Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 33
December 6, 2015
Terrorism as Virus
I wrote this back in 2009, based on some work I did on the notion of cultural “contagion” in 1994. It’s actually a rewrite of something I wrote right after 9-11. I was trying to get someone (anyone) in the State Department to accept the emergence of new non-linear forms of communication, and come to understand how they depend on immune deficiencies in the target population. Just consider the difference between a Manson, whose commands to followers depended on his in-person charisma, and today’s terror cults who are capable of inciting activity entirely memetically through social media.
What I wrote below (I’m pretty sure it was for Daily Beast) is now common knowledge, I think. I’ll be interested to see what Obama says about all this tonight.
Fighting the Terrorist Virus
As we watch our grandmothers drop toothpaste tubes into Transportation Security Administration trash bins before boarding planes this holiday season, we might reflect on whether something is wrong with our current model of national security. It doesn’t take a military expert to see that a strategy of spot-checking for dangerous fluids or scanning international phone calls is a losing battle against a foe that can pop up literally anywhere.
Could it be that the approach to intelligence we adopted for past wars is no longer appropriate for combating the newer threat of terrorism? For terrorism isn’t so much an act of war as it is a virus—a very contagious set of destructive commands. It depends on our highly networked “media space” for its transmission and exploits our society’s immune deficiencies in order to find candidates to carry out its orders. This is a new phenomenon and one we must understand if we are to mount an effective resistance. Before terrorism, war was conducted mostly through the principle of “command and control.” Generals issued orders for troop movements just as artillery sergeants specified target coordinates to gunners. Military intelligence meant intercepting the enemy chain of command. That’s why so much energy was expended in World War II on breaking the Germans’ secret codes. The allies needed to know where the Nazis intended to strike.
Norbert Wiener, a mathematician who worked for the U.S. Army in WWII, realized that war—and society itself—was growing too complex to be analyzed purely under these rules. Back in 1948 he invented the term “cybernetics” to describe a much more complex range of communication. Biologists had already observed this interaction in living systems—a coral reef whose millions of tightly networked members could communicate data about weather over hundreds of miles and a slime mold whose millions of member cells, spread out over acres, could coalesce and take organized action for survival at a moment’s notice.
What makes these systems so different from the relationship between a general and his troops is the existence of feedback. Instead of just taking commands, each member of a networked organism can report back to the whole collective. Wiener believed that the proliferation of media and technology could make human society as cybernetic as any networked organism. Enabled by the media—from phones to blogs to podcasts—we have gained the capacity to generate feedback, and as a result our ideas are exchanged more organically, rapidly, unpredictably, and—most important—uncontrollably than ever before.
Back in the early 1990s, for example, the massive spread of the infamous Rodney King videotape inspired me to come up with the term “media virus.” The image was so powerful (white cops beating up a black man) and the medium so new (camcorders were still a relative novelty) that the video shot around the world overnight, leading to massive feedback: urban rioting in a dozen American cities. Why? Because our immune response to its content had been repressed through our inability to engage in constructive public discourse about issues of race relations and police brutality. Biological viruses spread when they can find hiding places in their host’s DNA. They stow away in the more confused portions of our genetic code. Likewise, media viruses nest in the confused portions of our cultural code. They find the regions of our collective mind-set where honest, open conversations aren’t being held. It’s the lack of constructive conversation—about the West’s relationship with Islam, our own Arab citizens, and the human suffering we might permit in the Middle East to feed our oil addiction—that remains charged beneath the surface, waiting for detonation. This is why the media space that we’d ordinarily assume would promote open and honest exchanges among people may actually serve the opposite function. Terrorism itself may be a cybernetic system’s uncontrolled feedback response to an unarticulated crisis.
To thwart this, we must stop asking who is giving the orders and how can we intercept them. Between bloggers, consumer researchers, YouTube, and MySpace, it’s hard to tell who is broadcasting what to whom. And it doesn’t matter. We must instead explore what makes certain individuals—our own citizens in most cases—so vulnerable to infection in the first place. I suggest we begin by promoting healthier forms of feedback through the very same media that are now transmitting such destructive behavioral codes. We can’t counter the bottom-up terrorism bug with top-down public relations. We must spend less effort constructing false, politically motivated images of America, its leaders, and their intentions. These only feed the cognitive dissonance—the confusion—of those whose real experience tells them a very different story, making them more likely to imitate the violent forms of feedback they are already witnessing on the news or over the Internet.
Rather, we must begin the hard journey toward honest conversation and a long-delayed reconciliation with the facts of history. Ironically, intelligence in a cybernetic age will be conducted not by intercepting or blocking messages, but by fostering them.
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December 1, 2015
Donald Trump: The Ultimate Digi-genic Candidate
Earlier this month, Donald Trump spewed a string of enraged non sequiturs for two hours straight on a stage in Fort Dodge, Iowa.
He suggested castration or the death penalty as the only appropriate remedy for the self-admittedly “pathological” Ben Carson. He claimed the US plans to accept 250,000 Syrian refugees even though the Obama administration put that number at 10,000, citing “a pretty good source.” He insisted that in time, “I’ll be right,” as if the truth were some kind of interactive guessing game.
There was no throughline; no coherence; no reality. Even the crowd standing behind him seemed bored and fidgety through the contradictory mash-up of paranoia, wishful thinking, opinion masquerading as fact, and dehumanizing insults. It looked like a campaign implosion. Instead, Trump’s poll ratings went up a couple of points after the speech.
That’s because he’s leveraging a medium that is also, largely, a mash-up of paranoia, wishful thinking, opinion masquerading as fact, and dehumanizing insults. Donald Trump is the ultimate Internet candidate, in not just style but substance. He owes his success to more than just his keen ability to leverage the political economy of a digitally disrupted media space. His rhetoric and positions – such as they are – are also consonant with the underlying biases of the digital-media environment.
Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion/...
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November 30, 2015
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF TALKS DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY ON STEROIDS
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November 27, 2015
November 24, 2015
Cooperativism to Come – First talk about my upcoming book
I just attended a terrific conference on Platform Cooperativism, hosted by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider. It was a great gathering of hundreds of activists, alternative economy folks, thinkers, and doers. I was quite humbled to be asked to deliver the closing keynote, which was essentially a first effort at expressing the gist of my upcoming book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, in 40 minutes of speaking.
So here’s the video of that talk. It’s pretty high energy and fast-paced; I’m going to have to cut a lot of this material before I start doing my real talks about this book. But this may be the only talk where I try to include everything, and I think it’s interesting to look at the evolution of the expression of these ideas.
Plus, the talk is followed by a great analysis of the book’s ideas by Astra Taylor.
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October 29, 2015
Maybe you can handle the truth: How tech has dulled our taste for tall tales
Digital culture seems up in arms about the ways the new Steve Jobs movie diverges from factual history. Unlike the film, nothing ever failed in an Apple demo, Jobs didn’t get into fights with people before going on stage, Wozniak never said any of the things his character does in the movie, and engineers simply don’t work and speak the way they do in the movie.
For people who knew Jobs or Apple well – or have even read Walter Isaacson’s book – the poetic license taken by the film feels like an inaccuracy being entered into the historical record. In that sense, it’s worse than a time-travel inconsistency in the Star Trek universe.
But is that really why people are so disturbed? Biopics have always taken liberties with real lives of their subjects; the dismay over this fictional take on the Jobs legend rivals the hoopla over a lustful Jesus in Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ. Something else is going on: We’re dissatisfied with how movies work, because digital media has rendered them – or at least the way they tell stories — obsolete…
Read the whole thing at Digital Trends.
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Russia, the Internet and a New Way to Wage War?
(CNN) — According to a report in The New York Times this week, the presence of Russian spy ships near important trans-Atlantic data cables is causing consternation among American military and intelligence officials. What, if anything, are the Russians planning to do? Are they trying to see how easily they could cut the cables if war broke out?
All anybody knows for sure is that the game theory that we used to plot out provocations and responses during the Cold War is obsolete in a digital age.
On the one hand, concerns about acts of digital sabotage in wartime are silly. If war broke out between the United States and Russia, we’d have much bigger problems on our hands than spotty connectivity over the Internet. Sure, it would put a serious dent in Internet-based communications, international banking and a host of other rather essential digital traffic. But unless an enemy shot our satellites out of the sky, the military could maintain basic command and control without the Internet.
On the other hand, the genuine threat here is that the Internet offers a new way for superpowers to, in theory, wage war without blowing up the whole planet. Tactically, an offensive against a Western data pipeline would be more like an extreme embargo. It would be nasty and debilitating, but it doesn’t necessarily call for nuclear retaliation.
It’s a way to cause pain without bombing cities or launching the kinds of assaults that demand an escalation of violence. Like the recent hack of U.S. government employee files, presumably by China, it’s a meaningful attack but in a virtual realm, making it hard to gauge an appropriate response.
That’s why this alleged saber rattling (or actually wire-cutter rattling) makes us nervous. It suggests a whole new range of potential engagements for which we need to establish new protocols. And fast.
What makes this difficult is that — at least from our point of view — an attack on the Internet wouldn’t really be an attack on America so much as an attack on the free world. Europe’s objections to National Security Agency and corporate surveillance notwithstanding, the Internet wires us all together in one big family of Western corporate media companies, free expression and democratic governance.
From the perspective of a downsized Russia attempting to reassert its former nationalist and hierarchical glory, the Internet is just an extension of American imperialism. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Apple, and Intel are all essentially American companies, and their platforms and devices are embedded with the values of free market capitalism.
Russia’s oligarchy may not realistically want to restore the entirety of the former Soviet Union, but it does want to maintain an entirely less open and fluid order — one it sees threatened by the spread of the Western market, ideology and, yes, Internet, through Europe and beyond.
So while the Chinese simply block Internet traffic that presents alternative narratives to that of the ruling party, the Russians may well want to make the networked future appear less inevitable and entirely more vulnerable to the whims of a single world leader, Vladimir Putin. By conducting operations in those waters, Russia may not be merely saying, “We could take out the Internet,” but also asking, “And just what would you do in return?”
Besides, as Micah Sifry, co-founder of Civic Hall, pointed out, “Last I checked, Russia was pretty well integrated into the world financial system, so any move to cut those transcontinental cables would hurt it as much as anyone else. I don’t think they could somehow surgically cut cables carrying traffic not affecting their interests — it’s all bits and packets, right?”
That’s why — along with Russia laying claim to parts of the Arctic Circle, in an effort to pre-empt Western claims on untapped oil reserves — this implied threat, in this case to the Western communications infrastructure, demands response. No, not in the form of a counterthreat, but an open conversation about how we administer the use and abuse of our shared resources.
Until we can demonstrate that the Internet is less a national network than a true international commons, Russia may think it has less at stake in its survival than its destruction.
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