#its like it’s supposed to be a metaphor for god providing guidance - using the traditional image of god as an old white man!

[stagefoureddiediaz]

Ohhhh - Buck getting trapped in a collapsing building in 818 is going to be a parallel with Lev at the happiness convention isn’t it!

Buck figuring out what happiness is - what he’s been searching for - in the same way that Lev was.

It’s always the old men that come into Bucks life and then die that show him the way forward isn’t it - the universe is screaming at you Buck are you finally going to listen?!

[aliceviceroy]

Recent attacks on religion identify it with what is perceived to be its lowest common denominator: magical thinking. This means believing in supernatural agents who can be persuaded to intervene upon the natural chain of events – to turn the course of a battle, end a drought, free slaves or revive the dead. Magical thinking operates in terms of cause and effect, which is also the domain of science. This makes the conflict between religion and science inevitable.

But defenders of religion often argue that magical thinking isn’t the essence of religion. Other things can be regarded as more important in religious life than beliefs about the supernatural: morality, cultural identity, philosophical consolation, ecstatic experiences, social support systems, etc. You can be religious, say the defenders, without expecting to affect the physical world through ritual behavior. What you get from religion is nothing like what you get from technology or science.

This doesn’t satisfy the enemies of religion, who see all the good effects of religion (don’t get them started on the bad ones!) as tainted by their supposed dependence on beliefs about the supernatural, just as they see “holy books” as tainted – whatever their literary or moral value – by the absurd accounts of their origins. Besides, they say, the percentage of religious people who don’t indulge in magical thinking is vanishingly small. The idea that religious literature is to be read metaphorically rather than literally only appeals to an elite, educated contingent. You can’t say that the “essence” of religion is missing from the vast majority of its instances.

And yet there is a long tradition of religious people who claimed exactly that – claimed that the majority of their putative co-religionists (not to mention members of other religions) were laboring in the dark. Kierkegaard, for example, claimed that there were no real Christians in the “Christian nation” of Denmark. Such language is obviously exaggerated, but it points to something that the enemies of religion might find worthy of their attention.

I suggest that it isn’t by accident that religious people often get past magical thinking in order to concentrate on other topics. Rather, the battle against magical thinking is itself part of religion. Careful reading shows it to be a predominant concern of even the most “mythic” religious writers (especially in the Biblical traditions), and a source of their moral, philosophical and poetic energy. I want to call it the essence of religion (which really just means I think it’s the most important part). And I find its classical expressions far superior to the battles currently being waged by narrow-minded critics.

The first great Biblical example of what I mean is the story of “the binding of Isaac”. It presupposes a cultural background in which supernatural aid is sought by sacrificing animals and, in extreme cases, humans. It conveys the message that, at least in the human case, such behavior is unwarranted (in fact, henceforth forbidden); but that some aspect of the willingness to sacrifice can be captured and made use of, even (or especially) in the absence of actual killings. It also suggests the value of skepticism toward the traditions of one’s social group.

Animal sacrifices continued in the Jerusalem Temple until its destruction in 70 AD, but the Israelite prophets had started using them as an ironic counterpoint in the 8th century BC, when Hosea pictured God saying “For I desire mercy, and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings”. Similarly, the book of Samuel has the prophet rebuking the king with: “Has Yahweh as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of Yahweh? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifices, and to listen than the fat of rams.” And Amos disparages not just the sacrifices but the whole service, with its liturgical singing: “Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Here poetry in the service of morality trumps all magical thinking.

A final example comes in the form of the book of Deuteronomy. Modern scholarship suggests that it was written long after the earliest parts of the Bible, being associated with the scroll that, according to the book of Kings, was “discovered” in the Temple during the reign of Josiah (one of the last kings of Judah). The text makes use of the fiction of a second giving of the Law by Moses, 40 years after the events at Sinai, to deploy a rhetoric that emphasizes “we who gather here today”, the present generation, as its real subject. Textual analysis shows that Deuteronomy is a revision of the earlier laws in important ways. These include replacing all local shrines (the substance of religion as hitherto known in Israel) with the single Temple in Jerusalem. (There is even a provision for priests thrown out of work by this revolution). The consequent permission of meat-eating (which had previously required the ritual blessing of a local priest) without priestly assistance (and thus without the necessity of traveling to Jerusalem) is only one aspect of Deuteronomy’s general diminution of myth and ritual, in favor of morality and mental attitude (i.e. “love of God”). Its rewriting of the Ten Commandments, for example, replaces a mythic rationale for the Sabbath (God’s rest after creation) with a social rationale: because you were slaves in Egypt. Or again, the purpose of animal sacrifice changes from that of providing a “pleasing odor” for the deity in the sky, to a system of feeding the poor.

In these and other cases it isn’t just that enlightened thinkers had an admirable set of priorities; what’s important is the reversal of perspective they effected. Such reversals are useful, even essential, to the general process of moral education. What is first experienced as an external, abstract rule gets transformed into something felt and desired. Morality goes from being a parental “because I said so” to a pattern freely chosen because it is its own reward – life feels better that way. And “faith” (that purposely ambiguous term) may be transformed from an authoritarian “belief without evidence” to the kind of “faith” or hopeful confidence I can have in a cause, in a person, or in myself.

This is not news. 2300 years ago Aristotle explained the emotive requirements of moral education, and pointed out some of the consequences. Educating the emotions isn’t like teaching math. It works by means of poetry and music as much as by logical argument. There must be some kind of emulation of heroes – a flaw in the system, logically speaking (since without prior guidance how is one to pick the right hero?), but there it is. Everybody can see that the dependence on moral exemplars can easily devolve into rigid conservatism, if not corrupt authoritarianism. But this problem isn’t specific to religion. What it means is that all moral education must be dialectical, must involve the reversal of perspective in which one first gains a distance from what was simply taken on authority, and then grows into a new way of looking at and feeling about things – a way that is recognized as authentic, as “right for me”.

The magical thinking in religion provides the background for a process of emotional maturation. This process replaces the desire for control and security (which initially gives rise to magical thinking) with a moral and aesthetic perspective of acceptance and gratitude, correlative with the metaphorical reinterpretation of mythic symbols. The hurdle of magic is used as a launching pad onto the path of existential discovery. The possibilities of meaningful living, of love and generosity, turn out to be as “magically” wonderful as the literal-minded magic of stories learned as a child.

Now the objection was that such metaphorical reinterpretation only occurs very infrequently, amongst the elite, the educated, the intellectually inclined. Such people don’t need an elaborate mythic framework to work through moral and philosophical issues anyway. They can read novels, read Plato and Aristotle, sample the existential and moral musings of world culture. They can still celebrate weddings and mourn the dead. They can gather together in affinity groups, and give themselves a narrative and thus an identity.

All well and good, but still not a replacement for religion. The final test of such efforts lies not just with the experience of this rational elite itself, but with the viability of their community several generations hence. Here we have the mostly negative evidence of groups who tried founding religious communities without the pretense of a divine mandate, like the Transcendentalists and the Hippies. One of the problems such groups face is that their discourse speaks primarily to the individual in her subjectivity, and lacks a clear objective pole – even if the only function of this objective pole would be to provide a springboard for dialectical development, a stodgy parental solidity to be punctured and turned upside-down in creative reinterpretation.

The point is that the semiotic space for such dialectical development has been built into religious language and symbolism, honed and augmented over centuries. To invent a social equivalent of religion out of thin air is akin to inventing a new language – much harder than it looks. So the rational elite may indeed be missing out on something – the “essence” of religion. But my concern is not so much for them and their grandchildren; it is only with their view of religious experience and religious communities.

My suggestion is that while there is, and has always been, a great difference between the esoteric (metaphorical) and exoteric (literal) modes of religious understanding, there is also a continuum running between them. Many people move along this continuum in the course of their lives, beginning with the debunking of Santa Claus. As they learn the moral interpretations of mythic symbols and stories, they grow to put more emphasis on those interpretations than on the assertion that the stories really happened. Eventually they may come to feel that “God is within”, animating their moral judgment and feeling for the world. But in most cases this doesn’t prevent them from telling their children about Santa Claus, nor does it impel them to attack the “beliefs” of their less-advanced co-religionists.

Therefore it is wrong to classify everyone based on answers to polling questions about religious “belief”. What people say they “believe” doesn’t necessarily capture the functional role of the “beliefs”, their symbolism and moral perspective. It doesn’t tell you where they lie on the magical/moral continuum. So the picture of a tiny enlightened elite and literal-minded masses is also wrong.

Religion is both a process and a communal possession. Whether it can be replaced with cultural frameworks that don’t involve magical thinking is debatable. But any replacement would still have to address the processes of ethical education, intergenerational change and the dialectical movements upon which they depend. And it might well find that, without a framework for taming and transmuting magical thinking, its society experiences more superstition and authoritarianism than ever.

[illustir]

Highlights for Surveillance Valley

The people gathered at city hall that night saw Oakland’s DAC as an extension of the tech-fueled gentrification that was pushing poorer longtime residents out of the city.

the Internet was developed as a weapon and remains a weapon today. American military interests continue to dominate all parts of the network, even those that supposedly stand in opposition.

An even more disturbing dimension of the AIR’s pacification work in Thailand was that it was supposed to serve as a model for counterinsurgency operations elsewhere in the world—including against black people living in American inner cities, where race riots were breaking out at the time.

He began to see that in a society mediated by computer and information systems those who controlled the infrastructure wielded ultimate power.

Where Wiener saw danger, Lick saw opportunity. He had no qualms about putting this technology in the service of US corporate and military power.

Indeed, intelligence agencies were among the first users of the tools ARPA’s command and control program produced just a few years later.

Like many upper-class Americans of his day, North worried that the massive influx of immigrants from Europe was destroying the fabric of American society, causing social and political unrest, and threatening the nation’s racial purity.47 This fear of immigration would become intertwined with anticommunist hysteria, leading to repression of workers and labor unions across the country. North saw statisticians like himself as technocratic soldiers: America’s last line of defense against a foreign corrupting influence. And he saw the tabulator machine as their most powerful weapon.

Deemphasizing ARPA’s military purpose had the benefit of boosting morale among computer scientists, who were more eager to work on the technology if they believed it wasn’t going to be used to bomb people.

Fliers posted on both campuses railed against “computerized people-manipulation” and “the blatant prostitution of social science for the aims of the war machine.”

Pool saw computers as more than just apparatuses that could speed up social research. His work was infused with a utopian belief in the power of cybernetic systems to manage societies. He was among a group of Cold War technocrats who envisioned computer technology and networked systems deployed in a way that directly intervened in people’s lives, creating a kind of safety net that spanned the world and helped run societies in a harmonious manner, managing strife and conflict out of existence.

The language of Licklider’s proposal—talk about propaganda and monitoring political movements—was so direct and so obvious that it could not be ignored. It confirmed students’ and activists’ fears about computers and computer networks and gave them a glimpse into how military planners wanted to use these technologies as tools for surveillance and social control.

Today, people still think that surveillance is something foreign to the Internet—something imposed on it from the outside by paranoid government agencies. Rowan’s reporting from forty years ago tells a different story. It shows how military and intelligence agencies used the network technology to spy on Americans in the first version of the Internet. Surveillance was baked in from the very beginning.

Indeed, the army referred to activists and protesters as if they were organized enemy combatants embedded with the indigenous population.

In the 1990s the country was ablaze with sweeping religious proclamations about the Internet. People talked of a great leveling—an unstoppable wildfire that would rip through the world, consuming bureaucracies, corrupt governments, coddled business elites, and stodgy ideologies, clearing the way for a new global society that was more prosperous and freer in every possible way.

Kevin Kelly, a bearded evangelical Christian and Wired editor, agreed with his boss: “No one can escape the transforming fire of machines. Technology, which once progressed at the periphery of culture, now engulfs our minds as well as our lives. As each realm is overtaken by complex techniques, the usual order is inverted, and new rules established. The mighty tumble, the once confident are left desperate for guidance, and the nimble are given a chance to prevail.”

Brand disagreed. In a long article he filed for Rolling Stone, he set out to convince the magazine’s young and trend-setting readership that ARPA was not some big bureaucratic bummer connected to America’s war machine but instead was part of an “astonishingly enlightened research program” that just happened to be run by the Pentagon.

Brand was deeply embedded in California’s counterculture and appeared as a major character in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Yet there he was, acting as a pitch man for ARPA, a military agency that had in its short existence already racked up a bloody reputation—from chemical warfare to counterinsurgency and surveillance. It didn’t seem to make any sense.

Brand took a different path. He belonged to the libertarian wing of the counterculture, which tended to look down on traditional political activism and viewed all politics with skepticism and scorn.

Neuromancer coined the term cyberspace. It also launched the cyberpunk movement, which responded to Gibson’s political critique in a cardinally different manner: it cheered the coming of this cyber dystopia.

Leverage is a good word for Kelly’s sudden religious inspiration. His faith in God matched his faith in the power of technological progress, which he saw as a part of God’s divine plan for the world. Over the years, he developed the belief that the growth of the Internet, the gadgetization and computerization of everything around us, the ultimate melding of flesh and computers, and the uploading of human beings into a virtual computer world were all part of a process that would merge people with God and allow us to become gods as well, creating and ruling over our own digital and robotic worlds just like our maker.

At Wired, Kelly injected this theology into every part of the magazine, infusing the text with an unquestioning belief in the ultimate goodness and rightness of markets and decentralized computer technology, no matter how it was used.

It seemed more a networking hub and marketing vehicle for the industry, a booster intended to create a brand around the cult of technology and the people who made and sold it, and then repackage it for the mainstream culture. It was continuing a tradition that Stewart Brand had started, overlaying an increasingly powerful computer industry with images of the counterculture to give it a hip and grassroots revolutionary edge.

Wired’s impact was not just cultural but also political. The magazine’s embrace of a privatized digital world made it a natural ally of the powerful business interests pushing to deregulate and privatize American telecommunications infrastructure.

John Malone, the billionaire cable monopolist at the head of TCI and one of the largest landowners in the United States, made the cut as well. Wired put him on the cover as a punk counterculture rebel for his fight against the Federal Communications Commission, which was putting the brakes on his cable company’s multi-billion-dollar merger with Bell Atlantic, a telephone giant. He is pictured walking down an empty rural highway with a dog by his side, wearing a tattered leather jacket and holding a shotgun. The reference is clear: he was Mel Gibson of Road Warrior, fighting to protect his town from being overrun by a savage band of misfits, which, to extend the metaphor, was the FCC regulators. The reason this billionaire was so cool? He had the guts to say that he’d shoot the head of the FCC if the man didn’t approve his merger fast enough.

That’s where Wired’s real cultural power lay: using cybernetic ideals of the counterculture to sell corporate politics as a revolutionary act.

Brand saw computers as a path toward a utopian world order where the individual wielded the ultimate power. Everything that came before—militaries, governments, big oppressive corporations—would melt away and an egalitarian system would spontaneously emerge.

People treated the search box as an impartial oracle that accepted questions, spat out answers, and moved on. Few realized it recorded everything typed into it,

The book demonstrates that Page and Brin understood early on that Google’s success depended on grabbing and maintaining proprietary control over the behavioral data they captured through their services. This was the company’s biggest asset.

One thing was certain in the wake of the AOL release: search logs provided an unadulterated look into the details of people’s inner lives, with all the strangeness, embarrassing quirks, and personal anguish those details divulged. And Google owned it all.

Taken together, these technical documents revealed that the company was developing a platform that attempted to track and profile everyone who came in touch with a Google product. It was, in essence, an elaborate system of private surveillance.

The language in the patent filings—descriptions of using “psychographic information,” “personality characteristics,” and “education levels” to profile and predict people’s interests—bore eerie resemblance to the early data-driven counterinsurgency initiatives funded by ARPA in the 1960s and 1970s.

There was only one difference: instead of preventing political insurgencies, Google wanted the data to sell people products and services with targeted ads. One was military, the other commercial. But at their core, both systems were dedicated to profiling and prediction. The type of data plugged into them was irrelevant.

The truth is that the Internet came out of a Pentagon project to develop modern communication and information systems that would allow the United States to get the drop on its enemies, both at home and abroad.

All these CIA-backed companies paid Facebook, Google, and Twitter for special access to social media data—adding another lucrative revenue stream to Silicon Valley.

From their inception, Internet companies banked heavily on the utopian promise of a networked world. Even as they pursued contracts with the military and their founders joined the ranks of the richest people on the planet, they wanted the world to see them not just as the same old plutocrats out to maximize shareholder value and their own power but also as progressive agents leading the way into a bright techno-utopia.

Snowden’s views on private surveillance were simplistic, but they seemed to be in line with his politics. He was a libertarian and believed the utopian promise of computer networks. He believed that the Internet was an inherently liberating technology that, if left alone, would evolve into a force of good in the world. The problem wasn’t Silicon Valley; it was government power.

The cypherpunk vision of the future was an inverted version of the military’s cybernetic dream pursued by the Pentagon and Silicon Valley: instead of leveraging global computer systems to make the world transparent and predictable, cypherpunks wanted to use computers and cryptography to make the world opaque and untrackable. It was a counterforce, a cybernetic weapon of individual privacy and freedom against a cybernetic weapon of government surveillance and control.

I was puzzled, but at least I understood why Tor had backing from Silicon Valley: it offered a false sense of privacy, while not posing a threat to the industry’s underlying surveillance business model.

While couched in lofty language about fighting censorship, promoting democracy, and safeguarding “freedom of expression,” these policies were rooted in big power politics: the fight to open markets to American companies and expand America’s dominance in the age of the Internet.51 Internet Freedom was enthusiastically backed by American businesses, especially budding Internet giants like Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Google, and later Facebook and Twitter. They saw foreign control of the Internet, first in China but also in Iran and later Vietnam, Russia, and Myanmar, as an illegitimate check on their ability to expand into new global markets, and ultimately as a threat to their businesses.

China saw Internet Freedom as a threat, an illegitimate attempt to undermine the country’s sovereignty through “network warfare,” and began building a sophisticated system of Internet censorship and control, which grew into the infamous Great Firewall of China.

The correspondence left little room for doubt. The Tor Project was not a radical indie organization fighting The Man. For all intents and purposes, it was The Man. Or, at least, The Man’s right hand.

Despite Tor’s public insistence it would never put in any backdoors that gave the US government secret privileged access to Tor’s network, the correspondence shows that in at least one instance in 2007, Tor revealed a security vulnerability to its federal backer before alerting the public, potentially giving the government an opportunity to exploit the weakness to unmask Tor users before it was fixed.

From a higher vantage point, the Tor Project was a wild success. It had matured into a powerful foreign policy tool—a soft-power cyber weapon with multiple uses and benefits. It hid spies and military agents on the Internet, enabling them to carry out their missions without leaving a trace. It was used by the US government as a persuasive regime-change weapon, a digital crowbar that prevented countries from exercising sovereign control over their own Internet infrastructure. Counterintuitively, Tor also emerged as a focal point for antigovernment privacy activists and organizations, a huge cultural success that made Tor that much more effective for its government backers by drawing fans and helping shield the project from scrutiny.

Most people involved in privacy activism do not know about the US government’s ongoing efforts to weaponize the privacy movement, nor do they appreciate Silicon Valley’s motives in this fight. Without that knowledge, it is impossible to makes sense of it all.

In 2015, when I first read these statements from the Tor Project, I was shocked. This was nothing less than a veiled admission that Tor was useless at guaranteeing anonymity and that it required attackers to behave “ethically” in order for it to remain secure.

The old cypherpunk dream, the idea that regular people could use grassroots encryption tools to carve out cyber islands free of government control, was proving to be just that, a dream.

Silicon Valley fears a political solution to privacy. Internet Freedom and crypto offer an acceptable alternative. Tools like Signal and Tor provide a false solution to the privacy problem, focusing people’s attention on government surveillance and distracting them from the private spying carried out by the Internet companies they use every day. All the while, crypto tools give people a sense that they’re doing something to protect themselves, a feeling of personal empowerment and control. And all those crypto radicals? Well, they just enhance the illusion, heightening the impression of risk and danger. With Signal or Tor installed, using an iPhone or Android suddenly becomes edgy and radical. So instead of pushing for political and democratic solutions to surveillance, we outsource our privacy politics to crypto apps—software made by the very same powerful entities that these apps are supposed to protect us from.

So instead of pushing for political and democratic solutions to surveillance, we outsource our privacy politics to crypto apps—software made by the very same powerful entities that these apps are supposed to protect us from.

The IBM machines themselves did not kill people, but they made the Nazi death machine run faster and more efficiently, scouring the population and tracking down victims in ways that would never have been possible without them.

But not all control is equal. Not all surveillance is bad. Without them, there can be no democratic oversight of society.

By pretending that the Internet transcends politics and culture, we leave the most malevolent and powerful forces in charge of its built-in potential for surveillance and control. The more we understand and democratize the Internet, the more we can deploy its power in the service of democratic and humanistic values, making it work for the many, not the few.

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