Confessing to boredom is confessing to a character-flaw. Popular culture is littered with advice on how to shake it off: find like-minded people, take up a hobby, find a cause and work for it, take up an instrument, read a book, clean your house And certainly don’t let your kids be bored: enroll them in swimming, soccer, dance, church groups – anything to keep them from assuaging their boredom by gravitating toward sex and drugs. To do otherwise is to admit that we’re not engaging with the world around us. Or that your cellphone has died.
But boredom is not tragic. Properly understood, boredom helps us understand time, and ourselves. Unlike fun or work, boredom is not about anything; it is our encounter with pure time as form and content. With ads and screens and handheld devices ubiquitous, we don’t get to have that experience that much anymore. We should teach the young people to feel comfortable with time.
I live and teach in small-town Pennsylvania, and some of my students from bigger cities tell me that they always go home on Fridays because they are bored here.
You know the best antidote to boredom, I asked them? They looked at me expectantly, smartphones dangling from their hands. Think, I told them. Thinking is the best antidote to boredom. I am not kidding, kids. Thinking is the best antidote to boredom. Tell yourself, I am bored. Think about that. Isn’t that interesting? They looked at me incredulously. Thinking is not how they were brought up to handle boredom.
When you’re bored, time moves slowly. The German word for “boredom” expresses this: langeweile, a compound made of “lange,” which means “long,” and “weile” meaning “a while”. And slow-moving time can feel torturous for people who can’t feel peaceful alone with their minds. Learning to do so is why learning to be bored is so crucial. It is a great privilege if you can do this without going to the psychiatrist.
So lean in to boredom, into that intense experience of time untouched by beauty, pleasure, comfort and all other temporal salubrious sensations. Observe it, how your mind responds to boredom, what you feel and think when you get bored. This form of metathinking can help you overcome your boredom, and learn about yourself and the world in the process. If meditating on nothing is too hard at the outset, at the very least you can imitate William Wordsworth and let that host of golden daffodils flash upon your inward eye: emotions recollected in tranquility – that is, reflection – can fill empty hours while teaching you, slowly, how to sit and just be in the present.
Don’t replace boredom with work or fun or habits. Don’t pull out a screen at every idle moment. Boredom is the last privilege of a free mind. The currency with which you barter with folks who will sell you their “habit,” “fun” or “work” is your clear right to practice judgment, discernment and taste. In other words, always trust when boredom speaks to you. Instead of avoiding it, heed its messages, because they’ll keep you true to yourself.
It might be beneficial to think through why something bores you. You will get a whole new angle on things. Hold on to your boredom; you won’t notice how quickly time goes by once you start thinking about the things that bore you.
OS ultra-sécurisé à base de VM (fenêtres toutes dans un workspace, c'est super propre, cf screenshots).
"Delivering Signals for Fun and Profit"
Understanding, exploiting and preventing signal-handling
related vulnerabilities.
Michal Zalewski <lcamtuf@razor.bindview.com>
(C) Copyright 2001 BindView Corporation
According to a popular belief, writing signal handlers has little or nothing
to do with secure programming, as long as handler code itself looks good.
At the same time, there have been discussions on functions that shall be
invoked from handlers, and functions that shall never, ever be used there.
Most Unix systems provide a standarized set of signal-safe library calls.
Few systems have extensive documentation of signal-safe calls - that includes
OpenBSD, Solaris, etc.:
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=sigaction:
"The following functions are either reentrant or not interruptible by sig-
nals and are async-signal safe. Therefore applications may invoke them,
without restriction, from signal-catching functions:
_exit(2), access(2), alarm(3), cfgetispeed(3), cfgetospeed(3),
cfsetispeed(3), cfsetospeed(3), chdir(2), chmod(2), chown(2),
close(2), creat(2), dup(2), dup2(2), execle(2), execve(2),
fcntl(2), fork(2), fpathconf(2), fstat(2), fsync(2), getegid(2),
geteuid(2), getgid(2), getgroups(2), getpgrp(2), getpid(2),
getppid(2), getuid(2), kill(2), link(2), lseek(2), mkdir(2),
mkfifo(2), open(2), pathconf(2), pause(2), pipe(2), raise(3),
read(2), rename(2), rmdir(2), setgid(2), setpgid(2), setsid(2),
setuid(2), sigaction(2), sigaddset(3), sigdelset(3),
sigemptyset(3), sigfillset(3), sigismember(3), signal(3),
sigpending(2), sigprocmask(2), sigsuspend(2), sleep(3), stat(2),
sysconf(3), tcdrain(3), tcflow(3), tcflush(3), tcgetattr(3),
tcgetpgrp(3), tcsendbreak(3), tcsetattr(3), tcsetpgrp(3), time(3),
times(3), umask(2), uname(3), unlink(2), utime(3), wait(2),
waitpid(2), write(2). sigpause(3), sigset(3).
All functions not in the above list are considered to be unsafe with re-
spect to signals. That is to say, the behaviour of such functions when
called from a signal handler is undefined. In general though, signal
handlers should do little more than set a flag; most other actions are
not safe."
It is suggested to take special care when performing any non-atomic
operations while signal delivery is not blocked, and/or not to rely on
internal program state in signal handler. Generally, signal handlers should
do not much more than setting a flag, whenever it is acceptable.
Unfortunately, there were no known, practical security considerations of
such bad coding practices. And while signal can be delivered anywhere
during the userspace execution of given program, most of programmers never
take enough care to avoid potential implications caused by this fact.
Approximately 80 to 90% of signal handlers we have examined were written
in insecure manner.
This paper is an attempt to demonstrate and analyze actual risks caused by
this kind of coding practices, and to discuss threat scenarios that can be
used by an attacker in order to escalate local privileges, or, sometimes,
gain remote access to a machine. This class of vulnerabilities affects
numerous complex setuid programs (Sendmail, screen, pppd, etc.) and
several network daemons (ftpd, httpd and so on).
Thanks to Theo de Raadt for bringing this problem to my attention;
to Przemyslaw Frasunek for remote attack possibilities discussion; Dvorak,
Chris Evans and Pekka Savola for outstanding contribution to heap corruption
attacks field; Gregory Neil Shapiro and Solar Designer for their comments
on the issues discussed below. Additional thanks to Mark Loveless,
Dave Mann, Matt Power and other RAZOR team members for their support and
reviews.
Before we discuss more generalized attack scenarios, I would like to explain
signal handler races starting with very simple and clean example. We would
try to exploit non-atomic signal handler. The following code generalizes, in
simplified way, very common bad coding practice (which is present, for
example, in setuid root Sendmail program up to 8.11.3 and 8.12.0.Beta7):
/*****
void sighndlr(int dummy) {
syslog(LOG_NOTICE,user_dependent_data);
// Initial cleanup code, calling the following somewhere:
free(global_ptr2);
free(global_ptr1);
// 1 *** >> Additional clean-up code - unlink tmp files, etc <<
exit(0);
}
/**
at the beginning of main code. *
**/
signal(SIGHUP,sighndlr);
signal(SIGTERM,sighndlr);
// Other initialization routines, and global pointer
// assignment somewhere in the code (we assume that
// *** nnn is partially user-dependent, yyy does not have to be):
global_ptr1=malloc(nnn);
global_ptr2=malloc(yyy);
// 2 >> further processing, allocated memory <<
// 2 >> is filled with any data, etc... <<
This code seems to be pretty immune to any kind of security compromises. But
this is just an illusion. By delivering one of the signals handled by
sighndlr() function somewhere in the middle of main code execution (marked
as ' 2 ' in above example) code execution would reach handler function.
Let's assume we delivered SIGHUP. Syslog message is written, two pointers are
freed, and some more clean-up is done before exiting ( 1 ).
Now, by quickly delivering another signal - SIGTERM (note that already
delivered signal is masked and would be not delivered, so you cannot
deliver SIGHUP, but there is absolutely nothing against delivering SIGTERM) -
attacker might cause sighndlr() function re-entry. This is a very common
condition - 'shared' handlers are declared for SIGQUIT, SIGTERM, SIGINT,
and so on.
Now, for the purpose of this demonstration, we would like to target heap
structures by exploiting free() and syslog() behavior. It is very important
to understand how [v]syslog() implementation works. We would focus on Linux
glibc code - this function creates a temporary copy of the logged message in
so-called memory-buffer stream, which is dynamically allocated using two
malloc() calls - the first one allocates general stream description
structure, and the other one creates actual buffer, which would contain
logged message.
Please refer the following URL for vsyslog() function sources:
Stream management functions (open_memstream, etc.) can be found at:
In order for this particular attack to be successful, two conditions have
to be met:
syslog() data must be user-dependent (like in Sendmail log messages
describing transferred mail traffic),
second of these two global memory blocks must be aligned the way
that would be re-used in second open_memstream() malloc() call.
The second buffer (global_ptr2) would be free()d during the first
sighndlr() call, so if these conditions are met, the second syslog()
call would re-use this memory and overwrite this area, including
heap-management structures, with user-dependent syslog() buffer.
Of course, this situation is not limited to two global buffers - generally,
we need one out of any number of free()d buffers to be aligned that way.
Additional possibilities are related to interrupting free() chain by precise
SIGTERM delivery and/or influencing buffer sizes / heap data order by
using different input data patterns.
If so, the attacker can cause second free() pass to be called with a pointer
to user-dependent data (syslog buffer), this leads to instant root compromise
see excellent article by Chris Evans (based on observations by Pekka Savola):
Practical discussion and exploit code for the vulnerability discussed in
above article can be found there:
http://security-archive.merton.ox.ac.uk/bugtraq-200010/0084.html
Below is a sample 'vulnerable program' code:
--- vuln.c ---
#include <signal.h>
#include <syslog.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
void global1, global2;
char *what;
void sh(int dummy) {
syslog(LOG_NOTICE,"%s\n",what);
free(global2);
free(global1);
sleep(10);
exit(0);
}
int main(int argc,char* argv[]) {
what=argv[1];
global1=strdup(argv[2]);
global2=malloc(340);
signal(SIGHUP,sh);
signal(SIGTERM,sh);
sleep(10);
exit(0);
}
---- EOF ----
You can exploit it, forcing free() to be called on a memory region filled
with 0x41414141 (you can see this value in the registers at the time
of crash -- the bytes represented as 41 in hex are set by the 'A'
input characters in the variable $LOG below). Sample command lines
for a Bash shell are:
$ gcc vuln.c -o vuln
$ PAD=perl -e '{print "x"x410}'
$ LOG=perl -e '{print "A"x100}'
$ ./vuln $LOG $PAD & sleep 1; killall -HUP vuln; sleep 1; killall -TERM vuln
The result should be a segmentation fault followed by nice core dump
(for Linux glibc 2.1.9x and 2.0.7).
(gdb) back
#0 chunk_free (ar_ptr=0x4013dce0, p=0x80499a0) at malloc.c:3069
#1 0x4009b334 in libc_free (mem=0x80499a8) at malloc.c:3043
#2 0x80485b8 in sh ()
#4 0x400d5971 in __libc_nanosleep () from /lib/libc.so.6
#5 0x400d5801 in sleep (seconds=10) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/sleep.c:85
#6 0x80485d6 in sh ()
So, as you can see, failure was caused when signal handler was re-entered.
__libf_free function was called with a parameter of 0x080499a8, which points
somewhere in the middle of our AAAs:
(gdb) x/s 0x80499a8
0x80499a8: 'A' <repeats 94 times>, "\n"
You can find 0x41414141 in the registers, as well, showing this data
is being processed. For more analysis, please refer to the paper mentioned
above.
For the description, impact and fix information on Sendmail signal
handling vulnerability, please refer to the RAZOR advisory at:
http://razor.bindview.com/publish/advisories/adv_sm8120.html
Obviously, that is just an example of this attack. Whenever signal handler
execution is non-atomic, attacks of this kind are possible by re-entering
the handler when it is in the middle of performing non-reentrant operations.
Heap damage is the most obvious vector of attack, in this case, but not the
only one.
The attack described above usually requires specific conditions
to be met, and takes advantage of non-atomic signal handler execution,
which can be easily avoided by using additional flags or blocking
signal delivery.
But, as signal can be delivered at any moment (unless explictly blocked),
this is obvious that it is possible to perform an attack without re-entering
the handler itself. It is enough to deliver a signal in a 'not appropriate'
moment. There are two attack schemes:
A) re-entering libc functions:
Every function that is not listed as reentry-safe is a potential source
of vulnerabilities. Indeed, numerous library functions are operating
on global variables, and/or modify global state in non-atomic way.
Once again, heap-management routines are probably the best example.
By delivering a signal when malloc(), free() or any other libcall of
this kind is being called, all subsequent calls to the heap management
routines made from signal handler would have unpredictable effect,
as heap state is completely unpredictable for the programmer.
Other good examples are functions working on static/global variables
and buffers like certain implementations of strtok(), inet_ntoa(),
gethostbyname() and so on. In all cases, results will be unpredictable.
B) interrupting non-atomic modifications:
This is basically the same problem, but outside library functions.
For example, the following code:
dropped_privileges = 1;
setuid(getuid());
is, technically speaking, using safe library functions only. But,
at the same time, it is possible to interrupt execution between
substitution and setuid() call, causing signal handler to be executed
with dropped_privileges flag set, but superuser privileges not dropped.
This, very often, might be a source of serious problems.
First of all, we would like to come back to Sendmail example, to
demonstrate potential consequences of re-entering libc. Note that signal
handler is NOT re-entered - signal is delivered only once:
#0 0x401705bc in chunk_free (ar_ptr=0x40212ce0, p=0x810f900) at malloc.c:3117 #1 0x4016fd12 in chunk_alloc (ar_ptr=0x40212ce0, nb=8200) at malloc.c:2601
#2 0x4016f7e6 in __libc_malloc (bytes=8192) at malloc.c:2703
#3 0x40168a27 in open_memstream (bufloc=0xbfff97bc, sizeloc=0xbfff97c0) at memstream.c:112
#4 0x401cf4fa in vsyslog (pri=6, fmt=0x80a5e03 "%s: %s", ap=0xbfff99ac) at syslog.c:142
#5 0x401cf447 in syslog (pri=6, fmt=0x80a5e03 "%s: %s") at syslog.c:102
#6 0x8055f64 in sm_syslog ()
#7 0x806793c in logsender ()
#8 0x8063902 in dropenvelope ()
#9 0x804e717 in finis ()
#10 0x804e9d8 in intsig () <---- SIGINT
#11 <signal handler called>
#12 chunk_alloc (ar_ptr=0x40212ce0, nb=4104) at malloc.c:2968
#13 0x4016f7e6 in __libc_malloc (bytes=4097) at malloc.c:2703
Heap corruption is caused by interruped malloc() call and, later, by
calling malloc() once again from vsyslog() function invoked from handler.
There are two another examples of very interesting stack corruption caused by
re-entering heap management routines in Sendmail daemon - in both cases,
signal was delivered only once:
A)
#0 0x401705bc in chunk_free (ar_ptr=0xdbdbdbdb, p=0x810b8e8) at malloc.c:3117
#1 0xdbdbdbdb in ?? ()
B)
/.../
#9 0x79f68510 in ?? ()
Cannot access memory at address 0xc483c689
We'd like to leave this one as an exercise for a reader - try to figure
out why this happens and why this problem can be exploitable. For now,
we would like to come back to our second scenario, interrupting non-atomic
code to show that targeting heap is not the only possibility.
Some programs are temporarily returning to superuser UID in cleanup
routines, e.g., in order to unlink specific files. Very often, by entering
the handler at given moment, is possible to perform all the cleanup file
access operations with superuser privileges.
Here's an example of such coding, that can be found mainly in
interactive setuid software:
--- vuln2.c ---
#include <signal.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
void sh(int dummy) {
printf("Running with uid=%d euid=%d\n",getuid(),geteuid());
}
int main(int argc,char* argv[]) {
seteuid(getuid());
setreuid(0,getuid());
signal(SIGTERM,sh);
sleep(5);
// this is a temporarily privileged code:
seteuid(0);
unlink("tmpfile");
sleep(5);
seteuid(getuid());
exit(0);
}
---- EOF ----
$ ./vuln & sleep 3; killall -TERM vuln; sleep 3; killall -TERM vuln
Running with uid=500 euid=500
Running with uid=500 euid=0
Such a coding practice can be found, par example, in 'screen' utility
developed by Oliver Laumann. One of the most obvious locations is CoreDump
handler [screen.c]:
static sigret_t
CoreDump SIGDEFARG
{
/.../
setgid(getgid());
setuid(getuid());
unlink("core");
/.../
SIGSEGV can be delivered in the middle of user-initiated screen detach
routine, for example. To better understand what and why is going on,
here's an strace output for detach (Ctrl+A, D) command:
23534 geteuid() = 0
23534 geteuid() = 0
23534 getuid() = 500
23534 setreuid(0, 500) = 0 HERE IT HAPPENS
23534 getegid() = 500
23534 chmod("/home/lcamtuf/.screen/23534.tty5.nimue", 0600) = 0
23534 utime("/home/lcamtuf/.screen/23534.tty5.nimue", NULL) = 0
23534 geteuid() = 500
23534 getuid() = 0
Marked line sets uid to zero. If SIGSEGV is delivered somewhere near this
point, CoreDump() handler would run with superuser privileges, due to
initial setuid(getuid()).
This is a very interesting issue, directly related to re-entering libc
functions and/or interrupting non-atomic code. Many complex daemons,
like ftp, some http/proxy services, MTAs, etc., have SIGURG handlers declared -
very often these handlers are pretty verbose, calling syslog(), or freeing
some resources allocated for specific connection. The trick is that SIGURG,
obviously, can be delivered over the network, using TCP/IP OOB message.
Thus, it is possible to perform attacks using network layer without
any priviledges.
Below is a SIGURG handler routine, which, with small modifications,
is shared both by BSD ftpd and WU-FTPD daemons:
static VOIDRET myoob FUNCTION((input), int input)
{
/.../
if (getline(cp, 7, stdin) == NULL) {
reply(221, "You could at least say goodbye.");
dologout(0);
}
/.../
}
As you can see in certain conditions, dologout() function is called.
This routine looks this way:
dologout(int status)
{
/.../
if (logged_in) {
delay_signaling(); / we can't allow any signals while euid==0: kinch /
(void) seteuid((uid_t) 0);
wu_logwtmp(ttyline, "", "");
}
if (logging)
syslog(LOG_INFO, "FTP session closed");
/.../
}
As you can see, the authors took an additional precaution not to allow
signal delivery in the "logged_in" case. Unfortunately, syslog() is
a perfect example of a libc function that should NOT be called during
signal handling, regardless of whether "logged_in" or any other
special condition happens to be in effect.
As mentioned before, heap management functions such as malloc() are
called within syslog(), and these functions are not atomic. The OOB
message might arrive when the heap is in virtually any possible state.
Playing with uids / privileges / internal state is an option, as well.
In most cases this is a non-issue for local attacks, as the attacker
might control the execution environment (e.g., the load average, the
number of local files that the daemon needs to access, etc.) and try
a virtually infinite number of times by invoking the same program over
and over again, increasing the possibility of delivering signal at
given point. For remote attacks, this is a major issue, but as long
as the attack itself won't cause service to stop responding, thousands of
attempts might be performed.
This is a very complex and difficult task. There are at least three aspects
of this:
Using reentrant-safe libcalls in signal handlers only. This would
require major rewrites of numerous programs. Another half-solution is
to implement a wrapper around every insecure libcall used, having
special global flag checked to avoid re-entry,
Blocking signal delivery during all non-atomic operations and/or
constructing signal handlers in the way that would not rely on
internal program state (e.g. unconditional setting of specific flag
and nothing else),
Blocking signal delivery in signal handlers.
Michal Zalewski
<lcamtuf@razor.bindview.com>
16-17 May, 2001
The mind…can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. ― John Milton
The mind is certainly its own cosmos. — Alan Lightman
You go to school, study hard, get a degree, and you’re pleased with yourself. But are you wiser?
You get a job, achieve things at the job, gain responsibility, get paid more, move to a better company, gain even more responsibility, get paid even more, rent an apartment with a parking spot, stop doing your own laundry, and you buy one of those $9 juices where the stuff settles down to the bottom. But are you happier?
You do all kinds of life things—you buy groceries, read articles, get haircuts, chew things, take out the trash, buy a car, brush your teeth, shit, sneeze, shave, stretch, get drunk, put salt on things, have sex with someone, charge your laptop, jog, empty the dishwasher, walk the dog, buy a couch, close the curtains, button your shirt, wash your hands, zip your bag, set your alarm, fix your hair, order lunch, act friendly to someone, watch a movie, drink apple juice, and put a new paper towel roll on the thing.
But as you do these things day after day and year after year, are you improving as a human in a meaningful way?
In the last post, I described the way my own path had led me to be an atheist—but how in my satisfaction with being proudly nonreligious, I never gave serious thought to an active approach to internal improvement—hindering my own evolution in the process.
This wasn’t just my own naiveté at work. Society at large focuses on shallow things, so it doesn’t stress the need to take real growth seriously. The major institutions in the spiritual arena—religions—tend to focus on divinity over people, making salvation the end goal instead of self-improvement. The industries that do often focus on the human condition—philosophy, psychology, art, literature, self-help, etc.—lie more on the periphery, with their work often fragmented from each other. All of this sets up a world that makes it hard to treat internal growth as anything other than a hobby, an extra-curricular, icing on the life cake.
Considering that the human mind is an ocean of complexity that creates every part of our reality, working on what’s going on in there seems like it should be a more serious priority. In the same way a growing business relies on a clear mission with a well thought-out strategy and measurable metrics, a growing human needs a plan—if we want to meaningfully improve, we need to define a goal, understand how to get there, become aware of obstacles in the way, and have a strategy to get past them.
When I dove into this topic, I thought about my own situation and whether I was improving. The efforts were there—apparent in many of this blog’s post topics—but I had no growth model, no real plan, no clear mission. Just kind of haphazard attempts at self-improvement in one area or another, whenever I happened to feel like it. So I’ve attempted to consolidate my scattered efforts, philosophies, and strategies into a single framework—something solid I can hold onto in the future—and I’m gonna use this post to do a deep dive into it.
So settle in, grab some coffee, and get your brain out and onto the table in front of you—you’ll want to have it there to reference as we explore what a weird, complicated object it is.
The Goal
Wisdom. More on that later.
How Do We Get to the Goal?
By being aware of the truth. When I say “the truth,” I’m not being one of those annoying people who says the word truth to mean some amorphous, mystical thing—I’m just referring to the actual facts of reality. The truth is a combination of what we know and what we don’t know—and gaining and maintaining awareness of both sides of this reality is the key to being wise.
Easy, right? We don’t have to know more than we know, we only have to be aware of what we know and what we don’t know. Truth is in plain sight, written on the whiteboard—we just have to look at the board and reflect upon it. There’s just this one thing—
What’s in Our Way?
The fog.
To understand the fog, let’s first be clear that we’re not here:
Evolution
We’re here:
Evolution Plus
And this isn’t the situation:
consciousness binary
This is:
consciousness spectrum
This is a really hard concept for humans to absorb, but it’s the starting place for growth. Declaring ourselves “conscious” allows us to call it a day and stop thinking about it. I like to think of it as a consciousness staircase:
big staircase
An ant is more conscious than a bacterium, a chicken more than an ant, a monkey more than a chicken, and a human more than a monkey. But what’s above us?
A) Definitely something, and B) Nothing we can understand better than a monkey can understand our world and how we think.
There’s no reason to think the staircase doesn’t extend upwards forever. The red alien a few steps above us on the staircase would see human consciousness the same way we see that of an orangutan—they might think we’re pretty impressive for an animal, but that of course we don’t actually begin to understand anything. Our most brilliant scientist would be outmatched by one of their toddlers.
To the green alien up there higher on the staircase, the red alien might seem as intelligent and conscious as a chicken seems to us. And when the green alien looks at us, it sees the simplest little pre-programmed ants.
We can’t conceive of what life higher on the staircase would be like, but absorbing the fact that higher stairs exist and trying to view ourselves from the perspective of one of those steps is the key mindset we need to be in for this exercise.
For now, let’s ignore those much higher steps and just focus on the step right above us—that light green step. A species on that step might think of us like we think of a three-year-old child—emerging into consciousness through a blur of simplicity and naiveté. Let’s imagine that a representative from that species was sent to observe humans and report back to his home planet about them—what would he think of the way we thought and behaved? What about us would impress him? What would make him cringe?
I think he’d very quickly see a conflict going on in the human mind. On one hand, all of those steps on the staircase below the human are where we grew from. Hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary adaptations geared toward animal survival in a rough world are very much rooted in our DNA, and the primitive impulses in us have birthed a bunch of low-grade qualities—fear, pettiness, jealousy, greed, instant-gratification, etc. Those qualities are the remnants of our animal past and still a prominent part of our brains, creating a zoo of small-minded emotions and motivations in our heads:
normal animal brain
But over the past six million years, our evolutionary line has experienced a rapid growth in consciousness and the incredible ability to reason in a way no other species on Earth can. We’ve taken a big step up the consciousness staircase, very quickly—let’s call this burgeoning element of higher consciousness our Higher Being.
Higher Being
The Higher Being is brilliant, big-thinking, and totally rational. But on the grand timescale, he’s a very new resident in our heads, while the primal animal forces are ancient, and their coexistence in the human mind makes it a strange place:
animal + higher being
So it’s not that a human is the Higher Being and the Higher Being is three years old—it’s that a human is the combination of the Higher Being and the low-level animals, and they blend into the three-year-old that we are. The Higher Being alone would be a more advanced species, and the animals alone would be one far more primitive, and it’s their particular coexistence that makes us distinctly human.
As humans evolved and the Higher Being began to wake up, he looked around your brain and found himself in an odd and unfamiliar jungle full of powerful primitive creatures that didn’t understand who or what he was. His mission was to give you clarity and high-level thought, but with animals tramping around his work environment, it wasn’t an easy job. And things were about to get much worse. Human evolution continued to make the Higher Being more and more sentient, until one day, he realized something shocking:
WE’RE GOING TO DIE
It marked the first time any species on planet Earth was conscious enough to understand that fact, and it threw all of those animals in the brain—who were not built to handle that kind of information—into a complete frenzy, sending the whole ecosystem into chaos:
chaotic brain
The animals had never experienced this kind of fear before, and their freakout about this—one that continues today—was the last thing the Higher Being needed as he was trying to grow and learn and make decisions for us.
The adrenaline-charged animals romping around our brain can take over our mind, clouding our thoughts, judgment, sense of self, and understanding of the world. The collective force of the animals is what I call “the fog.” The more the animals are running the show and making us deaf and blind to the thoughts and insights of the Higher Being, the thicker the fog is around our head, often so thick we can only see a few inches in front of our face:
fog head
Let’s think back to our goal above and our path to it—being aware of the truth. The Higher Being can see the truth just fine in almost any situation. But when the fog is thick around us, blocking our eyes and ears and coating our brain, we have no access to the Higher Being or his insight. This is why being continually aware of the truth is so hard—we’re too lost in the fog to see it or think about it.
And when the alien representative is finished observing us and heads back to his home planet, I think this would be his sum-up of our problems:
The battle of the Higher Being against the animals—of trying to see through the fog to clarity—is the core internal human struggle.
This struggle in our heads takes place on many fronts. We’ve examined a few of them here: the Higher Being (in his role as the Rational Decision Maker) fighting the Instant Gratification Monkey; the Higher Being (in the role of the Authentic Voice) battling against the overwhelmingly scared Social Survival Mammoth; the Higher Being’s message that life is just a bunch of Todays getting lost in the blinding light of fog-based yearning for better tomorrows. Those are all part of the same core conflict between our primal past and our enlightened future.
The shittiest thing about the fog is that when you’re in the fog, it blocks your vision so you can’t see that you’re in the fog. It’s when the fog is thickest that you’re the least aware that it’s there at all—it makes you unconscious. Being aware that the fog exists and learning how to recognize it is the key first step to rising up in consciousness and becoming a wiser person.
So we’ve established that our goal is wisdom, that to get there we need to become as aware as possible of the truth, and that the main thing standing in our way is the fog. Let’s zoom in on the battlefield to look at why “being aware of the truth” is so important and how we can overcome the fog to get there:
The Battlefield
No matter how hard we tried, it would be impossible for humans to access that light green step one above us on the consciousness staircase. Our advanced capability—the Higher Being—just isn’t there yet. Maybe in a million years or two. For now, the only place this battle can happen is on the one step where we live, so that’s where we’re going to zoom in. We need to focus on the mini spectrum of consciousness within our step, which we can do by breaking our step down into four substeps:
substeps
Climbing this mini consciousness staircase is the road to truth, the way to wisdom, my personal mission for growth, and a bunch of other cliché statements I never thought I’d hear myself say. We just have to understand the game and work hard to get good at it.
Let’s look at each step to try to understand the challenges we’re dealing with and how we can make progress:
Step 1: Our Lives in the Fog
Step 1 is the lowest step, the foggiest step, and unfortunately, for most of us it’s our default level of existence. On Step 1, the fog is all up in our shit, thick and close and clogging our senses, leaving us going through life unconscious. Down here, the thoughts, values, and priorities of the Higher Being are completely lost in the blinding fog and the deafening roaring, tweeting, honking, howling, and squawking of the animals in our heads. This makes us 1) small-minded, 2) short-sighted, and 3) stupid. Let’s discuss each of these:
1) On Step 1, you’re terribly small-minded because the animals are running the show.
When I look at the wide range of motivating emotions that humans experience, I don’t see them as a scattered range, but rather falling into two distinct bins: the high-minded, love-based, advanced emotions of the Higher Being, and the small-minded, fear-based, primitive emotions of our brain animals.
And on Step 1, we’re completely intoxicated by the animal emotions as they roar at us through the dense fog.
animals in fog
This is what makes us petty and jealous and what makes us so thoroughly enjoy the misfortune of others. It’s what makes us scared, anxious, and insecure. It’s why we’re self-absorbed and narcissistic; vain and greedy; narrow-minded and judgmental; cold, callous, and even cruel. And only on Step 1 do we feel that primitive “us versus them” tribalism that makes us hate people different than us.
You can find most of these same emotions in a clan of capuchin monkeys—and that makes sense, because at their core, these emotions can be boiled down to the two keys of animal survival: self-preservation and the need to reproduce.
Step 1 emotions are brutish and powerful and grab you by the collar, and when they’re upon you, the Higher Being and his high-minded, love-based emotions are shoved into the sewer.
2) On Step 1, you’re short-sighted, because the fog is six inches in front of your face, preventing you from seeing the big picture.
The fog explains all kinds of totally illogical and embarrassingly short-sighted human behavior.
Why else would anyone ever take a grandparent or parent for granted while they’re around, seeing them only occasionally, opening up to them only rarely, and asking them barely any questions—even though after they die, you can only think about how amazing they were and how you can’t believe you didn’t relish the opportunity to enjoy your relationship with them and get to know them better when they were around?
Why else would people brag so much, even though if they could see the big picture, it would be obvious that everyone finds out about the good things in your life eventually either way—and that you always serve yourself way more by being modest?
Why else would someone do the bare minimum at work, cut corners on work projects, and be dishonest about their efforts—when anyone looking at the big picture would know that in a work environment, the truth about someone’s work habits eventually becomes completely apparent to both bosses and colleagues, and you’re never really fooling anyone? Why would someone insist on making sure everyone knows when they did something valuable for the company—when it should be obvious that acting that way is transparent and makes it seem like you’re working hard just for the credit, while just doing things well and having one of those things happen to be noticed does much more for your long term reputation and level of respect at the company?
If not for thick fog, why would anyone ever pinch pennies over a restaurant bill or keep an unpleasantly-rigid scorecard of who paid for what on a trip, when everyone reading this could right now give each of their friends a quick and accurate 1-10 rating on the cheap-to-generous (or selfish-to-considerate) scale, and the few hundred bucks you save over time by being on the cheap end of the scale is hardly worth it considering how much more likable and respectable it is to be generous?
What other explanation is there for the utterly inexplicable decision by so many famous men in positions of power to bring down the career and marriage they spent their lives building by having an affair?
And why would anyone bend and loosen their integrity for tiny insignificant gains when integrity affects your long-term self-esteem and tiny insignificant gains affect nothing in the long term?
How else could you explain the decision by so many people to let the fear of what others might think dictate the way they live, when if they could see clearly they’d realize that A) that’s a terrible reason to do or not do something, and B) no one’s really thinking about you anyway—they’re buried in their own lives.
And then there are all the times when someone’s opaque blinders keep them in the wrong relationship, job, city, apartment, friendship, etc. for years, sometimes decades, only for them to finally make a change and say “I can’t believe I didn’t do this earlier,” or “I can’t believe I couldn’t see how wrong that was for me.” They should absolutely believe it, because that’s the power of the fog.
3) On Step 1, you’re very, very stupid.
One way this stupidity shows up is in us making the same obvious mistakes over and over and over again.1
The most glaring example is the way the fog convinces us, time after time after time, that certain things will make us happy that in reality absolutely don’t. The fog lines up a row of carrots, tells us that they’re the key to happiness, and tells us to forget today’s happiness in favor of directing all of our hope to all the happiness the future will hold because we’re gonna get those carrots.
And even though the fog has proven again and again that it has no idea how human happiness works—even though we’ve had so many experiences finally getting a carrot and feeling a ton of temporary happiness, only to watch that happiness fade right back down to our default level a few days later—we continue to fall for the trick.
It’s like hiring a nutritionist to help you with your exhaustion, and they tell you that the key is to drink an espresso shot anytime you’re tired. So you’d try it and think the nutritionist was a genius until an hour later when it dropped you like an anvil back into exhaustion. You go back to the nutritionist, who gives you the same advice, so you try it again and the same thing happens. That would probably be it right? You’d fire the nutritionist. Right? So why are we so gullible when it comes to the fog’s advice on happiness and fulfillment?
The fog is also much more harmful than the nutritionist because not only does it give us terrible advice—but the fog itself is the source of unhappiness. The only real solution to exhaustion is to sleep, and the only real way to improve happiness in a lasting way is to make progress in the battle against the fog.
There’s a concept in psychology called The Hedonic Treadmill, which suggests that humans have a stagnant default happiness level and when something good or bad happens, after an initial change in happiness, we always return to that default level. And on Step 1, this is completely true of course, given that trying to become permanently happier while in the fog is like trying to dry your body off while standing under the shower with the water running.
But I refuse to believe the same species that builds skyscrapers, writes symphonies, flies to the moon, and understands what a Higgs boson is is incapable of getting off the treadmill and actually improving in a meaningful way.
I think the way to do it is by learning to climb this consciousness staircase to spend more of our time on Steps 2, 3, and 4, and less of it mired unconsciously in the fog.
Step 2: Thinning the Fog to Reveal Context
Humans can do something amazing that no other creature on Earth can do—they can imagine. If you show an animal a tree, they see a tree. Only a human can imagine the acorn that sunk into the ground 40 years earlier, the small flimsy stalk it was at three years old, how stark the tree must look when it’s winter, and the eventual dead tree lying horizontally in that same place.
This is the magic of the Higher Being in our heads.
On the other hand, the animals in your head, like their real world relatives, can only see a tree, and when they see one, they react instantly to it based on their primitive needs. When you’re on Step 1, your unconscious animal-run state doesn’t even remember that the Higher Being exists, and his genius abilities go to waste.
Step 2 is all about thinning out the fog enough to bring the Higher Being’s thoughts and abilities into your consciousness, allowing you to see behind and around the things that happen in life. Step 2 is about bringing context into your awareness, which reveals a far deeper and more nuanced version of the truth.
There are plenty of activities or undertakings that can help thin out your fog. To name three:
1) Learning more about the world through education, travel, and life experience—as your perspective broadens, you can see a clearer and more accurate version of the truth.
2) Active reflection. This is what a journal can help with, or therapy, which is basically examining your own brain with the help of a fog expert. Sometimes a hypothetical question can be used as “fog goggles,” allowing you to see something clearly through the fog—questions like, “What would I do if money were no object?” or “How would I advise someone else on this?” or “Will I regret not having done this when I’m 80?” These questions are a way to ask your Higher Being’s opinion on something without the animals realizing what’s going on, so they’ll stay calm and the Higher Being can actually talk—like when parents spell out a word in front of their four-year-old when they don’t want him to know what they’re saying.2
3) Meditation, exercise, yoga, etc.—activities that help quiet the brain’s unconscious chatter, i.e. allowing the fog to settle.
But the easiest and most effective way to thin out the fog is simply to be aware of it. By knowing that fog exists, understanding what it is and the different forms it takes, and learning to recognize when you’re in it, you hinder its ability to run your life. You can’t get to Step 2 if you don’t know when you’re on Step 1.
The way to move onto Step 2 is by remembering to stay aware of the context behind and around what you see, what you come across, and the decisions you make. That’s it—remaining cognizant of the fog and remembering to look at the whole context keeps you conscious, aware of reality, and as you’ll see, makes you a much better version of yourself than you are on Step 1. Some examples—
Here’s what a rude cashier looks like on Step 1 vs. Step 2:
cashier
Here’s what gratitude looks like:
gratitude
Something good happening:
good thing
Something bad happening:
bad thing
That phenomenon where everything suddenly seems horrible late at night in bed:
late night
A flat tire:
flat tire
Long-term consequences:
consequences
Looking at context makes us aware how much we actually know about most situations (as well as what we don’t know, like what the cashier’s day was like so far), and it reminds us of the complexity and nuance of people, life, and situations. When we’re on Step 2, this broader scope and increased clarity makes us feel calmer and less fearful of things that aren’t actually scary, and the animals—who gain their strength from fear and thrive off of unconsciousness—suddenly just look kind of ridiculous:
animals clump
When the small-minded animal emotions are less in our face, the more advanced emotions of the Higher Being—love, compassion, humility, empathy, etc.—begin to light up.
The good news is there’s no learning required to be on Step 2—your Higher Being already knows the context around all of these life situations. It doesn’t take hard work, and no additional information or expertise is needed—you only have to consciously think about being on Step 2 instead of Step 1 and you’re there. You’re probably there right now just by reading this.
The bad news is that it’s extremely hard to stay on Step 2 for long. The Catch-22 here is that it’s not easy to stay conscious of the fog because the fog makes you unconscious.
That’s the first challenge at hand. You can’t get rid of the fog, and you can’t always keep it thin, but you can get better at noticing when it’s thick and develop effective strategies for thinning it out whenever you consciously focus on it. If you’re evolving successfully, as you get older, you should be spending more and more time on Step 2 and less and less on Step 1.
Step 3: Shocking Reality
I . . . a universe of atoms . . . an atom in the universe. —Richard Feynman
Step 3 is when things start to get weird. Even on the more enlightened Step 2, we kind of think we’re here:
happy earth land
As delightful as that is, it’s a complete delusion. We live our days as if we’re just here on this green and brown land with our blue sky and our chipmunks and our caterpillars. But this is actually what’s happening:
Little Earth
But even more actually, this is happening:
IDL TIFF file
We also tend to kind of think this is the situation:
life timeline
When really, it’s this:
long timeline
You might even think you’re a thing. Do you?
Thing
No you’re a ton of these:
atom
This is the next iteration of truth on our little staircase, and our brains can’t really handle it. Asking a human to internalize the vastness of space or the eternity of time or the tininess of atoms is like asking a dog to stand up on its hind legs—you can do it if you focus, but it’s a strain and you can’t hold it for very long.3
You can think about the facts anytime—The Big Bang was 13.8 billion years ago, which is about 130,000 times longer than humans have existed; if the sun were a ping pong ball in New York, the closest star to us would be a ping pong ball in Atlanta; the Milky Way is so big that if you made a scale model of it that was the size of the US, you would still need a microscope to see the sun; atoms are so small that there are about as many atoms in one grain of salt as there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. But once in a while, when you deeply reflect on one of these facts, or when you’re in the right late night conversation with the right person, or when you’re staring at the stars, or when you think too hard about what death actually means—you have a Whoa moment.
A true Whoa moment is hard to come by and even harder to maintain for very long, like our dog’s standing difficulties. Thinking about this level of reality is like looking at an amazing photo of the Grand Canyon; a Whoa moment is like being at the Grand Canyon—the two experiences are similar but somehow vastly different. Facts can be fascinating, but only in a Whoa moment does your brain actually wrap itself around true reality. In a Whoa moment, your brain for a second transcends what it’s been built to do and offers you a brief glimpse into the astonishing truth of our existence. And a Whoa moment is how you get to Step 3.
I love Whoa moments. They make me feel some intense combination of awe, elation, sadness, and wonder. More than anything, they make me feel ridiculously, profoundly humble—and that level of humility does weird things to a person. In those moments, all those words religious people use—awe, worship, miracle, eternal connection—make perfect sense. I want to get on my knees and surrender. This is when I feel spiritual.
And in those fleeting moments, there is no fog—my Higher Being is in full flow and can see everything in perfect clarity. The normally-complicated world of morality is suddenly crystal clear, because the only fathomable emotions on Step 3 are the most high-level. Any form of pettiness or hatred is a laughable concept up on Step 3—with no fog to obscure things, the animals are completely naked, exposed for the sad little creatures that they are.
animals embarrassed
On Step 1, I snap back at the rude cashier, who had the nerve to be a dick to me. On Step 2, the rudeness doesn’t faze me because I know it’s about him, not me, and that I have no idea what his day or life has been like. On Step 3, I see myself as a miraculous arrangement of atoms in vast space that for a split second in endless eternity has come together to form a moment of consciousness that is my life…and I see that cashier as another moment of consciousness that happens to exist on the same speck of time and space that I do. And the only possible emotion I could have for him on Step 3 is love.
cashier 2
In a Whoa moment’s transcendent level of consciousness, I see every interaction, every motivation, every news headline in unusual clarity—and difficult life decisions are much more obvious. I feel wise.
Of course, if this were my normal state, I’d be teaching monks somewhere on a mountain in Myanmar, and I’m not teaching any monks anywhere because it’s not my normal state. Whoa moments are rare and very soon after one, I’m back down here being a human again. But the emotions and the clarity of Step 3 are so powerful, that even after you topple off the step, some of it sticks around. Each time you humiliate the animals, a little bit of their future power over you is diminished. And that’s why Step 3 is so important—even though no one that I know can live permanently on Step 3, regular visits help you dramatically in the ongoing Step 1 vs Step 2 battle, which makes you a better and happier person.
Step 3 is also the answer to anyone who accuses atheists of being amoral or cynical or nihilistic, or wonders how atheists find any meaning in life without the hope and incentive of an afterlife. That’s a Step 1 way to view an atheist, where life on Earth is taken for granted and it’s assumed that any positive impulse or emotion must be due to circumstances outside of life. On Step 3, I feel immensely lucky to be alive and can’t believe how cool it is that I’m a group of atoms that can think about atoms—on Step 3, life itself is more than enough to make me excited, hopeful, loving, and kind. But Step 3 is only possible because science has cleared the way there, which is why Carl Sagan said that “science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” In this way, science is the “prophet” of this framework—the one who reveals new truth to us and gives us an opportunity to alter ourselves by accessing it.
So to recap so far—on Step 1, you’re in a delusional bubble that Step 2 pops. On Step 2, there’s much more clarity about life, but it’s within a much bigger delusional bubble, one that Step 3 pops. But Step 3 is supposed to be total, fog-free clarity on truth—so how could there be another step?
Step 4: The Great Unknown
If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. —Carl Sagan
The game so far has for the most part been clearing out fog to become as conscious as possible of what we as people and as a species know about truth:
Step 1-3 Circles
On Step 4, we’re reminded of the complete truth—which is this:
Step 4 Circle
The fact is, any discussion of our full reality—of the truth of the universe or our existence—is a complete delusion without acknowledging that big purple blob that makes up almost all of that reality.
But you know humans—they don’t like that purple blob one bit. Never have. The blob frightens and humiliates humans, and we have a rich history of denying its existence entirely, which is like living on the beach and pretending the ocean isn’t there. Instead, we just stamp our foot and claim that now we’ve finally figured it all out. On the religious side, we invent myths and proclaim them as truth—and even a devout religious believer reading this who stands by the truth of their particular book would agree with me about the fabrication of the other few thousand books out there. On the science front, we’ve managed to be consistently gullible in believing that “realizing you’ve been horribly wrong about reality” is a phenomenon only of the past.
Having our understanding of reality overturned by a new groundbreaking discovery is like a shocking twist in this epic mystery novel humanity is reading, and scientific progress is regularly dotted with these twists—the Earth being round, the solar system being heliocentric, not geocentric, the discovery of subatomic particles or galaxies other than our own, and evolutionary theory, to name a few. So how is it possible, with the knowledge of all those breakthroughs, that Lord Kelvin, one of history’s greatest scientists, said in the year 1900, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement”4—i.e. this time, all the twists actually are finished.
Of course, Kelvin was as wrong as every other arrogant scientist in history—the theory of general relativity and then the theory of quantum mechanics would both topple science on its face over the next century.
Even if we acknowledge today that there will be more twists in the future, we’re probably kind of inclined to think we’ve figured out most of the major things and have a far closer-to-complete picture of reality than the people who thought the Earth was flat. Which, to me, sounds like this:
Laughing
The fact is, let’s remember that we don’t know what the universe is. Is it everything? Is it one tiny bubble in a multiverse frothing with bubbles? Is it not a bubble at all but an optical illusion hologram? And we know about the Big Bang, but was that the beginning of everything? Did something arise from nothing, or was it just the latest in a long series of expansion/collapse cycles?5 We have no clue what dark matter is, only that there’s a shit-ton of it in the universe, and when we discussed The Fermi Paradox, it became entirely clear that science has no idea about whether there’s other life out there or how advanced it might be. How about String Theory, which claims to be the secret to unifying the two grand but seemingly-unrelated theories of the physical world, general relativity and quantum mechanics? It’s either the grandest theory we’ve ever come up with or totally false, and there are great scientists on both sides of this debate. And as laypeople, all we need to do is take a look at those two well-accepted theories to realize how vastly different reality can be from how it seems: like general relativity telling us that if you flew to a black hole and circled around it a few times in intense gravity and then returned to Earth a few hours after you left, decades would have passed on Earth while you were gone. And that’s like an ice cream cone compared to the insane shit quantum mechanics tells us—like two particles across the universe from one another being mysteriously linked to each other’s behavior, or a cat that’s both alive and dead at the same time, until you look at it.
And the thing is, everything I just mentioned is still within the realm of our understanding. As we established earlier, compared to a more evolved level of consciousness, we might be like a three-year-old, a monkey, or an ant—so why would we assume that we’re even capable of understanding everything in that purple blob? A monkey can’t understand that the Earth is a round planet, let alone that the solar system, galaxy, or universe exists. You could try to explain it to a monkey for years and it wouldn’t be possible. So what are we completely incapable of grasping even if a more intelligent species tried its hardest to explain it to us? Probably almost everything.
There are really two options when thinking about the big, big picture: be humble or be absurd.
The nonsensical thing about humans feigning certainty because we’re scared is that in the old days, when it seemed on the surface that we were the center of all creation, uncertainty was frightening because it made our reality seem so much bleaker than we had thought—but now, with so much more uncovered, things look highly bleak for us as people and as a species, so our fear should welcome uncertainty. Given my default outlook that I have a small handful of decades left and then an eternity of nonexistence, the fact that we might be totally wrong sounds tremendously hopeful to me.
Ironically, when my thinking reaches the top of this rooted-in-atheism staircase, the notion that something that seems divine to us might exist doesn’t seem so ridiculous anymore. I’m still totally atheist when it comes to all human-created conceptions of a divine higher force—which all, in my opinion, proclaim far too much certainty. But could a super-advanced force exist? It seems more than likely. Could we have been created by something/someone bigger than us or be living as part of a simulation without realizing it? Sure—I’m a three-year-old, remember, so who am I to say no?
To me, complete rational logic tells me to be atheist about all of the Earth’s religions and utterly agnostic about the nature of our existence or the possible existence of a higher being. I don’t arrive there via any form of faith, just by logic.
I find Step 4 mentally mind-blowing but I’m not sure I’m ever quite able to access it in a spiritual way like I sometimes can with Step 3—Step 4 Whoa moments might be reserved for Einstein-level thinkers—but even if I can’t get my feet up on Step 4, I can know it’s there, what it means, and I can remind myself of its existence. So what does that do for me as a human?
Well remember that powerful humility I mentioned in Step 3? It multiples that by 100. For reasons I just discussed, it makes me feel more hopeful. And it leaves me feeling pleasantly resigned to the fact that I will never understand what’s going on, which makes me feel like I can take my hand off the wheel, sit back, relax, and just enjoy the ride. In this way, I think Step 4 can make us live more in the present—if I’m just a molecule floating around an ocean I can’t understand, I might as well just enjoy it.
The way Step 4 can serve humanity is by helping to crush the notion of certainty. Certainty is primitive, leads to “us versus them” tribalism, and starts wars. We should be united in our uncertainty, not divided over fabricated certainty. And the more humans turn around and look at that big purple blob, the better off we’ll be.
Why Wisdom is the Goal
Nothing clears fog like a deathbed, which is why it’s then that people can always see with more clarity what they should have done differently—I wish I had spent less time working; I wish I had communicated with my wife more; I wish I had traveled more; etc. The goal of personal growth should be to gain that deathbed clarity while your life is still happening so you can actually do something about it.
The way you do that is by developing as much wisdom as possible, as early as possible. To me, wisdom is the most important thing to work towards as a human. It’s the big objective—the umbrella goal under which all other goals fall into place. I believe I have one and only one chance to live, and I want to do it in the most fulfilled and meaningful way possible—that’s the best outcome for me, and I do a lot more good for the world that way. Wisdom gives people the insight to know what “fulfilled and meaningful” actually means and the courage to make the choices that will get them there.
And while life experience can contribute to wisdom, I think wisdom is mostly already in all of our heads—it’s everything the Higher Being knows. When we’re not wise, it’s because we don’t have access to the Higher Being’s wisdom because it’s buried in fog. The fog is anti-wisdom, and when you move up the staircase into a clearer place, wisdom is simply a by-product of that increased consciousness.
One thing I learned at some point is that growing old or growing tall is not the same as growing up. Being a grownup is about your level of wisdom and the size of your mind’s scope—and it turns out that it doesn’t especially correlate with age. After a certain age, growing up is about overcoming your fog, and that’s about the person, not the age. I know some supremely wise older people, but there are also a lot of people my age who seem much wiser than their parents about a lot of things. Someone on a growth path whose fog thins as they age will become wiser with age, but I find the reverse happens with people who don’t actively grow—the fog hardens around them and they actually become even less conscious, and even more certain about everything, with age.
When I think about people I know, I realize that my level of respect and admiration for a person is almost entirely in line with how wise and conscious a person I think they are. The people I hold in the highest regard are the grownups in my life—and their ages completely vary.
Another Look at Religion in Light of this Framework:
This discussion helps clarify my issues with traditional organized religion. There are plenty of good people, good ideas, good values, and good wisdom in the religious world, but to me that seems like something happening in spite of religion and not because of it. Using religion for growth requires an innovative take on things, since at a fundamental level, most religions seem to treat people like children instead of pushing them to grow. Many of today’s religions play to people’s fog with “believe in this or else…” fear-mongering and books that are often a rallying cry for ‘us vs. them’ divisiveness. They tell people to look to ancient scripture for answers instead of the depths of the mind, and their stubborn certainty when it comes to right and wrong often leaves them at the back of the pack when it comes to the evolution of social issues. Their certainty when it comes to history ends up actively pushing their followers away from truth—as evidenced by the 42% of Americans who have been deprived of knowing the truth about evolution. (An even worse staircase criminal is the loathsome world of American politics, with a culture that lives on Step 1 and where politicians appeal directly to people’s animals, deliberately avoiding anything on Steps 2-4.)
So What Am I?
Yes, I’m an atheist, but atheism isn’t a growth model any more than “I don’t like rollerblading” is a workout strategy.
So I’m making up a term for what I am—I’m a Truthist. In my framework, truth is what I’m always looking for, truth is what I worship, and learning to see truth more easily and more often is what leads to growth.
In Truthism, the goal is to grow wiser over time, and wisdom falls into your lap whenever you’re conscious enough to see the truth about people, situations, the world, or the universe. The fog is what stands in your way, making you unconscious, delusional, and small-minded, so the key day-to-day growth strategy is staying cognizant of the fog and training your mind to try to see the full truth in any situation.
Over time, you want your [Time on Step 2] / [Time on Step 1] ratio to go up a little bit each year, and you want to get better and better at inducing Step 3 Whoa moments and reminding yourself of the Step 4 purple blob. If you do those things, I think you’re evolving in the best possible way, and it will have profound effects on all aspects of your life.
That’s it. That’s Truthism.
Am I a good Truthist? I’m okay. Better than I used to be with a long way to go. But defining this framework will help—I’ll know where to put my focus, what to be wary of, and how to evaluate my progress, which will help me make sure I’m actually improving and lead to quicker growth.
To help keep me on mission, I made a Truthism logo:
logo
That’s my symbol, my mantra, my WWJD—it’s the thing I can look at when something good or bad happens, when a big decision is at hand, or on a normal day as a reminder to stay aware of the fog and keep my eye on the big picture.
And What Are You?
My challenge to you is to decide on a term for yourself that accurately sums up your growth framework.
If Christianity is your thing and it’s genuinely helping you grow, that word can be Christian. Maybe you already have your own clear, well-defined advancement strategy and you just need a name for it. Maybe Truthism hit home for you, resembles the way you already think, and you want to try being a Truthist with me.
Or maybe you have no idea what your growth framework is, or what you’re using isn’t working. If either A) you don’t feel like you’ve evolved in a meaningful way in the past couple years, or B) you aren’t able to corroborate your values and philosophies with actual reasoning that matters to you, then you need to find a new framework.
To do this, just ask yourself the same questions I asked myself: What’s the goal that you want to evolve towards (and why is that the goal), what does the path look like that gets you there, what’s in your way, and how do you overcome those obstacles? What are your practices on a day-to-day level, and what should your progress look like year-to-year? Most importantly, how do you stay strong and maintain the practice for years and years, not four days? After you’ve thought that through, name the framework and make a symbol or mantra. (Then share your strategy in the comments or email me about it, because articulating it helps clarify it in your head, and because it’s useful and interesting for others to hear about your framework.)
I hope I’ve convinced you how important this is. Don’t wait until your deathbed to figure out what life is all about.
Les Flexbox ont l'air vraiment puissantes pour résoudre la plupart des problèmes chiants du CSS :)
Nous connaissons maintenant les conséquences sur le climat de notre utilisation massive d’énergies fossiles. Pour les remplacer, le nucléaire, toutes générations confondues, n’est crédible ni industriellement, ni moralement. Indéniablement, nous pouvons et nous devons développer les énergies renouvelables. Mais ne nous imaginons pas qu’elles pourront remplacer les énergies fossiles et maintenir notre débauche énergétique actuelle.
Les problèmes auxquels nous faisons face ne pourront pas être résolus simplement par une série d’innovations technologiques et de déploiements industriels de solutions alternatives. Car nous allons nous heurter à un problème de ressources, essentiellement pour deux raisons : il faut des ressources métalliques pour capter les énergies renouvelables ; et celles-ci ne peuvent qu’être imparfaitement recyclées, ce phénomène s’aggravant avec l’utilisation de hautes technologies. La solution climatique ne peut donc passer que par la voie de la sobriété et de technologies adaptées, moins consommatrices.
Energies et ressources sont intimement liées
Les arguments sont connus : les énergies renouvelables ont un potentiel énorme ; et même si elles sont diffuses, pour partie intermittentes, et à date encore un peu trop chères, les progrès continus sur la production, le stockage, le transport, et leur déploiement massif devraient permettre de réduire les coûts et les rendre abordables.
Certes, la Terre reçoit chaque jour une quantité d’énergie solaire des milliers de fois plus grande que les besoins de l’humanité… Les scenarii sur des mondes « énergétiquement vertueux » ne manquent pas : troisième révolution industrielle du prospectiviste Jeremy Rifkin, plan Wind Water Sun du professeur Jacobson de l’université de Stanford, projet industriel Desertec, ou, à l’échelle française, simulations de l’association Negawatt ou de l’ADEME.
Tous sont basés sur des déploiements industriels très ambitieux. Wind Water Sun propose de couvrir les besoins en énergie de l’ensemble du monde, uniquement avec des renouvelables, d’ici 2030. Pour cela, il faudrait 3,8 millions d’éoliennes de 5 MW et 89 000 centrales solaires de 300 MW, soit installer en 15 ans 19 000 GW d’éoliennes (30 fois le rythme actuel de 40 GW au plus par an), et inaugurer quinze centrales solaires par jour.
Economie de guerre
Rien d’impossible sur le papier, mais il faudrait alors une véritable économie de guerre, pour organiser l’approvisionnement en matières premières – acier, ciment, résines polyuréthanes, cuivre, terres rares (pour fournir le néodyme des aimants permanents pour les génératrices de ces éoliennes, il faudrait – si tant est qu’il y ait les réserves disponibles – multiplier la production annuelle par 15 !) –, la production des équipements, la logistique et l’installation (bateaux, grues, bases de stockage…), la formation du personnel… Sans parler des dispositifs de transport et de stockage de l’électricité !
Mais l’irréalisme tient davantage aux ressources qu’aux contraintes industrielles ou financières. Car il faut des métaux pour capter, convertir et exploiter les énergies renouvelables. Moins concentrées et plus intermittentes, elles produisent moins de kWh par unité de métal (cuivre, acier) mobilisée que les sources fossiles. Certaines technologies utilisent des métaux plus rares, comme le néodyme dopé au dysprosium pour les éoliennes de forte puissance, l’indium, le sélénium ou le tellure pour une partie des panneaux photovoltaïques à haut rendement. Il faut aussi des métaux pour les équipements annexes, câbles, onduleurs ou batteries.
Nous disposons de beaucoup de ressources métalliques, de même qu’il reste énormément de gaz et pétrole conventionnels ou non, d’hydrates de méthane, de charbon… bien au-delà du supportable pour la régulation climatique planétaire, hélas.
Mais, comme pour le pétrole et le gaz, la qualité et l’accessibilité de ces ressources minières se dégradent (pour le pétrole et le gaz, le rapport entre quantité d’énergie récupérée et quantité d’énergie investie pour l’extraire est passé de 30-50 dans les champs onshore, à 5-7 dans les exploitations deep ou ultradeep offshore, et même 2-4 pour les sables bitumineux de l’Alberta). Car nous exploitons un stock de minerais qui ont été créés, enrichis par la nature « vivante » de la planète : tectonique des plaques, volcanisme, cycle de l’eau, activité biologique…
Deux problèmes au même moment
Logiquement, nous avons exploité d’abord les ressources les plus concentrées, les plus simples à extraire. Les nouvelles mines ont des teneurs en minerai plus basses que les mines épuisées (ainsi du cuivre, passé d’une moyenne de 1,8-2% dans les années 1930, à 0,5% dans les nouvelles mines), ou bien sont moins accessibles, plus dures à exploiter, plus profondes.
Exploitation de sables bitumineux au Canada (Jørgen Schyberg/flickr/CC)
Exploitation de sables bitumineux au Canada (Jørgen Schyberg/flickr/CC)
Or, que les mines soient plus profondes ou moins concentrées, il faut dépenser plus d’énergie, parce qu’il faut remuer toujours plus de « stériles » miniers, ou parce que la profondeur engendre des contraintes, de température notamment, qui rendent les opérations plus complexes.
Il y a donc une interaction très forte entre disponibilité en énergie et disponibilité en métaux, et la négliger serait se confronter à de grandes désillusions.
Si nous n’avions qu’un problème d’énergie (et de climat !), il « suffirait » de tartiner le monde de panneaux solaires, d’éoliennes et de smart grids (réseaux de transport « intelligents » permettant d’optimiser la consommation, et surtout d’équilibrer à tout moment la demande variable avec l’offre intermittente des énergies renouvelables).
Si nous n’avions qu’un problème de métaux, mais accès à une énergie concentrée et abondante, nous pourrions continuer à exploiter la croûte terrestre à des concentrations toujours plus faibles.
Mais nous faisons face à ces deux problèmes au même moment, et ils se renforcent mutuellement : plus d’énergie nécessaire pour extraire et raffiner les métaux, plus de métaux pour produire une énergie moins accessible.
L’économie circulaire est une gentille utopie
Les ressources métalliques, une fois extraites, ne disparaissent pas. L’économie circulaire, basée en particulier sur l’éco-conception et le recyclage, devrait donc être une réponse logique à la pénurie métallique. Mais celle-ci ne pourra fonctionner que très partiellement si l’on ne change pas radicalement notre façon de produire et de consommer.
Naturellement on peut et il faut recycler plus qu’aujourd’hui, et les taux de recyclage actuels sont souvent si bas que les marges de progression sont énormes. Mais on ne peut jamais atteindre 100% et recycler « à l’infini », quand bien même on récupérerait toute la ressource disponible et on la traiterait toujours dans les usines les plus modernes, avec les procédés les mieux maîtrisés (on en est très loin).
D’abord parce qu’il faut pouvoir récupérer physiquement la ressource pour la recycler, ce qui est impossible dans le cas des usages dispersifs ou dissipatifs. Les métaux sont couramment utilisés comme produits chimiques, additifs, dans les verres, les plastiques, les encres, les peintures, les cosmétiques, les fongicides, les lubrifiants et bien d’autres produits industriels ou de la vie courante (environ 5% du zinc, 10 à 15% du manganèse, du plomb et de l’étain, 15 à 20% du cobalt et du cadmium, et, cas extrême, 95% du titane dont le dioxyde sert de colorant blanc universel).
Ensuite parce qu’il est difficile de recycler correctement. Nous concevons des produits d’une diversité et d’une complexité inouïes, à base de composites, d’alliages, de composants de plus en plus miniaturisés et intégrés… mais notre capacité, technologique ou économique, à repérer les différents métaux ou à les séparer, est limitée.
Les métaux non ferreux contenues dans les aciers alliés issus de première fonte sont ferraillés de manière indifférenciée et finissent dans des usages moins nobles comme les ronds à béton du bâtiment. Ils ont bien été recyclés, mais sont perdus fonctionnellement, les générations futures n’y auront plus accès, ils sont « dilués ». Il y a dégradation de l’usage de la matière : le métal « noble » finit dans un acier bas de gamme, comme la bouteille plastique finit en chaise de jardin.
La vraie voiture propre, c’est le vélo !
La voiture propre est ainsi une expression absurde, quand bien même les voitures fonctionneraient avec une énergie « 100% propre » ou « zéro émission ». Sans remise en question profonde de la conception, il y aura toujours des usages dispersifs (divers métaux dans la peinture, étain dans le PVC, zinc et cobalt dans les pneus, platine rejeté par le pot catalytique…), une carrosserie, des éléments métalliques et de l’électronique de bord qui seront mal recyclés… La vraie voiture propre, ou presque, c’est le vélo !
Perte entropique ou par dispersion (à la source ou à l’usage), perte « mécanique » (par abandon dans la nature, mise en décharge ou incinération), perte fonctionnelle (par recyclage inefficace) : le recyclage n’est pas un cercle mais un boyau percé, et à chaque cycle de production-usage-consommation, on perd de manière définitive une partie des ressources. On peut toujours progresser. Mais sans revoir drastiquement notre manière d’agir, les taux resteront désespérément bas pour de nombreux petits métaux high tech et autres terres rares (pour la plupart, moins de 1% aujourd’hui), tandis que pour les grands métaux nous plafonnerons à un taux typique de 50 à 80% qui restera très insuffisant.
Canettes d'aluminium compactées avant recyclage (SB/Rue89 Bordeaux)
Canettes d’aluminium compactées avant recyclage (SB/Rue89 Bordeaux)
La croissance « verte » sera mortifère
La croissance « verte » se base, en tout cas dans son acception actuelle, sur le tout-technologique. Elle ne fera alors qu’aggraver les phénomènes que nous venons de décrire, qu’emballer le système, car ces innovations « vertes » sont en général basées sur des métaux moins répandus, aggravent la complexité des produits, font appel à des composants high tech plus durs à recycler. Ainsi du dernier cri des énergies renouvelables, des bâtiments « intelligents », des voitures électriques, hybrides ou hydrogène…
Le déploiement suffisamment massif d’énergies renouvelables décentralisées, d’un internet de l’énergie, est irréaliste. Si la métaphore fleure bon l’économie « dématérialisée », c’est oublier un peu vite qu’on ne transporte pas les électrons comme les photons, et qu’on ne stocke pas l’énergie aussi aisément que des octets. Pour produire, stocker, transporter l’électricité, même « verte », il faut quantité de métaux. Et il n’y a pas de loi de Moore (postulant le doublement de la densité des transistors tous les deux ans environ) dans le monde physique de l’énergie.
Mais une lutte technologique contre le changement climatique sera aussi désespérée.
Ainsi dans les voitures, où le besoin de maintenir le confort, la performance et la sécurité nécessite des aciers alliés toujours plus précis pour gagner un peu de poids et réduire les émissions de CO2. Alors qu’il faudrait limiter la vitesse et brider la puissance des moteurs, pour pouvoir dans la foulée réduire le poids et gagner en consommation. La voiture à un litre aux cent kilomètres est à portée de main ! Il suffit qu’elle fasse 300 ou 400 kg, et ne dépasse pas les 80 km/h.
Ainsi dans les bâtiments, où le niveau de confort toujours plus exigeant nécessite l’emploi de matériaux rares (verres faiblement émissifs) et une électronicisation généralisée pour optimiser la consommation (gestion technique du bâtiment, capteurs, moteurs et automatismes, ventilation mécanique contrôlée).
Avec la croissance « verte », nous aimerions appuyer timidement sur le frein tout en restant pied au plancher : plus que jamais, notre économie favorise le jetable, l’obsolescence, l’accélération, le remplacement des métiers de service par des machines bourrées d’électronique, en attendant les drones et les robots. Ce qui nous attend à court terme, c’est une accélération dévastatrice et mortifère, de la ponction de ressources, de la consommation électrique, de la production de déchets ingérables, avec le déploiement généralisé des nanotechnologies, des big data, des objets connectés. Le saccage de la planète ne fait que commencer.
La solution climatique passera par les « low tech »
Il nous faut prendre la vraie mesure de la transition nécessaire et admettre qu’il n’y aura pas de sortie par le haut à base d’innovation technologique – ou qu’elle est en tout cas si improbable, qu’il serait périlleux de tout miser dessus. On ne peut se contenter des business models émergents, à base d’économie de partage ou de la fonctionnalité, peut-être formidables mais ni généralisables, ni suffisants.
Nous devrons décroître, en valeur absolue, la quantité d’énergie et de matières consommées. Il faut travailler sur la baisse de la demande, non sur le remplacement de l’offre, tout en conservant un niveau de « confort » acceptable.
C’est toute l’idée des low tech, les « basses technologies », par opposition aux high tech qui nous envoient dans le mur, puisqu’elles sont plus consommatrices de ressources rares et nous éloignent des possibilités d’un recyclage efficace et d’une économie circulaire. Promouvoir les low tech est avant tout une démarche, ni obscurantiste, ni forcément opposée à l’innovation ou au « progrès », mais orientée vers l’économie de ressources, et qui consiste à se poser trois questions.
Pourquoi produit-on ? Il s’agit d’abord de questionner intelligemment nos besoins, de réduire à la source, autant que possible, le prélèvement de ressources et la pollution engendrée. C’est un exercice délicat car les besoins humains – nourris par la rivalité mimétique – étant a priori extensibles à l’infini, il est impossible de décréter « scientifiquement » la frontière entre besoins fondamentaux et « superflus », qui fait aussi le sel de la vie. D’autant plus délicat qu’il serait préférable de mener cet exercice démocratiquement, tant qu’à faire.
Il y a toute une gamme d’actions imaginables, plus ou moins compliquées, plus ou moins acceptables.
Certaines devraient logiquement faire consensus ou presque, à condition de bien exposer les arguments (suppression de certains objets jetables, des supports publicitaires, de l’eau en bouteille…).
D’autres seront un peu plus difficiles à faire passer, mais franchement nous n’y perdrions quasiment pas de « confort » (retour de la consigne, réutilisation des objets, compostage des déchets, limite de vitesse des véhicules…).
D’autres enfin promettent quelques débats houleux (réduction drastique de la voiture au profit du vélo, adaptation des températures dans les bâtiments, urbanisme revisité pour inverser la tendance à l’hypermobilité…).
Qui est liberticide ?
Liberticide ? Certainement, mais nos sociétés sont déjà liberticides. Il existe bien une limite, de puissance, de poids, fixée par la puissance publique, pour l’immatriculation des véhicules. Pourquoi ne pourrait-elle pas évoluer ? Un des principes fondamentaux en société est qu’il est préférable que la liberté des uns s’arrête là où commence celle des autres. Puisque nous n’avons qu’une planète et que notre consommation dispendieuse met en danger les conditions même de la vie humaine – et de bien d’autres espèces – sur Terre, qui est liberticide ? Le conducteur de 4×4, l’utilisateur de jet privé, le propriétaire de yacht, ou celui qui propose d’interdire ces engins de mort différée ?
Que produit-on ? Il faut ensuite augmenter considérablement la durée de vie des produits, bannir la plupart des produits jetables ou dispersifs, s’ils ne sont pas entièrement à base de ressources renouvelables et non polluantes, repenser en profondeur la conception des objets : réparables, réutilisables, faciles à identifier et démanteler , recyclables en fin de vie sans perte, utilisant le moins possible les ressources rares et irremplaçables, contenant le moins d’électronique possible, quitte à revoir notre « cahier des charges », accepter le vieillissement ou la réutilisation de l’existant, une esthétique moindre pour les objets fonctionnels, parfois une moindre performance ou une perte de rendement… en gros, le moulin à café et la cafetière italienne de grand-mère, plutôt que la machine à expresso dernier cri. Dans le domaine énergétique, cela pourrait prendre la forme de la micro et mini hydraulique, de petites éoliennes « de village » intermittentes, de solaire thermique pour les besoins sanitaires et la cuisson, de pompes à chaleur, de biomasse…
Comment produit-on ? Il y a enfin une réflexion à mener sur nos modes de production. Doit-on poursuivre la course à la productivité et à l’effet d’échelle dans des giga-usines, ou faut-il mieux des ateliers et des entreprises à taille humaine ? Ne doit-on pas revoir la place de l’humain, le degré de mécanisation et de robotisation, la manière dont nous arbitrons aujourd’hui entre main-d’œuvre et ressources / énergie ? Notre rapport au travail (meilleur partage entre tous, intérêt d’une spécialisation outrancière, répartition du temps entre travail salarié et activités domestiques, etc.) ?
Et puis il y a la question aigüe de la territorialisation de la production. Après des décennies de mondialisation facilitée par un coût du pétrole suffisamment bas et le transport par conteneurs, le système est devenu absurde.
À l’heure des futures perturbations, des tensions sociales ou internationales, des risques géopolitiques à venir, que le changement climatique ou les pénuries de ressources risquent d’engendrer, sans parler des scandales sanitaires possibles, un système basé sur une Chine « usine du monde » est-il vraiment résilient ?
Un projet de société
Pour réussir une telle évolution, indispensable mais tellement à contre-courant, il faudra résoudre de nombreuses questions, à commencer par celle de l’emploi. « La croissance, c’est l’emploi » a tellement été martelé qu’il est difficile de parler de sobriété sans faire peur.
Malgré l’évidence des urgences environnementales, toute radicalité écologique, toute évolution réglementaire ou fiscale d’envergure, même progressive, toute réflexion de fond même, est interdite par la terreur – légitime – de détruire des emplois. Une fois acté le fait que la croissance ne reviendra pas (on y vient doucement), et tant mieux compte tenu de ses effets environnementaux, il faudra se convaincre que le plein-emploi, ou la pleine activité, est parfaitement atteignable dans un monde post-croissance économe en ressources.
Il faudra aussi se poser la question de l’échelle territoriale à laquelle mener cette transition, entre une gouvernance mondiale, impossible dans les délais impartis, et des expériences locales individuelles et collectives, formidables mais insuffisantes. Même enchâssé dans le système d’échanges mondial, un pays ou un petit groupe de pays pourrait prendre les devants, et, protégé par des mesures douanières bien réfléchies, amorcer un réel mouvement, porteur d’espoir et de radicalité.
Compte-tenu des forces en présence, il y a bien sûr une part utopique dans un tel projet de société. Mais n’oublions pas que le scénario de statu quo est probablement encore plus irréaliste, avec des promesses de bonheur technologique qui ne seront pas tenues et un monde qui s’enfoncera dans une crise sans fin, sans parler des risques de soubresauts politiques liés aux frustrations toujours plus grandes. Pourquoi ne pas tenter une autre route ? Nous avons largement les moyens, techniques, organisationnels, financiers, sociétaux et culturels pour mener une telle transition. A condition de le vouloir.
Ce n'est pas un scoop: j'ai participé, à ma mesure, à la lutte contre la loi scélérate sur le renseignement. Ce n'est pas une surprise: j'ai été plus que déçu par la décision rendue par le Conseil Constitutionnel à son sujet. Mais ce n'est pas l'objet du présent billet. Avec le recul, il semble évident que nous (les opposants à cette loi) n'avons pas su nous faire comprendre du grand public. Le texte était complexe, ses enjeux très techniques ou très philosophiques, et nous avons choisi de les expliquer: c'était sans doute une erreur.
Pendant que les tenants du texte préféraient jouer sur le registre émotionnel ("Si vous ne votez pas ce texte, vous serez responsables du prochain attentat") ou démagogique ("si vous êtes contre nous, vous êtes avec les terroristes"), nous nous sommes fatigués à décortiquer le danger des "boites noires" et des algorithmes informatiques, à en appeler à Foucault et au panoptique, et à rappeler l'importance de la vie privée pour la liberté de penser.
Sur ces bases, le combat de l'adhésion populaire était perdu d'avance: face au populisme, le pari de l'intellligence est souvent perdant.
Une unanimité jamais vue
Pour autant, un point reste remarquable: jamais, en 20 ans de lutte pour les libertés je n'avais vu pareille unanimité de la mal nommée "société civile" contre un texte. Jamais. Du SNJ au Syndicat de la Magistrature, de l'ONU au Conseil de l'Europe, de la Quadrature du Net à la LDH, en passant par le juge Trevidic et le Défenseur des Droits Jacques Toubon: tous se sont opposés, avec peu ou prou les mêmes réserves, à ce texte. Il serait d'ailleurs bien plus court de faire la liste des organismes ou associations qui l'ont défendu: il n'y en a pas.
Et de cette levée de boucliers qui fut (et c'est aussi une nouveauté) bien reprise dans les médias, le gouvernement n'a rien vu, rien entendu. Devant les deux assemblées, elle a été ignorée d'un revers de main, quand elle n'a pas été dénigrée ou caricaturée.
On nous a tour à tour accusé d'avoir fait peser une "odieuse pression" sur les députés (car il est bien connu qu'il est honteux pour des citoyens d'essayer d'influencer le vote de leurs représentants), d'être des "exégètes amateurs" qui ne comprenaient rien au "juridisme" de la loi, ou encore de n'être que des "numéristes" (comme si comprendre les enjeux des nouvelles technologies ne pouvait que disqualifier ceux qui s'y essaient).
Quant aux rares parlementaires qui ont essayé de relayer ces inquiétudes, ils ont été raillés, dénigrés, ridiculisés par des ministres "droits dans leurs bottes" et totalement sourds aux arguments qui étaient développés. Aucun amendement, aucune remise en cause du texte présenté n'ont été admis. Et toujours au nom de la sacro-sainte lutte contre le terrorisme (qui n'était pourtant, faut-il encore le rappeler, pas l'enjeu principal de la loi).
Pour suivre les débats parlementaires de façon plus ou moins régulière, je n'avais jamais vu ça. Jamais vu autant de rejet de la part de tout ce que la société compte d'entités concernées face à autant d'immobilisme de la part du gouvernement. Quand on voit en parallèle la manière dont le même gouvernement a reculé sans la moindre hésitation face à la fronde des bonnets rouges, de la FNSEA ou d'autres lobbies moins connus à l'occasion des votes de textes qui, eux, ne touchaient pas aux libertés fondamentales, quand on voit avec quelle haine les ministres et la grande majorité des élus parlaient d'Internet pendant les débats, au point d'en faire une insulte, il me semble que c'est très symptomatique.
Odeur de rance.
Mais symptomatique de quoi ?
J'ai voulu, avant de réagir à tout ça, prendre du recul. Un recul qui, peut-être, m'a permis de relier ce symptôme à d'autres, sans rapport avec la loi renseignement, mais qui tous me semblent relever du même mal: un néoconservatisme galopant, une pensée réactionnaire à ce point "décomplexée" qu'elle a largement dépassé son habitat de droite naturel et largement infusé, y compris au sein des grands partis dits "de gauche".
Quand Jean-Jacques Urvoas se réjouit (https://twitter.com/JJUrvoas/status/624324424393592832), sur Twitter, de la décision du Conseil Constitutionnel sur (sic) 'la loi "rens."', le lapsus est révélateur. Quoi de plus rance, en effet, que cette volonté réaffirmée d'un contrôle social, d'une surveillance de masse à même d'imposer un ordre moral venu d'en haut, autrefois garanti par l'église, et dont toute une partie, elle aussi bien rance, de la société souhaite le retour ?
Ce que je vois, bien au delà de cette loi et de la manière dont elle a été votée, c'est une rupture. Une fracture qui est loin de n'être que "numérique".
La fracture temporelle.
Quand une grande part de la société est à la recherche de nouveaux modes de consommation, plus respectueux de l'environnement, plus éthiques aussi, qu'elle développe la culture du partage (des ressources, de la musique, du savoir...) alors que l'état abandonne l'écotaxe, soutient l'agriculture intensive au détriment des petites exploitations (http://www.politis.fr/Un-gouvernement-a-la-botte-de-la,32260.html), et lutte contre toutes les innovations qui risqueraient de mettre à mal des rentes qui remontent au siècle passé (taxe copie privée étendue au "cloud", redevance audiovisuelle étendue aux "box", loi Thevenoud imposant 15mn d'attente aux VTC, et tant d'autres...).
Quand une autre partie de la société - la plus démunie - cesse de réfléchir au futur faute de pouvoir s'y projeter et n'a d'autre espoir qu'un retour à un passé qu'elle croit meilleur, encouragée par tout ce que la classe politique compte de démagogues et de populistes, et entraînant avec elle quelques vieux autoproclamés intellectuels, dépassés par le monde moderne et qui n'ont pas de mots assez durs pour fustiger ce qu'ils n'ont pas les moyens de comprendre.
Tout se passe comme si nous avions d'une part une population tournée vers l'avenir, imaginant une démocratie modernisée, une économie collaborative, sociale et solidaire, s'adaptant aux nouveautés numériques (telle la petite poucette de Michel Serres) mais tout aussi capable d'imaginer un débat public sur le revenu universel, la dépénalisation des drogues douces ou l'accueil des réfugiés, et d'autre part une classe politique résolument tournée vers un passé archaïque, rêvant d'uniformes scolaires, de morale à l'école, d'interdiction du mariage pour tous, et d'un paternalisme assis sur le cumul des mandats, le copinage et la corruption.
Quand certains souhaitent la censure de la pornographie en ligne, ou le retour du "saint du jour" et de quoi remplacer l'église dans son rôle de maître-à-penser, d'autres pensent startup, démocratie liquide, liberté d'expression, post-capitalisme et protection de la vie privée.
Et, hélas, cette "fracture temporelle" emporte avec elle tout ce que la société compte d'exclus, de laissés pour compte et de vieilles haines rancies contre l'autre, quel qu'il soit, en les poussant à croire au bon vieux bouc émissaire (hier juif, aujourd'hui musulman) responsable de tous ses maux, à espérer qu'un retour à d'anciennes "valeurs" leur redonnera un pouvoir (qu'ils n'ont jamais eu) sur leur propre avenir, et à voter pour celui qui saura le mieux prendre la posture maréchalesque du sauveur suprême.
C'est je crois le sens qu'il faut donner à cette volonté manifeste de nos gouvernants, qu'ils soient d'un bord ou de l'autre, de "civiliser" (lire "contrôler, surveiller et censurer") Internet, en tant que symbole de toutes leurs peurs, de toute leur ignorance et de tous les espoirs d'une innovation sociale qu'ils rejettent aveuglément.
On pourrait appeler ça la querelle des anciens et des modernes 2.0, si ça n'était hélas un symptôme supplémentaire du pourrissement de la Vème république et notre démocratie.
Ne nous y trompons pas: "l'invasion des barbares", chère à Nicolas Colin, est en marche et ce ne sont pas les postures passéistes qui protégeront une société qui semble préférer le repli sur soi à l'ouverture aux autres. Sans une transformation radicale du discours politique, si nous ne savons pas mettre l'imagination au pouvoir plutôt qu'une nostalgie d'un passé qui n'a jamais existé, ce n'est pas seulement nos lois qui seront rances.
Ce sera notre société tout entière.
I have gone to Burning Man 15 years in a row. When I went the first time, back in 2000, I was a journalist on assignment for Rolling Stone. That was an amazing introduction to the event, as I was able to go “back stage” and meet the organizers, artists, and geniuses behind the sculptures, lasers, and camps. I was immediately hooked. I couldn’t believe such a place existed – that tens of thousands of people shared the same ideals, and worked together to realize their visions.
I wrote this piece about my experiences. I also wrote a feature about the festival for ArtForum. By proposing that Burning Man had validity as an artistic expression – I discussed Joseph Beuys’ idea of “social sculpture” – I got banned from ArtForum after they published my piece. I also wrote about the festival, personally and philosophically, in Breaking Open the Head, my first book, and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, my second. Burning Man has had a profound experience on my life, in many ways.
This year, I am skipping it. There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that I feel Burning Man – an institution in its own process of ongoing change and evolution – has lost its way. Hopefully, this is temporary. I know and love many of the people who create and run the festival, and believe in their intentions and their vision.
Burning Man has accomplished amazing things, opening up whole new realms of individual freedom and culture expression. At the same time the festival has become a bit of a victim of its own success. It has become a massive entertainment complex, a bit like Disney World for a contingent made up mostly of the wealthy elite. It always had this vibe, to some extent, but it seems more pronounced in recent years. It feels like there is more and more of less and less. The potential for some kind of authentic liberation or awakening seems increasingly obscure and remote.
The change in Burning Man – admittedly it is subtle – is happening as our world slides toward ecological catastrophe. The ecological crisis has become my almost monomaniacal focus recently. From my perspective, it is crucial that people awaken to what is happening to our Earth. We need to quickly understand and then start making the changes necessary to ensure the continuity of our ecosystems. Part of my enthusiasm for Burning Man was that it seemed a place where a new human community could arise – a new way of being. This potential is still there – but it seems like it has been co-opted, distorted.
At Burning Man, there was always a tension between two world views, which I would characterize as libertarian hedonism and mystical anarchism. I feel, as a result of its rapid growth and, also, as the festival has become a magnet for the wealthy elite (the Silicon Valley crowd, the media moguls and their entourages, the Ibiza crowd, etc), it has tilted too far toward libertarian hedonism. Art cars have become the new yachts, representing expressions of massively inflated egos. Wealthy camps will drop hundreds of thousands on a vehicle, then parade it around, with a velvet rope vibe. Increasingly, the culture of Burning Man feels like an offshoot of the same mindless, self-interested, nihilistic worldview and neoliberal economics that are rapidly annihilating our shared life-world.
I remember, a few years back, I stayed near a camp that had been built for the founder of Cirq du Soleil, Guy de Liberte, and his friends. The camp was empty throughout the week. There were many beautiful gypsy caravan-style tents set up, awaiting the weekend visitors from Europe and Ibiza. There were also a few Mexican workers who labored over the course of the week, building shade structures and decorating the art cars. Nobody had offered these workers a place to stay in one of the carefully shaded luxury tents, so they had pitched their small nylon tent directly in the hot sun. That image seems to sum up where Burning Man has drifted, inexorably.
We lack a moral center in our society, and we are rapidly caroming toward the abyss. It is absolutely extraordinary – in itself, miraculous – that the new Pope, Pope Francis, has shown up as one of the only people in our entire planetary culture able to speak directly to the needs of our moment – he calls for an “ecological conversion,” for shared sacrifice on the part of the wealthy elite, a new mode of empathic and compassionate action for us all. In the Encyclical, Care for Our Common Home, Francis writes:
All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe
and in the smallest of your creatures.
You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.
Pour out upon us the power of your love,
that we may protect life and beauty.
Fill us with peace, that we may live as brothers and sisters, harming no one.
O God of the poor,
help us to rescue the abandoned and forgotten of this earth,
so precious in your eyes.
Bring healing to our lives, that we may protect the world and not prey on it,
that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.
Is it possible that Pope Francis could rehabilitate the Catholic tradition, which seemed utterly hopeless, corrupt and antiquated, and turn it into a progressive force for good? We are going to need a number of miraculous conversions and transformations such as this one, if we are going to survive as a species, and learn to flourish together with nature, in the short time before it is too late to do anything but undergo a universal, horrific meltdown – a Chod ritual, on a planetary scale.
As I wrote in my books, I believe Burning Man represents an organic expression of something innate to human being-ness: We need initiatory experiences – centers where non-ordinary states of consciousness can be explored and, also, interpreted, with a shared context for understanding and integration. Emerging from the psychedelic culture of the Bay Area, Burning Man is, to a certain extent, a postmodern reinvention of centers of Mystery School wisdom, like Eleusis, which the artists, philosophers, and leaders of the Classical World visited each year. However, at this point, it lacks a deeper awareness of its own value and purpose. Without this, it is in danger of becoming another appendage of the military-industrial-entertainment complex – another distraction factory.
I find that many people I know are living on the razor-edge of nihilism right now, skating the edge of the Void. In my own life, I have lived through the eruption and the projection of my own shadow material – and I see many people undergoing their own versions of this, in different areas of their lives. I can’t help but see this as a perfectly appropriate and even necessary part of a process that could lead to our apotheosis as a species (the birth of the Ubermench, who according to Nietzsche, represents the fusion of “the mind of Caesar” with “the soul of Christ”) or our collective dissolution. It is exciting that this process seems to be happening within our current lifespans.
The infusion of Eastern metaphysics into the Western worldview is not necessarily helping, and it may actually be exacerbating our current crisis of values. The popular Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has recently noted that, within 100 years, the human race may go extinct. His perspective is accurate, according to scientific predictions. He notes, with an accelerated warming cycle like the one that caused the Permian Mass Extinction, 250 million years ago, “another 95 per cent of species will die out, including Homo sapiens. That is why we have to learn to touch eternity with our in breath and out breath. Extinction of species has happened several times. Mass extinction has already happened five times and this one is the sixth. According to the Buddhist tradition there is no birth and no death. After extinction things will reappear in other forms, so you have to breathe very deeply in order to acknowledge the fact that we humans may disappear in just 100 years on earth.”
There is a kind of fatalism to Buddhist thought that doesn’t mesh with our Western approach to reality. Personally, I find myself resonating far more deeply with the Pope’s call for a new spiritual mission that unifies humanity behind protecting life and nature, than I do with Hahn’s view, although I recognize the validity of his statement. Ultimately, there is only the white light of the Void, which certain psychedelic experiences – particularly 5-meo-DMT – experientially confirm. However, there are many other dimensions of being and levels of consciousness we can know and experience. We also possess creative, empathic, and imaginative capacities, which seem be a divine power and dispensation. I think it would be truly amazing if we chose to make use of our deepest abilities to reverse the current direction of our society – to confront the ecological mega-crisis as a true initiation, and offer ourselves as vessels of this transformation.
In order to accomplish this, we would need to overcome our desire for spectacular distraction and insatiable consumption. Burning Man has always drawn its imaginative power from the paradoxes which are essential to it. A huge amount of money, energy, time, and fossil fuel is expended to create conditions which are difficult and force people (except for those wealthy enough to have air-tight sanctuaries built for them) to undergo a certain level of inner confrontation. I think we could further generalize from this, realizing that difficult and uncomfortable conditions are, in fact, necessary for our own development.
I will wrap this up, for now. The main point is there are many crucial lessons to learn from Burning Man: In many ways, it reveals our innate capacities to build a new society, a redesigned society, based on creativity, community, inspiration, and compassion. At the same time, Burning Man has become another spectacle – another cultural phenomenon, in a sense, a cult – and one that sucks a huge amount of energy and time from people who could re-focus their talents and genius on what we must do to escape ecological collapse (building a resilient or regenerative society). The organization, itself, needs to undergo another level of self-analysis and transformation – much like the Catholic Church appears to be doing, under Pope Francis’ lead.
In order to survive what’s coming, we must find a way to awaken a new spiritual impulse in the human community, beginning with our cultural, technocratic, and financial elites. And we don’t have time to waste.
Bibliothèque de NLP sympa (sentiment analysis, tokenisation…)
Basics
A solid-state drives (SSD) is a flash-memory based data storage device. Bits are stored into cells, which exist in three types: 1 bit per cell (single level cell, SLC), 2 bits per cell (multiple level cell, MLC), 3 bits per cell (triple-level cell, TLC).
See also: Section 1.1
Each cell has a maximum number of P/E cycles (Program/Erase), after which the cell is considered defective. This means that NAND-flash memory wears off and has a limited lifespan.
See also: Section 1.1
Testers are humans, therefore not all benchmarks are exempt of errors. Be careful when reading the benchmarks from manufacturers or third parties, and use multiple sources before trusting any numbers. Whenever possible, run your own in-house benchmarking using the specific workload of your system, along with the specific SSD model that you want to use. Finally, make sure you look at the performance metrics that matter most for the system at hand.
See also: Sections 2.2 and 2.3
Pages and blocks
Cells are grouped into a grid, called a block, and blocks are grouped into planes. The smallest unit through which a block can be read or written is a page. Pages cannot be erased individually, only whole blocks can be erased. The size of a NAND-flash page size can vary, and most drive have pages of size 2 KB, 4 KB, 8 KB or 16 KB. Most SSDs have blocks of 128 or 256 pages, which means that the size of a block can vary between 256 KB and 4 MB. For example, the Samsung SSD 840 EVO has blocks of size 2048 KB, and each block contains 256 pages of 8 KB each.
See also: Section 3.2
It is not possible to read less than one page at once. One can of course only request just one byte from the operating system, but a full page will be retrieved in the SSD, forcing a lot more data to be read than necessary.
See also: Section 3.2
When writing to an SSD, writes happen by increments of the page size. So even if a write operation affects only one byte, a whole page will be written anyway. Writing more data than necessary is known as write amplification. Writing to a page is also called “to program” a page.
See also: Section 3.2
A NAND-flash page can be written to only if it is in the “free” state. When data is changed, the content of the page is copied into an internal register, the data is updated, and the new version is stored in a “free” page, an operation called “read-modify-write”. The data is not updated in-place, as the “free” page is a different page than the page that originally contained the data. Once the data is persisted to the drive, the original page is marked as being “stale”, and will remain as such until it is erased.
See also: Section 3.2
Pages cannot be overwritten, and once they become stale, the only way to make them free again is to erase them. However, it is not possible to erase individual pages, and it is only possible to erase whole blocks at once.
See also: Section 3.2
SSD controller and internals
The Flash Translation Layer (FTL) is a component of the SSD controller which maps Logical Block Addresses (LBA) from the host to Physical Block Addresses (PBA) on the drive. Most recent drives implement an approach called “hybrid log-block mapping” or one of its derivatives, which works in a way that is similar to log-structured file systems. This allows random writes to be handled like sequential writes.
See also: Section 4.2
Internally, several levels of parallelism allow to write to several blocks at once into different NAND-flash chips, to what is called a “clustered block”.
See also: Section 6
Because NAND-flash cells are wearing off, one of the main goals of the FTL is to distribute the work among cells as evenly as possible so that blocks will reach their P/E cycle limit and wear off at the same time.
See also: Section 3.4
The garbage collection process in the SSD controller ensures that “stale” pages are erased and restored into a “free” state so that the incoming write commands can be processed.
See also: Section 4.4
Background operations such as garbage collection can impact negatively on foreground operations from the host, especially in the case of a sustained workload of small random writes.
See also: Section 4.4
Access patterns
Avoid writing chunks of data that are below the size of a NAND-flash page to minimize write amplification and prevent read-modify-write operations. The largest size for a page at the moment is 16 KB, therefore it is the value that should be used by default. This size depends on the SSD models and you may need to increase it in the future as SSDs improve.
See also: Sections 3.2 and 3.3
15. Align writes
Align writes on the page size, and write chunks of data that are multiple of the page size.
See also: Sections 3.2 and 3.3
To maximize throughput, whenever possible keep small writes into a buffer in RAM and when the buffer is full, perform a single large write to batch all the small writes.
See also: Sections 3.2 and 3.3
Read performance is a consequence of the write pattern. When a large chunk of data is written at once, it is spread across separate NAND-flash chips. Thus you should write related data in the same page, block, or clustered block, so it can later be read faster with a single I/O request, by taking advantage of the internal parallelism.
See also: Section 7.3
A workload made of a mix of small interleaved reads and writes will prevent the internal caching and readahead mechanism to work properly, and will cause the throughput to drop. It is best to avoid simultaneous reads and writes, and perform them one after the other in large chunks, preferably of the size of the clustered block. For example, if 1000 files have to be updated, you could iterate over the files, doing a read and write on a file and then moving to the next file, but that would be slow. It would be better to reads all 1000 files at once and then write back to those 1000 files at once.
See also: Section 7.4
When some data is no longer needed or need to be deleted, it is better to wait and invalidate it in a large batches in a single operation. This will allow the garbage collector process to handle larger areas at once and will help minimizing internal fragmentation.
See also: Section 4.4
If the writes are small (i.e. below the size of the clustered block), then random writes are slower than sequential writes.
If writes are both multiple of and aligned to the size of a clustered block, the random writes will use all the available levels of internal parallelism, and will perform just as well as sequential writes. For most drives, the clustered block has a size of 16 MB or 32 MB, therefore it is safe to use 32 MB.
See also: Section 7.2
Concurrent random reads cannot fully make use of the readahead mechanism. In addition, multiple Logical Block Addresses may end up on the same chip, not taking advantage or of the internal parallelism. A large read operation will access sequential addresses and will therefore be able to use the readahead buffer if present, and use the internal parallelism. Consequently if the use case allows it, it is better to issue a large read request.
See also: Section 7.3
A large single-threaded write request offers the same throughput as many small concurrent writes, however in terms of latency, a large single write has a better response time than concurrent writes. Therefore, whenever possible, it is best to perform single-threaded large writes.
See also: Section 7.2
Many concurrent small write requests will offer a better throughput than a single small write request. So if the I/O is small and cannot be batched, it is better to use multiple threads.
See also: Section 7.2
Hot data is data that changes frequently, and cold data is data that changes infrequently. If some hot data is stored in the same page as some cold data, the cold data will be copied along every time the hot data is updated in a read-modify-write operation, and will be moved along during garbage collection for wear leveling. Splitting cold and hot data as much as possible into separate pages will make the job of the garbage collector easier.
See also: Section 4.4
Extremely hot data and other high-change metadata should be buffered as much as possible and written to the drive as infrequently as possible.
See also: Section 4.4
System optimizations
The two main host interfaces offered by manufacturers are SATA 3.0 (550 MB/s) and PCI Express 3.0 (1 GB/s per lane, using multiple lanes). Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is also available for enterprise SSDs. In their latest versions, PCI Express and SAS are faster than SATA, but they are also more expensive.
See also: Section 2.1
A drive can be over-provisioned simply by formatting it to a logical partition capacity smaller than the maximum physical capacity. The remaining space, invisible to the user, will still be visible and used by the SSD controller. Over-provisioning helps the wear leveling mechanisms to cope with the inherent limited lifespan of NAND-flash cells. For workloads in which writes are not so heavy, 10% to 15% of over-provisioning is enough. For workloads of sustained random writes, keeping up to 25% of over-provisioning will improve performance. The over-provisioning will act as a buffer of NAND-flash blocks, helping the garbage collection process to absorb peaks of writes.
See also: Section 5.2
Make sure your kernel and filesystem support the TRIM command. The TRIM command notifies the SSD controller when a block is deleted. The garbage collection process can then erase blocks in background during idle times, preparing the drive to face large writes workloads.
See also: Section 5.1
To ensure that logical writes are truly aligned to the physical memory, you must align the partition to the NAND-flash page size of the drive.
See also: Section 8.1
Conclusion
This summary concludes the “Coding for SSDs” article series. I hope that I was able to convey in an understandable manner what I have learned during my personal research over solid-state drives.
If after reading this series of articles you want to go more in-depth about SSDs, a good first step would be to read some of the publications and articles linked in the reference sections of Part 2 to 5.
Another great resource is the FAST conference (the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies). A lot of excellent research is being presented there every year. I highly recommend their website, a good starting point being the videos and publications for FAST 2013.
Bien intéressant, surtout la partie sur le processus de gentrification (me rappelle un certain Black Mirror…)
−
Any large and alienating infrastructure controlled by a technocratic elite is bound to provoke. In particular, it will nettle those who want to know how it works, those who like the thrill of transgressing, and those who value the principle of open access. Take the US telephone network of the 1960s: a vast array of physical infrastructure dominated by a monopolistic telecoms corporation called AT&T. A young Air Force serviceman named John Draper – aka Captain Crunch – discovered that he could manipulate the rules of tone-dialling systems by using children’s whistles found in Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes. By whistling the correct tone into a telephone handset, he could place free long-distance calls through a chink in the AT&T armour.
Draper was one of the first phone phreakers, a motley crew of jokers bent on exploring and exploiting loopholes in the system to gain free access. Through the eyes of conventional society, such phreakers were just juvenile pranksters and cheapskates. Yet their actions have since been incorporated into the folklore of modern hacker culture. Draper said in a 1995 interview: ‘I was mostly interested in the curiosity of how the phone company worked. I had no real desire to go rip them off and steal phone service.’
But in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), the US journalist Steven Levy went so far as to put up Draper as an avatar of the ‘true hacker’ spirit. Levy was trying to hone in on principles that he believed constituted a ‘hacker ethic’. One such principle was the ‘hands-on imperative’:
Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems – about the world – from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things.
For all his protestations of innocence, it’s clear that Draper’s curiosity was essentially subversive. It represented a threat to the ordered lines of power within the system. The phreakers were trying to open up information infrastructure, and in doing so they showed a calculated disregard for the authorities that dominated it.
This spirit has carried through into the modern context of the internet, which, after all, consists of computers connected to one another via physical telecommunications infrastructure. The internet promises open access to information and online assembly for individual computer owners. At the same time, it serves as a tool for corporate monopolists and government surveillance. The most widely recognised examples of modern ‘hackers’ are therefore groups such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks. These ‘cypherpunks’ and crypto-anarchists are internet natives. They fight – at least in principle – to protect the privacy of the individual while making power itself as transparent as possible.
Popular now
Why does everyone, of every faith and none, feel immortal?
How yuppies hacked the original hacker ethos
Life without boredom would be a nightmare
This dynamic is not unique to the internet. It plays out in many other spheres of life. Consider the pranksters who mess with rail operators by jamming ticket-barrier gates to keep them open for others. They might not describe themselves as hackers, but they carry an ethic of disdain towards systems that normally allow little agency on the part of ordinary individuals. Such hacker-like subcultures do not necessarily see themselves in political terms. Nevertheless, they share a common tendency towards a rebellious creativity aimed at increasing the agency of underdogs.
Unlike the open uprising of the liberation leader, the hacker impulse expresses itself via a constellation of minor acts of insurrection, often undertaken by individuals, creatively disguised to deprive authorities of the opportunity to retaliate. Once you’re attuned to this, you see hacks everywhere. I see it in capoeira. What is it? A dance? A fight? It is a hack, one that emerged in colonial Brazil as a way for slaves to practise a martial art under the guise of dance. As an approach to rebellion, this echoes the acts of subtle disobedience described by James Scott in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance (1986).
Hacking, then, looks like a practice with very deep roots – as primally and originally human as disobedience itself. Which makes it all the more disturbing that hacking itself appears to have been hacked.
Despite the hive-mind connotations of faceless groups such as Anonymous, the archetype of ‘the hacker’ is essentially that of an individual attempting to live an empowered and unalienated life. It is outsider in spirit, seeking empowerment outside the terms set by the mainstream establishment.
Perhaps it’s unwise to essentialise this figure. A range of quite different people can think of themselves in those terms, from the lonely nerd tinkering away on DIY radio in the garage to the investigative journalist immersed in politicised muckraking. It seems safe to say, though, that it’s not very hacker-like to aspire to conventional empowerment, to get a job at a blue-chip company while reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The hacker impulse is critical. It defies, for example, corporate ambitions.
In my book The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance (2013), I used this figure of the hacker as a model for readers wishing to challenge the global financial system. The machinery of global capital tends to be seen as complex, disempowering and alienating. The traditional means of contesting it is to build groups – such as Occupy Wall Street – to influence politicians and media to pressure it on your behalf. But this sets up a familiar dynamic: the earnest activist pitted against the entrenched interests of the business elite. Each group defines itself against the other, settling into a stagnant trench warfare. The individual activists frequently end up demoralised, complaining within echo-chambers about their inability to impact ‘the system’. They build an identity based on a kind of downbeat martyrdom, keeping themselves afloat through a fetishised solidarity with others in the same position.
Related video
11 MINUTES
Cyber-utopians believe the web spreads democratic freedom. In practice, it can serve oppressors as much as the oppressed
I was attracted to the hacker archetype because, unlike the straightforward activist who defines himself in direct opposition to existing systems, hackers work obliquely. The hacker is ambiguous, specialising in deviance from established boundaries, including ideological battle lines. It’s a trickster spirit, subversive and hard to pin down. And, arguably, rather than aiming towards some specific reformist end, the hacker spirit is a ‘way of being’, an attitude towards the world.
Take, for example, the urban explorer subculture, chronicled by Bradley Garrett in Explore Everything: Placehacking the City (2013). The search for unusual detours – through a sewer system, for example – is exhilarating because you see things that you’re not supposed to be interested in. Your curiosity takes you to places where you don’t belong. It thus becomes an assertion of individual defiance of social norms. The byproduct of such exploration is pragmatic knowledge, the disruption of standard patterns of thought, and also dealienation – you see what’s behind the interfaces that surround us, coming closer to the reality of our social world.
the hacker modifies the machine to make it self-destruct, or programmes it to frustrate its owners, or opens its usage to those who don’t own it
This is a useful sensibility to cultivate in the face of systems that create psychological, political and economic barriers to access. In the context of a complex system – computer, financial or underground transit – the political divide is always between well-organised, active insiders versus diffuse, passive outsiders. Hackers challenge the binary by seeking access, either by literally ‘cracking’ boundaries – breaking in – or by redefining the lines between those with permission and those without. We might call this appropriation.
A figure of economic power such as a factory owner builds a machine to extend control. The activist Luddite might break it in rebellion. But the hacker explores and then modifies the machine to make it self-destruct, or programmes it to frustrate the purpose of it owners, or opens its usage to those who do not own it. The hacker ethic is therefore a composite. It is not merely exploratory curiosity or rebellious deviance or creative innovation within incumbent systems. It emerges from the intersection of all three.
The word ‘hacker’ came into its own in the age of information technology (IT) and the personal computer. The subtitle of Levy’s seminal book – Heroes of the Computer Revolution – immediately situated hackers as the crusaders of computer geek culture. While some hacker principles he described were broad – such as ‘mistrust authority’ and ‘promote decentralisation’ – others were distinctly IT-centric. ‘You can create art and beauty on a computer,’ read one. ‘All information should be free,’ declared another.
Ever since, most popular representations of the hacker way have followed Levy’s lead. Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (1992) featured the code-wielding Hiro as the ‘last of the freelance hackers’. The film Hackers (1995) boasted a youthful crew of jargon-rapping, keyboard-hammering computer ninjas. The media stereotype that began to be constructed was of a precocious computer genius using his technological mastery to control events or battle others. It remains popular to this day. In the James Bond film Skyfall (2012), the gadget-master Q is reinvented by the actor Ben Whishaw as a young hacker with a laptop, controlling lines of code with almost superhuman efficiency, as if his brain was wired directly into the computer.
In the hands of a sensationalist media, the ethos of hacking is conflated with the act of cracking computer security
In a sense, then, computers were the making of the hacker, at least as a popular cultural image. But they were also its undoing. If the popular imagination hadn’t chained the hacker figure so forcefully to IT, it’s hard to believe it ever would have been demonised in the way it has been, or that it could have been so effectively defanged.
Computers, and especially the internet, are a primary means of subsistence for many. This understandably increases public anxiety at the bogeyman figure of the criminal ‘hacker’, the dastardly villain who breaches computer security to steal and cause havoc. Never mind that in ‘true’ hacker culture – as found in hackerspaces, maker-labs and open-source communities around the world – the mechanical act of breaking into a computer is just one manifestation of the drive to explore beyond established boundaries. In the hands of a sensationalist media, the ethos of hacking is conflated with the act of cracking computer security. Anyone who does that, regardless of the underlying ethos, is a ‘hacker’. Thus a single manifestation of a single element of the original spirit gets passed off as the whole.
Through the lens of moral panic, a narrative emerges of hackers as a class of computer attack-dogs. Their primary characteristics become aggression and amorality. How to guard against them? How, indeed, to round out the traditional good-versus-evil narrative? Well, naturally, with a class of poacher-turned-gamekeepers. And so we find the construction of ‘white-hat’ hackers, protective and upstanding computer wizards for the public good.
Here is where the second form of corruption begins to emerge. The construct of the ‘good hacker’ has paid off in unexpected ways, because in our computerised world we have also seen the emergence of a huge, aggressively competitive technology industry with a serious innovation obsession. This is the realm of startups, venture capitalists, and shiny corporate research and development departments. And, it is here, in subcultures such as Silicon Valley, that we find a rebel spirit succumbing to perhaps the only force that could destroy it: gentrification.
Gentrification is the process by which nebulous threats are pacified and alchemised into money. A raw form – a rough neighbourhood, indigenous ritual or edgy behaviour such as parkour (or free running) – gets stripped of its otherness and repackaged to suit mainstream sensibilities. The process is repetitive. Desirable, unthreatening elements of the source culture are isolated, formalised and emphasised, while the unsettling elements are scrubbed away.
Key to any gentrification process are successive waves of pioneers who gradually reduce the perceived risk of the form in question. In property gentrification, this starts with the artists and disenchanted dropouts from mainstream society who are drawn to marginalised areas. Despite their countercultural impulses, they always carry with them traces of the dominant culture, whether it be their skin colour or their desire for good coffee. This, in turn, creates the seeds for certain markets to take root. A WiFi coffeeshop appears next to the Somalian community centre. And that, in turn, sends signals back into the mainstream that the area is slightly less alien than it used to be.
If you repeat this cycle enough times, the perceived dangers that keep the property developers and yuppies away gradually erode. Suddenly, the tipping point arrives. Through a myriad of individual actions under no one person’s control, the exotic other suddenly appears within a safe frame: interesting, exciting and cool, but not threatening. It becomes open to a carefree voyeurism, like a tiger being transformed into a zoo animal, and then a picture, and then a tiger-print dress to wear at cocktail parties. Something feels ‘gentrified’ when this shallow aesthetic of tiger takes over from the authentic lived experience of tiger.
This is not just about property. In cosmetics shops on Oxford Street in London you can find beauty products blazoned with pagan earth-mother imagery. Why are symbols of earth-worship found within the citadels of consumerism, printed on products designed to neutralise and control bodily processes? They’ve been gentrified. Pockets of actual paganism do still exist, but in the mainstream such imagery has been thoroughly cleansed of any subversive context.
At the frontiers of gentrification are entire ways of being – lifestyles, subcultures and outlooks that carry rebellious impulses. Rap culture is a case in point: from its ghetto roots, it has crossed over to become a safe ‘thing that white people like’. Gentrification is an enabler of doublethink, a means by which people in positions of relative power can, without contradiction, embrace practices that were formed in resistance to the very things they themselves represent.
We are currently witnessing the gentrification of hacker culture. The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class. It began innocently, no doubt. The association of the hacker ethic with startups might have started with an authentic counter-cultural impulse on the part of outsider nerds tinkering away on websites. But, like all gentrification, the influx into the scene of successive waves of ever less disaffected individuals results in a growing emphasis on the unthreatening elements of hacking over the subversive ones.
Silicon Valley has come to host, on the one hand, a large number of highly educated tech-savvy people who loosely perceive themselves as rebels set against existing modes of doing business. On the other hand, it contains a very large pool of venture capital. The former group jostle for the investor money by explicitly attempting to build network monopolies – such as those created by Facebook and Google – for the purpose of extracting windfall profit for the founders and for the investors that back them, and perhaps, for the large corporates who will buy them out.
the revised definition of the tech startup entrepreneur as a hacker forms part of an emergent system of Silicon Valley doublethink
In this economic context, curiosity, innovation and iterative experimentation are ultimate virtues, and this element of the hacker ethic has proved to be an appealing frame for people to portray their actions within. Traits such as the drive for individual empowerment and the appreciation of clever solutions already resemble the traits of the entrepreneur. In this setting, the hacker attitude of playful troublemaking can be cast in Schumpeterian terms: success-driven innovators seeking to ‘disrupt’ old incumbents within a market in an elite ‘rebellion’.
Thus the emergent tech industry’s definition of ‘hacking’ as quirky-but-edgy innovation by optimistic entrepreneurs with a love of getting things done. Nothing sinister about it: it’s just on-the-fly problem-solving for profit. This gentrified pitch is not just a cool personal narrative. It’s also a useful business construct, helping the tech industry to distinguish itself from the aggressive squares of Wall Street, competing for the same pool of new graduates.
Indeed, the revised definition of the tech startup entrepreneur as a hacker forms part of an emergent system of Silicon Valley doublethink: individual startups portray themselves as ‘underdogs’ while simultaneously being aware of the enormous power and wealth the tech industry they’re a part of wields at a collective level. And so we see a gradual stripping away of the critical connotations of hacking. Who said a hacker can’t be in a position of power? Google cloaks itself in a quirky ‘hacker’ identity, with grown adults playing ping pong on green AstroTurf in the cafeteria, presiding over the company’s overarching agenda of network control.
This doublethink bleeds through into mainstream corporate culture, with the growing institution of the corporate ‘hackathon’. We find financial giants such as Barclays hosting startup accelerators and financial technology hackathons at forums such as the FinTech Innovation Lab in Canary Wharf in London, ostensibly to discover the ‘future of finance’… or at least the future of payment apps that they can buy out. In this context, the hacker ethic is hollowed out and subsumed into the ideology of solutionism, to use a term coined by the Belarusian-born tech critic Evgeny Morozov. It describes the tech-industry vision of the world as a series of problems waiting for (profitable) solutions.
This process of gentrification becomes a war over language. If enough newcomers with media clout use the hollowed-out version of the term, its edge grows dull. You end up with a mere affectation, failing to challenge otherwise conventional aspirations. And before you know it, an earnest Stanford grad is handing me a business card that says, without irony: ‘Founder. Investor. Hacker.’
Any gentrification process inevitably presents two options. Do you abandon the form, leave it to the yuppies and head to the next wild frontier? Or do you attempt to break the cycle, deface the estate-agent signs, and picket outside the wine bar with placards reading ‘Yuppies Go Home’?
The answer to this depends on how much you care. Immigrant neighbourhoods definitely care enough to mobilise real resistance movements to gentrification, but who wants to protect the hacker ethic? For some, the spirit of hacking is stupid and pointless anyway, an individualistic self-help impulse, not an authentic political movement. What does it matter if it gets gentrified?
We need to confront an irony here. Gentrification is a pacification process that takes the wild and puts it in frames. I believe that hacking is the reverse of that, taking the ordered rules of systems and making them fluid and wild again. Where gentrification tries to erect safe fences around things, hacker impulses try to break them down, or redefine them. These are two countervailing forces within human society. The gentrification of hacking is… well, perhaps a perfect hack.
Explore Aeon
Data & Information
Internet & Communication
Subcultures
Or maybe I’ve romanticised it. Maybe hacking has never existed in some raw form to be gentrified. Perhaps it’s always been part of the capitalist commodification processes. Stuff is pulled down and then reordered. Maybe the hackers – like the disenchanted artists and hipsters – are just the vanguard charged with identifying the next profitable investment. Perhaps hacking has always been a contradictory amalgam that combines desire for the unstable and queer with the control impulse of the stable and straight. Certainly in mainstream presentations of hacking – whether the criminal version or the Silicon Valley version – there is a control fetish: the elite coder or entrepreneur sitting at a dashboard manipulating the world, doing mysterious or ‘awesome’ things out of reach of the ordinary person.
I’m going to stake a claim on the word though, and state that the true hacker spirit does not reside at Google, guided by profit targets. The hacker impulse should not just be about redesigning products, or creating ‘solutions’. A hack stripped of anti-conventional intent is not a hack at all. It’s just a piece of business innovation.
The un-gentrified spirit of hacking should be a commons accessible to all. This spirit can be seen in the marginal cracks all around us. It’s in the emergent forms of peer production and DIY culture, in maker-spaces and urban farms. We see it in the expansion of ‘open’ scenes, from open hardware to open biotech, and in the intrigue around 3D printers as a way to extend open-source designs into the realm of manufacture. In a world with increasingly large and unaccountable economic institutions, we need these everyday forms of resistance. Hacking, in my world, is a route to escaping the shackles of the profit-fetish, not a route to profit.
Go home, yuppies.
Méthode de saisie de texte vraiment intéressante/différente
[Déjà posté en Français un peu avant, mais cet article est bien plus complet]
Seven months ago, I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building in a vibrant central neighbourhood of Tehran, and I did something I had done thousands of times previously. I opened my laptop and posted to my new blog. This, though, was the first time in six years. And it nearly broke my heart.
A few weeks earlier, I’d been abruptly pardoned and freed from Evin prison in northern Tehran. I had been expecting to spend most of my life in those cells: In November 2008, I’d been sentenced to nearly 20 years in jail, mostly for things I’d written on my blog.
But the moment, when it came, was unexpected. I smoked a cigarette in the kitchen with one of my fellow inmates, and came back to the room I shared with a dozen other men. We were sharing a cup of tea when the voice of the floor announcer — another prisoner — filled all the rooms and corridors. In his flat voice, he announced in Persian: “Dear fellow inmates, the bird of luck has once again sat on one fellow inmate’s shoulders. Mr. Hossein Derakhshan, as of this moment, you are free.”
That evening was the first time that I went out of those doors as a free man. Everything felt new: The chill autumn breeze, the traffic noise from a nearby bridge, the smell, the colors of the city I had lived in for most of my life.
Around me, I noticed a very different Tehran from the one I’d been used to. An influx of new, shamelessly luxurious condos had replaced the charming little houses I was familiar with. New roads, new highways, hordes of invasive SUVs. Large billboards with advertisements for Swiss-made watches and Korean flat screen TVs. Women in colorful scarves and manteaus, men with dyed hair and beards, and hundreds of charming cafes with hip western music and female staff. They were the kinds of changes that creep up on people; the kind you only really notice once normal life gets taken away from you.
Two weeks later, I began writing again. Some friends agreed to let me start a blog as part of their arts magazine. I called it Ketabkhan — it means book-reader in Persian.
Six years was a long time to be in jail, but it’s an entire era online. Writing on the internet itself had not changed, but reading — or, at least, getting things read — had altered dramatically. I’d been told how essential social networks had become while I’d been gone, and so I knew one thing: If I wanted to lure people to see my writing, I had to use social media now.
So I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. Turns out Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it.
It became clear to me, right there, that things had changed. I was not equipped to play on this new turf — all my investment and effort had burned up. I was devastated.
Blogs were gold and bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was arrested. At that point, and despite the fact the state was blocking access to my blog from inside Iran, I had an audience of around 20,000 people every day. Everybody I linked to would face a sudden and serious jump in traffic: I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted.
People used to carefully read my posts and leave lots of relevant comments, and even many of those who strongly disagreed with me still came to read. Other blogs linked to mine to discuss what I was saying. I felt like a king.
The iPhone was a little over a year old by then, but smartphones were still mostly used to make phone calls and send short messages, handle emails, and surf the web. There were no real apps, certainly not how we think of them today. There was no Instagram, no SnapChat, no Viber, no WhatsApp.
Instead, there was the web, and on the web, there were blogs: the best place to find alternative thoughts, news and analysis. They were my life.
It had all started with 9/11. I was in Toronto, and my father had just arrived from Tehran for a visit. We were having breakfast when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. I was puzzled and confused and, looking for insights and explanations, I came across blogs. Once I read a few, I thought: This is it, I should start one, and encourage all Iranians to start blogging as well. So, using Notepad on Windows, I started experimenting. Soon I ended up writing on hoder.com, using Blogger’s publishing platform before Google bought it.
Then, on November 5, 2001, I published a step-to-step guide on how to start a blog. That sparked something that was later called a blogging revolution: Soon, hundreds and thousands of Iranians made it one of the top 5 nations by the number of blogs, and I was proud to have a role in this unprecedented democratization of writing.
Those days, I used to keep a list of all blogs in Persian and, for a while, I was the first person any new blogger in Iran would contact, so they could get on the list. That’s why they called me “the blogfather” in my mid-twenties — it was a silly nickname, but at least it hinted at how much I cared.
Every morning, from my small apartment in downtown Toronto, I opened my computer and took care of the new blogs, helping them gain exposure and audience. It was a diverse crowd — from exiled authors and journalists, female diarists, and technology experts, to local journalists, politicians, clerics, and war veterans — and I always encouraged even more. I invited more religious, and pro-Islamic Republic men and women, people who lived inside Iran, to join and start writing.
The breadth of what was available those days amazed us all. It was partly why I promoted blogging so seriously. I’d left Iran in late 2000 to experience living in the West, and was scared that I was missing all the rapidly emerging trends at home. But reading Iranian blogs in Toronto was the closest experience I could have to sitting in a shared taxi in Tehran and listening to collective conversations between the talkative driver and random passengers.
There’s a story in the Quran that I thought about a lot during my first eight months in solitary confinement. In it, a group of persecuted Christians find refuge in a cave. They, and a dog they have with them, fall into a deep sleep. They wake up under the impression that they’ve taken a nap: In fact, it’s 300 years later. One version of the story tells of how one of them goes out to buy food — and I can only imagine how hungry they must’ve been after 300 years — and discovers that his money is obsolete now, a museum item. That’s when he realizes how long they have actually been absent.
The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. Stemming from the idea of the hypertext, the hyperlink provided a diversity and decentralisation that the real world lacked. The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web — a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization — all the links, lines and hierarchies — and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks.
Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in. They were Tehran’s taxicabs writ large.
Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.
Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
At the same time, these social networks tend to treat native text and pictures — things that are directly posted to them — with a lot more respect than those that reside on outside web pages. One photographer friend explained to me how the images he uploads directly to Facebook receive a large number of likes, which in turn means they appear more on other people’s news feeds. On the other hand, when he posts a link to the same picture somewhere outside Facebook — his now-dusty blog, for instance — the images are much less visible to Facebook itself, and therefore get far fewer likes. The cycle reinforces itself.
Some networks, like Twitter, treat hyperlinks a little better. Others, insecure social services, are far more paranoid. Instagram — owned by Facebook — doesn’t allow its audiences to leave whatsoever. You can put up a web address alongside your photos, but it won’t go anywhere. Lots of people start their daily online routine in these cul de sacs of social media, and their journeys end there. Many don’t even realize that they’re using the Internet’s infrastructure when they like an Instagram photograph or leave a comment on a friend’s Facebook video. It’s just an app.
But hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: They are its eyes, a path to its soul. And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage — and this has serious consequences for the dynamics of power on the web.
More or less, all theorists have thought of gaze in relation to power, and mostly in a negative sense: the gazer strips the gazed and turns her into a powerless object, devoid of intelligence or agency. But in the world of webpages, gaze functions differently: It is more empowering. When a powerful website — say Google or Facebook — gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it — it brings it into existence; gives it life. Metaphorically, without this empowering gaze, your web page doesn’t breathe. No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind; and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page.
On the other hand, the most powerful web pages are those that have many eyes upon them. Just like celebrities who draw a kind of power from the millions of human eyes gazing at them any given time, web pages can capture and distribute their power through hyperlinks.
But apps like Instagram are blind — or almost blind. Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying.
Even before I went to jail, though, the power of hyperlinks was being curbed. Its biggest enemy was a philosophy that combined two of the most dominant, and most overrated, values of our times: novelty and popularity, reflected by the real world dominance of young celebrities. That philosophy is the Stream.
The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web. Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex –and secretive — algorithms.
The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more. You don’t need numerous tabs. You don’t even need a web browser. You open Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone and dive deep in. The mountain has come to you. Algorithms have picked everything for you. According to what you or your friends have read or seen before, they predict what you might like to see. It feels great not to waste time in finding interesting things on so many websites.
But are we missing something here? What are we exchanging for efficiency?
In many apps, the votes we cast — the likes, the plusses, the stars, the hearts — are actually more related to cute avatars and celebrity status than to the substance of what’s posted. A most brilliant paragraph by some ordinary-looking person can be left outside the Stream, while the silly ramblings of a celebrity gain instant Internet presence.
And not only do the algorithms behind the Stream equate newness and popularity with importance, they also tend to show us more of what we’ve already liked. These services carefully scan our behaviour and delicately tailor our news feeds with posts, pictures and videos that they think we would most likely want to see.
Popularity is not wrong in and of itself, but it has its own perils. In a free-market economy, low-quality goods with the wrong prices are doomed to failure. Nobody gets upset when a quiet Brooklyn cafe with bad lattes and rude servers goes out of business. But opinions are not the same as material goods or services. They won’t disappear if they are unpopular or even bad. In fact, history has proven that most big ideas (and many bad ones) have been quite unpopular for a long time, and their marginal status has only strengthened them. Minority views are radicalized when they can’t be expressed and recognized.
Today the Stream is digital media’s dominant form of organizing information. It’s in every social network and mobile application. Since I gained my freedom, everywhere I turn I see the Stream. I guess it won’t be too long before we see news websites organize their entire content based on the same principles. The prominence of the Stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the Internet biased against quality — it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned.
There’s no question to me that the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the past. New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today’s social networks because their ranking strategies prioritize the popular and habitual. (No wonder why Apple is hiring human editors for its news app.) But diversity is being reduced in other ways, and for other purposes.
Some of it is visual. Yes, it is true that all my posts on Twitter and Facebook look something similar to a personal blog: They are collected in reverse-chronological order, on a specific webpage, with direct web addresses to each post. But I have very little control over how it looks like; I can’t personalize it much. My page must follow a uniform look which the designers of the social network decide for me.
The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear. After my arrest, my hosting service closed my account, because I wasn’t able to pay its monthly fee. But at least I had a backup of all my posts in a database on my own web server. (Most blogging platforms used to enable you to transfer your posts and archives to your own web space, whereas now most platforms don’t let you so.) Even if I didn’t, the Internet archive might keep a copy. But what if my account on Facebook or Twitter is shut down for any reason? Those services themselves may not die any time soon, but it would be not too difficult to imagine a day many American services shut down accounts of anyone who is from Iran, as a result of the current regime of sanctions. If that happened, I might be able to download my posts in some of them, and let’s assume the backup can be easily imported into another platform. But what about the unique web address for my social network profile? Would I be able to claim it back later, after somebody else has possessed it? Domain names switch hands, too, but managing the process is easier and more clear— especially since there is a financial relationship between you and the seller which makes it less prone to sudden and untransparent decisions.
But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilized lives, and it just gets worse as time goes by. The only way to stay outside of this vast apparatus of surveillance might be to go into a cave and sleep, even if you can’t make it 300 years.
Being watched is something we all eventually have to get used to and live with and, sadly, it has nothing to do with the country of our residence. Ironically enough, states that cooperate with Facebook and Twitter know much more about their citizens than those, like Iran, where the state has a tight grip on the Internet but does not have legal access to social media companies.
What is more frightening than being merely watched, though, is being controlled. When Facebook can know us better than our parents with only 150 likes, and better than our spouses with 300 likes, the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And predictability means control.
Middle-class Iranians, like most people in the world, are obsessed with new trends. Utility or quality of things usually comes second to their trendiness. In early 2000s writing blogs made you cool and trendy, then around 2008 Facebook came in and then Twitter. Since 2014 the hype is all about Instagram, and no one knows what is next. But the more I think about these changes, the more I realize that even all my concerns might have been misdirected. Perhaps I am worried about the wrong thing. Maybe it’s not the death of the hyperlink, or the centralization, exactly.
Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing. After all, the first visitors to the web spent their time online reading web magazines. Then came blogs, then Facebook, then Twitter. Now it’s Facebook videos and Instagram and SnapChat that most people spend their time on. There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at. Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?
Is this trend driven by people’s changing cultural habits, or is it that people are following the new laws of social networking? I don’t know — that’s for researchers to find out — but it feels like it’s reviving old cultural wars. After all, the web started out by imitating books and for many years, it was heavily dominated by text, by hypertext. Search engines put huge value on these things, and entire companies — entire monopolies — were built off the back of them. But as the number of image scanners and digital photos and video cameras grows exponentially, this seems to be changing. Search tools are starting to add advanced image recognition algorithms; advertising money is flowing there.
But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication — nodes and networks and links — toward a linear one, with centralization and hierarchies.
The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.
When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on like or share button, read peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television.
Sometimes I think maybe I’m becoming too strict as I age. Maybe this is all a natural evolution of a technology. But I can’t close my eyes to what’s happening: A loss of intellectual power and diversity, and on the great potentials it could have for our troubled time. In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment. So much that even Iran doesn’t take some — Instagram, for instance — serious enough to block.
I miss when people took time to be exposed to different opinions, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares.
That’s the web I remember before jail. That’s the web we have to save.
Even though multiple generations have now grown up glued to the flickering light of the TV, we still can’t let go of the belief that the next generation of technology is going to doom our kids. We blame technology, rather than work, to understand why children engage with screens in the first place.
I’ve spent over a decade observing young people’s practices with technology and interviewing families about the dynamics that unfold. When I began my research, I expected to find hordes of teenagers who were escaping “real life” through the Internet. That was certainly my experience. As a geeky, queer youth growing up in suburban America in the early 1990s, the Internet was the only place where I didn’t feel judged. I wanted to go virtual, for my body to not matter, to live in a digital-only world.
If Americans truly want to reduce the amount young people use technology, we should free up more of their time.
To my surprise — and, as I grew older, relief — that differed from what most youth want. Early on in my research, I met a girl in Michigan who told me that she’d much rather get together with her friends in person, but she had so many homework demands and her parents were often concerned about her physical safety. This is why she loved the Internet: She could hang out with her friends there. I've heard this reasoning echoed by youth around the country.
This is the Catch-22 that we’ve trapped today’s youth in. We’ve locked them indoors because we see the physical world as more dangerous than ever before, even though by almost every measure, we live in the safest society to date. We put unprecedented demands on our kids, maxing them out with structured activities, homework and heavy expectations. And then we’re surprised when they’re frazzled and strung out.
For many teenagers, technology is a relief valve. (And that goes for the strung-out, overworked parents and adults playing Candy Crush, too.) It’s not the inherently addictive substance that fretting parents like to imagine. It simply provides an outlet.
The presence of technology alone is not the issue. We see much higher levels of concern about technology “addiction” in countries where there’s even greater pressure to succeed and fewer social opportunities (e.g., China, South Korea, etc.).
If Americans truly want to reduce the amount young people use technology, we should free up more of their time.
For one thing, we could radically reduce the amount of homework and tests American youth take. Finland and the Netherlands consistently outperform the U.S. in school, and they emphasize student happiness, assigning almost no homework. (To be sure, they also respect their teachers and pay them what they’re worth.) When I lecture in these countries, parents don't seem nearly as anxious about technology addiction as Americans.
We should also let children roam. It seems like every few weeks I read a new story about a parent who was visited by child services for letting their school-aged children out of their sight. Indeed, studies in the U.S. and the U.K. consistently show that children have lost the right to roam.
This is why many of our youth turn to technology. They aren’t addicted to the computer; they’re addicted to interaction, and being around their friends. Children, and especially teenagers, don’t want to only socialize with parents and siblings; they want to play with their peers. That’s how they make sense of the world. And we’ve robbed them of that opportunity because we’re afraid of boogeymen.
We’re raising our children in captivity and they turn to technology to socialize, learn and decompress. Why are we blaming the screens?
« Google et de manière plus générale les grands services de l’Internet (le plus souvent californiens) sont en train de prendre, sans qu’on s’en rende compte, la place de l’État, des États, dans la gestion quotidienne de nos droits et libertés. Cette évolution quasiment invisible s’est faite avec l’assentiment tacite (parce que l’enjeu est incompris) des citoyens-internautes-clients, et avec la complicité aveugle des gouvernements qui, par manque de vision politique, ont cédé chaque jour davantage de terrain en croyant y trouver leur intérêt. Si, en moins de vingt ans, une entreprise comme Google a pu prendre une place aussi gigantesque dans le cœur même des usages et des infrastructures numériques, c’est qu’elle a su maîtriser son développement sur tous les fronts.
Internet est un espace et un réseau qui, par sa nature, a vocation à mettre en relation les uns avec les autres des ordinateurs, dans une construction non-pyramidale. L’immense nouveauté d’Internet, par opposition à la transmission « hors ligne » des informations ou au Minitel, par exemple, c’est cette organisation décentralisée, « neutre » techniquement, où il suffit de se brancher pour avoir accès à tout le réseau. C’est ainsi qu’Internet a pu tisser ce qu’on a rapidement appelé, dans le monde entier (ou presque), une « Toile ». Forcément, c’était un peu déstabilisant. Et quiconque se projette dans l’Internet pré-Google se souvient de l’importance absolument cruciale des annuaires et des premiers moteurs de recherche pour trouver, ou tenter de trouver, ce qu’on cherchait sur cette Toile en apparence anarchique.
Et puis sont arrivées les grandes plateformes, telles Google, Amazon, etc., à partir du début des années 2000. Des services web à vocation hégémonique, qui ont fondé leur développement uniquement sur la publicité, et sur une publicité exploitant nos comportements de navigation et nos données personnelles. Il me semble que c’est ainsi que le rêve de substitution googlien décrit dans ce livre a pu se développer. Il serait injuste d’ailleurs de ne parler que de Google : d’autres entreprises comme Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc., fonctionnent de la même façon. Leurs caractéristiques et manières d’agir sont communes.
Avant tout, s’imposer sur un domaine en fournissant le « meilleur » service. Que ce service soit simple d’utilisation, que l’exploitation massive de données et la « fermeture » soient organisées pour servir le client et lui apporter ce qu’il veut. Ce qu’il cherche. Qu’il ne se pose aucune question et soit satisfait dans ses besoins primaires : obtenir une réponse satisfaisante à sa recherche, trouver ou retrouver des amis et pouvoir échanger avec eux, trouver un livre, une musique, en trois clics.
Améliorer en permanence les services en se basant sur une centralisation et une exploitation massive des données personnelles et de navigation. Petit à petit, réduire le périmètre d’exploration et de navigation de l’internaute. Orienter les résultats, montrer des contenus « associés », reproposer encore et encore des contenus similaires. Détruire petit à petit ce qui est peut être la plus grande qualité d’Internet : la sérendipité, soit la possibilité de faire des découvertes accidentelles.
Après avoir réussi l’hégémonie, le monopole « horizontal », développer une concentration verticale. Posséder et développer toute la chaîne de production de l’Internet. Comme l’explique le texte que vous venez de lire, que Google tire ses propres câbles sous-marins ou produise son électricité est un signe majeur de la concentration inouïe du secteur. Un signe majeur de l’emprise verticale qu’une entreprise (au départ dédiée aux moteurs de recherche) a pu prendre sur le secteur technologique.
Il devient alors facile pour ces innovateurs talentueux, grisés par leur succès et idéologiquement convertis à une technophilie virant parfois au transhumanisme (la foi en l’amélioration physique et mentale de l’Humain par la technique), de rêver de vivre sans État et, via une transformation « liquide » et insensible des règles de la société, de faire le saut de l’utopie politique et sociale.
Il faut dire que les États se montrent bien impuissants, dépassés, voire complices de cette évolution. Ils délèguent des pans entiers de leurs missions régaliennes à ces géants, sans qu’il semble y avoir eu une quelconque réflexion préalable sur les bouleversements politiques et sociaux que cela peut entraîner. Oui, Google et ses comparses sont en train de dominer le monde et d’en créer un nouveau. Mais ils le peuvent parce que nous et nos États les laissons faire.
Quand la NSA (National Security Agency) n’a plus besoin de faire elle-même la collecte des données des internautes du monde entier pour pratiquer sa surveillance de masse, puisqu’elle n’a qu’à aller les chercher directement chez les géants de l’Internet, le gouvernement américain n’a aucun intérêt à ce que ce modèle économique basé sur les données personnelles ne s’arrête. Les services de renseignement du monde entier peuvent ensuite, sur le grand marché de la surveillance, venir chercher ce dont ils ont besoin.
Les pouvoirs régaliens fragilisés sont récupérés par des entreprises avides de combler ces manques
Quand la Cour de justice de l’Union européenne demande à Google et aux moteurs de recherche de masquer, à leur discrétion, des résultats au nom du « droit à l’oubli », elle entérine le fait que la mémoire collective, le droit à l’information, qui passent aujourd’hui prioritairement par Internet, sont gérés par une entreprise privée. Hors de toute décision judiciaire, Google décide ce qui doit ou ne doit pas être accessible aux yeux du monde.
Quand les ayants droit de l’industrie de la culture et du divertissement demandent que les services Web cessent de donner accès à des contenus violant le droit d’auteur, là encore sans décision judiciaire, ils entérinent le fait que l’expression culturelle individuelle et le partage de contenus puisse être soumis aux choix des robots de Google. C’est ainsi qu’à la demande de ces ayants droit, des robots traquent, sur YouTube, les contenus qui leur semblent enfreindre les droits d’auteur et les suppriment sans discussion, entraînant de nombreux abus contre lesquels les internautes sont souvent impuissants à agir. La justice n’intervient pas en amont de ces décisions et c’est ensuite à l’internaute de prouver son « honnêteté » pour que ses contenus soient remis en ligne.
Quand des ministres du gouvernement français préfèrent que les services Web et les réseaux sociaux gèrent les abus de langage en « prenant leurs responsabilités », ils leur délèguent un de nos droits les plus fondamentaux : la liberté d’expression.
Quand des entreprises américaines comme Facebook ou Apple proposent à leurs employées de congeler leurs ovocytes pour les laisser « libres » de reporter leurs grossesses et leur permettre de ne pas « gâcher leurs carrières », c’est la vie privée dans ce qu’elle a de plus intime qui est prise en charge par l’entreprise.
Quand les pays africains se réjouissent qu’un Google ou un Facebook mettent en place gratuitement des infrastructures d’accès à Internet, sans se préoccuper de l’objectif final de ces entreprises, ils se défaussent de leurs responsabilités et acceptent que l’accès au monde numérique soit totalement dépendant des objectifs commerciaux de ces acteurs.
Ces exemples montrent qu’en actant, sans y réfléchir plus avant, la puissance phénoménale de ces nouvelles entreprises sur des pans de plus en plus grands de toute notre vie, bien au-delà des services mis en avant par les entreprises, les gouvernements et les citoyens ont baissé les bras ou n’ont, en tout cas, pas pris la mesure de ce qu’ils abandonnent à Google, à Facebook, à Apple, Amazon et autres géants.
Dans une période de crise économique et politique généralisée, il n’est pas étonnant que les pouvoirs régaliens soient fragilisés et récupérés par des entreprises avides de combler ces manques. La rapidité des évolutions technologiques pour des dirigeants politiques souvent dépassés et en carence de pensée politique à long terme aggrave le problème. Le monde ne se divise pas entre technophiles et technophobes. Penser ainsi, c’est entrer dans le jeu des United States of Google. C’est croire qu’on n’a le choix qu’entre un repli mortifère dans le passé ou une fuite en avant vers la gestion algorithmique de nos vies.
Il faut absolument lire ceux qui réfléchissent sur l’avenir du numérique. Comme Fred Turner, cité dans ce texte, qui montre brillamment comment l’utopie technophile ne peut servir d’alternative à la société politique. Qu’il faille changer de politique et que les gouvernements aient à se réinventer, cela paraît évident. Cela ne signifie surtout pas que l’on doive céder à la facilité en délégant la gestion de nos droits fondamentaux ou de la sphère publique à des entreprises dont la principale préoccupation est, évidemment, leur résultat économique. Non, Google ne nous offrira pas de vies meilleures. Google change le monde à son profit, et ce but est naturel pour une entreprise. À nous de savoir ce que nous voulons faire de ce monde numérique qui bouleverse nos vies depuis vingt ans.
Le devoir des citoyens et des politiques est de voir plus loin. De choisir et de dessiner la société qu’ils veulent. De ne pas penser la Loi en réaction aux mastodontes de l’Internet, ou au contraire en leur cédant tout, mais en pensant à l’intérêt général, et d’abord à celui des citoyens.
Nos libertés fondamentales sont fragiles. Elles étaient fragiles hier, mais davantage cloisonnées entre espace public, espace privé, espace économique, espace politique. Aujourd’hui tout se retrouve sur Internet et les espaces se rejoignent et s’entremêlent intimement. Il est d’autant plus important de mesurer ces évolutions et de légiférer intelligemment. Économie et libertés, politique et vie privée sont imbriquées comme elles ne l’ont sans doute jamais été dans l’Histoire.
Nous avons la chance de vivre une époque de mutation fondamentale dans l’histoire humaine. Il appartient collectivement à tous les acteurs de nos sociétés d’en faire une révolution au service de l’Homme et non un abandon généralisé de nos valeurs à quelques acteurs dominants ou à des États sans gouvernail.
Internet a donné la possibilité à chacun de faire entendre sa voix. Qu’en ferons-nous ? »