Category: book reviews

In Mistrust We Trust by Ivan Krastev

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ivan Krastev paints a bleak picture of the current state of democracy around the world. He argues that we so deeply mistrust our democratic institutions that it’s unclear what a corrective path forward looks like.

In Mistrust We Trust builds off Ivan’s 2012 TED talk in which he makes an abbreviated version of his argument based on five revolutions he identifies as contributing to the transformation of democratic society. First, the cultural and social revolution of the sixties destroyed the idea of a collective purpose by increasing individualism. This was followed by the market revolution of the 1980s whereby we saw a huge increase in inequality—decoupling the reduction of inequality with the spread of democracy for the first time. Then there was the end of Communism and the Cold War, which tore social contract between elites and the people in Eastern Europe. Then, the internet revolution, which brought echo chambers and political ghettoes—making it more difficult to understand people who aren’t you. Finally, Ivan points to the brain sciences revolution as arming political consultants with the knowledge that emotional manipulation is more powerful than ideas.

While the theory of revolutions is interesting and worth reflecting on, the most compelling part of the book is Ivan’s critique of transparency as a political religion riddled with inaccurate assumptions of how to “manage mistrust” in government. He argues that in fact we are fostering mistrust by trying to keep our representatives honest through monitoring, in other words we are assuming that control over others is equal to trust.

Without public trust democracy doesn’t work and a sustained campaign of transparency will only make it worse. We can’t simply design a foolproof system of good governance because that’s insufficient to convince us it is foolproof; it will merely press us to inspect it closer, confident we will find corruption lurking.

Ivan warns readers at the beginning of the book that it will not offer answers or solutions. It is a provocation. And I think it is an important one, especially for the civic activists and technologists in my circles. In some ways, Ivan is calling for the community-based and community-building efforts we celebrate in participatory design. BUT, if those efforts are always in opposition to and alternative from public institutions, rather than attempts to build them up into something we can believe in again, will things just keep getting worse?

A short, thought-provoking “must” read.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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