Justice from Transparency

A tsunami of light... In a cameras - everywhere culture, science fiction becomes reality, The Los Angeles Times ran an excellent run-down on this year’s status of camera and surveillance tech, showing how the trend is accelerating. Oh... and this front page article features yours truly, in the first sentence and last...

...and on radio, I was a panelist about the trend of turning the cameras back on the police.  The latest? The ACLU offers a new cell phone app. One tap and your video-phone turns on while uploading the event directly to YouTube, in case the device itself gets “damaged”.  In Turning the Cameras Back on Police, I discussed this on NPR with an ACLU representative… along with a representative of the Los Angeles County police officers’ union and an organizer for Black Lives Matter.

Of course, all this media comes after 25 years predicting and opining on this inevitable trend. With this posting -- and this one -- among the most recent examples. 

== Are some folks starting to get it? ==

As that L.A. lieutenant typifies, the mature pros in our constabularies are already ahead of the curve, emphasizing that the 2013 rulings are fully accepted. "Citizens have a perfect right to record us, so long as they stand back and do not interfere."  Ah, but this will be a process (as I described in EARTH and The Transparent Society.) A process in which good cops will learn how to cull their own ranks of thugs...

... while the rest of us learn the subtleties of citizen power.  Take this article: 

What to say when the police tell you to stop filming them.

'First of all, they shouldn’t ask! “As a basic principle, we can’t tell you to stop recording,” says Delroy Burton, chairman of D.C.’s metropolitan police union. “If you’re standing across the street videotaping, and I’m in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I’m subject to recording, and there’s nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording.”…  

Yet still some officers do. Last week, an amateur video appeared to show a U.S. Marshal confiscating and destroying a woman’s camera as she filmed him.'

'Most officers, says Sanchez, now know that bystanders have a legal right to film police. Now, instead of hearing assertions that they can’t record at all, he says that Copwatch volunteers are accused of interfering with police activity. “What we hear is, you can’t film here, you need to back up,” he told me. At which point, says Sanchez, the volunteer complies—by taking one step back.'

Me? Mr. Transparency is much less confrontational, when it comes to the small details. Hey, my aim is not to be an asshole, but to assert citizen oversight. I would instead say: 

“Out of respectful citizenship, officer, I am taking five steps backward.  Any further will impede my right – as your employer – to supervise you. But I am willing to listen, if you explain why you need even more space than that.  Oh, and meanwhile this interaction is uploading live.”

So, what if the fellow seems angrily about to lose it, and do something regrettable? Then I would speak loudly:

“Are you getting this Larry?  Well keep your camera aimed at me while staying out of sight!  We’ll see what this officer with badge number 68643 is about to do.”  

Whether or not “Larry” exists, by now they are starting to grasp this. That it is not the camera you see that will ultimately hold you accountable.

It's the one you don't see....

== And more on cop cams == 

Now this article from Gizmodo - How Police Body Cameras Were Designed to Get Cops Off the Hook -- yet again provides a feast of in-depth information about the cop-cam trend... while the author maintains the most amazing obduracy and inability to step back or ask even the simplest question.  Like "what might be next?" 

Not one year ahead, did he look, nor even try to extrapolate.  Or ask "What might happen when the plummeting price of body cams and instant cloud storage, puts these tools onto the lapels of every ghetto youth?"

Picture every kid, every harassed pedestrian or driver, with a little box and winking red light, and every frame going straight to online storage. Are you actually... actually telling us that won't change things?

(Note: I was talking this over with design guru Don Norman, and we realized that there are two innovations badly needed, right now, beyond the ACLU's instant-upload app.  In the SHORT term we have to come up with some kind of velco or hanging lanyard thing that will let ghetto youths get out of their car with their cell phones hanging free from their necks... so that they can raise their hands open and bare! Hands free is absolutely essential and you know why. These innovations are needed right now, this very moment... plus some millionaire to fund a very rapid deployment of thousands of cheap, hanging-phone-holders.

(Over the longer run, of course, we need small, blue-tooth detachable cams that any person can leave as a dash cam, but snatch up and pin to his lapel, before getting out of the car... and the very act of pinning it sets the upload going. Again, to complete the process, and NOT in order to be offensive to the majority of decent men and women who heroically patrol our streets. No aspersions, just moving on to complete this transition to a world of accountability and light.)

I portrayed this happening around the year 2020, in my novel EARTH.  In my nonfiction book, The Transparent Society, there is a section describing exactly this transformation, as citizens become empowered with both the right to look-back at authority and the tools to enable it.

No, getting back to the detailed and yet myopic Gizmodo piece, the issue here is one of journalism.  How on Earth does a fellow who cannot even squint at how the simplest tech trends might affect tomorrow get to opine and tell us what's going on? 

== Bright fools ==

How Transparency Will Change the World: In a pair of TED-style talks, Daniel Dennett, the Tufts University philosopher and cognitive scientist, and Deb Roy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and Twitter’s chief media scientist, talk about the spread of digital technology and the advent of social media has made it much more difficult to keep secrets. This new transparency will profoundly influence the evolution of our institutions, the authors argue. “When these organizations suddenly find themselves exposed to daylight, they quickly discover that they can no longer rely on old methods; they must respond to the new transparency or go extinct,” they write.

Dennett’s talk at a skeptic’s conference in 2014 is “Can churches survive the new transparency?”  Starts rather interesting, by comparing our new transparent society to the sudden transition that life on Earth underwent, when (according to one theory) the oceans suddenly became clear or transparent. “Transform and adapt to a new, transparent society, or die,” he tells all organizations.  Alas, though, the second half of his talk slows down and devolves into another atheism rant, much too akin to the structured belief systems that he (with some good reason) disdains.  

Alas, as we saw in an earlier blog, most of the punditsphere is filled with bright fools yammering about Big Brother’s eyes, without offering a single suggestion what we might do to effectively hide from them.  Meanwhile ignoring the truly important matter, Big Brother's hands.

== Transparency blips ==

An ex-girlfriend of the co-pilot who deliberately crashed a Germanwings plane into the alps, killing all 150 on board, has told how he vowed to "do something" history would remember him by. Creepy … and totally to be expected.  Indeed. I told you all to expect more and more guys like this.  Call it the Erastratos Syndrome.” See my longstanding proposal for how to deal with it: Names of Infamy: Deny Killers the Notoriety they seek.

Twitter trolls getting their come-uppance when a vigorous (and empowered) dad hunts them down and names them?  Sure, it's straight from The Transparent Society​, but even earlier Vernor Vinge's story "True Names."  In fact this is a good thing. We need a society that forgives (in wary stages) youthful indiscretions.  But these guys have shown us they are the sorts of fellows who might be bullies, if not held accountable.  Most of us aren't.  We deserve better lifelong credibility than you do, putz. And accountability will flow.

Ah justice... Man who made thousands posting women's stolen nudes goes after news sites that posted pictures of him.

More and more eyes are looking down on our planet: As both satellites and UAVs grow cheaper, smaller, and more ubiquitous, researchers and agencies such as SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch are using increasingly pervasive sky images to catch cheaters and destroyers, tracking down environmental violations ranging from oil spills to wetland destruction, from illegal landfills to fracking to illicit fishing activity. Skytruth's motto: If you can see it, you can change it.... 

It all begins with shining light into the shadows.

Alas, the deepest shadows might bring about our worst nightmares. The money now spent on developing “artificial intelligence” or AI for finance, equities or commodities trading etc vastly exceeds the AI research budgets at the top 100 universities, combined.  And nearly all of it is done in secret, to develop programs whose ferocious drives are predatory, parasitical and all-devouring insatiable. 

That’s some combination!  As I have said repeatedly, “Skynet” won’t come out of the military.  It will come out of the portions of our economy that win every political battle and every tax break.  Indeed, what better clue that our AI overlords have already… come awake?

== Finally...politics ==

 "A Florida statute governing the preservation of public records requires elected officials, including the governor, to turn over records pertaining to official business “at the expiration of his or her term of office.”

Let's just take this law, in principle, and: (1) extend it to the period during term of office, and (2) to any communications not with close family members, and (3) require that such official uses only communications devices publicly certified to be reliably be recording all.

Oh, but an interesting aside: it took Jeb Bush 7 years to comply fully with a Florida law requiring him to turn over his emails. So much for yer dubble standard, boys.

A Little More Hormatsian Wisdom

I just have to keep kvelling over some of the remarks made by Robert Hormats in that paper I last quoted. Here's a little more, where he goes on to say:

"In my judgment, the single most significant piece of economic legislation in the last 60 years was not a particular tax cut. It was the G.I. Bill of Rights. It provided, for a whole generation of people, the opportunity to go to college. "

I would not only ditto this remark, but go on to suggest that it was not just an economic and education bill, but also the most successful piece of social engineering, ever.

What should "social engineering" aim to achieve?

First, I have deliberately used provocative language in even mentioning that phrase. At worst, the term elicits images of Big Brother. At BEST it rouses notions of meddlesome, paternalistic liberals sticking their noses into everbody's business.

And yet, are societies not fantastic machines that deliver justice, opportunity and - through markets - things to nourish every need except those of the soul? (And a fair amount for the soul, as well.) Anyone who thinks that these vast machines have not been "engineered" is naive beyond belief. One of the chief purposes of politics is to mediate conflicting views over how to fine-tune their operation.

In fact, as we speak, some powerful groups are trying to re-engineer our society's basic format, from diamond-shaped (emphasizing meritocracy, open competition, small business and a vibrant middle class) back toward a more traditional pyramid shape, emphasizing interlocking directorates of inherited privilege. Again, find me a culture that had metals and farms, across 4,000 years, that did not see this kind of attempt happen. Generally successful.

It was exactly in order to counter that ubiquitous and ever-lurking trend that so many experiments in "leveling" have been tried over the centuries, for example, by seizing assets from elites and distributing them to those below. Often violent, these rebellions never achieved their utopian aims - though the European revolutions of 1789, 1835 and 1848 did incrementally help farmers and foster some movement toward a middle class. Far more often, such revolutions simply replaced one set of repressive ideologically-justified overlords with another, as happened when horrible Czars were replaced by horrible commissars in 1917.

Here is where the American Miracle has truly made a difference. Yes, it is reliable that some fraction (not all!) of any decade's aristocracy will try to find new ways to cheat, using their privileged position to grab more. (Instead of competing fairly by helping to create new and better products and services.) But each generation of Americans has found clever ways to stave off this relentlessly consistent behavior. And it has been mostly done without very much in the way of confiscature or simpleminded class warfare. Indeed, it can be argued that we have followed Jefferson's prescription of "a revolution every generation"... with only a few of them violent at all. Most weren't even seen as "revolutions" but mere waves of tweaking and reform

Above all, it is vital that "social engineering" must pass the basic test of do no harm. In other words, while trying to achieve some desirable rebalancing of forces within markets or democracy, etc. it is essential not to harm other parts of the machine that are working well. Especially the market based incentive system that spurs creative competition into a cornucopia of new goods and services, propelling a fecund economy. The goose that lays all the golden eggs. Including the taxes that arise from burgeoning wealth, a fact that liberals seem all-too often to forget

This is exactly what the GI Bill did, and it perfectly exemplifies modernism at its best. (And is it any surprise that it had George Marshall's fingerprints all over it?)

First off, it devastated the tight grip that elites formerly held upon higher education, sending millions of motivated, mentally disciplined, veterans to land grant universities, which in turn attracted many of the best professors away from the Ivy League. One result was a burst of creativity and small business so huge that the middle class, always America's pride, so burgeoned in size and confidence that the whole ideas of "class" began to vanish from public awareness.

This bill, at low cost, achieved all of the beneficial effects of "social levelling" without any of the usual nasty effects on market capitalism, because it was not repressive but stimulative.

For nearly all our lives, we grew accustomed to there being very little effective difference between middle class americans and the rich. Socially - and even economically - this was largely true. Only people in their 80s can today remember how things were back in the 1920s and 1930s, when it was not.

That is, till now.

Look around and recognize what's happening for the very simple thing that it is. All administration policies fall into place in light of a vast raid by kleptocrats. Not the brightest portion of the aristocracy, only the most rapacious part, willing to send us into war (stupidly) but unwilling (for the first time in US history, to tax themselves to help pay for it.

(At even a hint that anyone wants to discuss this, they shriek: "Class warfare!" knowing that Americans despise social levelling. All of us fantasize about joining the ranks of the rich, not cutting off their heads. But of course, this attitude won't last, if this goes on. Proving that these frat boys really are the stupid wing of the aristocracy. The Warren Buffets of the world - who look forward more than a year at a time - are not on their side.)

I could go on about the GI Bill, whose effects were too numerous to elaborate here. For example, I believe it directly caused both the incredible richness of musical creativity by the sons and daughters of GI's - back in the 60s and 70s - AND the incredible deficit in new melodies being written and performed today.

But enough for now. I'll add one more Hormat's snippet later.

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For now, let me conclude with a few fun links!


Hey Verne! Hurry and have a look at: http://www.nantes.fr/ext/royal_de_luxe_2005/ Maybe that Rutan guy is barking up the wrong tree with his rockets and composite hull material. Giant cannons, that's the ticket!

An interesting commencement address given by Steve Jobs at Stanford University: More humble and reflective than you might expect, filled with things you never knew about a modern Edison.

See the sci fi futurist "Year 2056 edition" of the Onion humor magazine at:  The Onion is normally terrific. But this special issue is just wonderful. Try looking at the choices of languages you can view the document in (supposedly). And the sci fi author-bases horoscopes. Dang. I guess I don't rate. Yet.

(#$%$#! I only 'algored' the whole Web in Earth.! And check out page 206 of The Transparent Society! How good a prognosticator do you have to be!)