World Affairs

Studying for a evolutionary biology test, I read:

“Scientists discovered the first antibiotics, made by bacteria and fungi, in the mid-1900s, and they soon ushered in a new chapter in the history of medicine. Infections that once almost certainly would have been lethal simply disappeared in a matter of days. Some optimists declared that infectious diseases would soon be a thing of the past. But not long after antibiotics first became available, doctors began reporting that they sometimes failed. In the 1950s, Japanese doctors used antibiotics to battle outbreaks of dysentery caused by E. coli, only to watch the bacteria develop resistance to one drug after another.”

Compare to Evgeny Morozov writing in Foreign Policy:

“In the days when the Internet was young, our hopes were high. As with any budding love affair, we wanted to believe our newfound object of fascination could change the world. The Internet was lauded as the ultimate tool to foster tolerance, destroy nationalism, and transform the planet into one great wired global village… But just as earlier generations were disappointed to see that neither the telegraph nor the radio delivered on the world-changing promises made by their most ardent cheerleaders, we haven’t seen an Internet-powered rise in global peace, love, and liberty. And we’re not likely to. Many of the transnational networks fostered by the Internet arguably worsen — rather than improve — the world as we know it… Sadly enough, a networked world is not inherently a more just world.”

Yet, unlike with the Interwebs, we have clear-cut case of successful strategic use of technology and tactics to fight microbial infections: Norway.

Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia this year, soaring virtually unchecked.

The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs.

Twenty-five years ago, Norwegians were also losing their lives to this bacteria. But Norway’s public health system fought back with an aggressive program that made it the most infection-free country in the world. A key part of that program was cutting back severely on the use of antibiotics.

Throwing more of something – money, technology or rhetoric – at a problem rarely solves it; instead, strategic, tactical responses are needed. What are those to realize the hopes of digital utopians?

The arrival of broadband Internet in Africa via the undersea cables is widely hailed as an opportunity for economic advancement due to the power of ICT-enabled businesses. The hopeful look at India’s success in software and services as a model for African growth, but a new meme is emerging that see the interconnections of Africans as a threat to global security. While it is an interesting, and perhaps fruitful, exercise to think through the potential downsides of the Internet in Africa, the way the issue is being framed, largely by Westerners promoting cybersecurity services, strikes me as overwrought and misplaced.

The argument has two versions:

In one, detailed by cybersecurity consultant and author Jeffrey Carr, there is a dangerous fusion of anti-American forces who do, or will soon have, the means, motive and opportunity to unleash cyberwarfare upon American critical infrastructure and commerce. Looking at Somalia, where piracy and terrorism seem to be mixing, Carr argues that the arrival of the EASSy cable will present a dangerous new challenge to international security:

Once Somalia goes digital, it will create a never-before-seen opportunity for local gangs to move their strategic alliances with Al Shabaab onto the Internet. Their twin exports – extortion and terrorism will have unlimited opportunities for profit and mayhem, particularly if they are directed against critical infrastructure such as energy, water, and transportation facilities.

The second version, which is probably a more likely one, is that the combination of broadband connectivity and poor virus protections in Africa will make African computers prime targets for botnet herders who will use them to “paralyze the network infrastructure of a major western nation.” Writing in Foreign Policy, an organizer of a major cybersecurity summit, Franz-Stefan Gady, argues

“[T]he continent is home to the world’s most vulnerable computers. About 80 percent of the African population lacks even rudimentary knowledge of information technologies, according to a recent World Bank survey. Though Internet cafes are widespread, providers often cannot afford proper antivirus software, making computers very easy targets for skilled botnet operators and hackers.”

Moreover, he says, African countries, by and large, lack the legal wherewithal to prosecute cyber-criminals.

As a final datapoint, consider a recent report by the cybersecurity firm Symantec which says South Africa is in the “unenviable” position of receiving better connectivity right when it is hosting the World Cup; this, they say, is a recipe for accelerated cybercrime.

It should be noted at the outset that the people we are not hearing from on this are Africans. Cybersecurity demands international cooperation, but the views of African regulators, businessmen and civil society – who likely have a more nuanced views of the upsides of connectivity – are missing.

I suspect this voice would add context to the above worries. For example, in countries where basic literacy is a challenge yet to be overcome, worrying about the next Kevin Mitnick rising from Mogadishu seems a little silly. Recall that the most sophisticated cyber attacks come from Russia, a country with a long history of technological prowess, and China, where top-notch technical schools are likely the source of the recent Google hacks. In addition to infrastructure, you need computer skills, and as anyone who works to promote ICTs in Africa knows, this is a tough job.

The obvious response to this is that the Somali terrorist-pirates could purchase hacking services. This are widely available and, as I understand it, fairly affordable (though likely much more than a few AK-47s and a boat). But this is also nothing new. Al-Qaeda, an organization which is far more anti-American, far more well-funded, and has far more access to broadband Internet, does not seem to be a fan of cyberattacks. As far as I know, there is no evidence that Al-Qaeda has established offensive cyber capabilities, despite having operatives in broadband-saturated locations.

There are some hints that affiliated people have considered hacking as a means to their end – manuals, for example – but terrorists rely on shock factor to, umm, terrorize. When effective cyberwar is as theoretical as it, risk-averse groups are likely to stick to IEDs and suicide bombers.

Furthermore, the view of the Somali pirates and “terrorists” is ahistorical. It misses the reprehensible waste dumping and illegal fishing that have decimated the Somali economy (of course enabled by the absence of a functioning government). Writing frantic articles about cyber WMDs arising from this position is reckless. Somalia instead needs state-building, legal protection of its sovereignty and job opportunities.

ICTs are a great opportunity and although they do have potential downsides, the whole framing of these African cyberwar (!!!!) pieces leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Update: For a hilarious and spot-on treatment of this subject, see this:

I think that Africans have more to fear from older technology outside their continent than the rest of the world fearing Africa. It would be ironic if at some point in the near future, Nigeria had to block IP addresses from the United States.

He’s right. When Franz-Stefan writes that “skillful cybercriminals operating out of an unregulated Internet café in the slums of Addis Ababa, Lagos, or Maputo” will create the world’s biggest botnets, he shows that he has little understanding of those “slums” – for starters, electricity is a little intermittent to power a cyberwar.

Update 2: A new bill in the US Senate would require punishment for governments who do not control cybercrime allegedly occurring in their country. It would create a list of bad states and could cut aid to them if they don’t align their cyber-policies with American desires. Imagine, if you will, that this ends up like the USTR’s Special 301 list which coerces developing countries to enforce more draconian intellectual property regimes. If, as Jonathan Zittrain argues, innovative networks (“generative” in his parlance) are under threat from cybercrime, then it won’t be long until America is coercing African countries to lock down their networks, perhaps at the behest of the same security consultants who are arguing we need to re-engineer our networks to be more locked down. I don’t like where this is heading.

The Google/China back-and-forth that has played across the media for the past few months has raised the specter of a fragmenting Internet, catchily known as the “splinternet.” The fear, raised in various forms, is that proprietary networks and devices, in addition to censorship and corporate withdrawal from certain nations, are fracturing the unified, standardized Internet that made it such a promising medium for international communication. To add to these fears, exacerbated by the withdrawal of Google from China, GoDaddy has just announced that it will no longer register domains in China due to onerous regulations. This has many arguing that China’s Internet will be a separate entity from the rest of the world.

But was the Internet ever all that unified? Or was it merely a potential, a hope?

The potential to speak, or even the potential to link, does not mean that potential is met. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is often missed in the rhetoric surrounding the transformational effect of the Internet.

The barriers to a unified Internet are far more numerable – and long-standing – than proprietary code or government censorship (though these certainly do have an impact). For one, language is a significant barrier to communicating on an international medium. More fundamentally (and less cured by technological advancement), most people lack either the time or interest to meet the potential of a unified Internet. Even more, as UCT Professor Marion Walton notes, the billions of people excluded from the Internet due to poverty have never been connected to even the hope of a unified Internet.

It is important to be aware and attempt to counteract new divisions between the communicative capacity of humans – among which are censorship and technical incompatibility – but valuing interconnectedness requires a far broader view than most pundits have right now.

Interesting passage from Darfur: A New History of a Long War by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal:

The Kalashnikov rifle changed the moral order of Darfur. The Abbala had lived by an honor code that included loyalty, strenuous self-discipline when herding camels and communal responsibility for homicide. The principle of paying diya, or blood money, to the kin of an individual killed in a feud ensured that violence was a collective responsibility. In the era of spears and swords, and even the earlier rifles, a killing was a deliberate an individual act readily traceable to the man responsible. Fights rarely had more than a handful of fatalities. The AK-47 – capable of slaughtering an entire platoon, truckload of people, or family - swept this aside. Blood money for a single massacre could exceed the camel wealth of a whole lineage. The sheer number of bullets fired made it impossible to ascertain who had shot whom. Young men with gun were not only able to terrify the population at large, but were free of the control of their elders.

Over the past couple days, millions of dollars have been donated to help Haiti through the use of text messaging. This will surely be chalked up as another example of the role that ICTs can play in saving the world. People with that view are right to be excited about what this signals – another example of technology lowering the transaction costs to doing good.

But it would be a mistake to believe that the good news is all there is.

As an example, Chris Blattman points to a recent paper [PDF] about the infamous “hate radio” in Rwanda that played a role in motivating the genocidal violence. By looking at the variety of radio coverage in villages (due to hills interfering with radio waves), the author concludes that “complete village radio coverage increased violence by 65 to 77 percent, and a simple counter-factual calculation suggests that approximately 9 percent of the genocide, corresponding to at least 45,000 Tutsi deaths, can be explained by the radio station.”

ICTs are a tool and it’s important to remember that other factors (people, geography) will impact whether they are used for good or ill.

The apparent ties between the Nigerian man charged with plotting to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day and a radical American-born Yemeni imam have cast a spotlight on a world of charismatic clerics who wield their Internet celebrity to indoctrinate young Muslims with extremist ideology and recruit them for Al Qaeda, American officials and counterterrorism specialists said. [Emphasis added]

This is the lede of a recent NYT article about the failed Christmas bombing of a Detroit-bound international flight. It is, I think, the common way for the public to see the process of terrorist development: Naive, wide-eyed Muslim youngster gets pulled into the web of extremist ideology by a Rasputin-esque character with a bushy beard and flowing white robes. These nefarious characters are the only ones who have any form of agency; the suicide-bomber to-be is warped and cajoled into his murderous mission by promises of martyrdom by the celebrity clerics. After all, who would actively choose to blow themselves up, right?

This narrative, though, is far from accurate. As the NYT piece rightly points out (much further down), the suicide-bombers are, more likely than not, acting on their own accord, especially when the choose to enter the terrorist networks. As a former CIA employee notes,

“Young people have a mind of their own,” he said. “They are not robots, brainwashed. They are already radicalized. What they want in a sense is a validation of what they already believe. The religious leaders are lightning rods, because of the extreme statements. They form a community around them.”

This viewpoint is not the full story, however. It still lacks an understanding of why a wealthy Nigerian or a Major in the American military seeks out the bushy bearded bad-guy. Why do they choose to start down that path? And why do they stay on it?

To understand what motivates “them” to hate “us” requires seeing the world from a very different perspective than most Americans do. It requires what may be uncomfortable and quickly labeled unpatriotic.

But it also requires recognizing that the ideal of America is something that is both powerful and unquantifiable – it is something immeasurably harmed by White House-sanctioned torture and mistakenly aimed bombs that kill civilians. As Robert Wright wrote after the Fort Hood massacre, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were supposed to make the U.S. safer, but by placing America in the position to compromise its ideals (“victory at any cost”), it makes it more likely that more and more people will lose their faith in the country so many strive to join each year. It will make the way Americans see the world will be increasingly at odds with others.

Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were supposed to reduce the number of anti-American terrorists abroad. It’s hardly clear that they’ve succeeded, and they may have had the opposite effect. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, they’ve inspired homegrown terrorism — a small-scale incident in June, a larger-scale incident this month. That’s only two data points, but I don’t like the slope of the line connecting them

We have to recognize that our foreign policy choices have direct consequences to the thinking of those would-be terrorists. It is not just clerics and imams who influence murderous Nigerian or Army Medics, it can be us.

I just re-watched Wade Davis’s TED Talk from nearly two years ago where he provides a rapid-fire tour of some of the most ancient cultures around today. In doing so, he provides an important reminder that a Western tradition does not hold all the answers. It’s a fantastic talk filled with plenty of powerful points.

The New York Times recently published a lengthy article about Pandora, the personalized online music site. In stark contrast to most Web 2.0 systems, Pandora has eschewed the model of collaborative filtering and social recommendations (think Digg or iLike); instead, they manually codify hundreds of attributes for individual songs to create a database that, in my experience, is able to provide very sound musical recommendations. Have they codified musical taste?

Jonathan McEuen told me he heard about Pandora a couple of years ago and started using it immediately, “with the goal of breaking whatever algorithm they had.” A devoted music fan and a musician himself, McEuen says he did not believe an online service could understand what sort of music he would like and introduce him to new artists based on some deconstruction of his listening tastes. “You can’t just reduce it to a bunch of numbers,” he recalls thinking. “This is a romantic, emotional thing,” and Pandora’s approach to it “can’t work.”

He has changed his mind. A 28-year-old clinical neuroscience researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, he’s a listener who lacks the time to keep up with music news the way he did while amassing hundreds of CDs as a student. Sometimes he runs Pandora as background music; sometimes he’s more engaged, using it as a way to learn about contemporary classical and opera — and as a result has become a fan of the music of a young composer named Eric Whitacre. “I don’t know how else I would have found out about it,” he says. “Except through the exhaustive process of making new friends on the Internet. Which is something I’m kind of loath to do.”

Have they succeeded in quantifying musical tastes through their labor-intensive algorithmic process? Is there a lesson for all the other realms in which people are attempting to quantify human experience?

They may have been successful, but I think there are limited lessons. The reason is because the cost of failure is so low. If they recommend a song that I don’t like (and that doesn’t happen too infrequently), all I need to do to fix the situation is click the ‘Thumbs Down’ button and it ends. In fields like economics, the thumbs down function is far more costly.

Update: Via my friend Alex’s Twitter feed… an algorithm that predicts music success with 80% success:

So far HSS programming boasts an 80 percent success rate, classifying tracks such as Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” and t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said” as potential hits, according to a 2006 study from Harvard Business School. That compares to a 10 percent success rate for songs promoted by record companies as singles, according to the study.

That’s certainly a high rate of success, but:

• Though impressive, that rate of success, it would seem, is far from acceptable for scenarios where failure is far more costly to society.
• Does it evolve? Would it have predicted unique new sounds like M.I.A. or just boring stuff like Drake? Is the evolution of music what’s found in the 20% error zone? This is especially important when you look at things like GDP and see that they have largely been the same since the 1940s, despite its increasingly detrimental effects.
• I believe it was Mick Jagger who once said that the key to the success of a song was exposure. Science seems to back him up: the exposure effect posits that experience with something increases likelihood of liking it. So, if musical tastes are constructed, not given, how does the algorithm account?

One of the most pressing topics in the digital activism debate is that of slacktivism, a “pejorative term that describes “feel-good” measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction. The acts also tend to require little personal effort from the slacktivist.”

Livestrong wristbands or green-tinted avatars are some prime examples of what Evgeny Morozov calls “the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation”. He worries that the same lowered transaction costs that were supposed to make activism more accessible are, in fact, displacing effective models of change:

“The real issue here is whether the mere availability of the “slacktivist” option is likely to push those who in the past might have confronted the regime in person with demonstrations, leaflets, and labor organizing to embrace the Facebook option and join a gazillion online issue groups instead. If this is the case, then the much-touted tools of digital liberation are only driving us further away from the goal of democratization and building global civil society.”

But placing political importance on every politically-inclined action misses the motivation behind it. Much of the involvement in what is seen as digital activism should, instead, be seen through the lens of social activity.

Fred Stutzman noted this while examining the success of the Students Against Facebook News Feed, a group that garnered hundreds of thousands of members and encouraged Facebook management to implement significant changes in one of their most important site updates:

In the Facebook, groups are arbitrary affiliation vectors. Groups can be whimsical, such as a group named after a movie quote, or serious, such as a group dedicated to volunteering. Groups are costless to join, and they simply require a click of the mouse to join. Many users partake in a large number of groups; groups are generally thought of as a low-involvement way to make identity statements.

Certainly many of the group members disliked the changes to Facebook, but this is unlikely to be the only, or even the predominant, motivating factor for “slacktivists.” Instead, as Stutzman mentions, these digitally mediated acts are ways to craft an identity. As danah boyd writes in her essay on teens’ use of social networking sites [PDF], these sites “are providing teens with a space to work out their identity and status, make sense of cultural cues, and negotiate public life.” Joining the Barack Obama for President group or tinting your Twitter avatar green may do little to actually beat McCain or Ahmadinejad, but that is not the motivation for many of the clicks. It isn’t, as Evgeny writes, that “our digital efforts make us feel very useful and important but have zero social impact.” Instead, it is that the digital acts are innately social that they have impact, but for important personal social interests, not necessarily wider societal goals.

To be fair, the widespread misinterpretation of digitally mediated actions isn’t just due to the skeptics who rightly point out that traditional power structures still matter. The digital activism adherents also place too much emphasis on the case studies like the recent Trafigura kerfuffle where Twitter hashtags seemed to play an important role. They look at cases like Students Against Facebook New Feed and see a political act where much of the action was, in fact, motivated by personal social motives. Mainstream media stories that breathlessly count the number of group members or new trending topics on Twitter are to blame, as well.

Humans are diversely motivated beings, and often these motivations are mundane or vain; it’s important to recall this while celebrating or vilifying next week’s digital activism case study.

[Photo credit]

So, Gordon Brown gave a talk at TED Global that argues that “foreign policy can never be the same again” because instantaneous digital communication makes it necessary that the masses are heeded. It’s nice to see someone in his position aware and passionate about technology’s ability to change the world for the better, but I think he falls prey to the over-optimism that too often shapes these discussions.

Take a look at some of his examples in the above video:

• #IranElection Twitter activity and #Neda [yet, Ahmadinejad was just sworn in]
• The Saffron Revolution in Burma [yet, the Junta remains in power]
• The Ethiopian and Sudanese children dying during famine [yet, poverty remains rampant in the African horn]
• Tienanmen Square tank man [yet, China is now even more powerful and far from democratic]

Now, to be fair, PM Brown’s real call was for a truly global society built on solid institutions, but his focus on media and technology distracts from the real power structures that are far more resilient than, say, the voting of American Idol, where text messaging actually does matter.

Remember, the two Current.tv journalists weren’t released because of Twitter activity. It took some high-power diplomacy.