myreadingexperience

[myreadingexperience]

I’ve had the luck of bumping into Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren again, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely, even now. I didn’t plan to read it, but it just happened. I started one story, then went on with another, and laughed and laughed. Then I got sick and couldn’t read anything complicated for a whole day, so B. read Pippi to me.  I was surprised at how readable this book still is and how funny! I don't remember my first experience of going through it, I must have been around 10, but I remember liking it for some reason (also forgotten). Well, it's confirmed, I still like it. Pippi is quite the hero, so independent, so silly, so imaginative, and, weirdly - so self-conscious. She doesn't need parents to control her, she controls herself.

DOR’s 30th number is a very good collection of journalistic stories. I cannot get the ”Apollo's spit" article out of my head, a piercing analysis of how public life & opinion treats women in Romania, especially in politics, fueled by the #metoo debates. I also enjoyed the article on Gianina Carbunariu's attempts at re-making the face of a state theatre, and found the one on Simona Halep also very interesting, moving, and well-written, given I read it with so much pleasure and I don't even care about tennis.

[myreadingexperience]

<< Love is not straight, because reality is not straight. Everywhere, there are curves and bends, things veer. Per-ver-sion. En-vir-onment. These terms come from the verb „to veer”. To veer, to swerve toward: am I choosing to do so or am I being pulled? Free will is overrated. I do not make decisions outside the Universe and then plunge in, like an Olympic diver. I am already in. >>

Perforated, fuzzy, broken & spectral: that’s how the arguments of Humankind: solidarity with non human people  (Timothy Morton) are, making its way through continental philosophy and Marxism to insert non-humans, only to argue, ultimately, that there’s no such thing as solidarity without non-humans anyway. Reading it is a game: annoying, because you don’t know the rules, but nonetheless, fascinating. Morton keeps being in conversation with this, and that, from critical theorists to pop icons, jumping and jumping, unable to be grasped, constantly unfollowing himself from the reader’s understanding. But for all that it tortured me with, I loved it. I both believe it and not believe it. It makes such great arguments: adding non-humans to marxist theory, ontologically unpinning species (and thus race, and racism, too), accepting the fuzziness of the world (its spectral x-being), but also its toughness (it’s object oriented, not socially constructed), strongly in favor of an implosive holism (one that isn’t a whole greater than the sum of its parts, but less – subscendence), and pushing (rocking) against anthropocentrism. But also, it’s not very serious, it’s rather playful, which is, maybe, the point, or part of it, anyway. Is it like this so it cannot be contradicted? Maybe. Morton would love that, getting into a space into which contradictions are possible, and present – an excluded middle. Getting us into a loop, or brain-fucked, or preferably both, but in a beautiful, disgusting kind of way.

<< Beauty is always a little bit weird, a little bit disgusting. Beauty always has a slightly nauseous taste of the kitsch about it, kitsch being the disgusting enjoyment object of the other, disgusting precisely because it is the other’s enjoyment-thing, and thus inexplicable to me. Moreover, since beauty is an enjoyment that hasn’t to do with my ego and is thus a not-me, beauty is always haunted by its spectral double, the kitsch. The kitsch precisely is the other’s enjoyment object: how can anyone in their right mind want to buy this snow globe of the Mona Lisa? Yet there they are, hundreds of them, in this tourist shop. >>

[myreadingexperience]

“Good night stories for rebel girls”  is wonderful book I received as a Christmas present, full of inspiring little stories and beautiful illustrations. I read it carefully, each day, out loud, with my mother, or my aunt, other friends, or whoever I found, and I plan to read it again, to children. I'm really glad it exists, and quite excited to get my hand on the second one sometime. 

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Acasa, pe drum, by Elena Stancu & Cosmin Bumbut. A beautiful book of journalism and how journalism is done: a photographer and a journalist, on the road for four years, documenting stories by staying with the people for weeks/months at the time. These stories have entered their lives, they aren't separated work, they are the work of living (kindly), doing what one does best (for them, telling stories together). A touching account, one that should encourage us to listen better, look more attentively, and also, support them in their plans.

As a side note, this was the last finished book of 2017. Made it to 45, having at least 10 or so started, some mid-through. An ok year, I guess?

[myreadingexperience]

November came and I didn’t read a thing, and in December life started slowly again, and so I started reading again, this and that, but not finishing much. 

In “Four Futures”, Peter Frase gives a concise snapshot of futures based on how much ecological destruction we will have, and how much technological advancement. There are four choices, and they're on two different continuums: from scarcity to abundance, and from equality to hierarchy, given how we will govern ourselves. It's a necessary exploration, albeit short, but adding to the many we ought to have. And as Frase says, it it us who go towards one of these futures - the book is thus trying to prevent the bad ones in a "self-preventing prophecy" kind of fashion, and push for the good ones as "self-fulfilling prophecies". So, we have communism, with equality and abundance (the best of all solutions, the utopic one) - ecological disaster didn't destroy us, work is fully automated, and we find meaning in something else; whether we get there by revolution, reforms, revolutionary reforms, or not at all, is an open question; not everything is absolutely equalitarian, there will still be some form of conflict, maybe on managing respect as a social force, but hey it's still pretty good. Second, we have rentism, with abundance but hierarchy, where we might be heading towards: more and more proprietary discourse and copyrights on everything - in an abundant world, that will mean that some people will own the patents for most things, and, although they could be materially made, the intellectual rights will cost. Socialism paints a world in which there's scarcity, but equality, and the last one, the worst one, extremism, a world in which there's scarcity and hierarchy - there's very few of everything and even fewer people own it. "... it is always more interesting to read an account that derives the general from the particular (social theory) or the particular from the general (science fiction), rather than attempting to go from the general to the general (futurism) or the particular to the particular (conspiracism)."

Tsiolkas’ “Loaded” is a book I wouldn't have normally read, but it was short, and furious, and from far away: an acceptable enough way to start the year, getting through Ari's hateful mumbling about everything, his constantly self-destructive behavior and incessant fucking with every third stranger. Kind of a deep jump into a typically tortured teenager's mind, full with the obvious world-depreciation, well-contextualized into a specific racial/class/sexual-orientation Australian situation. 

<< On speed I dance with my body and my soul. In this white powder they’ve distilled the essence of the Greek word kefi. Kefi is the urge to dance, to be with good friends, to open your arms to life. Straight, I can approximate kefi, but I am always conscious of fighting off boredom. Speed doesn’t let you get bored. >> << Truth they use against you. I speak slowly, no mumbling, no slurring. I struggle to form my words free of the deleterious effects of the drugs, of my emotions. You’re wrong, you never tell a wog anything important about yourself. The truth is yours, it doesn’t belong to no one else. >>

[myreadingexperience]

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo is probably one of the most poetic books I've ever read. Unfortunately I wasn't in the proper mood for it to catch me with its magic, but I could sense it. It's just so unlucky when a book you know you'd love comes at the wrong time, and you can't enjoy it properly. I hope I will make some time to re-read it someday, as it is puzzling and spiny, with time and point of view jumping and jumping, and surely there's much more to it than I got right now.

In the meantime, I’ve started lots of other books, or just didn’t finish lots. For example, October by China Mieville, the short prose magazine Iocan nr. 4, Morton’s Ecology without Nature is still pending, and Roy’s The god of small things.  And McKenzie’s General intellects. 

[myreadingexperience]

I’ve been reading a bunch of things lately, but slowly. I finished Bourdieu’s A sketch for self-analysis. He  writes this autobiography that is not really an autobiography, with plenty of sociological analysis in his theoretical style. But does he give us what we want? No. He just positions himself as well as possible in the sociological field of the time. Might re-read, as my lack of knowledge on many of the personalities he mentioned impaired my understanding.

On and off, I’ve been getting some inspiration from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big magic.  It's not the kind of book I'd read usually. So why did I read it? Well, it's actually quite nice. Although cheesy and although I disagree with her at times, Gilbert is still uplifting, and has this good point about art that is sometimes not stressed enough: don't cling to your suffering. And don't be a jerk. Also, when you fail, pause and then breathe and just keep working. She also points out that we shouldn't take creativity too seriously, while simultaneously taking it quite seriously. Sounds a bit crazy, but this I think is also good advice.

I also read Ben Shapiro’s essay, How to debate leftists and destroy them. Initially I didn't even want to get into this, but I was too curious. I thought I'd get annoyed, but after reading I got more worried then annoyed, and after checking the goodreads reviews, I got even more worried. Shapiro seems to be a really charming debater, very cool, doesn't lose a beat. But what is he even talking about? There is no "left" as he sees it, it's a weird mix of stuff the media looks at, the big debates: abortion, racism, same-sex marriage. There's no political theory, no economic theory, and no philosophy to ground either views (left or right). This is a smash - debate manual, about how to "destroy" opponents, assuming these opponents are puppet figures with no data that only want to make you look bad (because this is how he usually describes leftists). It's short and charming, I give it that, but it's doing more bad than good. What good is it to debate a group of people you see as uniformly wanting to bully you? Shapiro repeatedly says the leftists are bullies, and indeed there is no reason to debate them, unless it's public and you can humiliate them. Does this sound like a non-bully strategy to you? Either way, it's painting a fake opposition as being heterogeneous and unfounded, it's making people feel divided by feeling righteous where they are and - seeing the goodreads reviews - this "winning the argument" is only creating more polarization.

Finally, I finished Kevin Mitnick’s Art of Invisibility, on how to hide online. It’s quite an interesting read, even if you never want to go through all the trouble that is having an unrelated laptop, email address and location, for complete anonymity. That is, unless you need it. Unless your country is actively spying on you and you can’t do stuff.  

[myreadingexperience]

I’ve been waiting for the time to read Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith. For that moment when I knew I’d have time to delve in and stay with it. And there it was, just a few days ago, during mildly warm September nights. The planet of Jeep, the Company that wanted to colonize it, the main character - Marghe - is an anthropologist -, and there’s a virus that made all men die, including 30% of the women. Sounded like a great premise. Unfortunately, Marghe is a very bad anthropologist, which pissed me off a lot. Some characters and events seem off, as if they could have been really well written, but somehow the editing was pushed off into a far future that never happened. I wanted to like the book, and in a way I guess I did, since I read so quickly, but it also annoyed me immensely - characters behaved weirdly and sometimes it became boring because the narration didn’t go anywhere. I guess I’m a bit disappointed because it could have been so good. The writing is beautiful at times, and the cultural explorations are interesting, and there’s adventure and love and life, but it still doesn’t make up for the bad parts. 

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I was just browsing the stuff on my Kindle when I got irremediably hooked on this book. Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren, is a beautiful account of modern day scientific inquiry and life. I found myself reading & going back to it whenever I got the chance. The chapters about Jahren’s personal life (which happens mostly in the lab, 24/7) are followed by chapters on tree life, so full of wonder that they make you look twice at every other tree you meet from then on. Her scientific work is unraveled in the day to day aspects of it, showing what it actually feels (and tastes – at times, reheated burgers) like to „do” science as she does it: to construct a lab, ask for funding, write years of research in a tiny paper, stay day and night with the same people in a confined space, and to relentlessly  ask questions about trees and soils and plants. A magical – almost fateful – encounter has been brought upon her when she met her lab partner in the early years, with whom she has worked throughout hard & easy times all her life (and then another, just as magical, when meeting her husband).

„Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.” And as her happiness has usually come at the cost of inhuman hours of work, this book is a kind gift she corageously made herself.

„We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitabile.„

I’ve been slowly reading “The shock of the Anthropocene” by Bonneuil & Fressoz, and finally I finished. It’s a very good book on the subject, with some of the best documentation I’ve read and the most complex, courageously critical views. It’s very good to check after you already know a bit about the subject, and not before - only then you realize what it brings new, what it summarizes better, and what it stands against. For example, one of its main arguments is that this “ecological awakening” of the 2001 with the naming of the Anthropocene and the rise of “anthropocenologists” is a historical illusion, as various people have been fighting for the environment from various political stances since 1750 (at least). What it does best is, it shows multiple histories with equal value, denying the right to any hegemonic so-called apolitical narrative. We have, therefore, a Thermocene, caused by the raise in carbon in the atmosphere, one that exists in a context of colonization and imperial powers. There’s a  Thanatocene, fueled by the military-industrial complex, showing how military training is destroying the environment even in times of peace, and how the Second World War set the stage for a society of mass consumption (for example, it made flight readily available).  So we go into a Phagocene, of consuming the world - there’s disciplinary hedonism, as products become indispensable for attaching workers to their jobs. Leisure and a reduction of working hours lose in face of the economic crisis, which, with Keynsian ideology, meant full employment and state intervention - but with opportunities for profit! The next, the Phronocene, shows how histories of environmentalism have been depoliticized and erased, even though the knowledge about natural destruction has existed for long, so the quest is „to understand the schizophrenic nature of modernity, which continued to view humans as the producs of their environment at the same time as it let them damage and destroy it”. Then we enter an Agnotocene, a combination of ignorance and economic narratives (which should have been kept separate, in my opinion). There’s a spead of misinformation about nature, together with an overwhelming story about infinite growth - the gold standard is down, the idea of GDP is born. There’s compensation for damage, the idea of ecosystems services, the future of a high-tech human Earth, one in which Nature was once the biggest company. Towards the end, they write about the Capitalocene, a history closest to what I’ve heard of before, in which it is the flows of capital and ideologies of growth (but from somewhere else) that fueled the human-as-geological-agent. It’s a recognition that the  . prosperity of rich countries is constructed „by way of a monopolization of the benefits of the Earth and an externalization of environmental damages by the phenomena of dispossession and unequal exchange”. The last, the Polemocene, writes a history of resistance to the deterioration of Earth, ever since 1750. There’s questioning of machines, of mass production, of particular technologies, activism against deforestation, pollution, land grabbing, nuclearity, growth. It is an almost cheerful, optimist ending to a rather depressing subject - an ending that pulls you back into your life, where you’re responsible for this age, collectively, with the other humans. 

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I started checking out “the princess and the prophet” by Shafique Keshavjee randomly, as I was browsing my cousin’s library. I remember she liked it, and so did our common English teacher, who recommended it, so I picked it up and started reading. The first feeling was disappointment, really - the writing is simple, tern, the characters flat, and predictable. Slowly, then, it caught my attention. The real strength of the book is its philosophical and political ramblings, or essays, to call them by the name. Each character is made into a world view and explained. Had this book been sold as an easy introduction to globalization and political thought through narrative, it would have been much better. The problem is, it doesn’t fit the expectations of a novel. But if you look at it from the other side, of easy-to-grasp ideas on the state of the world, economics, nature and inequality, then it’s pretty cool, and definitely recommended for high schoolers (as we were when it was recommended to us). 

I jumped on the #29th number of the DOR romanian magazine as soon as I got my hands on it. This is by far my favorite number, I’ve read it over the weekend - basically devoured it - and I was interested in every article, which rarely happens. Its main theme is “us vs them”, an in group out group exploration of many sorts. The editor’s beginning essay is gets quite emotional, and the shorts at the beginning are all good, especially Oana Zaharia’s. My favourite articles (well, half of them or so): O’Ceallaigh’s essay on writer Saul Bellow’s friendship with the Romanian intellectual (ex?)fascist Mircea Eliade; the translation from Ta-Nehisi Coate’s recently published book Between the world and me; Home, a short account of the long story of the Vacaresti Delta and the people living in it, especially Gica Pescarul; the one about the pensions - finally I read something about this boring-ish subject; Satul Madalinei - one of the firsts I read, and I dearly await the podcast, about a young girl and her children living in poverty and trying to be helped out of it by donors ... actually I kinda liked all of them, so I’ll mention another three and that’s it: the one about gated communities and the families in Bucharest living there; the one about the “lost generation”, which even gets a bit inspirational, and Pink Patricia, finally something about body-positivity in the Romanian Media. And as usual, the illustrations were superb all over. 

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A week or so ago I finished “Liquid surveillance”. The conversation between Bauman and Lyon is at pace, unfolding the complicated truths of today’s surveillance. First, it’s said: it’s post-panoptical. We’re not in the age of Jeremny Bentham’s prison design anymore, the guards are away and we watch ourselves. Bauman emphasizes the fact that we do this out of a deep need of being together, and that the fear of being watched has transformed into exhilaration, a promise of never being abandoned: „the condition of being watched and seen has thereby been reclassified from a menace into a temptation”.  Quoting Josh Rose, „the internet doesn’t steal our humanity, it reflects it”, shines light on the fact that, maybe, Facebook had such a huge success because we have been in waiting for it.  In Georg Simmel’s writings, secrecy is important in shaping social interaction, because „how we relate to others depends deeply on what we know about them”. Whether Foucault would call today’s blogs and tweets confessional is at question, as Bauman says that this society has brought the private to the public in unprecedented ways. The paradox is that, while the hard end of the panoptic will generate resistance, the soft end „seems to seduce participans into a stunning conformity”. Bigo introduces the concept of „ban-opticon”, to indicate the way exclusion and profiling technologies work, through „managers of unease” (such as police) and „globalised (in)security” (through security technologies that make us feel threatened). The features of the ban-opticon are: exceptional power in liberal societies, profiling, and normalizing non-excluded groups (to a belief in free movement of goods, persons, etc.).  The DIY surveillance system expects people to „erect the walls themselves”. Because we live in a „consumer society”, we ourselves become commodities, and social media aids us to be both „promoters of commodities” and „the commodities we promote”.  In Sherry Turkle’s words, „we expect more from technology and less from each other”. For Bauman, the debate is between security and freedom, one must be sacrificed to another to find the viable solution. Morality comes to mind, as automation and remoteness allows us to be liberated from moral constraints, with the principle „we can do it, so we will do it”.  The adiaphorization of military killing is the removal „from the category of acts subject to moral evaluation”, as Gunther Anders warns there is negligibility in the effort needed to set off a cataclysm, including „globocide”. The need to cope with fear of „the other” makes citizens stockpile on alarms and insurances while endorsing extreme measures such as torture and domestic spying. „Security’s imagined future is one in which all abnormalities ... have been excluded.” 

I’ve been reading “I’m with the bears”, one or two stories each day. They’re quite depressing and scary. There’s a good introduction by Bill McKibben and then we’re on to a story about early eco-activists, very realistic, just one night unfolding, with a pointing question at the end, by T. C. Boyle. The second, Zoogoing, by Lydia Millet, is an account of a man who becomes obsessed with watching animals by himself, at their own pace, in their cages at night. “Sacred space” must be read to get it, but shortly, Kim Stanley Robinson describes a group of friends trekking up the mountains, experiencing a changing landscape. Hermie, by Nathaniel Rich, is a sad-funny story about a man talking, as an adult, to his imaginary childhood friend, a crab. Diary of an Interesting Year by Helen Simpson describes a world in which governments have fallen and the fittest survive, it’s quite violent, sad and engaging, but having read the MaddAddam trilogy by Atwood, it’s nothing new. Newromancer by Toby Litt happens in a world of control and no fun, telling the story of a few “rebels” trying to find some. The last four stories are, interestingly, my favorites. I also had some expectations of them, but they’ve been met. “The Siphoners” by David Mitchell is about an old couple living at the end of a land, in a world falling apart, with oil princes unimaginably high. It jumps from a life of before the fall, when they were anthropologists, to the now, when they’re old, vulnerable, and useless to society. This back and forth happens in “arzestula” by Wu Ming 1 too, a story that is quite poetic about a flooded world, also without internet and communications, in which a woman goes back to her home so she can go towards the future. “The tamarisk hunter” is particularly despairing, but I didn’t expect any less from Paolo Bacigalupi, from whom I read a few years ago a short story that stayed with me vividly (one about a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by mechanical humans who unexpectedly find an organic dog - interestingly, I didn’t much enjoy his novel, The wind-up girl). Anyway, it’s a world with water scarcity, insomuch that the river itself is taken by the rich and the rest cannot use it anymore. The last story, ending the book, is a short account of human history, from the past to a future of us-no-more, by Margaret Atwood.

Elena Ferrante’s “Those who live and those who stay” is so close to my heart it's a bit beyond a novel now, almost like having an old friend Elena who tells me her stories, so vividly they hurt & annoy me and I can see them happen. So whatever criticism there is to write about it, I cannot do it, I've been completely drawn in the universe.

"voglio che tu faccia meglio, e la cosa che desidero di piu, perche chi sono io se tu non sei brava, chi sono?" (says Lila to Lenu)

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The most comprehensive and coherent book on data collection and surveillance I have stumbled upon: Data and Goliath, by security expert Bruce Schneier. Because I’ve read it in parallel with others, I cannot tell if it is this one, or another, or the whole reading process, that has put forth a really good accound of bulk collection of data, but from the very beginning, the book puts it transparently: just by carrying a phone in your pocket, you are telling phone companies where you are. This is not a bargain you signed for, but it’s how phones work. This data can (and has been used) by governments to determine where citizens are and if they had been at a certain place at a certain time (ex. Kiev 2014 protests, Michigan 2010 labor protest). Mass surveillance can single out profiles of people, censor and discriminate on any criteria: race, religion, class. Even when it is just metadata, it covers an amazing amount of information (for example, you can tell what is someone’s network of close friends and aquaintances by their phone calls, and can figure what’s going on if they call an abortion clinic). „Data is content, metadata is context”, Schneier writes to explain, and metadata is enough to say lots about anyone, and much easier to process (in 2014, former NSA director Michael Hayden said „we kill people based on metadata”). To the author, the future is one in which store clerks, your car, and even billboards, will know you and what you want. Video footage is like „herd immunity, but in reverse” – once enough people will record it, you’ll be in one. Information-age surveillance looks like a panopticon more efficient than Bentham could have ever imagined. Even anonymized collection can be easily de-anonymized if one has access to the large google search database, for example. Schneier likes to turn it around: „Imagine that the US government passed a law requiring all citizens to carry a tracking device. Such a law would be immediately found inconstitutional. Yet we carry our cell phones everywhere. If the local police department required us to notify it whenever we made a new friend, the nation would rebel. Yet we notify Facebook.”

One can’t go no-where on the internet, as long as surveillance is its business model. „Our relationship with many of the Internet companied we rely on is not a traditional company-customer relationship ... we’re products those companies sell ... the relationship is more feudal than commercial. The companies are analogous to feudal lords, and we are their vassals, peasants, and – on a bad day – serfs. We are tenant farmers for these companies, working on their land by producing data that they in turn sell for profit. ... we trust the feudal lords to treat us well and protect us from harm.” US is the internet hegemon because it has a larger intelligence budget than the rest of the world combined, because the physical wiring causes the traffic to cross its borders, and because the most popular hardware and software is subject to its laws. Corporate and government interests collide, and technology can be used both ways, as corporate tools for blocking employees from „emailing confidential data can be used by repressive governments for surveillance and censorship.... the same anti-censorship tools that Saudi and Iranian dissidents use to evade their governments can be used by criminals to distribute child porn.” If we are generating so much data and storing it indefinitely, what can we do to control what will be known and used about/against us in the future? The situation can look like Minority Report, mixed with some Orwellian fear and Kafkaeque surrealism: you won’t even know what could be held against you, and maybe you haven’t even done anything yet. According to Schneier (& research), post 9/11 surveillance has already caused self-censorship – a study conducted after the first Snowden articles found that people didn’t want to talk about NSA online, and another poll found that half of Americans have changed what they research because of surveillance. If all laws could have always been enforced through such overwhelming surveillance, then we probably would have never had black rights, women rights, gay rights. The controls we put on the governments that rule over us „need to work not only when the party we approve of leads the government but also when the party we disapprove of does”. Depending on how our data will end up being used, it could influence the way we are treated not only in employment, but also by insurance companies, by banks or by educational institutions (in 2000, Wells Fargo bank created a website to promote home mortgages, its calculator referred white residents to white neighborhoods). And of course, it can be used to manipulate public opinion, by filtering what you are shown. Unfortunately for the US, this is starting to cost it some money: people are fleeing US cloud providers, not buying US equipment and not trusting its companies.  

Schneier makes another, very important, argument: data mining doesn’t work for finding terrorists, although it is collected with this excuse. For advertising, it can be successful even with a large error rate, so it works best when „you’re searching for a well-defined profile, when there are a reasonable number of events per year and when the cost of false alarms is low”.  When billions are wasted on masss surveillance programs, they are not being invested in investigation and emergency response, „tactics that have been proven to work”.  Although attackers have the upper hand, as it is easier to find a vulnerability than it is to patch up all of them, „widespread encryption has the potential to render mass surveillance ineffective and to force eavesdroppers to choose their targets”. This would finally be a step towards security, as having systems with backdoors for governments to get in certainly isn’t safe, despite the NOBUS promise („nobody but us”, a NSA saying for zero-day vulnerabilities that no one else could find or use, of which the US is stockpiling in the hundreds, probably).

Not all is lost, and Schneier urges us to not be fatalists. He writes that „the general principle here is that systems should be designed with the minimum surveillance necessary for them to function, and where surveillance is required they should gather the minimum necessary amount of information and retain it for the shortest time possible”. Secondly, we need transparency in the algorithms that judge us on the basis of our data, from search engines to credit score systems. Ceding power to others is essential for societies to fuction, and for democratic societies, we need „transparency, oversight and accountability”. The first question is – are the rules imposed the correct ones?, and the second – are they being followed? Third, we need laws to protect whitsleblowers (law professor David Ponzen contends that „democracies need to be leaky”, and etnographer danah boyd calls whistleblowing „the civil disobedience of the information age”)  - they provide an extra oversight mechanism. Fourth, we need international agreements that „would recognize a country’s duties don’t entirely stop at its borders”, and protecting foreigner’s privacy is just as important. Fifth, Schneier proposes NSA’s espionage mission to be separated from its surveillance mission – NSA should deal with foreign millitary targets, while the Department of Justice should do targeted and legally permissible surveillance activities. Sixth, we need open spaces on the internet that are not government or corporate controlled, „common-carrier social networking areas that the owners are not allowed to monitor or censor”. Seventh, data controllers should be held accountable, as right now the cost of privacy breaches falls on the people (an idea from law professor Michael Froomkin is requiring agencies to file Privacy Impact Notices, similar to Environmental Impact Reports). Because Schneier writes extensive suggestions for companies, governments and citizens, I might have missed some, however, he leaves us with an important question: „how do we design systems that make use of our data collectively to benefit society as a while, while at the same time protecting people individually?”.

 ps. I’ve also started reading Ferrante’s third book in the Napoletan Novels series, “Those who leave and those who stay”, and I’m checking from time to time “The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us” by Christophe Bonneuil.

[myreadingexperience]

Researching cybersurveillance, I stumbled upon the Citizen Lab, and subsequently upon Deibert’s book, Black Code. First book to have read on Kindle, and there’s irony in this, as the more I read, the more data I produced to be collected and analyzed. 

A few of the main ideas: To start with, code is law. As Marshall McLuhan postulated that the medium is the message and Harold Innis showed the bias of communications, we must understand that instructions encoded in software regulate what we can do. Second, a recent change is the movement away from searching the WWW to a push notifications environment where „information is delivered to us” through apps. Third, while in the beginning the internet seemed like a free place, hard to regulate, right now, many countries use censorship and block Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. Internet censorship went from being regulated – like usual things – through law, to being regulated through code and software, and responsibility is put directly on the service providers. For example, China has a particular way of doing this: it sends back to the user an error message, as if the content itself doesn’t exist (Google found a way around this, suggesting users alternate spellings). We must begin to understand and connect the dots, as users and as citizens: the internet is international, but its cables are everywhere, its central nodes are everywhere – but mostly around the US – and the devices we use are from specific nations – bending to specific national laws. From a lawless place, it has became a place of many, many laws. Fourth, the future is at least partly out of the West’s hands. The growing populations of the rest of the world will have access to the net, along with living in increasing inequality due to climate change and capitalism’s mechanism,  so the question Deibert asks is, what kind of web will they craft? As the author shows, in some countries governments outsource to extra-legal intervention groups to deal with unrurly citizens. Coming back to corporations, Google has started issuing transparency reports, showing the number of requests it has received from governments to censor or remove content, and highlighting those it complied with or turned down (most requests are „other requests”, not issued through a court order). Most companies don’t tell users if their data is asked for by the government. In 2002 and 2004, Chinese government requested information on two dissidents from Yahoo!, who complied. When being sued by the families in the US, the company testified that it was following local law. Skype, as well, uses content filtering for China, and can be intercepted, although it promises end to end encryption. After 9/11, a key point in the cybersurveillance debate, governments felt entitled to more and more of citizen’s information, creating the false tradeoff: privacy vs security. Human Rights Watch found that the UN passed several resolutions urging member states to pass laws that expand government powers to „investigate, arrest, detain, and prosecute individuals at the expense of due process”. With enough data, a Minority Report future isn’t just dystopian fiction anymore – politically inclined individuals can be monitored before they do anything. Researcher Chris Soghoian pointed out that some companies even charge fees for „lawful access”, with automated process. Cybercrime is real, and just like most crime, its structure is knotted in complicated patterns and networks – many „cyberweapons” (spying software, malware for breaking in, or just hiring a black hat to hack someone) are cheap and easy to buy on the internet, and, as Deibert puts it, how can the West condemn the Syrian Electronic Army when it openly markets computer network attack products at trade shows? Besides, when cyberweapons are perceived as clean, there might be „strong pressures to adopt military over diplomatic solutions”.  Technology is multi-puroposed, and the same is used for surveillance of dangerous targets or of peace activists. Hacking used to have a more positive value – „of experimentation and exploration of limits and possibilities”. Technology can be seen not as a thing, but as a craft, inherently political. In the context of our constant connectedness, the increasing restrictions on cyberspace „are alarming”. The closing off of hardware and software and putting on copyright or other laws to diminish access to them are not only barriers to our freedoms, but ultimately to our security as well. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has found laws (in debate – Article 3 of DAAIS in Europe) that limit the publishing of research on security flaws. The denial of access to knowledge is increasing, together with the tools to dismantle it. One solution could take the form of a distributed model: mixture of multiple actors with governance roles, division of control with cooperation and consent, and restraint. Without humans „cyberspace would not exist”. Deibert pushes for a position of joint custodianship: we either degrade cyberspace, or we extend it. The responsibility is inter-generational. 

I also finished Program or be programmed by Rushkoff. It’s a kind of manifesto for the digital age, with ten main “commandments”, which I quite enjoyed - an easy read, fast and recommended for anyone interested in what it means to live online. Rushkoff is a character, writing that “instead of optimizing our machines for humanity ... we are optimizing humans for machinery”. The base for the ten commands are the biases inherent in the technology we use. First, ‘do not always be on’, as machines live beyond time, from decision to decision, while we live in the present, continuously flowing, so, “by becoming “always on”, we surrender time to a technology that knows and needs no such thing”. Second, ‘live in person’, be local, be there, where you are - technology is biased towards distance, non-space, and scaling. Third, ‘you may always choose none of the above’, as technology draws lines that are too simple, categorizing or binary through our lives, we can refuse all options, or label freely, with tags. Fourth, ‘you are never completely right’, because, “thanks to its first three biases, digital technology encourages us to make decisions, make them in a hurry, and make them about things we’ve never seen ourselves up close”. It is “biased towards a reduction of complexity”. Rushkoff stresses that we should opt for a world in which we learn about our technology, not a world in which it learns about us. Fifth, ‘one size does not fit all’, because this hyper-abstracted model of internet business doesn’t work for smaller start-ups. Sixth, ‘be yourself’, because while anonymity can protect you, it can also make people behave irresponsibly, facilitating angry and revengeful mobs. Seventh, ‘do not sell your friends’, exposes the internet’s bias towards connection rather than content, and how businesses are making money off it. Eighth, ‘tell the truth’, “because this will increase our value to others”, and besides, lies don’t last long. Ninth, ‘share, don’t steal’, shows how our belief in open sharing has lead to the current business model based on ads, and how we should support the work we consume directly. Tenth, and most importantly, ‘program or be programmed’, because if you don’t understand the inner workings, or at least the superficial biases of the technology you use, it will bias you towards certain things, and you’ll never know why.  

When I find the time, I plunge into Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, Men without Women - a gift from my cousin. I re-read the first story, which I hear a few years ago at a “Vocea cititorului” meeting - “Drive my car”. This time, I enjoyed it more. I guess I read the book with a kind of nostalgia, but also detachment. Murakami used to be a favorite of mine in high school, and although I’ve always sensed his novels are far better than his short stories, I have a feeling now I wouldn’t like those as much as I did back then. Men without women is a collection of stories about exactly this - lonely men, left by women in one way or another. I think they’re a bit like writing exercises, in which Murakami tries this and that, typical characters and settings of his, on jazz or Beatles music. None of them contain anything too surreal, maybe just a smokey atmosphere. “Yesterday” is about the narrator’s relationship with his peculiar friend and his girlfriend, “The independent Organ” is about a doctor that is constantly in romantic relationships, for short time and without engagement, with married women, “Sheherezade” contains a woman taking care of a man who can’t go out for some mysterious reason and telling him stories of her youth, “Kino” is about a man whose wife cheats on him so he leaves and opens a bar, “Samsa in love” is, well, a bug turned into a man, and “Men without women” is the narrative of a man who gets a phone call about the death of a love from his youth. I most liked “Kino”, for its emotional, fantastic ending, and “Samsa in love”, because it’s such a nice stretch of the imagination, and kind of lovely all in all. 

[myreadingexperience]

”... it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but were alive in a different way, a paler way admittedly, and somewhere darker. But still able to send messages, if only such messages could be recognized and deciphered. People need such stories, Pilar said once, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.” The end of a majestic trilogy, one I adored and always read over summer, in hot weather, imagining the end of the world as Crake made it. The last novel is no disappointment, it's well written and crafted, which I admire so much - the way Atwood chose a different narrative structure for each of the books, a different point of view, and each book had its "thing". MaddAddam's was, besides closing the circle by revealing Zeb's story (and Adam's!) from Toby's point of view, the storytelling to the Crakers, and how they came to learn myth, history and writing (through Toby's friendship and guidance with Blackbeard, a Cracker child). Evil still roams the world, even after Crake's flood, but so does hope.

[myreadingexperience]

I’ve been researching cyberspace & cybersurveillance themes, so I started with two light books: Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet by Julian Assange (a conversation with other cypherpunks) & Supernerds: Conversations with Heroes by Angela Richter (interviews with some of the most important whistleblowers from US history). By far I liked Richter’s more, because it is much more candid and interesting. Assange’s conversations with the others were a bit rough, a bit angry, a bit too dramatic. In comparison, I enjoyed Snowden’s take on the matter (from the last interview with Richter) much more than Assange’s. Although they both seem to have this charming personality and smarts with which to say things that sound very good, I get this feeling that Assange sometimes says something just because it sounds good, while Snowden really looks at the world and what could be done with a kind of kindness or optimism. 

Main themes in Cypherpunks: (1) encryption as a “law of physics”, a possibility of systems that is inherent to them and cannot be beaten by brute force (2) secrecy as a way to maintain power and control over the narrative (”They see the internet like an illness that affects their ability to define reality”) (3) the militarization of cyberspace (surveillance of citizen’s private communications by military agencies) (4) solving surveillance through laws of physics - encryption - or laws of man - democratic rule of law (privacy by policy, privacy by design) (5) the cheapening of cybersurveillance makes bulk collection of data feasible (6) making surveillance visible - a comparison with how we learnt to wash our hands from microbes (7) “three fundamental freedoms: freedom of communication, freedom of movement and freedom of economic interaction” (8) “isn’t the freedom, or privacy, of economic interactions actually more important than the freedom of speech, because economic interactions really underpin the whole structure of society?” (9) the issue of copyright and adapting policy to culture (10)  censorship and being spied upon - the panopticon (11) journalists not being censored anymore, but being sent into debt (12) code is law (13) utopia as multiple utopias - a diversity of systems. 

Main themes in Supernerds: (1) mythical heroes of truth-telling - such as Cassandra, or Prometheus (2) most whistle-blowers are patriots of the US, driven by their belief in the constitution and the fourth amendment (3) surveillance affects the cognition of everyone, almost Foucaludian style (4)  “when art is good, it leaves the viewer more powerful than before they had an interaction with the art” (5) Obama’s war on whistle-blowers and his support of FISA (6) “In a free society, this would be flipped – the powerful would be transparent, the people would have privacy” (7) after 9/11, lots money flows in the intelligence agencies and all kinds of surveillance is permitted, even of US’s own citizens (8) because there is so much money, inside people don’t have incentives to stop (9) too much data is dysfunctional & no terrorist attacks have been stopped thanks to it (10) rule of law is broken, as the government doesn’t act by the constitution and imprisons those who should the citizens its actions (11) “The lesson of 9/11 is not to be afraid of terrorists, because though there was a significant attack, and though it did claim a lot of lives, when we look at it over the fullness of time, we still lose more people to health hazards, to heart attacks, to car accidents, even to bathtub falls, lightning strikes, police officers, than we do to terrorists. We have lost more lives from our response to 9/11, from misguided wars, from invasions that never should have occurred, from the misappropriation of public resources.” (12) the possibility of pre-criminal investigation, stopping crimes before they start (13) how can activists progress society if they are stopped beforehand? ex. votes of women (14) “The government in the United States spends 75 billion dollars a year on intelligence programs. How many lives has that 75 billion dollars every single year saved? How many people in the United States have died from terrorism in the worst year? When you look at September 11th, you’re talking about roughly 3,000 people. How many lives could that 75 billion dollars a year save, using measures that we know help people who are dying for want of food? People who are dying for want of medical care? Ultimately, it comes down to: what’s going to benefit society more? “ 

[myreadingexperience]

There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

Maddaddam, Margaret Atwood (via novelwisdom-blog)

[myreadingexperience]

Cat’s cradle by Kurt Vonnegut: Witty, yes, and it's been a delight to read those Bokonist sayings. However, the episodic structure of the narration made it hard to keep track of, and besides, there were too many characters with too many names. It's a short book, so for full enjoyment it's probably best to read in very few sittings, otherwise it doesn't stand together.