Names of infamy. Deny killers the notoriety they seek

NOTE as of 2021, the number of these events just keeps skyrocketing, with many heinous individuals openly proclaiming that their motive for wreaking harm was fame... or infamy. So, before handing you over to the original 2007 essay, below, let me add that the Romans also adopted the "Erastratos Option" at times. 

"Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to damnatio, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing; the practice is seen as long ago as the reign of the Egyptian Pharaoh Hatshepsut in the 14th century BC." And further: "One example of damnatio memoriae, or oblivion, as a punishment was meted out by the peoples of Ephesus after Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of antiquity. The Romans, who viewed it as a punishment worse than death, adopted this practice. Felons would be erased from history for the crimes they had committed."

... Now back to the original 2007 essay...

== Deny them what they seek... ==

Now it’s “James Eagan Holmes,” another name we’d rather not know. Opening fire at a crowded Colorado movie theater during a midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises," Holmes killed twelve and injured dozens -- seizing world attention and far more than his fair share of our collective memories.

Though hate crimes, mass murders and school shootings draw the public eye, statistically, there is no evidence of a rise in episodes of wholesale slaughter. Nor is it a uniquely American phenomenon, as illustrated by the horrific acts of Norwegian lunatic Anders Behring Brevik. Though perhaps there has been a rise in the perpetrator's ability to swiftly and easily do harm.

Journalists and shrinks and the public fret over each killer's declared motives, From Brevik's islamophobia to Timothy McVeigh's war against government, to Al Qaeda suicide bombers, to the murderous students at Columbine High School who appeared to be seeking vengeance for bullying. Yet, when we step back and look for common threads, the emerging pattern seems to be less about specific hatreds, racism or anti-Semitism than frenzied, bloody tantrums staged by a string of losers with one common goal — to grab headlines.

“The reason they are doing this is for their moment of glory,” says Marvin Hier, who has studied the subject intensely for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, “when they feel the whole world is stopping to take notice of them.”

This trend isn’t limited to hate crimes. In the chilling story of Cary Stayner — the Yosemite killer — we saw how one man’s penchant for brutality can be sharpened by an appetite for publicity. Soon after he confessed to murdering four women in Yosemite National Park in 1999, Stayner told San Jose reporter Ted Rowlands, “I want a movie of the week.” Though he admitted having murderous fantasies since childhood, Stayner may also have been propelled by a jealous wish for notoriety equal to his brother Steven, whose escape from a pedophile in the late ’70s was indeed dramatized for television.

It’s an all-too-familiar pattern. The Oklahoma City terrorists, Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, killer Mark David Chapman and Anders Breivik all showed a yearning for attention, both in the headline-grabbing nature of their crimes and in their polemics after capture. And it extends to less violent outlaws who relish fame, like cyber-vandal Kevin Mitnick, who portray themselves as Robin Hood romantics for what amounts to pissing in the common well. Whatever their diverse surface-rationalizations, it also surely has a lot to do with getting noticed in an era that reveres fame.

Society appears to be trapped, obliged to pay madmen the attention they crave, in direct proportion to the hurt they do.

=== History and biology ===

Small surprise - this is not a new problem. Two millennia ago, in the Hellenistic era, a young man torched one of the seven wonders of the ancient world — the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. When caught and asked why, he replied first with grievances against individuals and his city state, then admitted that he really wanted to make a mark, to be remembered. Since he wasn’t a great warrior, or creative person, his best chance was to gain infamy by destroying something.

Evolutionary biologists explain why this happens almost exclusively among frustrated, under-achieving males.  In nature, a male animal is never assured reproductive success.  He must find some way to be noticed, to stand out, at least a bit.  And the drive to stand out more than just a bit always simmers under the surface... because a risky gamble might bring disproportionate rewards.

"If I can't achieve that through talent or great works or team effort or any of the regular routes... I'll make a splash in ways you won't forget!"

Sure, none of these fellows gets to breed after committing awful acts. It must have been more successful in the Neolithic. It will take millennia - or fierce female selection - to work that crazy recourse out of our genes.

=== A healthy reflex, turned horrid by exaggeration ===

Conditions today are ripe for more of this. Not only has fame itself been made sacred, but countless films and novels feed a culture of resentment by extolling the image of romantic loners, battling vile institutions. On the plus side, this all-pervading mythos fosters a healthy suspicion of authority - or SOA.

(Much of modern politics revolves around which elite you perceive grabbing too much power -  e.g. oligarchs or snooty academics. Culture War might ease a bit, if we recall that other folks'  SOA fears may be as valid as ours.)

Alas though, SOA all-too easily inflates into contempt for all institutions, along with disdain for the very same tolerance and cooperative effort that sustain civilization. Now add another ingredient — the progressive diffusion of destructive technologies into private hands — and you get a recipe for profound unpleasantness in the years ahead. We just don’t need this trend further reinforced by the seductive lure of renown.

=== A possible solution? ===

One answer is suggested by that fellow who burned the temple at Ephesus. He is often called Herostratos. But in fact, many scholars think that is a made-up name, used to replace his true identity, which was expunged. To punish his abhorent act and to deter others with the same aim, the city banned speaking of him. Two millennia later, no one knows for sure who he really was.

Were the ancients on to something? If a sociopath’s attraction to villainy is partly engendered by hope for celebrity, might a “Herostratos law” take away some of the allure, by ensuring the opposite?

Of course things work differently today. Coerced forgetfulness is out of the question in a free society. Newspapers and journalists would have to participate voluntarily. Instead of suppressing actual facts, which are needed for accountability, good results might be achieved simply by making adjustments in style and presentation. After all, reporters assented, en masse, when Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh asked to be called “Tim” and the Unabomber said “call me Ted” instead of Theodore. If journalists accommodate murderers in this small way — as a reflex of professional courtesy — why can’t they lean a bit the other direction, after someone is convicted of gross felonies in a court of law?

Courts already do have some authority to order name-changes. Suppose that power were widened — any criminal sentenced for a truly heinous crime could be renamed as part of his punishment, with a moniker that invites disdain. New history books might state: “Robert F. Kennedy was slain in 1968 by Doofus25*.”

The asterisk is there to let anyone find the assassin’s former name in a footnote, if they are truly interested, so no one is actually suppressing knowledge. Nevertheless, the emphasis on a new moniker will take hold.

Who would choose the new names? Judges could get creative, or the public might be invited to suggest appropriate derogations.  Or something random might be the greatest punishment of all.

However it’s done, won’t it make sense for ridicule to replace some of the grotesque fashionableness that’s now attached to terror? It would reflect society’s determination to allocate fame properly, to those who earn it. We would be saying — “You can’t win celebrity this way. By harming innocents, you’re only destroying your own name.”

The idea may seem odd, at first. Maybe even needlessly vindictive. But I promise it will grow more appealing each time the cycle is repeated by some murderous loony who demands our attention with both violence and contempt. Pragmatically speaking, it could contribute to breaking today’s vicious feedback loop by denying sociopaths the attention they crave, perhaps even tempting them to seek help. (Help we all-too-often fail to provide. But that’s another, much harder subject.)

Moreover, this approach to deterrence may give us — civilization’s rambunctious, argumentative, yet cooperative citizens — the last laugh. We can catch, punish and outlast them, of course. But above all we’ll deny villains any chance to win through violence a bigger place in history than the hard-working, creative people they hurt and despise.

Who knows? Some of those angry ones out there, who are teetering with indecision each desperate day, may even decide that it’s better to help lay a few bricks, alongside the rest of us, than to claw after infamy by tearing the walls down.

If they do — if they choose to join us — we should try to welcome them. Listen to them. And learn their names.

-------------------------------
This article originally appeared in Salon and was revised and updated in light of recent events.

Bulletins from the Transparency Front

1) Toronto researcher Steve Mann, who was one of the earliest pioneers of wearable computing and augmented reality (AR), and who co-coined the term “sousveillance,” was physically assaulted by employees of a Paris McDonald’s restaurant during a recent family vacation, for the crime of wearing AR visual aids akin to Google’s Project Glass.  We are indeed in an era of rough transition.

2) CBS tours the newly opened Nazi archives on the Holocaust which have been (unbelievably) closed until now.  Now, miles and miles of documents constitute a stunning blow to the denialist cult.  Well... one of the denialist cults.  The drought destroying crops all over the world may budge a few climate denialists.  But then, there are still some who deny tobacco is anything but good for you.

3) More on those terahertz laser scanners that do chemical spectroscopy on materials and vapors around you, without exposing you to ionizing X-Rays or (disturbingly) ever letting you know you are being scanned. This is not an imaging device, but a tool for reading absorbance spectra at the high microwave, low infrared range. “This kind of picosecond laser reads the environment in real-time. That gunpowder residue on your hand from hunting the other day, cannabis smoke particles in your hair, or even a bit of (explosive-boosting) nitrate fertilizer stuck to your shoe could trigger this scanner.


Will that cause an entirely new set of headaches for airline passengers?”  But get used to the new world.  And push for the ability to look back.  To get this for ourselves.

4)  This month, if everything goes according to schedule, your Internet Service Provider may begin monitoring your account, just to make sure you aren't doing anything wrong with it -- like sharing copyrighted movie or music files. Violations may result in an escalating scale from warnings to termination of service.

5) The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) secretly spied on E-mails of its own scientists - who were filing whistle blower complaints. Disturbing? Yes, but my perspective is unusual.  I see it as a case of everything working as it should.  Looking back at power worked.  This time.

6) A report from Wired: Saying it wanted to help to protect dissidents who appear in videos shared on YouTube, Google launched a tool Wednesday that can blur their faces in footage uploaded to its servers. Now mind you, this is a stopgap measure.  As more cameras swarm, the bad news is that this won't work for long.  The good news?  If we all can use those cams, then lying - even by the mighty - will get a lot harder. And abusing witnesses won't be a workable option anymore.

=== Politics redux (get used to it) ===

Somewhat turgid, overblown and self-righteous, an article by Sara Robinson on AlterNet nevertheless takes a look at the present Culture War that’s tearing America apart and calls it what it is.  What I have long realized that it is.  Nothing less than Phase Three of the American Civil War.
In fact, I would couch things slightly less radically than  Robinson does in: "Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America: America didn't used to be run like an old Southern slave plantation, but we're headed that way now. How did that happen?"
Nevertheless, let’s be plain, her essential point about the divide between two styles of American aristocracy, one represented by Gates and Buffett and the other by those wanting an old fashioned feudalism to return, is the core conflict tearing the United States apart at present.

Moreover, this phase of the Civil War must end the way the others did --

-- by the blue Union being awakened, roused perhaps by polemical exaggerations like Robinson’s. Into realizing What Fox has accomplished -- what southern yellow papers did at the command of slave-holding elites in 1860 -- destroying any hope of negotiation.

All that is left is for Blue America to win.  Simply - and for the sake of freedom and progress and the Great Experiment - win.

=== Some (mostly) science miscellany ===

A fascinating breakthrough in producing graphene transistors. Will this result in computers based on graphene rather than silicon chips?

University of Granada researchers have developed an “artificial cerebellum” that controls a robotic arm with human-like precision.

The University of Nottingham has begun the search for a new class of injectable materials that will stimulate stem cells to regenerate damaged tissue in degenerative and age-related disorders of the bone, muscle and heart.  This is part of a huge new development in rediscovering the regenerative capability most mammals appear to have abandoned millions of years ago.

For more see Juan Enriquez's TED talk...

The first artificial molecules whose chirality (handedness) can be rapidly switched from a right-handed to a left-handed orientation with a beam of terahertz light has been developed by a multi-institutional team including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). This development holds potentially important possibilities for uses of terahertz technologies across a wide range of fields, including reduced energy use.

...amazing times...

Accelerating Dangers & Opportunities from Transparency

The future comes rushing upon us so quickly, already I worry that the world portrayed in my freshly minted novel will be old hat long before the time it is set, 30 years from now. (Meaning that we need futuristic and open-minded thought experiments now, more than ever.)

Try these items on for size...

With new laser technology, hidden government scanners will instantly know everything about you from 150 feet (or 50 meters) away, detecting traces of drugs, explosives, bioweapons or gunpowder on your clothes or luggage -- even recording your adrenaline levels. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will install these scanners (a million times more sensitive than current systems) at airports and border crossings across the country -- as early as 2013. The Russians are developing a comparable system.

Now... if this reduces our exposure to x-rays and allows the TSA to tamp down the aggravation at airports, you can expect the new systems to have their upside. On the other hand, this sort of thing could be Big Brother's most delicious dream.  (More on that aspect.)

...then there's this. Cell phone providers received 1.3 million cell phone snooping requests last year from law enforcement agencies seeking information on locational data and calling records. There is little oversight over who can make such requests, or what is done with the information.

Way back in '97, in The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose between Privacy and Freedom, I made it clear that we'll not stop any of this with whining, moaning or by trying to ban these technologies.  Our only chance? If government - and other mighty elites - are absolutely fated to know everything about us anyway, our sole option is to know everything about them. 

This is the important distinction between surveillance and sousveillance -- looking down vs. looking back.

And though I've covered it at-length from many directions, I expect to be doing so repeatedly, for the rest of my life.

Is it even remotely possible for sousveillance to work?  For citizens to shine enough light upward to remind our civil servants that they are servants?  To keep a choke-chain on our guard dogs, so they never see themselves as wolves?  To remind corporations that they are constructs, and oligarchs that they are not feudal lords, with droit du seigneur?  As it happens, there are dozens of techniques that might help... providing we nurture the calm, rational... but militant... determination to make this practically happen.

Let's start simple. See just one practical approach that - with a very simple slip of legislation that could be written on one piece of paper - and maybe cost 20 million dollars - we might suddenly and smoothly add a layer of safety and accountability to help let us sleep at night. It's no panacea!  But by simply changing how government inspectors general function, we might follow the sage advice of Sun Yat Sen and stymie the bad in government, while aiding the good.

Let's hope that this election cycle someone actually listens.

And another Transparency related item.  This one not only forecast in The Transparent Society  but also in EARTH...

...the tendency of humans to filter out news or opinions or views or even sensory input that we don't like or agree with.  (Yes, one side of the political "spectrum" is currently doing it to psychotic degrees... but the other end does it too!)  We've been finding out that our brains naturally pass disagreeable info and opinions and input through emotional centers rather than those devoted to reason.  But as predicted, electronic "filters" are making things even worse for some, even while opening up vast universes of wonder and possibilities for others.  See "Are we stuck in a filter bubble...hearing only what we want to hear?" Then see how this very issue was dealt with, in Earth (1989).

Indeed. And then comes the new world of "augmented reality."
Patricia F. Anderson wrote: "Graffiti goes virtual with an augmented reality app for your cell phone, called LZRTAG  Shades of @DavidBrin 's early scenes in Existence."  Indeed, the layering of virtual surfaces over our world has already begun. Still images, animations and video can be tagged to real world surfaces, so your smartphone can interact with media, billboards, lampposts or landmarks. Vernor Vinge and I do - however - show where it must eventually lead. That is, where it must lead if we are lucky and do smart things!

To see where it will lead if we drop courage and brains?  Try Nineteen Eighty-Four.


=== Fascinating cases of watching the watchers at work ===

Think I am naive? Teams at Harvard and the University of Hong Kong have been using new software that allows them to watch the censoring of posts on Chinese social-media sites more closely than before. Monitoring the Monitors summarizes their report in The Economist:

The team found that, overall, 13% of all social media posts in China were censored. Yet their most surprising result is that posts critical of the government are not consistently censored. On the other hand, posts urging people to assemble in protest, are generally removed from the internet within hours. Harvard professor Gary King writes, “Clearly the goal is actually to repress people gathering.”

Rebecca MacKinnon, author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, comments. “The goal has never been total control. The goal is to keep the Chinese Communist Party in power.”

The researchers analyzed the posts that had been censored to determine exactly what had made them objectionable to the government. What they found was a constantly changing list of keywords and sensitive topics, resulting in "a cat-and-mouse contest between people and censors.”


=== Keep the dream alive ===

On the recent American Independence Day... with a marathon of the eponymous film playing in the background ... I was reminded of the ways that our revolution has affected the world.  Sometimes for ill - though less than any other great "pax" power across time. And sometimes for profound good.  That may be viewed as biased (though in fact, I am more of a Californian than a yankee).  So I suggest steeping in points of view that might be considered neutral and yet poetically insightful.  Such as this account, by the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, of how a remote Circassian mountain tribe once sat at his feet, demanding stories about ... Abraham Lincoln.

Are we made of lesser stuff than our parents, or the heroes of the first phase of the American Civil War?  We are in phase three now.

Wake up and end it.  By winning it.


=== Science Miscellany ===

We need to discuss what to do about nuclear waste.  It never made the slightest sense for us to abandon the Yucca Mountain site on account of some supposed small chance that the depository might leak a little in 10,000 years.  Say what? So these people are now willing to talk about sci fi levels of time, when they won’t even discuss a decade from now, on any other issue?  Dig it. In 10,000 years, the stored radionuclides are far more likely to be more valuable as stored "gold", than they are to leak into a desert aquifer.  Read up.

Dinosaur sex! Scientific!  With feathers, yet.  And facial expressions.

Writing Suspenseful Fiction: My Favorite "Bit"

First a flash: Salon Magazine just featured my article, How will The World End?... incorporating excerpts from my latest novel, Existence: Does the universe hate us? How many pitfalls lie ahead, waiting to shred our conceited molecule-clusters back into unthinking dust? Shall we count them? Today, our means of self-destruction seem myriad — though we at Pandora’s Cornucopia will try to list them all!  So adjust your AI-ware, your im-VR-sive wraparounds, your omnivision eyeptics and dive right in.

My colleague Mary Robinette Kowal - an excellent writer and a leader in the Science Fiction Writers of America - has started on her site a series "My Favorite Bit" in which  of authors are invited to talk about some particular moment of scene in their latest work that made them especially happy.

At Mary's request, I threw together a short essay.  But it is less about my own work than one of the core aims of good fiction writing.  How to torment your readers just right, so that your story "hurts so good!"

With Mary's permission, I'll reprint it here:

Before I tell you about my "favorite bit" from the new novel EXISTENCE (June 2012),   I'd like to offer an aside -- one piece of advice that I often give students of writing.

No matter what genre or style they want to create for a living, I recommend that new authors make their first major project a murder mystery.

The reason is simple.  All other genres let the author get away with flaws in plotting and suspense, by distracting the reader with genre-specific  razzle-dazzle, e.g. romantic tears or dying dragons or scifi tech-speak. But in a murder mystery, just one question is paramount; did the dramatic, whodunit revelation pay off?  Was it simultaneously both well foreshadowed and surprising?

Does the reader experience a pleasurable moment of shock and self-loathing? "It was all there and I just missed figuring it out! I'm sooooo stoooopid!" If that's how your reader feels, at the crucial moment of whodunit disclosure, then she or he will buy your next book. That's the wonderful, ironic fact.

Having done a murder mystery as my first novel (albeit one wherein the first victim gets dumped into the Sun), I always try to have one or more suspense arcs in every book -- sometimes half a dozen, running in parallel. I also circulate my manuscripts-in-progress through up to fifty harsh pre-readers, as quality control, before ever letting the publisher's editors see it.  And achieving that special "aha!" moment is the one thing I fret over, above all else.

Which brings us to my "favorite bit" from EXISTENCE. In fact, there are several such moments and all have been fine-tuned to wreak maximum sadistic tension and release from the customer. But one of them stands out.

It occurs when a diverse team of investigators have been interrogating an "alien artifact" in order to determine whether its passengers -- virtual beings who claim to carry a message for Earth -- are for real, or an elaborate hoax.  And, if they are truly alien, how much of their message to believe. This process of peeling away layer after layer of deception and truth makes up one major theme.

My favorite moment... and that of more than a dozen pre-readers... comes when a Russian member of the commission has a sudden epiphany. "My God, I don't believe it.!  It's a..."

And no.  I will not finish that sentence here.  Nor did I give it away in the fancy-schmancy lavish premier-trailer that renowned web artist Patrick Farley made for EXISTENCE.  A gorgeous 3-minute taste of the book that doesn't give away any major spoilers, nor will I do so here.

But I've explained WHY it is my favorite bit. And why I always tell myself -- even plunging into the heart of the sun or a distant galaxy -- to write a mystery whodunit! And to make the surprised reader shout:

"Dammit, I shoulda seen that coming, suddenly it's soooo obvious!"

And a few items for lagniappe....

And what if we are genetically “programmed”? One of the most common of these epigenetic changes involves a methyl group -- one carbon atom and three hydrogen atoms—binding to a nucleotide, usually cytosine. In general, this binding, called methylation, turns off the gene in question. The linked study found a significantly higher amount of cytosine methylation in the newborn than in the centenarian: 80.5% of all cytosine nucleotides, compared with 73%. To look at an intermediate case, the team also performed WGBS on the DNA of a 26-year-old male subject; the methylation level was also intermediate, about 78%.  Moreover, in the centenarian: The team identified nearly 18,000 so-called differentially methylated regions (DMRs) of the genome, covering many types of genes. More than a third of the DMRs occurred in genes that have already been linked with cancer risk. In contrast, the small number of genes in the centenarian that had greater methylation levels were often those that needed to be kept turned on to protect against cancer.

What bugs me about the discovery described above is what appears (in my reading) to be a very non-random trend. A steady decline in the protections against cancer... in BOTH methylation directions.  Almost as if it were not the result of damage, but rather, systematic programming.

***

hmmmm then, swinging toward the ridiculous -- but on a wry, cynical and raunchy note -- Stuff that must have happened: L.Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand... how they started.

Here’s one of a dozen reasons why I didn’t buy - and don’t intend to buy - Facebook stock.  Can anyone say Yahoooooo?

Will Johnny Code Again?

Partly in response to my famous challenge on Salon “Why Johnny Can’t Code” -- denouncing the disappearance of basic, introductory coding languages from our personal computing devices -- several groups have done wonderful things to help bring back at least a simple, reliable way for kids to learn programming.

For example, Quitebasic.com is a cool, easy, accessible Basic site, offering a simple and obvious entry and display system, usable via any mere browser, ease-of-use and applicability to simple textbook exercises. Quitebasic is instantly ready to use. with a very plainly separated coding area, palette and results screens.

Just last week I spoke at Microsoft Research and brought this topic up again (along with many others; it was a wonderful audience of 200 or so brilliant people). So they are aware of the "basic" problem.

Given today's lavish available memories and cyber-power, they could tuck into the corner of Windows a turn-key system so simple and universal it might tempt textbook publishers to bring back "Try it in BASIC” exercises that used to ease millions of kids into ten-line programs that showed them that exciting, world-changing epiphany….

...The moment when they realized: "Wow! Every pixel is created by an algorithm!"


And now some coincidental news: Just today I was shown a new BASIC system for the iPhone and iPad that attempts to chip away at the problem. Have a look at techBASIC.

This is the sort of thing - rather than 140 character lobotomizations - that we need to be encouraging for kids.  Before we become a society of dunces.

=== More about Your Existence ===

Here's an excerpt from Existence that's been eliciting some yucks... and yucks (!) from readers:

"E-calculi— gut bacteria transformed to function as tiny computers, powered by excess food. Have a problem? Unleash trillions of tiny, parallel processors occupying your own intestine! Speed them up by eating more! And they produce Vitamin C! 

"At first, Tor thought this must be a hoax. It sounded like a comedy routine from Monty Phytoplankton. She wondered how the computed output finally emerged."

If that weren't enough to entice you to race out, buy the hardcover and tell your friends, then how about this from the LA Times review: "Whodunits are a sure thing in publishing — just about everyone loves a good mystery — but Brin's multifaceted novel proves that another question resonates just as powerfully with most people: Are we alone in the universe?" 

And this by Simon Bisson on ZDNet: "Science fiction is as much a literature of the moment as it is of the future….

...This book, then, is both a warning and an encouragement: a novel that engages with the world we're building and tries to show us a way to become a mature civilization rather than a raggle-taggle band of individuals. Technology has libertarian roots, but in the end we build the tools that construct a civil society. 

"In Existence Brin shows us the world our technology is building, and then poses one of the biggest questions: what is it all for?

"What we're left with in Existence is one of those rare SF novels that needs to be on every technologist's desk, alongside John Brunner's Shockwave Rider, Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, Charles Stross's Rule 34, and Brin's own Earth. We may not be able to see our future, but in Existence we get a picture of a possible — even a plausible — tomorrow."

=== Experts line up against High Frequency Stock Trading ===

This from one of the smartest and most on-target tech economy sages around - Mark Anderson, of the Strategic News Service: 

“At a time when bankers are already at the bottom of the reputational heap, it now seems that their ration of scorn has jumped again. Not only are the worst of them greedy, it turns out, and dangerous, and unrepentant, and unwilling to pay for their mistakes, and undesiring of the most obviously needed reforms - but they are also building systems so complex that even they cannot manage them.


"We already knew that retail investors were no longer safe on the trading playground, but now we've learned that neither are the big bullies who made the new rules. Having already heard that about half of the volume of the NY Stock Exchange was in what is now called High Frequency Trading (HFT), this week I've learned that that figure is probably conservative, and that as much as 80% of the trades may be program-driven.

"What kind of zoo is this? A practice ground for Chaos Theory? Is this the centerpiece of capitalism? When the NYSE not only encourages HFT, but profits by selling colocation of servers at exorbitant rates to allow HFT practitioners that extra picosecond of advantage - you know that the wheels are about to come off."

Of course, I have my own "crackpot" or rather far-seeing reason for wanting this HFT lunacy to stop.  It is the surest road to "Skynet"... to the emergence - in secret and without the slightest oversight or public scrutiny, of AI that is programmed from the start to be predatory, parasitical, voracious, insatiable, amoral and relentlessly sociopathic.

=== And Finally... 

I have a few shout-outs to members of the brilliant Contrary Brin community, some of whom I met in person during my recent book tour, and some of whom I'd like to ask a favor!  I'll say more in the first "comment" below.

Do Sci Fi attitudes reflect our times?

Congress now speaks a full grade level lower than it did in 2005. Falling from grade 11.5 to 10.6. Using the Flesch-Kincaid test that gives your kids the "reads at a 10th grade level" score, the Sunlight Foundation has measured the vocabulary used in Congressional speeches over the years and found that the level has dropped suddenly. For both parties, but particularly amongst Republican Congressmen, particularly amongst the newest batch, such as Rand Paul (3rd worst, speaks at an 8th grade level.) Indeed the entire worst ten are Republicans (eight of those are freshmen.) And the more conservative they are, the worse their speech (dropping by three full grades from center to fringe.) Interestingly, amongst Democrats with less than 10 years in Congress, the trend is similar, those closest to the political centre have the most complex speech, while those further to the left drop by about a grade. But for Democrats in Congress for more than 10 years, the trend is sharply reversed.

Are candidates dumbing down their speech, or are parties dumbing down their candidates?

Nearly two thirds (65 percent) of Americans think that President Obama would be a better leader than Mitt Romney if an alien invasion were to happen.  Hm, well, yes... and?  So?  A survey for National Geographic finds extraterrestrial visits not that crazy an idea to most Americans. Thirty-six percent of Americans think aliens have visited Earth, and almost 80 percent believe the government has kept information about UFOs a secret from the public.

Sigh. Mr. Sci Fi and aliens here... and I am in the 12% who say “not!”  But that hasn’t stopped me from issuing taunts at alien lurkers.  Which you can laugh at (aloud!) in Existence.

Is this a sign of the times -- correlated with the public's attitudes toward science?

Indeed, North Carolina legislators want to stop planners from using the state's own science panel's prediction of sea level rise (about 1m by 2100, fairly conservative). Alack! There is one potential salvation from this madness.  For the insurance companies to make clear that, in 20 years, they plan to go after all the doofuses who delayed prudent measures by squelching the reasonable advice of the scientists who actually knew what they were talking about.

Part of the hysterical incantation that “government is never good” comes from folks who actually believe we would have had jets, rockets, telecom, weather forecasting, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, the Internet, or countless other things, without the advanced R&D that we, as citizens, agreed to pay for because the benefits and ROI lay beyond any plausible Return on Investment horizon of major corporations.

And if we - as a people - had drawn only a small “businesslike" 5% royalty on those things, all red ink in the budget would today be erased.  HALF of economic growth in the last 60 years is attributed to Science and Technology.  And here is just one of many documents making that point.

Hence, the War on Science... and on all other intellectual or knowledge castes is a lot more than just politics.  It is a stab at the very heart of any chance for your grandchildrens’ prosperity.  Think about it.  (But then, people who come here are already thinkers.  You already HAVE thought about it. So I’m wasting breath.)

See also: Unscientific America: Denying Science at Our Peril

==Politics & Economics for 2012==

What is Bain Capital?? Co-founded by Mitt Romney in 1984, Bain would buy a company and increase its short-term earnings through firing workers and shuttering plants in order to borrow enormous amounts of money. The borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends, however, those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts. When they couldn’t, that meant plant closures, more layoffs, bankruptcies, and in many cases, the end of the business. Yet these bankruptcies still meant huge profits for Bain’s investors. Furthermore, Bain continued to collect management fees even as companies failed.  As the New York Post reported, during his 15 years as head of Bain, Romney “made fortunes by bankrupting five profitable businesses that ended up firing thousands of workers.”

Our Wall Street friends are offshoring even their own subordinates’ jobs...

David Cameron held his first meeting with Francois Hollande and threatened to veto the new French president’s plan for a European tax on financial transactions. The Prime Minister made clear he will block any French move that would harm the (banker-financiers) of the City of London. Many of you have seen how firmly I support the transaction fee which - at 0.1% - would scarcely be noticed by humans like you or me, but shift power away from a few brokerage houses doing High Frequency Trading (HFT) which inflates bubbles, creates wild speculative swings, dashes in to rob buyers and sellers of the “price difference” they count on... and may (as I explain elsewhere) lead to the "Calamity of Skynet.”  I have lived in both London and Paris. I know the quirks of their inhabitants.  In this case, the London quirks add up to -- wrong!

On NPR I listened to an interview with Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, about his new book The Road to Freedom, which is clearly a take-off from Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.  Now, I started out hostile, since I consider the AEI to be one of the core nexi that gave us neoconservatism and almost every rationalization for the monstrous hijacking of American Conservatism, turning it into a force that has done indescribable harm to America and the Western Enlightenment Experiment.

Those of you who know me can attest that I parse this denunciation not from any “leftist” position, but as an acolyte of Adam Smith and a believer in the proved creative power of fair and vigorous human competition.  As Smith declared - and as 6000 years of history have shown - the worst enemy of markets, freedom, and (yes) capitalism has always been monopolistic oligarchy.  The very force that pays AEI’s bills and bribes its boffins to concoct a rationalizations for a return of feudalism. And yet...

And yet, listening to Brooks, I got a sense of a rather reasonable fellow!  An intelligent person who believes in nuance and even something anathema on today’s right -- the possibility of negotiation and mixed/pragmatic/innovative solutions to modern problems.  Fr example, he takes the attitude that government should be working to prepare us for a world of climate change, whether or not the worst fears prove valid.

How much of his stance is feigned?  Perhaps as part of an effort to keep despairing smart-conservatives from bolting the GOP, as nearly all the formerly republican scientists, teachers, journalists, economists, medical doctors and others already have?  Or else, is he the real deal?  An archetype for the dreamt-of return of the Goldwater-Buckley conservative?  That nearly extinct species who spoke with gentility and calm willingness to negotiate with their neighbors? How I miss em.

On the Transparency Front: Secrecy, Drones and War

Since 9/11 the budget for Special Ops has quadrupled. Under President Obama, the forces of the Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which includes the Green Berets, Navy SEALS and Army Rangers, have been granted more latitude and greater autonomy, engaged in counter-terrorism, surveillance and reconnaissance in as many as 120 countries around the world.

According to an appraisal published in Mother Jones, America's Rising Shadow Wars: “They are displacing conventional forces, becoming the “force of choice” in operations with far less civilian oversight, accountability or control -- i.e. no Congressional approval or consultation necessary, no press coverage, their operating budget a black book...”

Hm. Well now... as “Mr. Transparency” I naturally feel my hackles rise over any systematic increase in secrecy.  It’s not that secrecy in military operations and intelligence matters cannot be justified - I am actually quite moderate about that. 

 It is the fact that such secrecy should always face demands for justification.  It should bear a burden of proof, or else a “ratchet effect” will carry us down an ever deeper pit of unaccountable obscurity.  That's simply human nature and, across the last 6000 years, we've seen where that leads.

But, having said that, there is the other side to all of this.  The clear and blatant fact that there is a profound, staggeringly clear difference between Democratic and Republican styles of waging war.

Now, let’s put aside the fact that large democratic constituencies have always despised war in principle and have given the party a reputation for pacifist leanings.  In fact, that reputation seems rather undeserved, if you scan history.  Indeed, across the last 100 years, democrats were ready and willing to confront militarism in 1917 Germany, and then Hitler and Imperial Japan, then the communists, far more than the isolationist republicans of those eras.

But Democrats, going back to JFK, have always favored special forces.  “Surgical” responses. And, after the fiasco of Vietnam, their record in that department is pretty strong.  Both positive (e.g. from the Balkans and Libya to the killing of Osama bin Laden and today's search for Joseph Kony) and negative (e.g. Somalia), it is the preferred approach of Democratic presidents.

In rather sharp contrast, Republicans go for heavy firepower, tens of thousands of boots and treads on the ground.  Toe-to toe battle! Armies in motion and flag pins stuck into a map. For example Grenada, Panama, both Iraq Wars and and the endless, interminable quagmire attrition of Afghanistan.

(Note: Afghanistan actually had two phases.  Phase one, right after 9/11, was undertaken swiftly, with minimal presidential meddling, and followed Clintonian military doctrines, even though the President who said "go!" was George W. Bush.  That first part, toppling the Taliban, used mostly special ops and air power and worked with savage effectiveness. But the decision to stay and occupy with a massive army for 12 years? That was phase II and entirely Bush's decision.

I will write more on this, over the summer.

See more: Articles on our progress toward a Transparent Society.

==More on Transparency==

Speaking of transparency, Wired Magazine has published a map showing 64 locations where the US government maintains drones on American soil.  Creepy signs of Big Brother? Wellllll... I am always more concerned about things we don’t see, or efforts to prevent us from performing sousveillance or looking back.  (Of which the Wired article is an example.)  I’ll be furious if the government winds up with a monopoly on look-down vision.  See Existence for a number of scenes that lay out some interesting possibilities.

And what happens if and when they get drones?

In the last half of 2011, Google received over 1,000 official requests to remove content from its search results or YouTube videos. Google denounced what it calls an alarming trend -- but it complied with 65% of court orders and 47% of informal requests to remove content. And yet, Google has not complied with Spanish regulators who asked Google to remove links to blogs and articles criticizing public figures, mayors and public prosecutors. In some countries, Google submits to such requests, because certain types of political speech are unlawful. For example, in Germany, references to Nazis are banned, so Google removes such videos from YouTube. And then there are issues of pornography and copyright…

The following item isn’t as bad as it first appears... but still it is disturbing: “The NYPD has created a "wanted" poster for a Harlem couple who films cops conducting stop-and-frisks (posting the videos on YouTube). The poster brands them "professional agitators" who portray cops in a bad light -- and lists their home address.”  Not as bad as it first appears?  Well, this was an internal flyer, posted on a few precinct bulletin boards, not in public or on the web.  And I guess cops have a right to tell each other “watch yourselves around these vexatious citizens." Still, it’s offensive, probably illegal, and certainly the sort of thing that could easily get out of hand.  But in any event, note this: light did shine on this event. The ones who posted it now probably regret it. The next such flyer will be more cautiously worded, knowing it, too, will leak.

Are your reading habits public?

Your e-reader is reading you, tracking and collecting data on your bookish habits.

When and where did you put the book down? Or take notes?  Or reread a passage? Publishers now have access to detailed information about exactly how people use a book. Did most readers finish?  Which sections did readers favorite or ‘highlight’? The major players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting into novels and nonfiction, how long they spend and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books.

"We think of it as the collective intelligence of all the people reading on Kindle," says Amazon spokeswoman. But how will all this data be used? Who can access it? The Electronic Frontier Foundation has pushed for legislation to prevent information about consumer’s reading habits from being turned over to law enforcement agencies without a court’s approval.

Of course this is creepy.  It is not "transparency" because the light shines in only one direction.

On the other hand, I would love to use this system myself... if it were Opt-In.  I could then ask my pre-readers (I thank at least 40 of them at the back of every book) to turn on this reporting feature when reading an early draft. I'd be able to tell where in the book they slowed down, perhaps having to struggle with a passage.  Or put the book down, even temporarily in order to do homework or get sleep or feed the kids.  Or if found a section tiresome or noteworthy.  I want it for product quality control!  And hence I can see why the big corporations want it too.... without the "opt-in" part.

That's the part we should resist.

==Looking and Looking Back...==

Then again, the reflex to resist can get over-wrought. Take this exercise in tendentious pattern-recognition as an example that's both illuminating and deeply misleading. This article compares 7 "sinister" technologies from Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" to things we see today. Parallels are easy to come by!  And since Orwell's book is the archetype of what I call the "self-preventing prophecy" - motivating millions to act in defiance of whomever they see becoming Big Brother - I don't mind such contemporary alert-warnings!  (Indeed, when it comes to the NewSpeak aspects of lobotomizing Twitter feeds, I do agree.) Still, you need some grains of salt. And a willingness to say "Yes, but..." and to remind yourself of the myriad ways that tech pushes in the opposite direction.

Far more disturbing is this brief excerpt from an interview given by a FBI spokeswoman, about "National Security Letters" in which the government can demand information about you from third parties (e.g. your internet provider) without ever even going to a judge for a warrant.

Now as you may know, I am a moderate about the government's access to reasonable levels of surveillance and even secrecy.  But in absence of any supervision, any human beings will naturally drift toward grabbing more and more, redefining "reasonable" as they go along, without accountability or criticism.

There are ways that accountability could be assured while maintaining an ability to surveil legitimate threats.  I've written about dozens both in The Transparent Society and in online articles. Here is one example: Free the Inspectors General!

==Existence and Other News==

How will the world end? Salon recently ran a series of snippets from my new novel, all of them (entertainingly, I hope) relating to Doomsdays... or the many  ways our world might end.  Oh, but in fact I am a cheerful guy!

For those craving different questions and insights, here’s an interview with Brenda Cooper at the Futurist.

Mary Robinette Kowal - one of my favorite “whipper-snapper” young authors of the next generation - runs a nifty cool web site that now features a series called “My Favorite Bit” in which wrtiers are invited to describe a snippet of scribbling - from a novel or story, that made them especially proud or happy.  In my own contribution to Mary’s series, I dance around one of the best (according to many pre-readers) moments in Existence... without actually describing, or spoiling the scene.  Instead, I use it as an excuse to discuss the importance of suspense.

The Wall Street Journal review of Existence is clearly very positive and boils down to “very very interesting from many directions.”  Alas, I wish they had actually said that in a quotable way!

Salon Compilation of Brin Articles:  These range from sober assessments of how technology might affect transparency, privacy and freedom (leading to my book The Transparent Society) to a discussion or why our personal computers no longer carry a basic programming language and what this has done to our kids. From appraisals of Tolkien and Star Wars (leading to Star Wars on Trial) to a survey of several dozen plausible and less-likely ways the world might end! From my Ray Bradbury tribute to ways that the Internet just might be turning us into gods.  Have fun with ideas.

 Like your version of a novel on audio?  The new edition of Existence by Audible uses three narrators to excellent effect, making this complex and tightly interleaved tale come alive with real drama.  Let me know what (some of you) think of it!

==Government Science Fiction?==

Pitches for Government Sci Fi! As a member of SIGMA, the think tank of scientifically trained science fiction authors, I have consulted with a wide range of agencies... e.g. about future threats & opportunities. Now Wired offers snippets from stories that various sci fi writers might (in theory) create to rally support for different US Government departments.  The outlines are mostly (except for the initial puerile-political snark) pretty imaginative.

=== Appearing in Seattle and Portland and at Comicon ==

Drop by http://www.davidbrin.com  to see my schedule across the next couple of weeks!

And more soon...

Transparency, Secrecy, and Copyright for the Modern Age

=== A Look at The Transparent Society  - 15 years later ===

Why freedom of the press concerns us all. Nick Cohen of Standing Point Magazine (UK) does a detailed retrospective and appraisal of my book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? He examines how far we have gone in the directions that I discussed, suggested.... and warned about.  Especially regarding the profession of journalism.

"Brin's Transparent Society stood out from the mass of now forgotten predictions about the internet because he understood that technology had made old levels of privacy impossible: "The djinn cannot be crammed back into the bottle. No matter how many laws are passed, it will prove quite impossible to legislate away the new tools and techniques." The best encryption systems in the world are of no use if the state or another public, private or criminal organization can place a miniature camera behind you while you type, or insert a program into your system to monitor your key strokes. Instead of trying to protect the unprotectable, Brin called for political change to match changes in technology. He envisaged possible responses by imagining how two cities might look in 2018.

In his first city, cameras were on every vantage point. Only the authorities could access them. Crime fell, but the city's inhabitants knew that the police could monitor their behavior and record their arguments against the status quo.

Brin's second city looked much like the first. It, too, had cameras on every vantage point. All citizens could access them via devices on their wristwatches, however. (He could not predict the sophistication of the modern mobile phone.) A woman walking home could check that no one was lurking behind a corner. A man late for a date could check if his girlfriend was still waiting for him. When the police arrest a suspect they do so with meticulous attention to his rights because they know that unknown eyes might be monitoring them."

===Swiss Cheese Mountains==

Recall the “Helvetian War” from my novel Earth?  In which the whole world pummels Switzerland and it takes years and nukes, before they finally release the bank records?  Well nobody ever said it would be easy!  John McPhee reports: “Near the German border of Switzerland, every railroad and highway tunnel has been prepared to pinch shut explosively. Nearby mountains have been made so porous that whole divisions can fit inside them. There are weapons and soldiers under barns. There are cannons inside pretty houses. Where Swiss highways happen to run on narrow ground between the edges of lakes and to the bottoms of cliffs, man-made rockslides are ready to slide...”

The whole country, in fact, is mined with self-destructs.  Did they reinforce the efforts, after reading EARTH?

==Technology for better and for worse==

You will want Google Glasses: A glimpse into the advantages of wearable “overlay computing” that is given its early, primitive-initial form in Google’s Project Glass... which was unveiled (intentionally?) during the very same month that saw publication of my novel EXISTENCE, filled with speculations, warnings and things-you-never-thought-of about wearable Augmented Reality (AR).

Farhad Manjoo writes about Google Glass in Technology Review: “This was a revelation. Here was a guy wearing a computer, but because he could use it without becoming lost in it—as we all do when we consult our many devices—he appeared less in thrall to the digital world than you and I are every day." Such mobile systems may actually help the user pay more attention to the real world as opposed to retreating from it, providing you with the integrated information you need, when and where you need it.

(Well, this shows a remarkable lack of imagination beyond the five year near-future. Still, it is nice to see a positive tilt unfold.)

=== Other AI developments ===

The Pentagon’s intergalactic black-magic plot is getting ready to raise the dead. Dead satellites, that is. Darpa, the military’s research agency, intends to harvest parts from unused communications satellites still orbiting the Earth, and convert them (particularly antennas) into a communications array to reach troops on the ground.  Yes you read that right. Actually cannibalizing physical parts in GEO. Very different from my idea of utilizing the 10% remaining capacity in retired DoD commsats for a backup civilian net.  This new idea offers possibilities for good, including automation and cleanup techniques... and is also meant to make clear US ability to act at will in the valuable realm of GEO.

Are we drifting too far from Asimov's Three Laws?  More and more machines are being equipped with capabilities to use force - including lethal - against human beings. Despite case-by-case justifications, will this turn out to be a creep we later regret?  Are there methods to embed ultimate human judgment and control into the "DNA" of such machines?

==Copyright for the Modern Era==

Unglue.it – is a new approach to paying authors to make their ebooks freely available: The author sets a price (“I’d like to make another $10,000 from this novel I wrote a while back, and if I could make that much I’d be happy to release it into the world under a Creative Commons license so the ebook would be free to anyone who wants it.”) and Unglue.it has a fundraising campaign to raise the money to pay the author for some of the rights to the book.

I’ve long held that copyright is a practical measure to guarantee creative people enough income for them to be creative publicly.  Along with patents, this bribes them out of the recourse to secrecy that dominated the previous 6000 years.  There is no mystical right to “own” ideas.  But the practical effects of Intellectual Property (IP) have been staggeringly positive.  Today, instead of being squirreled away and lost (e.g. Hero’s steam engines, the Antekithera Device, the Baghdad Battery...) our ideas now mingle and breed in the open, leveraging and accelerating progress.  Find another way to solve the age-old disaster of secrecy, and I will happily watch copyright go into retirement.

== The big security Trojan Horse ===

Buy up old computers.  Seriously.  A fellow I know sent this: “When a recent edition of Windows came out, I looked very closely into the security literature on it. I was appalled to see that the main new security features were security against users trying to establish control over their own computer either at home or at work. Many large institutions discriminated against Mac in favor of Windows, because Windows made it easy to install "hidden" security software (easy enough to find, impossible to suppress) to monitor and control everything you do. I have had a few struggles with Radia at home. But a corollary is that the computer is wide open to things from the outside.

"The new Mac operating system Lion is said to make the institutions much happier, and is fully compatible with external control. Great news for really competent hackers. And regular security updates come to Mac too, more and more."

==Miscelleneous==

A thought provoking rumination about how many of the world’s extant 6500 spoken languages are dying, while English and Chines and Spanish rise.... And English speakers use less complex or precise speaking patterns.  Worth some contemplation!

Former WIRED editot-in-chief Kevin Kelly has an interesting kickstarted project that I recommend you look at: The Silver Cord. Kelly writes, “The Silver Cord is my first try at fiction. My co-authors and I are giving away the first book, hoping that those who enjoy it will want to fund the concluding half. First part of the story is free; the ending will cost. We'll see how well that works.” It’s an interesting exercise in speculative theology as Kevin puts it.  A phrase you’ll also find - with some differences - in another book that came out the same day... Existence.  (Kevin's approach is about how technological advances may instigate a clash between humans, robots and angels!)

I'm told, I was mentioned in the original British version of the show: The Office, season 2, episode 6?  Can anyone verify?

Oops!  A “nasty octopus” clings to a dolphin for dear life.