Category: book reviews

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a fun and detailed look through the early history of the Internet. I revisited key figures like JCR Licklider, Vint Cerf, and Jon Postel, who I first learned about during my freshman year of information technology education at RIT. And I learned the inane origins of the inane debate between TCP/IP and OSI that added mind-numbing tedium to my computer networking courses in high school.

The majority of the book though focuses on the relationship between the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and Cambridge, MA-based Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) that won the contract to construct the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. I didn’t appreciate the impressive feat of engineering undertaken to connect the first mainframe computers together. Over the course of months, programmers, engineers, and computer scientists, largely coming from MIT / Lincoln Laboratory and inspired by a few crude experiments, some mathematical theory, and the visionary scientists cum policymakers at ARPA, willed computer networking into existence.

At least that’s how it seems from the dramatic retelling offered by Hafner and Lyon in this book. For a nonfiction examination of technical protocol creation, this is a pretty decent page-turner. They don’t spare too many technical details either, which I absolutely drank up—probably because I was familiar with the basic concepts already and so could simply enjoy the backfill of context and sweat.

I definitely recommend this to folks interested in getting a better sense of how we came to have the “series of tubes” we call the internet, and in appreciating the openness, pragmatism, and genius that built it. I also think the book helps us appreciate the fragility of what we have come to take for granted, and the rarity of the moment in history where federal funding and a willingness to experiment allowed the ARPANET to happen.

Finally, I want to recognize the grad students. While the core hardware of ARPANET was a perfect example of government contracting with a determined company, the success of the internet as a broader experiment was built on the free time and inquisitiveness of graduate students who wanted to play and push the system further: creating an ad hoc system of protocols and proposals (RFPs) that led to the internet transforming how we live our lives. Those early pioneers deserve all our thanks for their late nights.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet by Molly Sauter

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Full disclosure: I am a good friend and colleague of the author and followed this work from near its inception.

This is an important contribution to political theory, social movements and civic studies. Molly provides a nuanced argument for situating DDOS within a repertoire of more widely and traditionally accepted civil disobedience tactics. Her command of the relevant history, literature, and theory allows her to trace the fundamental qualities of disruptive political action, cutting through the nostalgic version of the civil rights movement and the confusing media and legal narratives that push political hacktivists into criminal and terrorist categories.

Once again, this is a work of political theory by an adept media scholar. She is not an apologist for DDOSers broadly. Molly is clear that DDOS’s efficacy as disruptive political action has never been clear and is in fact on the path toward diminishing returns. Moreover, despite Molly’s argument, we as a society may never successfully separate activist DDOS from criminal DDOS. The ethical boundaries under which legitimate civil disobedience occurs within this form of digital activism are hard to accomplish as the tools move away from one computer one voice, voluntarily and explicitly offered, toward passive participation or nonvoluntary botnets employed in protests.

In many ways, the metaphors to street protest and sit-ins break down in the online spaces, where there are no true public spaces in which freedom of speech and assembly can be practiced in legally sanctioned ways. Furthermore, DDOS actions don’t clearly represent their political nature

And where does it extend? I recently asked Molly if she thought that giving money to big campaigns, trusting them to spend it wisely, was similar to offering your computer to an IRC channel to use for DDOS actions they deemed a priority. Using her theory, we can relate both of these resources—money and computing—to political speech. And she believes they are similar. However, there is a difference in cost. One hundred dollars costs someone $100, whereas the computing resources are negligible as they are part of the sunk cost of owning computers and paying for bandwidth. There is also a difference in risk. Giving money to a cause is a low cost activity. In many cases you can give money anonymously too, if privacy is important.

Thanks to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act though, participating in a DDOS action puts a person at risk of felony fraud charges with significant prison time and “damage” liability. The value and legitimacy of political action should not be based on either cost or risk, even though, as Molly points out in her book, personal cost and the threat of arrest are historically markers of public legitimization of dissent. The police and courts help draw attention to an action by reacting to it and your willingness to be put on trial demonstrates your respect for the law whilst also disagreeing with it.

DDOS activists do not have the luxury of facing “reasonable” risk though in their civil disobedience. The legibility of DDOS as political action is hard for observers less sophisticated than Molly. The dramatic consequences of the CFAA forces most arrests into plea bargaining in which the role of legal spectacle to legitimize the political action disappear: there is no “day in court” for the activists, rather they come off as guilt-admitting criminals, who are now not allowed to talk about the intention of their actions publicly due to the conditions of the plea deal.

This is Molly’s other major contribution in this work: a cogent argument for reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in light of how it squelches what she argues should be understood as legitimate political speech acts in the form of DDOS actions.

Note: the book begins with a dense introduction as Molly outlines the theoretical, technical, and legal context of her argument, but this sets the stage for a highly readable journey through the evolution of DDOS as action and a healthy reminder of what civil disobedience is all about. Reading this book in the midst of the Ferguson and Eric Garner protests around the country, I was more reflective about disruptive action. What can we do online? Where should the direct and indirect actions go and how will they be judged? I’m both eager and worried for the future of digital activism, as I know Molly is.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is an incredible critique of the accidental and not so accidental authoritarianism of the past 200+ years in which high modernist planning used scientific knowledge and oversimplification to attempt to improve the world. Through social and environmental engineering, James C. Scott documents the ways revolutionaries have attempted to simplify the world so that it is more legible and controllable, assuming scientific expertise would make society more efficient and productive. Most of these efforts were well intentioned and meant to advance a society rapidly like in the case of the budding Soviet Union under Lenin and villagization in East Africa after independence. Scott argues that these schemes fail because they disrespect “metis,” the local practical knowledge that people have accrued over hundreds of years that allow their agriculture to be productive and resilient in the harshest of settings and their communities to have an organically developed internal logic that keeps them stable. The importance of these “traditional” features is proven not just in the failure of authoritarian imposed systems but in the survival of people in spite of these failures. From the kolkhoz farmers in the Soviet Union to the peripheral residents of Brasilia, the author notes how they adapted and improvised to create the diverse practices and informal relationships typical of metis that kept the larger society functioning. This often meant parallel or dark economies conducted beyond the ledgers of centralized authorities.

The book’s critique is an important perspective for any industry or sector that has a tendency toward over-simplifying the world in order to fit certain scientific visions of rational systems (most of the them). Solutionism, whether derived from high modernist appeals to perfect geometry of all things or the belief that Big Data will provide universal insights as long as we have enough rows and columns, should be balanced by a respect for local, practical knowledge. This is the key insight and offering of the book, that despite the fact metis doesn’t scale by definition it will inevitably determine how society works and whether it survives. Scott argues that we need to think about design which is open to the influence of practical knowledge, which is connected to its organic roots and made more productive by the interaction between the local and the global. The book is not a rejection of scientific knowledge but of acknowledgement its limitations, where breadth of application dominated by averages cannot simply replace depth and detail.

Must read.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The near future depicted in this book takes some getting used to, like the sexism of Mad Men or the violence of a Tarantino film. And you never feel great about accepting this world for what it is but at least you can enjoy the ride while it lasts after a couple of chapters of desensitization (a theme of the novel itself). Gary Shteyngart appears to have once again written a part of himself into his book as Lenny Abramov, the insecure middle-aged Russian Jew clinging to his vintage clothes and printed books in a Post-Literate world where young people major in “Images” and “Assertiveness” and hope for careers in Retail or Credit—the remaining vocations of prestige in a perfectly service-oriented and paralyzingly indebted to the Chinese America.

This book proposes one extreme vision of where our world might go post-financial crisis, where we live mostly within our Facebook accounts or in scanning through whatever we can buy online on our mobile devices. We are getting dumber and the rich are getting richer. Corporations have merged with sovereign nations to rebrand whole geographies. It’s Shteyngart’s version of Idiocracy. He’s painted a fairly cohesive portrait of this world and commented on a range of issues: cowboy military deployments, superficial media personalities, hyper-sexualization, anti-intellectualism, and the Millennial need to feel like a special flower.

At it’s heart, as the title suggests, is a love story, meditating on family values and responsibility and the complexity of emotions that make us either beautifully authentic or that much more stupid. The novel’s epistolary form augments these intimate aspects. I must admit, I found it pretty absorbing and charming, as well as gross and horrifying, as Shteyngart intended it to be.

Check it out if you enjoy dystopic love stories. Fans of Snow Crash will find some familiar territory here, only with the more cyberpunk action sequences replaced by good ol’ Jewish worry.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics by Micah L. Sifry

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In The Big Disconnect, Micah Sifry provides a clear, concise, and important perspective on how the internet and related technologies have yet to transform the practice of politics in the Unite States. As the editor of techpresident and co-founder/curator of Personal Democracy Forum, he has closely tracked the role of the internet as both a technology and cultural movement through several presidential election cycles and complicated legislative battles in the past 10-15 years.

Sifry takes a stand as an optimist in the potential of the internet to change how we relate to government and participate in making society better, but it is clear that he is a deeply disappointed optimist. His main gripes stem from how the ability to connect people and scale actions online have largely led to disempowerment of average citizens by strengthening broadcast forms of communication and organization rather than nonhierarchial, peer-to-peer, and other more participatory forms. The two expressions of this he puts under the headings “Big Data” and “Big Email.”

In Big Data, Sifry discusses how political campaigns have taken the model of polling and audience research to a point where voters are entirely abstract concepts, represented by numbers slotted into certain buckets that either help or hurt the campaign. Using this data, contemporary campaigns can pinpoint very precise demographics for television and internet advertising, and who needs more personal contact with staffers and volunteers via door-knocks and phone calls. This kind of communication and management pervades all levels of political campaigns as well—it determines what staff and volunteers should do and where they should go. Messaging is fine tuned from the top in a way that undermines local staffers ability to develop meaningful relationships with constituents. While we elevate Obama’s 2008 campaign for its community organizing spirit and spontaneous and ad-hoc manners of support and activation, Sifry argues that the real value created according to campaign managers during that cycle was a more effective voter list and the data science tools used to mine it and set strategy from the top. This is what is driving subsequent campaigns and disconnecting politicians from voters rather than involving them in the campaigns in any real way. Big donors are the only ones left with that kind of personal touch and influence.

In Big Email, Sifry looks at how this data-driven approach to political organizing of campaigns and advocacy organizations like MoveOn is based on clever and massive use of email. Email replaces the postcards of old in alerting supporters and organizational members of key issues, actions, and calls for donation. MoveOn certainly transformed how email is used for political advocacy but Sifry believes it hasn’t changed how politics is practiced. A few staffers at the head of such organizations control the email list and send all the emails. They may poll their members for input on issues and direction either explicitly via survey or implicitly via tracking email opens and clicks. However, their experiments in greater participation in decisions and activities have been one-offs, while the convenient one-to-many behemoth that is email has remained the main mode of interaction. Despite the fact that email efficacy is dwindling, as response rates go down, the groups that are large enough—in the hundreds of thousands and millions of subscriber-members—can maintain themselves with the tiny fraction that respond.

Sifry doesn’t see this as sustainable or desirable. In the latter part of the book, he explores a couple of projects he hopes will change the nature of internet-empowered political participation. He offers a detailed and insightful case study of New Haven-based SeeClickFix, a company that has created an easy way for citizens to participate in everyday governance of their city—reporting potholes, stray dogs, and other such problems in a way that makes it easily usable by appropriate government departments and trackable. Moreover at the scale SeeClickFix has been adopted in its native city, it creates a backchannel for citizens to discuss the performance of the government and see the gestalt of what problems plague the city. Sifry also introduces Loomio, a consensus-building tool, that is trying to support and scale the kinds of decision-making that the Occupy Movement employed and popularized—giving participants a more equal opportunity to be involved in political processes.

The Big Disconnect ends on a bit of a curveball. Sifry reflects on the state of transparency and whistleblowing in light of the Snowden NSA revelations. He tries to connect this to the larger question of how internet’s culture of openness may or may not be changing political practice through taking and supporting such actions. While this additional meditation connects well to Sifry’s other work, particularly his previous book on Wikileaks, it feels disjointed from the throughlines of the rest of the book and deserves a longer treatment elsewhere or a shorter tighter integration into the book’s main argument.

You should read this book if you study or build civic technology like I do. I must caveat that I know Micah personally and thus am more likely to read and review it as a result. I am also more familiar with the backstory of his thinking, which may bias my opinion of the book. Still, it’s a good, quick read, and should be considered if you are thinking about what it might take to really transform the practice of politics in the information/internet/network/digital age.

View all my reviews on Goodreads