I’m taking a short break from the roller-coaster of politics and reading these:
The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future
Excerpt:
Adam Greenfield, a design director at Nokia, wrote one of the defining texts on the design and use of ubiquitous computing or ‘ubicomp’ called “Everyware” and is about to release a follow-up on urban environments and technology called “The city is here for you to use”. In a recent talk he framed a number of ways in which the access to data about your surroundings that Hill describes will change our attitude towards the city. He posits that we will move from a city we browser and wander to a ‘searchable, query-able’ city that we can not only read, but write-to as a medium.
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The city of the future increases its role as an actor in our lives, affecting our lives. This of course, is a recurrent theme in science-fiction and fantasy. In movies, it’s hard to get past the paradigm-defining dystopic backdrop of the city in Bladerunner, or the fin-de-siècle late-capitalism cage of the nameless, anonymous, bounded city of the Matrix. Perhaps more resonant of the future described by Greenfield is the ever-changing stage-set of Alex Proyas’ Dark City.
For some of the greatest-city-as-actor stories though, it’s perhaps no suprise that we have to turn to comics as Archigram did – and the eponymous city of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan as documented and half-destroyed by gonzo future journalist-messiah Spider Jerusalem.
Of Free Will and Suggestion Boxes
Excerpt:
The philosophical mileage which could readily be…er…extracted3 from a strip in which tiny creatures control a character’s every thought and deed by inserting messages into a “Suggestion Box” (a sort of fax machine-cum-tissue box4) remains curiously untapped. Nowhere in the course of my three undergraduate years studying philosophy in Galway (under the tutelage of Markus Worner, Joe Mahon, Paschal O’Gorman et al) was any mention made of “The Numskulls” and their importance in regard to debates about free will, mind/body dualism etc., etc. Something of an oversight on UCG/NUIG‘s part I’m sure you’ll agree.
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Let us return to Wikipedia once more:
The above description is typical of the Numskull’s formula. The Man (who represents ‘us’) is totally determined by the decisions and actions of the numskulls. He has the freedom only to reflect on what has occurred, all his decisions are made by Brainy [The numskull in charge of the "brain department"]. As all the thoughts sent from Brainy’s ‘suggestion box’ appear to “our Man” as his own he little suspects the existence of the numskulls. Much of what he reflects on is actually a consequence of the Numskulls’ free will, rather than his own.
All of this seemed to suggest that the numskulls were the true instigators of human action and desire, but an obvious question raises itself…as noted on daily chump.org:
The thing that used to really bug me was whether the numskulls were operated by their own, smaller, numskulls, and so ad infinitum.
The mind boggles. If, like Russian dolls, there is always a smaller numskull within a numskull then where does the trail end? If Aristotle had read “The Numskulls” (and ’tis a pity for him that he didn’t) then I’m sure he’d have suggested his “Prime Mover”(the universal numskull) as an answer.
The RIAA Succeeds Where The Cypherpunks Failed
Excerpt:
For years, the US Government has been terrified of losing surveillance powers over digital communications generally, and one of their biggest fears has been broad public adoption of encryption. If the average user were to routinely encrypt their email, files, and instant messages, whole swaths of public communication currently available to law enforcement with a simple subpoena (at most) would become either unreadable, or readable only at huge expense.
The first broad attempt by the Government to deflect general adoption of encryption came 10 years ago, in the form of the Clipper Chip. The Clipper Chip was part of a proposal for a secure digital phone that would only work if the encryption keys were held in such a way that the Government could get to them. With a pair of Clipper phones, users could make phone calls secure from everyone except the Government.
Though opposition to Clipper by civil liberties groups was swift and extreme, the thing that killed it was work by Matt Blaze, a Bell Labs security researcher, showing that the phone’s wiretap capabilities could be easily defeated, allowing Clipper users to make calls that even the Government couldn’t decrypt. (Ironically, ATT had designed the phones originally, and had a contract to sell them before Blaze sunk the project.)
The Government’s failure to get the Clipper implemented came at a heady time for advocates of digital privacy — the NSA was losing control of cryptographic products, Phil Zimmerman had launched his Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) email program, and the Cypherpunks, a merry band of crypto-loving civil libertarians, were on the cover of the second issue of Wired. The floodgates were opening, leading to…
…pretty much nothing. Even after the death of Clipper and the launch of PGP, the Government discovered that for the most part, users didn’t want to encrypt their communications. The most effective barrier to the spread of encryption has turned out to be not control but apathy. Though business users encrypt sensitive data to hide it from one another, the use of encryption to hide private communications from the Government has been limited mainly to techno-libertarians and a small criminal class.