… nothing more than feelings…

December 22, 2012 1 Comment

What are these strange things we call feelings?

When I’ve dabbled in Jung’s work, I enjoy his notions of Conscious and unConscious, rational and emotional. In a ying/yang sense, I think it’s fairly descriptive of our constitution. The problem is, our culture teaches us to praise the rational, and reject the emotional. Men aren’t supposed to cry, women are weak for doing so. One might even extend the rational/emotional to male/female. And then you bring in the dynamic of power, where men are strong, women are weak, men hold property, women marry the men, etc etc. But what does this lead to If those like Ayn Rand are correct, that man is a rational being, not emotional, and emotion is weakness, that means we never focus on it, never develop it, and never emotionally mature.

Words do give us power to control emotions. If you have words to describe different types of emotions, then when you feel an emotion, you can identify it, and figure out how to process it. For example, shame and guilt need to be handled quite differently. Shame is an emotion based on who you are (“I’m ashamed to be a Jew!”), whereas guilt is an emotion based on what you’ve done (“I feel guilty for robbing the bank.”) One is tied to being, the other is tied to action. If you do something wrong, you can learn to not do it again, and thus have resolution. If you are ashamed of who you are, you might be able to reflect on positive elements of yourself and gradually cheer up. This isn’t to say this isn’t difficult, but it *is* possible.

Why aren’t we taught to handle our emotions? Why can’t we embrace them, both happy and sad, and rejoice in that we are able to feel? The more we do, the more we become acquainted with ourselves, and the less harm words can do to us. “He called me a wetback, but I know that’s not true.” and so on. How can we use our self-explorative knowledge of our feelings to own ourselves, and also to contextualize things and work our way through them? Could we turn our response from “He called me a horrible name” to “Why should I care what he calls me? Do I respect his opinion?”

I believe in facing dark shadows. I do not believe it is easy, and I believe it takes a lot of courage. Racism, sexism, all these isms…. they are a product of power imbalances within human relationships. Are there ways we can explore to begin to balance these dynamics without compromising ourselves? Or should I both not give up a position simply so someone else can have it, but at the same time not take it when someone else should have it?

One of the challenges of rationalism is that it tries to recreate the world and nature in logic, in provable definable quantifies and qualities. But feelings don’t fit into that. Do I need to justify my feelings to others? No, but I can work on owning my emotions to ensure that others don’t affect my emotions in ways I do not consent.

Perhaps I’ll have more on this later.

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The tintinnabulation of the names…

November 20, 2012 Leave a comment

Have you ever wondered about the sheer power of naming something?

I’ll draw an analogy. Imagine you have a totally blank slate… let’s say you’re out in the middle of the desert. Then you pound in a stick of rebar, basically putting a stake in the ground. Consider this the first point. From here on out, you can define all future stakes and other objects by their relation to this initial stake. By distance from, color of (darker than, lighter than…), bigger, smaller, the comparisons abound.

So what happens when you name something? First, think about what happens without a name. You have to use other characteristics to identify it, often creating that same comparison. When you coin the name, it creates a symbol by which that entire group of characteristics can be identified. And often, from then on, anything which has a similar set of properties might remind you of the initial name.

If this is all true, then it follows that not only does naming something often cast a set of perceived properties, but it also grants a great deal of power to the entity which crafts the name. Think of two events from Genesis here: Adam naming the animals, using the power of language to name them, thus getting that element of control over them; and the Tower of Babel, where languages are scattered and nobody can communicate with anyone else, leaving God as the sole arbitrer of names.

I would argue this same idea applies to things like value systems. If you are a shopkeeper, you can name the price of an item, and thus control who can afford it (and whether it is sellable). You can also use names to judge things, comparing one writer to another, for example, either damning or praising. After all, what is language without comparison, and what is comparison without judgement?

If I can shine a white light through a prism and break it into the spectrum, I wonder if one could shine a metaphorical white light into your senses and break the noumena into elements of logic. Could it be, the a priori to a posteriori, as emotion to logic, as unConscious to Concious, as id to ego, as meaning to symbol?

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What is a legitimate name?

October 19, 2012 Leave a comment

Some more thoughts on the identity issue…

I’ve heard a lot of people mix two terms together interchangeably: “real” name, “legitimate” name. I think the etymology of the word “legitimate” is interesting. It stems from “legitimare”, or “to make legal.” Another word which stems from this is “legislate”, and all these words, to me, have specific meanings, all joined by one very specific and powerful word: “law.”

The other interesting facet of this is the multiple natures of law: you have written law, the spirit of the law, and interpretations of the law. Following the written law, or the “letter of the law”, carries an implication that you must conform to what the words mean. In a sense, it’s a legal version of a religious fundamentalist. The spirit of the law involves someone who might not be completely in line with what the law demands, but is trying to do what they think is “the right thing.” A common example is a man who runs a red light to get his wife to the emergency room. Interpretations of the law, also known as case law, demonstrate an attempt to retain the grip of the law while both respecting changes in societal standards, as well as changes in the meanings of words themselves.

Given that we have these multiple natures which constitute the structures of law, it seems that the meaning of the word “legitimate” also has multiple natures. Most people I have asked about this to suggest that a “legitimate” name is one that seems real, or is similar to names they already know. To me, this suggests an element of familiarity, which begs yet another question: how do we establish what names are familiar? One could extend this and ask what words are names, and what words not? We build up a lexicon of this over time, and it varies based on cultures.

For example, someone who grew up in Germany probably has a different sense of what is a “real” name than someone who grew up in Russia, or someone who grew up in a America. And yet, there are patterns within these names that help us identify them to which culture they are from, which semi-legitimizes them. For example, names ending with a “v” such as “Rostov” or “Kruschev” sound to me like they are Russian or Eastern-European. This is a pattern I learned somehow, and a pattern other people seem to also be familiar with. So where do these patterns come from?

There is a phenomenological branch of this, where we could look at the sounds of words and their relations over time, which probably starts to answer the question. Also consider that I might hear a name pronounced in a different accent, and thus recognize the name, but also recognize it is spoken in a different tongue than I am used to. I may consider this less legitimate, possibly because I view the foreign accent as a lower class than my own? To those who contest this, think of the relief in getting an American tech support agent after talking with 5 Indians ones who barely speak English. I’m not saying it’s justified, I’m simply saying it is there.

I think now of the contrast between known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar. When you look at something and recognize it, it touches on the known and familiar instincts, which I suspect we might equate to a sense of good, safe, etc. The unknown and uncertain brings risk, which raises the fearful question “how do I know what is real?” The unknown elements remove structures we can grab onto, whereas something recognizable and familiar allows us to have a sort of emotional grounding. It is similar to the fear (for example) of starting a new job and not knowing anyone; as the days go by, you start learning peoples traits, the layout of the office, etc, and things become more familiar.

I sense that similar instincts arise when we’re used to hearing people called by a set of names (Tom, Dick, Joe, Harry, Sarah, etc) and we hear or see a name that isn’t in that lexicon. Do we automatically become suspicious, just as a small town views a newcomer with untrusting eyes until he proves himself? And now I start to realize why it is so hard to codify this into computer systems…

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Hell’s Bells

October 13, 2012 1 Comment

Some thoughts on supporting our armed forces.

I am an American, and many things currently embarrass me about my country, but our military is not one of them. Let me elaborate.

I have deep, deep reservations about the state of the country. I believe there are many points where things started going downhill politically, partly because of the classification system we adopted between WW1 and WW2, partly due to the Marshall Plan, and partly due to our government establishing needless agencies as a reactionary response to events like 9/11. I believe that every President since Truman has lied to the public and betrayed the Constitution, as well as every Director of the CIA and multiple four star generals. In general, I think America is headed in a direction towards totalitarianism and suppression of the Bill of Rights, and yet these things are not what I refer to when I use the word “military.”

I have many friends who have enlisted, into all branches of the service. Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, you name it. The highly structured culture of their service has changed all of them in many ways, and in some cases they are no longer people who I can relate to. But they are still people I can respect. When you join the military, you make an agreement with the government. You sign away your rights and cease to be a US citizen, as you are now a soldier. In many cases, this is a lifelong commitment, and it is putting your life on the line. Although circumstances vary based on the type of agreement you have, there is always a chance you may be called into battle, and there is always a chance, however small, you may be killed in duty.

For all the anger, frustration, and confusion I maintain towards the path of my country, that is a commitment I have never made, and one I probably shall never make. There are many things, including free speech, that I will fight for in my own way, but for all the soldiers who have dedicated themselves to what they feel or have been told is “right”, I have the utmost respect. It is difficult to express fully in words, but if you are a soldier, I thank you.

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Are you a Facebook snitch?

September 22, 2012 Leave a comment

Facebook tests prompt asking you to snitch on your friends who aren’t using their real name

This article has slowly been making the rounds, complete with a validating screenshot. The premise: you are surfing around on Facebook, and suddenly the site prompts you with a window displaying a picture of your friend and asking “Is this their real name?” You’re presented with several options, including the “I don’t want to answer” opt-out. Which do you choose?

To illustrate one of the reasons I dislike this entire practice, I will share a story from my past. Years ago when I was helping organize raves, one of the key lessons I learned was that if or when the police come to ask what’s going on, there are a few words you never mention, including “permit.” When you mention a specific word or phrase, it can trigger reactions and disrupt a set of assumptions someone might have been making. With the rave example, the natural response to “And of course we have our permits” might be “Why wouldn’t you have permits?” whereas before you mentioned that word, the police weren’t even thinking about that. In a sense, you have just taken two concepts which might not have been linked (“the rave” and “permits”) and created a relationship.

Jumping back to the Facebook example, I believe that when random Facebook users see a construct like this over and over again, not only does it create a relationship between “real names” (I call them “legal names”) and your ability to maintain a presence on their system, but it also sets up a dangerous Prisoner’s Dilemma like dynamic. As a Facebook user, not only are you forcefully introduced to the idea of a “real name” (as well as the obvious fact that everyone has a first and last name), then convinced this concept is totally valid, but you are also asked to join the forces of good in helping police people who are not “with it.” While this construct remains opt-in for now, it makes me start to wonder two things: will there be an eventual cost for people who refuse to play the game, and what is the likelihood that a friend will “rat you out” regardless of whether your name is, to them, “real” or not?

Given that there has been at least one study showing that forcibly linking someone’s online profile on a website to the name approved to them by their government has little to no impact on the “quality” of data produced, it should make people begin to wonder not only who Facebook’s customers (not users) are and why they might be insisting on standards like these, but what lengths Facebook is willing to go to to ensure they meet their standards.

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A rumination on identity

September 16, 2012 Leave a comment

This post is more a collection of recent ruminations than anything else, but I feel they are worth sharing. For the last year and change, I have been studying two primary concepts: where we get our notion of identity from, and how trust plays into this.

As many of you know, I was suspended from my Google+ account in July 2011 for violating their “real names” policy. The challenge was, Google didn’t seem to really know what a “real” name was, nor how to differentiate it from their other internal phrasing, “common” name. After leading a rather public fight insisting that “aestetix” is indeed a common name, they reinstated my account, then suspended it again two weeks later. This left me with two questions I am still trying to answer:

  1. Why did getting suspended from Google over this policy upset me so much?
  2. Where do people get the notion of what a “real” name is?
    There is actually a third question that is much less obvious, but a personal realization I’ve had after running into these battles:
  3. Why aren’t we allowed to use multiple names on most computing systems?

The first question is personal, and one I feel is very valuable. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of people whom I have met that were using “handles” gradually drop the use of their handles, often connected with other events: graduation, getting a job, and other integrations with the “real” world. I sense there is a lot of social pressure on people to avoid things they are told are “immature” or “gimmicky.” And in all fairness, I agree that if you’re doing something immature or gimmicky, perhaps you might change, although I’d suggest first asking *why* you consider it so. I think there is a fine line between shallow imitation of an art and practicing of it, and when someone is exploring new ideas, I feel it is important to encourage them. I covered this somewhat in my HOPE9 talk when I introduced my linking of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” to eventual maturation of a hacker handle. In the same way that we don different behaviors and skillsets based on clothes we wear, titles we hold, I think operating under various names has a similar continence.

The second question is much more broad, and one I think everyone might try asking themselves. When I see or hear a word, how do I know it is a name? And following that, how do I know it is “real” or “fake”? Eva Galperin of the EFF used the phrase “name-shaped names,” which I really like. It seems that we all have a sort of internal lexicon of vocabulary, and each new phrase or word we hear gets compared to what we already know. Where that lexicon comes from is extremely fascinating to me. Is it a sense of familiarity? If I grow up with a friend named “Bob” I will probably consider “Bob” a normal name, but what if later on in life I meet someone who has a name I’ve never heard before, or it’s pronounced in a funny way? Why does it seem funny to me? What should my reaction be?

The other element that is fascinating is why we seem at times to be incapable of recognizing or at risk of developing fears of names that are unfamiliar. If we have a set outlook on the way the world works, which includes knowing what seems “legitimate,” do we then ascribe something outside of that frame as “illegitimate”? Or when we’re uncertain, do we fall back onto an established procedure or policy, disdaining any notion of personal agency to the perceived authority of the matter? Why do we fear this so much? Is it simply a fear of the unknown, an arena unlabeled by our waking Conscious to fit within the identified or identifiable? Naturally, these are difficult questions.

My final thesis question is very applicable to computer systems, especially as sites like Facebook and Google push to make the world more global. What are the downsides of forcing people to use the names on an ID as the one displayed on your online profile? First, I would suggest that creating an implied link between an ID and an independent company is dangerous, leading users (not citizens) to the false belief that it is not only ok but required to hand over data to the companies. Second, it empowers the company with authority one normally gives to the government, but without the restraints provided in the Constitution. Third, it overly empowers the purpose and importance of the government issued ID to begin with. Are we then to assume that the name granted to you by a government is somehow more important and more “real” than the one you are known by? Fourth, it empowers a system which requires you to maintain trackability and relegation to the government in the first place. I have more reasons, but these hopefully start to demonstrate why I feel relying either on a website profile or a government ID reduces personal autonomy.

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Everything that Rises must Converge

August 12, 2012 Leave a comment

Ten years ago, summer of 2002, I was really excited to be going to DefCon, the hacker conference in Las Vegas, for the first time. This year, 2012, I had the ability to go, and decided against it.

There were a lot of things acting as motivating factors. The hacking culture I knew ten years ago doesn’t seem to exist anymore– it’s been replaced by “information security.” Ten years ago, DefCon was famous for the people who would show up and sleep on the side of the pool at the Alexis Park, taking sponge baths in the bathroom because they didn’t have a place to stay. The people who were young and passionate about tech but were too young to afford luxury. Last year at DefCon, I felt a heavy stigma to not be “immature”, to do “the right thing”, and an overall mood that our community had become one with the very government to which we had once been in defiance.

DefCon has many roots that predate me. As I understand it, it began after Operation SunDevil, carried out by Gail Thackeray and documented in “The Hacker Crackdown,” as a sort of meeting and reunion of the BBS days. If you look at the early websites, listen to the talks, and talk to the people who were there, there is a sense of rebellion, but there is also a sense of freedom. It was also much smaller. It had grown to 2000 attendees by the time I showed up, and this year I heard rumors of 20,000.

Obviously time changes a lot of things. The kids I hung out with in 2002 have all gotten older: at least one fell into drugs, another became disinterested in computers, many more have gotten married and had kids, have a mortgage, a job, and anything else in the long list of that American transition into “adulthood.” More than once, I’ve heard words like “nobody cares” and “I have my family to think about”, in the same jaded fashion Peter Bogdanovich portrayed in “The Last Picture Show.”

I had originally planned to go this year, the 20 year anniversary, as a final homage to the once-exciting event, the place where I met a lot of friends and learned a lot about myself. I was going to go hang out, ignore the conference, the toxic socially clueless harassment environment, and all the things that upset me. I was going to suppress that and give it one last chance. And then I saw that they were giving a speaking spot to General Keith Alexander, the Director of the NSA.

For someone who spent a decent amount of time both fearing the impending authority of “No Such Agency” and harboring desires to learn what secrets lay within, spending hours reaching through tomes like “The Codebreakers” and “The Puzzle Palace,” and overall admiring this enigma, this should have seemed like a golden opportunity, a physical manifestation of many dreams and realization of questions answered. However, with age comes wisdom.

In recent years, I have learned to strongly disagree with the notion that the only way to motivate people is to pit them against something. This notion follows that in order to be good, something else must be evil, and your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to stamp out the evil; when you’re done, you come home, get the girl, the medal, or whatever else will hold you off until the next mission. The challenge with this model is that you’re basing your happiness off of removing an unhappiness, and without that unhappiness you can’t actually be happy. To put it another way, once you have defeated the mighty evil, you no longer have an enemy by which to gauge yourself, and you must find a new enemy, creating a cyclic witch-hunt.

If you replace the words good and evil with words like “patriot” and “terrorist” or “attack” and “defense”, you begin to unravel the trap set by the Military Industrial Complex. For without conflict, what is the point of their existence? The drama writes itself. So then, what is an appropriate response? How do we re-merge these partitions, duct-taping back the shattered vessels of morality? We shall revisit this question momentarily.

Let’s jump back to the DefCon I knew ten years ago, where there were definitely hints of the rebellion of the early DefCons, which I actually call not rebellion but exploration and freedom, and fast-forward to this year. How do we react to the NSA on our turf? Perhaps we should pass the conch to the 18,000 other folk who have shown up in recent years, their opinions littered by what the media has taught them about DefCon, by how their jobs and school has told them things should be. Do we question authority or respect it? Do we treat everyone equally or give them special treatment based on the badges they wear? Do we remember what people have done in the past, or do we see that they look just like us and let them into our community?

Director Alexander wore no such medals or badges. He wore a “regular guy” t-shirt. The first DefCon photo I saw of him was being hoisted into an awkward bear-hug by a mid-30s fellow who seemed charming enough. The Director was accepted, greeted, smiled at, revered with awe. When the Dark Tangent, the original sin of DefCon, introduced him for his talk, the Director was greeted with applause, and his speech (or should I say, job pitch?) was welcomed. At the end, DT middlemanned the questions from the audience, perhaps to make sure nothing too daring would be asked. After all, we want to encourage and fasten this new relationship, right?

It’s worth pointing out that this year was the first to welcome several world-renowned musical acts (the Crystal Method!), and to my knowledge the first year in recent times the really elaborate and expensive hardware badges did not sell out. In fact, they were selling extras to anyone who wanted one, and it sounds like there may be online sales as well.

So DefCon welcomed Director Alexander, the same Director who had just a few months previous denied allegations of wrongdoing both posted on Wired and questioned in Congress. From the same NSA that pushed illegal wiretaps on American citizens, caused William Binney to resign his post, and may be setting up a massive data-mining facility in Utah. Not only did DefCon welcome him and give him special treatment, the attendees at DefCon thought it was grand, applauded him, and in his presence seemed to forgive any sense of wrongdoing.

Then again, I suppose it’s difficult to criticize someone when you both drink from the same kool-aid.

To revisit our morality question, what happens when you have been fighting these battles, these crusades, and finally come face to face with your opponent and discover a mirror? When you see them wearing the same clothes, speaking in the same lingo, and even having a beer with the same friends with whom you were going to meet? Is this a joining of forces, or have you crossed over the lines, without ever asking who created them or why, and become what you once despised? And there’s no need to keep asking those questions, because  you already “get it”. After all, it’s your family. And the people who keep asking those annoying questions, who keep causing problems, and make it a little harder for you to get a paycheck? Well, they need to grow up.

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