the slippery slope.

On a less-depressing note, Nick Mediati rounds up the “top” memes of 2013, including the latest attempt to de-grammaticize the internet:

Doge meme of 2013

After years and years of cats dominating the Internet, dog lovers were finally thrown a bone in 2013 with the emergence of the Doge meme. The meme typically features photos of Shiba Inu dogs with internal thoughts overlaid in brightly colored Comic Sans. And it’s frickin’ awesome. You might find yourself spontaneously speaking in doge. Such language. So words. Very thought. Wow.

November 18, 2013

Lifelogging in 30-second intervals

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:38

Jerry Brito is a sousveillance fan and he thinks you should be too:

The Narrative Clip is a digital camera about the size of a postage stamp that clips to one’s breast pocket or shirt collar and takes a photo every thirty seconds of whatever one’s seeing. The photos are uploaded to the cloud and can be accessed on demand with a smartphone app, making it easy to look up any moment in one’s life. When the project to mass-produce these cameras first hit Kickstarter, I knew I had to have one, and with any luck mine will be arriving in a couple of weeks.

The prospect of having a complete photographic record of my life is compelling for many reasons. I have a terrible memory, especially for faces, so it will be interesting to see if this device can help. There are also moments in life that would be great to relive, but that one can’t – or one doesn’t know one should – be photographing. Narrative’s Instagram feed has some good examples of these. But most importantly, I want to help hasten our inevitable sousveillance future.

[…]

Being monitored in everyday life has become inescapable. So, as David Brin points out in The Transparent Society, the question is not whether there should be pervasive monitoring, but who will have access to the data. Will it only be the powerful, who will use the information to control? Or will the rest of us also be able to watch back?

Ideally, perhaps, we would all be left alone to live private lives under no one’s gaze. Short of halting all technological progress, however, that ship has sailed. Mass surveillance is the inevitable result of smaller cameras and microphones, faster processors, and incredibly cheap storage. So if I can’t change that reality, I want to be able to watch back as well.

November 14, 2013

How the internet was “weaponized”

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:45

In Wired, Nicholas Weaver looks back on the way the internet was converted from a passive network infrastructure to a spy agency wonderland:

According to revelations about the QUANTUM program, the NSA can “shoot” (their words) an exploit at any target it desires as his or her traffic passes across the backbone. It appears that the NSA and GCHQ were the first to turn the internet backbone into a weapon; absent Snowdens of their own, other countries may do the same and then say, “It wasn’t us. And even if it was, you started it.”

If the NSA can hack Petrobras, the Russians can justify attacking Exxon/Mobil. If GCHQ can hack Belgicom to enable covert wiretaps, France can do the same to AT&T. If the Canadians target the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy, the Chinese can target the U.S. Department of the Interior. We now live in a world where, if we are lucky, our attackers may be every country our traffic passes through except our own.

Which means the rest of us — and especially any company or individual whose operations are economically or politically significant — are now targets. All cleartext traffic is not just information being sent from sender to receiver, but is a possible attack vector.

[…]

The only self defense from all of the above is universal encryption. Universal encryption is difficult and expensive, but unfortunately necessary.

Encryption doesn’t just keep our traffic safe from eavesdroppers, it protects us from attack. DNSSEC validation protects DNS from tampering, while SSL armors both email and web traffic.

There are many engineering and logistic difficulties involved in encrypting all traffic on the internet, but its one we must overcome if we are to defend ourselves from the entities that have weaponized the backbone.

November 9, 2013

Barack Obama on the difference between private enterprise and government

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:43

Ann Althouse finds it amazing that President Obama clearly understands why his campaign website was so effective and why the Obamacare website fails on so many levels, but can’t generalize that knowledge to the whole public/private sphere:

In yesterday’s interview with Chuck Todd, Obama said:

    You know, one of the lessons — learned from this whole process on the website — is that probably the biggest gap between the private sector and the federal government is when it comes to I.T. …

    Well, the reason is is that when it comes to my campaign, I’m not constrained by a bunch of federal procurement rules, right?

That is, many have pointed out that his campaign website was really good, so why didn’t that mean that he’d be good at setting up a health insurance website? The answer is that the government is bad because the government is hampered by… government!

    And how we write — specifications and — and how the — the whole things gets built out. So part of what I’m gonna be looking at is how do we across the board, across the federal government, leap into the 21st century.

I love the combination of: 1. Barely able to articulate what the hell happens inside these computer systems, and 2. Wanting to leap!

    Because when it comes to medical records for veterans, it’s still done in paper. Medicaid is still largely done on paper.

    When we buy I.T. services generally, it is so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that a whole bunch of it doesn’t work or it ends up being way over cost.

This should have made him sympathetic to the way government burdens private enterprise, but he’s focused on liberating government to take over more of what has been done privately. And yet there’s no plan, no idea about what would suddenly enable government to displace private businesses competing to offer a product people want to buy.

November 4, 2013

QotD: Software quality assurance

Filed under: Business, Government, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

The fundamental purpose of testing—and, for that matter, of all software quality assurance (QA) deliverables and processes — is to tell you just what you’ve built and whether it does what you think it should do. This is essential, because you can’t inspect a software program the same way you can inspect a house or a car. You can’t touch it, you can’t walk around it, you can’t open the hood or the bedroom door to see what’s inside, you can’t take it out for spin. There are very few tangible or visible clues to the completeness and reliability of a software system — and so we have to rely on QA activities to tell us how well built the system is.

Furthermore, almost any software system developed nowadays for production is vastly more complex than a house or car — it’s more on the same order of complexity of a large petrochemical processing and storage facility, with thousands of possible interconnections, states, and processes. We would be (rightly) terrified if, say, Exxon build such a sprawling oil refining complex near our neighborhood and then started up production having only done a bare minimum of inspection, testing, and trial operations before, during and after construction, offering the explanation that they would wait until after the plant went into production and then handle problems as they crop up. Yet too often that’s just how large software development projects are run, even though the system in development may well be more complex (in terms of connections, processes, and possible states) than such a petrochemical factory. And while most inadequately tested software systems won’t spew pollutants, poison the neighborhood, catch fire, or explode, they can cripple corporate operations, lose vast sums of money, spark shareholder lawsuits, and open the corporation’s directors and officers to civil and even criminal liability (particularly with the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley).

And that presumes that the system can actually go into production. The software engineering literature and the trade press are replete with well-documented case studies of “software runaways”: large IT re-engineering or development projects that consume tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, or in a few spectacular (government) cases, billions of dollars, over a period of years, before grinding to a halt and being terminated without ever having put a usable, working system into production. So it’s important not to skimp on testing and the other QA-related activities.

Bruce F. Webster, “Obamacare and the Testing Gap”, And Still I Persist…, 2013-10-31

Living in a Surveillance State: Mikko Hypponen at TEDxBrussels

Filed under: Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

October 31, 2013

Reason.tv – Do the Healthcare Mash

Filed under: Government, Health, Humour, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

Trick or Treatment? Remy channels Bobby “Boris ” Pickett for this Healthcare.gov-Halloween mash-up.

Written and performed by Remy. Video by Sean Malone.

[…]

Lyrics:
He was working on his laptop late one night
when his eyes beheld a ghoulish site
He could not log in despite several tries
then suddenly to no one’s surprise

(he did the Mash)
He did the Healthcare Mash
(the Healthcare Mash)
it was a keyboard smash
(he did the Mash)
the website was trash
(he did the Mash)
He did the Healthcare mash

Who could design such a site so flawed and so sloppy?
The code is so ancient, perhaps it was Hammurabi
He’d try to apply but the site would suspend
I’ve seen a eunuch with a more functional front end

(he did the Mash)
He did the Healthcare Mash
(the Healthcare Mash)
it was a keyboard smash
(he did the Mash)
He tried to clear his cache
(he did the Mash)
He did the Healthcare mash

Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent
for a website that has trouble loading
How could the government’s web designers
create a site with such awful coding?

(they did the Mash)
Ahh, they did the Healthcare Mash
(the Healthcare Mash)
it was a keyboard smash
(they did the Mash)
they spent all of our cash
(they did the Mash)
They did the Healthcare Mash

October 29, 2013

Obamacare’s technical issues

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:48

A comment at Marginal Revolution deservedly has been promoted to being a guest post, discussing the scale of the problems with the Obamacare software:

The real problems are with the back end of the software. When you try to get a quote for health insurance, the system has to connect to computers at the IRS, the VA, Medicaid/CHIP, various state agencies, Treasury, and HHS. They also have to connect to all the health plan carriers to get pre-subsidy pricing. All of these queries receive data that is then fed into the online calculator to give you a price. If any of these queries fails, the whole transaction fails.

Most of these systems are old legacy systems with their own unique data formats. Some have been around since the 1960′s, and the people who wrote the code that runs on them are long gone. If one of these old crappy systems takes too long to respond, the transaction times out.

[…]

When you even contemplate bringing an old legacy system into a large-scale web project, you should do load testing on that system as part of the feasibility process before you ever write a line of production code, because if those old servers can’t handle the load, your whole project is dead in the water if you are forced to rely on them. There are no easy fixes for the fact that a 30 year old mainframe can not handle thousands of simultaneous queries. And upgrading all the back-end systems is a bigger job than the web site itself. Some of those systems are still there because attempts to upgrade them failed in the past. Too much legacy software, too many other co-reliant systems, etc. So if they aren’t going to handle the job, you need a completely different design for your public portal.

A lot of focus has been on the front-end code, because that’s the code that we can inspect, and it’s the code that lots of amateur web programmers are familiar with, so everyone’s got an opinion. And sure, it’s horribly written in many places. But in systems like this the problems that keep you up at night are almost always in the back-end integration.

The root problem was horrific management. The end result is a system built incorrectly and shipped without doing the kind of testing that sound engineering practices call for. These aren’t ‘mistakes’, they are the result of gross negligence, ignorance, and the violation of engineering best practices at just about every step of the way.

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