To See More Clearly

A few days ago, Evan Selinger wrote an article on Augmented-Reality Racism which has been (unfortunately) gaining some traction around the web. I say ‘unfortunately’, because Evan is a sharp and insightful thinker who can translate dense philosophical ideas into nuanced and popular forms (see his July article on The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun for a great example), and Augmented-Reality Racism is not that. Since I think there’s some merit to the premise, I’d like to take my own whack at it.

Augmented reality (AR) takes modern computing technology and puts it on the bridge of your nose, interlaying projected images and sounds with your view of the world. Evan hypothesizes that such a technology could be used in a racist manner, either to ‘erase’ people of a certain race from view or to become super-aware of their presence (pulse-Doppler blackdar?). He notes that technologies have frequently embedded racist agendas, like the example of Robert Moses’ low bridges on the Long Island Parkway, designed to block buses--full of black people from the city--from the beaches. Evan concludes by wondering if augmented realities designed to individualize and humanizing the masses in the crowd might be a good way to build social bonds and empathy.

There’s an irritating floppiness to the scenario (does racist AR obscure people or highlight them?), but more fundamentally, the article fails to think deeply about augmented reality or the relationship between technology and race. First AR: Augmented reality is much more than the visible front-end of a head-mounted display. AR (properly, Nathan Jurgenson’s definition of Mild Augmented Reality) is the belief that “The digital and physical are part of one reality, have different properties, and interact.” It’s about “Spiming” as much of the world as possible, so that the qualities and histories of objects can be viewed and understood in those nifty heads-mounted displays.

In many ways, the world is already augmented. Any surface covered with words and other signs and signifiers, which in certain places can be pretty much all of them, is already augmented. Awnings block the rain and advertise stores. Packages conceal the materiality of their contents, while displaying an image. What makes the new augmented reality unique is that digital information is fluid, protean, infinitely customizable and transformative. Much like alchemists, modern entrepreneurs invoke a quicksilver digital as they attempt to transmute the dull substance of commerce into glittering profits.

Race is a complicated topic, far too big to be contained in a short essay, but one of the most interesting sections in Sorting Things Out by Bowker and Star concerns the system of racial classification used in Apartheid South Africa.  From 1948 to 1994, every South African was classified as Black, White, Indian, or Coloured, with segregated housing, employment, and legal rights. Apartheid was an institutional system, a technology backed by a racial pseudo-science, for legitimating and perpetuating the exploitation and oppression of a large portion of the South Africa population.  But it was also a system for generating order, and Bowker and Star explain in detail the Kafka-esque nightmare of lives upended by the arbitrary classificatory decisions of petty bureaucrats. To make this absurd system work, the physical bodies of non-white South Africans had to be ‘augmented’ with administrative tests and pass books detailing precisely what race a person belonged to.

Now, contemporary America is not nearly as racist as apartheid South Africa, but race still matters here, whether it’s on the census form, or in the lived experience of people who experience prejudice, police brutality, and shorter life expectancy. What I find interesting is that as America has moved away from the worst excesses of Jim Crow, racism only becomes visible through technology. We know that the NYPD is racist from their own data on Stop and Frisk, which records statistically higher numbers of searches for African Americans and Hispanics and fewer cases of illegal drug or weapon possession.  If you buy the results from the Implicit Association Tests, pretty much everybody has some degree of racist sentiment. Racism as a matter of systemic bias, rather than overt discrimination, is only revealed through the augmented reality of statistics and demographics, which attach data to people.

There are also interesting patterns in how people of difference races and classes use technology, for example the now classic description of MySpace as a ‘digital ghetto’ afflicted by ‘white flight’, or how twice as many African-Americans use cell phones as their primary form of internet access compared to whites.  Race in America is more than skin color; it’s also cultural, in patterns of speech and metaphor. Even bad ideas sound plausible when presented articulately, with clean graphic design and proofreading. I wonder what would happen to political discourse if we removed this embedded bias towards certain authoritative voices by making everybody present their ideas in ERMAHGERD or after nurbling. Making the form of arguments identical (and ridiculous) might help us focus on their contents.

To return to the premise of the Augmented Reality racism, I’d take the opposite tack from Evan. If race is a matter of surface appearances, than an augmentation that erases these surface differences is likely to make us less racist on an individual level. To flip a popular saying, on the internet we’re all dogs.  And while I’m sure there are some Racial Holy War (link warning: extreme racism) types who would enjoy knowing precisely how many ‘mud people’ there are in a three-mile radius so they could feel threatened and hateful all the time, for most people being more aware of the statistical and systemic patterns of racism (link warning: awesome maps) is useful tool to engage forms of social justice we are currently ignorant of. As for humanizing people, maybe it’s holiday misanthropy, but most people are kinda terrible (link warning: internet Nice Guys), and we probably don’t want to know how much they enjoy Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, or their views on gun control, or the contents of their fridge. Apathy is the lubricant of urban living.

Evan opened with a story about his very Jewish grandmother, and so I’d like conclude with a story about my equally Jewish great-Grandmother, who had very poor eyesight and only got her first pair of glasses late in life. Right after getting her new glasses, she went for her usual walk around the neighborhood with her daughter, and began to sob.

“Ma, why are you crying?” My grandmother (then a young woman) asked her mother.

“Everybody looks so sad,” The old lady said, “Before I could see, I thought they were smiling all the time.”

Trust the Man in the White Lab Coat, He is Your Friend: or, Restoring Public Faith in Science

Science in the 20th century produced miracles. Physicists discovered the fundamental building blocks of the universe, chemists invented almost every modern object with plastics, biologists cracked the genetic code, and engineers literally flew to the moon. But at some point, the relationship between science and society went off the rails. Maybe it was a variety of food scares in the European Union, or perhaps the mandatory climate change denial for American conservatives. But whatever the cause, scientists lost the public trust. Those of us who account ourselves policy realists believe that accurate science is vital to proper policy formation. How then, can the public trust in science be restored?

In “See-Through-Science”, James Wilson and Rebecca Willis of Demos argue that public engagement with science has to move upstream. Rather than scientific knowledge flowing from the technical elite to an accepting public, scientists and ordinary people should be talking about the values, visions, and vested interests of emerging fields of research as early as possible. The goal is to create better, more socially robust, science that doesn’t clash with public values at a later date, such as occurred with embryonic stem cell research. The idea is to re-engage people with the scientific ideas that will drive the future.

“Taking European Knowledge Society Serious” is a similar effort by a star-studded EU academic panel to diagnose how European science can be both socially responsive and a driver of innovation in the 21st century. Their recommendations are far reaching, but center around the idea that ‘risk assessment’ has to incorporate broader values, and that political elites should be careful that they don’t predetermine the framings of scientific controversy.

Personally, I’m doubtful of the ability of citizens’ juries, value mapping, or the other kinds of participatory efforts to positively alter the course of science, or the relationship between science and society. The day to day activities of science are fairly dull for those who are not already invested in them. Public participation would pick from the same select pool as criminal juries; the retired, the unemployed, and the flakey, and the effects of participation would not extend beyond their immediate social network. Science is driven by foremost, the immutable facts of nature, and their discovery and use. Secondly, it is driven by priority of novel results and the internal advancement of scientists within the community, and finally, it is driven by money, and the decisions by which grant panels, venture capitalists, and corporate executive allocate money. According to liberal political and economic theory, democracy and the free market already serve as adequate proxies for ‘public participation’ in deciding the direction of research.

But the weaknesses in these European STS policy pieces go deeper than an inability to alter the course of research. Rather, they don’t even attempt to figure out why the public distrusts science. This is a core issue, because without diagnosing the disease, there can be no purposeful attempt at a cure. And finding a cure is important, because the opposite of science is not apathy, but rather a particularly subversive and dangerous form of magical thinking.

People distrust science because science is inherently fallible. Every reversion of a theory, every recall of a new drug or product, every breakdown in a complex socio-technical system demonstrates that science is weaker than the magic thinking associated with religion, dark green ecocentrism, climate change denial, and neo-classical economics. The incomplete, esoteric, and contradictory nature of these beliefs systems is in fact their strength, since any failure in their magic can be explained away. Science, without these ambiguities, must suffer until a paradigm shift.

A second aspect is the persistent disintegration of trust in our society. During the Cold War, political leaders (in alliance with scientists) were able to use the threat on immanent nuclear annihilation to create obedience. It is no surprise that the decline in the credibility of science happened at the same time as defense intellectuals were rendered irrelevant by the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. People began to look for new theories that matched their own personal beliefs, that weren’t as hard to understand and didn’t change as rapidly as science. A few canny politicos realized that by destroying civic trust and the belief in an empirical, historical past, they could craft the past anew each election cycle, avoiding all responsibility for their mistakes. And so far, we’ve been rich enough and robust enough not to suffer any existential disasters from thinking magically, despite the purposeless wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan, the flooding of New Orleans, the financial collapse, the BP oil spill, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, etc etc.

The problem with directly attacking false beliefs and magical thinking is this tends to alienate the audience you are trying to court, and may even entrench their status as an oppressed minority. However, changing minds is very, very hard, and the first priority must be stopping the spread of the infection. We can’t censor, but we can ridicule, and demand to see the credentials of these peddlers of false beliefs. The ideals of equality and neutrality espoused by the mainstream media are fictions which have stopped being strictly useful. Bullshit must be publically exposed as such. Perhaps we need a new journalism award, the Golden Shovel, for the best demolition of bullshit and lies.

At the same time, we need to recast public education towards a realistic understanding of the limits of science, technology, and state power. People have impossible expectations for science, they demand that it solve ill-formed problems, such as those dealing with the regulation of potentially toxic chemicals, in the absence of useful models. Or they want their drugs safe, effective, and now. Or they believe the Federal government has the power to plug a hole thousands of feet beneath the sea. At the same times as people learn about the limits of science, they should also be taught about the line between falsifiable science, and unfalsifiable magical thinking. Of course, this will not be easy, especially at a high school level. I am barely coming to grips with these issues, and I’ve spent several years studying them. But more important than any factual knowledge, is the ability to reason, to think critically, and to distinguish valid arguments from invalid one. Until every member of the public can articulate their values, and the supporting evidence for them, efforts to input public values into science will be useless at best.

Report from Transforming Humanity

This past weekend (Dec 3-4), I attended the Transforming Humanity: Fantasy? Dream? Nightmare? Conference hosted by the Center for Inquiry, Penn Center for Bioethics, and the Penn Center for Neuroscience and Society. James Hughes and George Dvorsky of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies give their blow-by-blow record of the conference, but I'd like to step back and provide an overview of the field, and its position today.

The ability to use pharmaceuticals, cybernetics, and genetic engineering to alter human beings poses many complicated ethical, philosophical, and political issues about the potential deployment of these technologies. The attendees at the conference ranged from hardcore transhumanists, to left-wing bio-conservatives, and took a variety of approaches, from theology, to philosophy, to bioethics and medical regulation.

On the philosophical side, several speakers traced the philosophic heritage of transhumanism, and the demand to either find a place for man in the nature world, or the necessity of creating a unique standpoint, through the works of Thoreau, Sartre, and Cassirer. Patrick Hopkins of Millsap College gave an interesting lecture on a taxonomy of post-human bodies, Barbies, Bacons, Nietzsche, and Platos. Post-humans will have to find internal meaning in their lives in many ways, and while I appreciated the scholarship, there should have been more about the new intimacy of technology to the post-human, and its effects on daily life, beyond the obligatory references to Harraway's Cyborg Manifesto.

On the practical side, the Penn contingent (Jonathan Moreno, Martha Farah, and Joseph Powers) talked about coming developments in cybernetic devices, brain implants, and pharmaceuticals. As it stands, there exists no regulatory framework for enhancements. The FDA will only certify the safety of therapeutics, drugs that treat diseases, which means that a prospective enhancement will either have to find disease (medicalization, in the jargon), or exist in a legal limbo. Katherine Drabiak-Syed gave a great lecture about the legal and professional risks that doctors prescribing Modafinil off-label run. Despite American Academy of Neurology guidelines approving neuroenhancement, prescribing doctors are putting their patients at risk, and are violating the Controlled Substances Act.

Allen Buchanan opened the conference by suggesting that there was nothing special about unintended genetic modification, or evolution, while Max Mehlman of Case Western closed the conference by asking if humanity can survive evolutionary engineering. Dr. Mehlman posed four laws: Do nothing to harm children, create an international treaty banning a genetic arms race, do not exterminate the human race, and do not stifle future progress for understanding the universe. Good principles, but as always, the devil is in the details. International law has been at best only partially successful at controlling weapons of mass destruction or global warming.

To close on two points: The practical matter of regulating human enhancement remains highly unsettled, and leading scholars in the field are only beginning to figure out how we can judge the effectiveness and risk of particular enhancements on a short-term basis, let alone control long-term societal changes. The potential creators, users, and regulators of enhancement are spread across medicine, electrical engineering, law, education, and nearly every other sector of activity, and they are not communicating well. Basic questions such as “What does it mean to enhance?” and “Who will be responsible?” are unlikely to be closed any time soon.

On a philosophical level, the question of whether “To be human is to choose our own paths,” and “To be human is to find and accept your natural limits,” is unlikely to have a right answer. But Peter Cross was correct when he pointed out that even enhanced, humans will still need to find a source of meaning in their lives. If there is a human nature, it is to be unsettled, to always seek new questions and answers. The one enhancement we should absolutely avoid is the one that will make us content.

Belief-based certainty vs. evidence-based certainty

Over at [this] foum I noticed the following comment #10, which plays into some recent thoughts I've been having :

"Evidence-based certainty uses rationality to gradually prove or disprove theories based on empirical evidence. Belief-based certainty works in the other direction, the desired certainty is already known and rationality is abused to build on carefully selected evidence to “prove” that belief.

Belief-based certainty will always have a higher value socially and politically in the short term because it satisfies the immediate need for certainty and it is purchased by those who have the assets to afford it and have the most to lose.

Evidence-based inquiry is a process that only produces a gradually increasing probability of certainty in the long term. Facts will lose the news cycle but quietly win the cultural war."

I think in a very broad sense the narrative which "RFLatta, Iowa City" is drawing, and which Paul Krugman often uses to distinguish himself from those dastardly freshwater economists, is true, but should be taken with a grain of salt because it is a false dichotomy.

"Evidence-based inquiry" is surely what we ultimately want to point to when we talk about science and mathematics, but the process of how the sausage is made is obviously different in some important respects. An investigator knows he must collect evidence, but what are the right questions to ask? What are the right experiments to perform? These decisions cannot be made on the basis of hard evidence, since we haven't collected any hard evidence yet -- one must take existing hard evidence from other's experiments and then try to extrapolate to make a plausible prediction.

Indeed in computational learning theory too, we see the importance of this approach of "finding a plausible fit" to some of the data based on some unjustified assumptions, and then testing the hypothesis against other data.

The point is, we can't find a good fit until we understand the data, but we have to start somewhere, so where do we start? The answer is, generally, we start with our beliefs, and go with our gut.

In mathematics of course, having a good intuition is critically important. Famously for Godel, intuition was all important -- even though the Continuum Hypothesis is known to be independent of ZFC, Godel believed we can have set theoretic intuition about some of its consequences such that we should reject it as false. How Godel could possibly have cultivated such an intuition continues to be regarded as something of a mystery, depending on how much you read into it. Richard Lipton writes a nice blog post about all of this: http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/mathematical-intuition-what-is-it/

Which brings me to a critical juncture -- what is the distinction between intuition and prejudice? My contention is that there is none, they are semantically equivalent and differ only in positive / negative connotation. I should mention another quote I am fond of which I may have disseminated previously:

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." -William James

How do we know when we are really meaningfully investigating an open question as opposed to just juggling around our prejudices? It really seems that at least some of the time, this may be the hardest aspect of science. I can certainly remember advisors on projects I worked on in the past who were pleased when, I lead myself to backtrack on some entrenched assumption I had made.

How do we confront issues like this when the question is something like P vs. NP, where now essentially 90% of the field believes P != NP, and takes the attitude "we know they aren't equal, now we just have to prove it"? In at least one talk I've seen, Peter Sarnak stuck his neck out and opined that this attitude is unscientific.

It seems to me that most of the time, we don't spend too much time arguing about intuitions, because it is largely unproductive. Use whatever mystical value system you want to guide your research, but if it doesn't produce results, you'd better toss it out the window, and it must yield to proofs. It's fine to believe "P != NP because everything is an expander graph", and get it tattooed on yourself in German if you want, but if it doesn't go anywhere... don't get too attached to your burdens.

So whats the moral? At this point, it seems to me that, mathematical intuition is a total myth, part of this silly hero worship ritual that we all seem to indulge in to some extent. Yet on the other hand, I've never known professors to disabuse undergrads or grad students of this idea. Indeed we even see really famous people like Godel, Richard Lipton, and Enrico Bombieri "indulging".

So perhaps as a reasonable hypothesis is that, we progress as follows -- when we are young we believe anything, when we are grad students, we become dramatically more skeptical, and then somehow with experience, we come around and believe again.

I just spent like 20 minutes trying to find this webcomic I believe I saw like this... it was either xkcd or smbc, one of these things where you have a graph showing how, either with age or amount of thought put into it, your belief in God begins very high, then plummets "how could god possibly exist", and then continues to oscillate between 50% and 0 for the rest of your life "oh that's how...".

Personally I don't find that to be the case wrt God, but I now think its plausible with respect to mathematical intuition.

And there we go again, extrapolating some kind of crazy oscillating curve based on two data points, some hearsay, and a web comic... fml.

The Rightful Place of Science Policy

This previous post on the goals of neuroscience (and the ensuing flamewar) got me thinking. What is it that I am trying to do?

I'll freely admit it, I am not a scientist. I don't generate testable hypothesis, knowledge about the natural universe, or anythng that can be nailed down with a reasonable degree of certainty. Why then should I be trusted (and publicly funded?). As science policy expert, I believe that I provide a unique skillset and viewpoint for decision-making in the 21st century.

Science policy has two research thrusts: guiding the development of the natural sciences through funding mechanism and other incentives, and understanding and responding to the effects of science and technology on our society. Science does not exist in a vacuum, every it of knowledge or technological artifact has associated social processes, what Sheila Jasanoff calls 'co-production.' The ultimate goal of science policy is to combine the two research thrusts into a means of steering society by favoring certain research paths. Though this seems at anti-democratic, elitist, or even Orwellian, it is the state of the world. We are always making choices vis a vis science policy, even relinquishment or defunding counts as a choice. The work of the science policy professional is to make good choices, in a full understanding of the technosocial context in which they are made, and as broad of public participation as possible.

The origins of science policy as a discipline can be traced back to WW2, where America rapidly mobilized its scientists and engineers to produce war-winning weapons: the proximity fuse, operations research, and the atomic bomb. Vannevar Bush's Office of Scientific Research and Development organized thousands of scientists to turn knowledge towards military ends, but despite its spectacular success, it could only be tempory. Bush ruled in a climate of secrecy and military necessity which justified any decision. The war forced people to work together, and Bush was a managerial genius. The conditions of the OSRD could not be replicated indefinitely, and so Bush moved to create a civilian successor to the OSRD for basic research, the National Science Foundation, and pressed for more scientific expert participation at the highest echelons of government.

Within the decade, spurred on by sputnik terror, Federal science funding had become a permanent part of the political landscape. Dozens of agencies, from the Department of Defense to the National Institutes of Health, funded basic and applied science. Corporate labs served as epicenters of invention in Silicon Valley and along Route 128. But while this era brought forth wonders, science remained a servant only of those wealthy enough to directly support it; the military and high tech. The vast majority of America's scientific output languished in academia. In 1980, Congress fundamentally reorganized science policy with Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed patents for the products of federally funded research. Now, scientists did not need to choose between the public and private sectors, their work could be universally applied. The Federal government took on the role of a basic driver of innovation.

At the same time, citizens became more aware of the role of science and technology in constituting their world. The environmental and anti-nuclear movements exposed people to the hazards of modern technology, while making science itself an object of contention. Neo-luddite responses to computerization, suburbanization, and militarization further mobilized ordinary people and academics to seriously consider the state of science, technology, and society.

We stand now poised at the edge of a great transformation. Convergent technologies in nano, biological, information, and cognitive realms propose to alter and redefine human beings. A combination of population growth and industrialization has placed the planetary ecosystem and resource supply under near critical stress. In this delicate scenario, we can no longer trust to the blind forces of the market to make the best decisions, or leave it entirely in the hermetic hands of a self-selecting technological elite.

Science policy is therefore about making good decisions. It is about a set of intellectual tools that allow you to analyze issues and expose critical elements, consequences, and constituencies in political decisions involving human beings and scientific knowledge. I do not believe that science policy experts should have a preeminent role at the table, that's just as bad as turning decision-making over to politicians, or bankers, or generals, or engineers. Instead, we try and get as many people at the table as possible, as many views to ensure that science is working towards socially desirable ends, that people are not being unjustly excluded, and that there is a full and fair engagement with the future.

The deterministic loop between advances in science, deployment of new technologies, changes in society, and new socially supported science to advance certain ends is an exaggeration. It is impossible to predict the future. But we can give people the tools to make the best decisions they can.

"Nothing dates the past like impressions of the future"

Was oscillating online, came across this, with an interesting quotation:

"Nothing dates the past like its impressions of the future."

Debatable?

I think certainly nothing speaks of an era like its dreams, and dreams do become dated.

When it comes to tech speculations its certainly easy to misinterpret an era as being optimistic -- yes Sci Fi writers loved rocket cars and space ships, but to call the 60s and 70s an optimistic era I think is a bit misleading. Of course there are dystopian sci fi futures as well... my impression of much of Sci Fi is that it was not so much about making accurate predictions as suggesting interesting possibilities, with a goal of commenting on society.

Getting a little off topic... forget about dreams, can we focus on impressions of the future?

For instance I'm not really aware of any impressions of the future that anyone had, in Ancient Rome, even in the 1800s? What did Cicero think the world would be like in the year 1000? Did anyone in the pre-industrial age foresee the industrial revolution?

Getting back to the claim, itself, are there reasons we should think it should really be true? Its easy to see why impressions of the future would age quite badly, and obviously, to observers with knowledge of the future. And its hard to think of any other subject that they should have many ideas on, but a person from our time would surely have different ideas about.

Yet, if you just ask the simple question, "How should I know a person / thing from the past when I encounter it?", its not clear that my obvious first step is to try to determine what ideas they carry about what the future will be like. Generally I would expect such a person or thing to be immediately recognizable because of stylistic elements -- perhaps style is wrapped up in this question as well though. The sleek, the modern, the cutting edge, all this is related to the future.

Is this true? Does fashion really have to do with our ideas of the future? To be honest when I put on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans and go to class, I don't really feel like I'm "dressing for the future", even though I guess I am.

My instinct is that, the fashions, the design ideology, the style of an era speaks most about how that era believes they will solve the great problems. Modernism, modernist buildings particularly, of a grand, uniform design, with a utilitarian focus... speaks of a dispassionate, unified approach to science and all problems great and small, with which one may suppose all our problems may be subdued before us. When I throw on a T-shirt, I'm still solving a problem, however small... in some sense, the now pervasive "casual work environment" which has come to pervade the 90s and 2000s, I think speaks quite highly of our society -- on a typical day, I do not expect I will have to negotiate with an extremely powerful superior, or for any other reason need to curry favor with someone by dressing formally. My work place is substantially more egalitarian than that. I don't wear a watch either -- but no one wears a watch anymore except someone trying to look professional. Watches are dated -- it is clearly expedient to look at any of the hundreds of computers which will surround you throughout your work day. They are the trappings of the wealthy from a few decades ago, and while they will probably percolate down through society for a few decades to come, for all intents and purposes they are now as quaint as the pocket watch, and the "upper class" will rid themselves of them not so long from now.

I'm not really making a very strong argument that fashion reflects the ideology of an era -- at least when it comes to personal fashion, I'm only really able to argue that it reflects the technology of the era which is kind of obvious. I'm also pretty fashion illiterate, maybe there's much better arguments to be made, and maybe I should be looking at fashion statements by entertainers, rock bands, high profile people etc. the fashionistas.

I would also suspect that you can come up with lots of counter examples -- in the case of traditions, when they are kept alive they aren't seen as dated, even though they are still sort of relics of the past. Very few traditions and religions actively hold impressions of the future, I assume because, things like this have to keep it short and simple or the extra cruft won't be passed along. The book of Revelations is one of the few major examples of predictions of the future that I am aware of... but this aspect of Christianity at least doesn't seem to be the part that makes it most "dated". In my mind, the fixation on rituals, the lighting of candles, the latin, the peculiar dress and language, the frequently gothic or baroque taste of churches, these are the things that one immediately recognizes as dated.

Well, we've wandered around for a bit. What's the verdict? Is there some truth here, does "nothing date the past like impressions of the future"? Or is it just a zippy one liner in a magazine?

Cultural Enclosure

In the late 18th century, English society underwent a major structural change: the enclosure of the commons. The enclosure movement effectively destroyed ancient patterns of rural life, as wealthy land-owners used legal clout to turn peasant farmers into landless laborers. Something similar is happening here and now; an attempt by powerful media companies to enclose our common cultural heritage inside a fence of copyright law.

Copyright is one of the few specific powers enumerated in the American constitution. “The Congress shall have the power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Copyright was initially established at 14 years, with a 14 year renewal, but the term has been lengthed repeatedly, with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act bringing the duration to life of the author plus seventy years, or 120 years for corporate authors. At the same time, the scope of copyright has expanded from maps and direct copies of literary works to all forms of media, adaptations, and translations.

The stated rational is that extending copyright benefits creators, and while it does, this grand cultural enclosure has inflicted grievous harm on our cultural vitality. It walls off immense tracts of our shared heritage, fights against technological architecture, and has raised high barriers to entry. At the current rate, any work created after 1923 will remain in copyright effectively forever, even if it has become completely out of print and of only limited utility to anyone. Bringing old works into the open is very difficult, because there is now registry of copyright owners, and prospective publishers must prepare for surprise lawsuits. For a devote of old culture this is a crime.

On a computer, there is no difference between the act of reading and the act of copying. Software controls are required to prevent copying, strictly making our digital tools less useful. As a simple example, Adobe's restrictions on use mean that I can't easily highlight and annotate academic papers. So much paperless office, or a searchable, linked database of articles I've read, and for the protection of who's rights? The penalties for violating copyright are entirely excessive. The putative fines associated with a typical pirated music library are an order of magnitude larger than the gross revenue of the entire music industry.

But most significantly of all, no cultural artiface exists in a vacuum, and internet culture especially is a mash-up, a juxaposition and collage of objects in a new context, whether it be youtube videos or fan fiction. I can't deny the quality of a lot of internet culture is terrible, but it is sandbox tomorrow's artists play in. As it stands, monetizing internet culture is basically impossible, and working in the medium exposes you to those putative copyright violation penalties. There are ways around this, through fair use and getting permission, but that's expensive in terms of time and lawyer's fees. Copyright has become a barrier to commerce and creative expression.

What can we do? We can slap the Creative Commons license on everything, but that's a crude patch. Copyright law should be rewritten to recognize that not all works of art are equal. If you want a copyright, you should be forced to pay a nominal fee for it. The term should be short, and extensions easy, but rising in cost with the term and value of the copyright. Lobby your Congress-drones, support open media, and prepare for the infopocalypse.

((With thanks to Lawrence Lessig and his book Free Culture))

The Hazards of Ze Goggles

Kenna - Hell Bent (Official Music Video). Watch more top selected videos about: Kenna

Long term effects of ze goggles have not been adequately studied. Possible side-effects may include persistent visual artefacts, vocabulary reduction to "whoa", "dude", and "groovadelic", and loss of your human essence. Pregnant and nursing mothers should avoid use of ze goggles. Use in moderation. Protect your vital bodily fluids.

Nature

Yes, it has come to this : the prestigious scientific journal Nature mentions, by name, Limbaugh, Fox News, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, as concrete threats to the American scientific complex, and hence threats to the future prosperity of this country.

I almost don't want to weigh in on this ( all sides have committed errors ), but the fact that one of the most prestigious scientific journals is listing enemies by name clearly signifies at least one thing : the relationship between science and society is deteriorating.

Some time in the past, I'm told, Americans respected science. It let us end WWII brutally and concisely, and got us to the moon before the Soviets. What is different today, that the public no longer respects scientific evidence for making informed policy decisions ?

It also seems to me that complaints about liberal bias in science have a very simple solution. If you think science is too liberal, get off your political stage, get a doctorate from a reputable research institute, and do some quality peer reviewed science of your own. Science doesn't really care that much about your politics. One of my more excellent mentors, who taught me about the Fourier transform and various image processing algorithms, was politically conservative. This was absolutely no barrier to his ongoing stem cell research. So, my more conservative friends, rather than complaining about the inherent liberal bias in science, why don't you come on over and learn some rigorous scientific reason and help us out.

p.s. : the comments on that Nature opinion piece get, predictably, a little crazy. "La République n'a pas besoin de savants, uniquement d'équité" .. oh dear, has it really come to this again ?

Making Do [ Review & Speculation ]

I recently got an opportunity to speak with Steve Daniels, author of "Making Do", about making a business out of making things out of waste in Kenya. You should read it, its free online. This was Mr. Daniels senior honors thesis at Brown University, and I am impressed.

I'm unfamiliar with the social sciences, and have never done anything as ballsy as travel to the poorest parts of the world to study their problems and potential solutions first hand. So, utmost respect to Mr. Daniels, and I doubt I will be able to contribute much to this particular topic, but here are some thoughts.

My absolute favorite line in the thesis is the following :

"microenterprise efficiency comes not from the individual firm, but from the dynamics among similar enterprises in collective geospatial clusters. In fact, through clustering the jua-kali economy displays a critical property of ecosystems that Western economies lack: it produces virtually no waste."

Daniels illustrates how large industrial centers have arisen spontaneously in Kenya, capable of processing local scrap into useful goods. Everything is recycled and re-used. Items as complex as welding tools and metal lathes are made locally from improvised scrap. These tools can then be used to process more scrap, and to improvise even more tools, creating an organically growing and self reproducing means of production.

"... the linkages among microenterprises form dense networks of activity. Take a stroll through Gikomba, and one can’t help but think of the informal sector as a living organism with intricate systems that form a concordant whole."

Daniels goes on to elaborate on what industrialized nations can learn from this production scheme, in terms of building an efficient economy that wastes nothing and can run on constrained resources. Daniels also notes that there are a number of barriers slowing down the technological progress of this informal manufacturing. Most notable is that subsistence lifestyles leave no room for risk taking and credit is scarce, so there is no room try to develop new technology. There are a number of clear and very doable suggestions in the text, and the work represents one of the few satisfying "and this, in detail, is how we will save the world" answers that I've come across.

In some sense, this form of production is similar to an idealized future-society that we've been considering some time. That is, a society that can run on very low resources, produces zero waste, fits into the natural environment, is local, is self reproducing, and is highly mobile. Now, scrap processing in Kenya does not fit all of these criteria and presents with some serious drawbacks. It would be beneficial to consider weather the flaws evident in the from scrap production in Kenya generalize to our idealized science-industrial complex.

In Making Do, Daniels notes that production of uniform, high quality machinery in the improvised production environment is not cost effective. The specific example cited is an irrigation pump that could not be made affordable to local farmers until its production was outsourced to China. I believe that this could be a fundamental flaw in aiming for local, robust economies that contain a complete industrial basis. At the end of the day, the most efficient means of production is always to produce en masse, for the entire planet, and in a giant optimized and computer controlled assembly facility. Globalization is not just inevitable, it is the necessary and most efficient means to produce high technology.

That said, the optimal means of production my be a hybrid of the local-cellular approach and the global-centralized approach. It makes some sense to claim that the level of sophistication in a technology is directly related to the extent that globalization of production is necessary. As a simple matter of resources, technology that requires neodymium, sapphire, gold, silicon, arsenic, germanium, must necessarily involve global trade networks. Simpler technology that requires only rocks and plants can be manufactured in your backyard. Scrap metal re-use in Kenya that can produce lathes and welding torches and stoves requires an intermediate level of trade integration.

I suspect we can reason about this formally. If we look at a graph representing the transportation cost between population centers, we can get some insight as to where to place the global-local trade off. If transportation costs are low, the whole world is highly connected anyway, so in a sense everything is local. If transportation costs are infinite, no global activity is possible. Reality lies somewhere on this spectrum. It also seems likely that the transportation cost has been kept artificially low due to the temporary abundance of fossil fuels, skewing our means of production to have more globalized characteristics than may be sustainable.

So why was I ever set on some science fiction of the self-reproducing assembly machine that could produce everything I'd ever want in my garage (this being the epitome of hyper-local high tech production)? I remember it has to do with Star Trek and those "replicator" machines that you carry around in space and will make you tea, lasers, whatever you want. If we are to achieve off-world colonization, it is necessary to reduce our industrial basis to something that can escape Earth's gravity well. If we can figure out how to make computers in a slum in India, from purely local resources, maybe we can start working on how to produce them on Mars.

So, with that selfish interest in mind, it sounds like improving the availability of micro-finance in poor regions, coupled with Fab Labs to distribute prototyping technology and skills, is a promising course to follow both for alleviating world poverty and for purely academic advancement in local manufacturing. Read Daniels' thesis for the full list concrete solutions for expanding improvised manufacturing in the third world.

Consensus

I am not at all qualified to discuss issues of brains, but I do have some thoughts the previous post about society that deserve their own thread.

The definition of self is fluid and culturally defined. Western cultures are individualist, the person is defined by internal characteristics. Eastern cultures are relativistic, people are defined in relation to their role in a social structure.

But as it relates to eusocial humans, we need to think about how groups of people make decisions. A classic approach is authoritarian, decisions are made by some central authority (the king, the church, tradition), and radiates outwards into society. The democratic model has individuals rationally evaluating options according to their own metrics, voting, and then the group abiding by that vote.

A more modern model sees individuals as linked into networks, influencing each other through a non-rational transmission of ideas. Decisions are made by consensus, some critical mass breaking towards a policy choice. Consensus selves are aware of their membership in free associations, and do not have the same concern for internal intellectual growth as individuals, instead picking and choosing from the general cultural memepool.

Authoritarian decision-making is totally discredited, but the question for us is about the distinction between democratic and consensus models. We're in a hybrid state right now, but can sufficient technology create a pure consensus model? Do consensus models break down, and do they actually produce better decisions?

I have a creeping suspicion that consensus fails in any group larger than few hundred. Democracies have many roadblocks to making a decision, forcing deliberation. Those who lose out have the satisfaction of being a loyal opposition, and waiting for the time when issues will swing their way.

Consensus models may seem to invite participation from all, but in reality they are driven by memetic blitzkriegs. The winners are those who can mobilize and make decisions before an opposition can form. Debate becomes more acrimonious, and facts and history are thrown by the wayside (see the Ground Zero Mosque for a great example). Quality of decision-making suffers.

Consensus forms people into cliques, and because the policy-making group is not well defined, losers have an incentive to splinter off, into smaller communities with more narrow intellectual spaces, again harming the quality of debate.

Of course, the question of how close Twitter is to a true eusocial system, and what upgrades might be needed, remains open. But I would definitely argue that consensus, while flawed for the reasons mentioned above, is not inherently unsalvageable. Democracies can work spectacularly (the American Revolution), and fail spectacularly (the French Revolution). The same kind of serious intellectual debate that lead to the American constitution should also be applied to the architecture and norms of consensus based decision-making processes.

Are nation-states becoming irrelevant?

This article claims that they are, and that cities are going to be in the driving seat in the 21st century. I feel like actually it's misstating its own thesis, which seems to be that the wealth of individuals and their voluntary associations will once again outstrip states' ability to control them. (Otherwise, what does it mean for a city to want something or do something?) It supports this by pointing out worldwide urban growth and the growing gap between urban rich and rural poor in countries like China, but it doesn't really make clear why a city is a more coherent entity with more potential for controlling things than, say, a patch of countryside which shares some political allegiance or ethnic identity. What I want to say to fill this gap is that the urbanized masses are actually organized into corporations and similar organizations with common interests, and that it is those, and not cities per se, that are doing the controlling; whereas the countryside is generally composed of individual farmers and such who are mostly concerned about their immediate neighborhood. This is a very libertarian future this guy is predicting, though I'm not sure he realizes it.

I'm still skeptical, but I don't have anything clever to say. Thoughts?

The Information Monopoly

From the New York Times Magazine.

...As broadband brought millions of facts, the fantasy of perfect factuality and the satisfaction of fact-checking to everyone. Soon — and astonishingly — Google became much more than trusted; it became shorthand for everything that had been recorded in modern history. The Internet wasn’t the accurate or the inaccurate thing; it was the only thing.

Those of us who think seriously about the creation of facts in society should be concerned about the totalitarian effects of the internet, search engines, and in particular Google on the search for truth. The internet is the first, and often last stop on any quest for information. That information is filtered through search algorithms by a handful of companies, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft (somewhere between 60%-70% is Google alone).

For an Orwellian overlord, the power of this technology is obvious. No longer will tyrants have to burn books, they simply have to drop dangerous information off page one. Dissent is like a wild-fire, and like how a fire can be stopped by removing one of the sides of the Combustion Triangle, dissent can be squashed by sucking away the oxygen of information. You need not remove it all, just make the cost of access to information high enough that the energy that fuels revolution disappears. The crude techniques of airbrushing and book burning are obsolete, just switch up an algorithm and watch the inconvenient truth disappear.

As a society, we must resist the centralization of access to information under a few massive providers. We should demand openness on algorithms, so that search results may be fairly judged, and we should form an organization devoted to looking for such Orwellian modification, cataloging them, and making the public aware of what is hidden.

America's Ruling Class

Recently I read an article in The American Spectator entitled America's Ruling Class-And the Peril's of Revolution. I disagreed powerfully with Angelo M. Codevilla's conclusions, but thought that many of his arguments made sense, with strong logical foundations. A dangerous contradiction, and one that I've not experienced so strongly since reading The Unabomber Manifesto (and like The Unabomber Manifesto, America's Ruling class goes from "yeah, I agree," to "wtf are you smoking" fairly quickly).

Mr. Codevilla's thesis is that the political disenchantment in America, as most contemporanious represented by the Tea Party, comes from the growing power of a new ruling class since World War II, that class' arrogance, and its failure to govern. The common people of America, sick at this unnatural state of affairs, are beginning to rise up in revolt.

Who are America's ruling class?

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct... Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The ruling class encompasses Democrats and Republicans. At its top are Senators and Congressmen, its ranks are swelled by public servants, teachers, union members, and those who suckle at the trough of public money, ranging from welfare queens to non-profit activists to research scientists.

I took immediate offense to this, but as I calmed down, I realized that the reason I got angry was that Mr. Codevilla was right. I am a member of America's ruling class. My education at a state university is subsidized by local taxes, and I plan to find more government grants soon. My friends are liberals who speak in a certain language, many of whom work in the non-profit sector. And I am skeptical of the ability of business to help America, and am sanguine about the power of intelligent government intervention.

America does having a ruling class, and no one can deny the influence of the federal government, and its followers. "By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty... By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support." Nor can I deny that this ruling class has failed America. Since WW2, we've seen four useless quagmire wars in Asia, the decline of American education, immense increases in pollution, a decline in global prestige, massive government debt, an expansion of regulation without a commensurate expansion in safety etc etc. The ruling class is separated from its intellectual foundations, and is less intelligent and less coherent than ever before. They have failed to make a case for their position, and now in the everyday process of politics, denigrate their own ability to govern.

The Center Cannot Hold
Codevilla posits as a counter-weight the forgotten America of ordinary people, what he calls the "Country Class." These plain folks are fed up with an intrusive, top heavy, inefficient and unresponsive federal government. They believe in local autonomy, the family, and the Bible, and their beliefs are cruelly mocked by the ruling class.

Describing America's country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers' defining ideas and proclivities -- e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class's coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members' yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.

Wait, what? This class doesn't match any group I've heard of. Social conservatives are more eager than anyone short of radical Marxists to re-engineer society, in their case along Biblical lines. Libertarians want freedom to pursue their own rights, but trample over the ability of people to collectively face challenges. There is no such thing as a 'redistribution of wealth', all distributions are redistributions, and even hunter-gatherer tribes share food. The kind of society that Codevilla envisions is not Industrial, or old agricultural (as in Europe), it appears closest to the historical idealization of the American West. This lifestyle was contingent on a specific set of historical factors, primarily open land, that will not appear again. My personal experience of the country class, from the Tea Party, is that they are not rugged individualists, they are proles. They are worn out cogs in the social machine.

The country class wants local autonomy to choose their own school boards and curricula, but this is suicidal in a modern economy. Global competitiveness is dependent on a set of skills that can be assumed nationwide. Companies need to trust that their employees in Los Angeles have the same skills as their employees in Fargo, lest the company collapse through inefficiency and misunderstanding. They decry the intrusion of the Federal government, then demand agricultural subsidies, social security, and disaster relief. Without pork-barrel projects like the interstate highway system and rural electrification, the countryside would be a desolate wasteland of third world poverty.

Mr Codevilla shows his true colors: "Restoring localities' traditional powers over schools, including standards, curriculum, and prayer, would take repudiating two generations of Supreme Court rulings. So would the restoration of traditional 'police' powers over behavior in public places." What are these 'traditional police powers', not having to read suspects their Miranda Rights? What about immigrants? And where is the Military-Industrial Complex in Codevilla's society, the generals, spies, and defense contractors who justify so much of America's dysfunctional foreign policy in the name of 'national security'. I do not wish to call names, but under Codevilla's rejection of the Democratic-Republican establishment is a desire to raise up a new Military-Christian alliance, in short, fundamentalist fascism. Cities, the main drivers of American prosperity, would see their complex institutional networks disbanded in the name of 'autonomy.' And individually, small towns would slip into religious hysteria and xenophobic paranioa; Arizona's laws against illegal immigrants, and the Salem Witch Hunts.

America's ruling class has failed, but the solution that Codevilla advocates, a return to local autonomy, and "[An] attack on the ruling class's fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one's own is in effect the break-up of the American Empire (and we are an empire, even domestically). He may believe that America's grand democratic experiment that he claims to defend can survive this assault, but I feel differently. We are tottering on the edge of the knife. We must unite to survive. Policy debate and disagreement are vital to the health of our democracy, but the empty repetition that "Washington is broken" has to end.

Next Week on We Alone on Earth: America's New Ruling Class.

(PS: Apologies for typos, this was banged out in a hurry and I don't have time to proof read right now.)

Modern-day colonialism, culture, and the meaning of life

This is my first post here, so hello people, I'm some guy and I've previously lived here. This spring break I spent the week visiting a good friend who is teaching high school math in the Yup'ik Eskimo village of New Stuyahok in the bush in southwestern Alaska. Since it was only a week, a week in which I planned to hike around and read math, since I wasn't particularly social or observant for most of it and talked largely to one person, these impressions are just that: I'm not vouching for their correctness. They also have little to do with the stated scope of this blog. Finally, I doubt any of what I'm saying is new; most of it is not new even to me. Still, the trip left me with a lot to write about, so here I go.

New Stu is spread over a few de facto nameless dirt roads on a hillside sloping down to the Nushagak River. The brand-new snazzy "Chief" Ivan Blunka School (yes, with the quotes) stands suggestively at the top of the hill. The teachers -- the only white people in a place of 500 or so -- live in an adjacent housing complex and refer to the rest as "the natives," a habit which is hard to resist no matter how patronizing and colonial it feels. In late March, the river is still almost entirely frozen over, though it has been a warm winter and the snowmobiles are forced to tear through half-snowless ground. Sled dogs, tied up by houses down the hill, yap violently when they sense a stranger.

The thing is, the world of the Yup'ik is falling apart, and nothing is coming to replace it. The kids speak English in drawn-out, alien-sounding syllables, as if the words had to be unwound from creaky spinning wheels deep inside; yet most of them speak hardly any Yup'ik. The villagers live an ostensibly hunter-gatherer "subsistence lifestyle;" yet they ride snowmobiles they pay for with dividend money, and I doubt they make very many of the clothes they wear. It's inhumane to expect otherwise, of course, because in a real "subsistence lifestyle" most people die in childhood from preventable diseases. But without the urgency of subsistence and without anything to fill the gap, the adults turn to drinking and gambling.

In some sense, New Stu is what we like to call a post-scarcity society. This is not to say that some people aren't legitimately poor and sometimes have trouble getting by. Because there's a lower bound imposed by the dividend from the native fund, and on the other hand there's just not that much you can own or do in a place this remote, everyone has essentially the same set of things and differences are not apparent. But whether people's needs are filled or whether there is just not a good way to expend time and effort in order to fill them, the most obvious problem relevant to a post-scarcity society is apparent here: boredom.

I read somewhere that hunter-gatherers always had plenty of time on their hands, and it was that damned invention of agriculture that, while providing a consistent food supply, destroyed the idyll humans were meant to live in. After seeing--no, who am I kidding--after talking to Lori about New Stu, I find this significantly harder to believe. People in their natural state just don't know how to deal with free time.

But maybe the trouble is just with the generation that had to adapt to the sudden intrusion of America into their lives? Are the younger ones doing better?

I met Tammy in the stairwell leading up to Lori's apartment. Kids would hang out there because it's one of the few public indoor places in the village, and probably also because they wanted to meet a stranger. They were easy to talk to, because they would volunteer all sorts of information, sometimes puzzling. "You're 22? Wow! You look older than my mom! She's 37!" The first thing Tammy said was, "I like drawing. I'm going to be an artist." I wanted to see.

So the next day, ninth-grader Tammy, looking serious in glasses like an owlet, comes in with a folder (should I say--a portfolio?) and we sit down to look. On top are slavish portraits of anime characters; Dragonball Z, she explained later. The rest is largely animals drawn in the same style. There is nothing childishly fresh here, nothing Yup'ik, nothing particularly imaginative. From what I could understand from her disjointed narrative, there had been an art teacher at the school for one year a couple years ago, and her only formal art instruction was with him. People had offered to send Tammy to Sitka or even all the way to Washington state for art school, but instead, for some reason, she would be teaching art to the other kids the following year. No, she didn't have a favorite artist.

Apparently, Tammy represents a general problem. You might tell kids about a one-week summer program in Dillingham, 50 miles away. You might fill out the forms for them. You might remind them that all they do all summer is walk up and down the hill and complain about how bored they are. They won't go. And in adulthood, too, they will largely stay in New Stu.

Is this a problem? Indeed, is any of what I've described a problem? Alcoholism and addictions clearly are: they make people unhealthy, abusive, unhappy at last. It's a little harder to justify lamenting cultural change. After all, snowmobiles, classrooms, cell phones and iPods are all cultural artifacts, and any culture has to adapt to them to remain relevant. And like most any culture, the Yup'ik have survived previous outside assaults which left as scars a Russian Orthodox church and a variant of Christmas caroling called Slavi (presumably derived from the Slavic root meaning 'praise', which compels me to mention Hallelujah, a religion deposited by missionaries in a different corner of the Americas.) Perhaps, as much as people like me weep at the loss of a distinct way of seeing the world with its poetry, as much as American culture in general values heritage as one of the more important of the myriad ways to build up an identity and connect with others, these kids will be happier in a modern world watching Dragonball Z and rocking out to Britney Spears?

This would perhaps be a valid argument if the community itself were disappearing. But people are staying in New Stuyahok, and as long as they are, they need, if not an occupation--I don't like our society's obsession with occupation--then some sort of raison d'être. The area is too flat and unspectacular for wilderness tourism and pretty much too remote for hunting or fishing tourism. It is in no way self-sustaining. Though it does sell some salmon, there is no particular economic reason for New Stu to exist--in fact, given the amount of goods that must be flown in, the place is profoundly unsustainable, and without the native claims settlement, it might not still be there. Which is why I at first placed so much hope in Tammy: the only thing the Yup'ik really have is their culture. The village could remain as a sort of factory of human experience that exports art and know-how and understanding. But to make this possible, Yup'ik culture would need to bend masterfully so as not to break.

Whereupon we've circled back up the hill, because it's in the school that such a synthesis could take place. Right now, of course, as anywhere in the US, the school teaches a standard mix of often hard to justify subjects which are supposed to prepare kids for college, which is in turn supposed to prepare them for jobs. Colleges teach little that is relevant to people's future jobs; secondary schools, even less. And people who don't need to jump through these hoops feel justifiably uninspired by the whole charade. This includes most of the people in New Stu.

What could the school be doing for those who are not going to take advantage of the opportunity to get out? While I was there, I saw the kids practicing for Native Youth Olympics. They would line up in front of a little ball hanging from a string. In turn, they would jump up and kick it with one hand planted on the ground. I have no idea what relation this activity bears to anything natively Alaskan--certainly no cultural exchange with towns in ancient Greece was involved--but it looked fun and athletic and I'd never seen anything like it.

It's possible to see this sort of cultural assimilation as a negative--that it produces a product that's inauthentic, or some other such adjective. But I think that the way such traditions can survive most authentically and unartificially in a modern world is by being assimilated into a framework that fits into its context. Because the place is so small and remote, there are two factors that make this hard. On the one hand, Tammy cannot relate to most of Western culture: it's far away, its exponents look different and their experiences have almost nothing to do with hers. So she echoes the Soviet joke about (perhaps not coincidentally) a Chukcha who applies to become a member of the Writers' Union: "Have you read Pushkin?" "No." "Tolstoy?" "No." "Dostoevsky?" "No." "What have you read then?" "Chukcha is not reader, Chukcha is writer!" On the other hand, there are simply not enough Yup'ik to even potentially produce a stream of culture strong enough to prevent her from being captivated by commonplaces such as Dragonball Z. Perhaps the school could be a partnership to fix both these problems by manufacturing a Yup'ik culture that feeds both from and into the Western mainstream, as seems to have already been done in the domain of sports. Obviously, this would require a good deal of creativity; but judging from the number of rock bands formed in a typical high school, there's plenty of that to go around, and this is not going to be any different in New Stu. The more difficult problem is finding outsiders who can help perform the synthesis in an aesthetically and anthropologically sensitive way.

This may be even more difficult than it seems. I didn't experience it myself, perhaps because I hardly interacted with any Yup'ik adults, but prejudice against outsiders is a common theme in the teachers' conversations. And how could it be otherwise? After all, in some sense the white man did cause the calamities that have transformed and are starting to destroy the community. And while the kids don't seem to have the same prejudices, there's the danger that cultivating them exclusively would separate them from the rest of the community even more than they are now. In other words, whoever undertakes this would have to tread very carefully.

Who can do this? Well, what are the current job prospects for a grad student in the humanities? These people are trained precisely in taking apart bits of culture, and would presumably be receptive to the aims and values of such an endeavor. In fact, at this point I'm envisioning some sort of fuzzy Peace Corps of anthropologists, historians, and literary theorists bringing bringing peace, happiness and enlightenment to the world.

Immediately, this may sound absurd and off the mark. Do the problems of the Alaska bush--boredom, isolation physical and social, and a lack of critical mass for unmediated cultural development--really extend to the rest of the world in any meaningful way? And is there a whiff of colonialism and "The White Man's Burden" that makes the whole proposition potentially distasteful?

As technological progress continues in developed countries, parts of the Third World fall further and further behind. Even now, we could feed and clothe the world with what we have, and to me it feels wrong not to. But doing so would be a disservice because, as is evident from the example of New Stuyahok, it makes people feel powerless and irrelevant, if perhaps not consciously. If we are to feed the world, we must provide an antidote to this powerlessness. But one way to empower people that isn't necessarily tied to monetary resources--especially with the Internet at the fingertips of so many--is an education geared towards the arts, which, as copyright on the one hand and survival on the other become less relevant, are gradually separated from the economy of money, goods and services. And in this context, a bit of cultural imperialism is inevitable, because technological imperialism is inevitable, bringing with it all the Dragonball Z's and Britney Spearses to which we end up having to sacrifice some toes to preserve the body.

All this is not to belittle the need to provide basic literacy, educational opportunities, and improvements in infrastructure throughout the developing world. What I'm trying to say is that thoughtless charity--the alien-looking school sitting on top of the hill--can hurt people, prevent them from helping themselves. What I've described is one way of counteracting this, which does not stand by itself, but could also help preserve cultural diversity.

But this grandiose speculation is almost independent of my original topic: the problems I found when I visited southwestern Alaska. And in that context my thesis is much less controversial. There is no reason for most schoolkids in New Stu to learn necessarily watered-down high school algebra. They need to learn how to avoid boredom, because this is something that most people don't learn by themselves.

Travis, in a shirt loudly proclaiming slackerhood, walked into the apartment with another middle-schooler, Silly, and spent a while conversing with Lori in Pig Latin, which I could barely follow. Eventually, though, the first letters of his words came back where they belonged, and his life came out in fits. He talked about his grandparents, about how important it is for kids to appreciate everything their elders do for them, and about how many don't; about native cooking and his favorite dish, stinky fish heads, consisting of fish heads and entrails fermented in a barrel for a few weeks. He knew a number of words in Yup'ik, though not so many that he could resist spending a while just listing them. In high school, he will study Yup'ik so that he can talk to the elders in the church. (Every few minutes, Silly texts Travis from across the room and giggles uncontrollably. Travis's phone chants "Na-na-nanana, I've got a text, you can't see it.") When he grows up, Travis will go to Kodiak Island to study to become an Orthodox priest. He will marry--his wife needs to be a good cook!--and settle wherever the bishop tells him to.

Here is another thing this area needs: people who get out, get some perspective, and come back. If Travis comes back, the others will trust him, and this is important. But equally importantly, he will have experience both inside and outside. Whether what seemed to be his ingrained conservatism is what New Stu needs is perhaps irrelevant. All that matters is that he can see the problems, see that things can be different, and try to make it so.

Later we found out that Travis's dad had just gone on another drinking spree.

The Economics of Attention in a Post Scarcity World

There's been a fair amount of talk bandied about about post scarcity economies (see Cory Doctorow-Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). Now, I would hold that there is no such thing. The conventional definition of a post-scarcity economy is more artifacts and information than an individual can consume in a given period of time, but in actuality, this kind of scarcity is mediated by expectations of what should be consumed. Modern society exists in a post-scarcity economy by any historic definition. In the first world, even a moderate income provides levels of food, shelter, and entertainment higher than those enjoyed by historic nobility.

What remains scarce are luxury goods, expertise, and finally attention. Luxury goods are not an absolute, they're relative to the productive level of the culture, the shifting status of meat is one good example. Even in a universe of home nanoreplicators, there will be some objects not amenable to nanofabrication for technical reasons, or 'handmade' items will have cachet for status reasons. Expertise covers any form of service requiring intelligence or skill, anything from legal advice to a massage. Even in a world where artificial intelligence makes modern expertise cheap, there will be some computationally intensive projects that cannot be run trivially. . I am reminded of the scene in Zardoz where friend requests an analysis of design trends in automobiles, and refused because the otherwise all-powerful Tabernacle can't spare the processing cycles. As with the claims of “power too cheap to meter” from the early atomic age, intelligence too cheap to measure is another lie.

There is one commodity that can never be made abundant through technological means: human attention. Human beings crave the attention and approval of others. The amount of attention in the world is limited by the number of hours of wakefulness. Even when every material desire has been satiated, we will still desire friendship, and even celebrity, and these goods cannot be faked. What is called the novelty or information economy could be more accurately described as the attention economy. Once energy and physical objects become passe, all we'll have is the ability to pay attention to each other (note the structure of this traditional phrase).

Our economy is transforming into one of youtube celebrities, reality TV stars, and blogger-gurus. Those who can adapt their production to garner attention, and know how to translate it into something more lasting (influence?), will be the movers and shakers of the future.