Secrets and Democracy

I know the timely issue is to make a response about Syria (I am opposed to military action for all the reasons that everyone has been), or, perhaps, to make fun of the new iphone while admitting quietly that I like pretty colors and the thumb print thing is cool.

But instead, I am going to talk about secrets and democracy. This is, of course, inspired by the NSA papers, and the broader issues of American and British pushback against journalism meant to undermine secrecy. I mean of course issues surrounding Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, the harassing of Glenn Greenwald's romantic partner and journalistic partner. I also mean the gag order against the activist journalist who could go to prison for over a century because of linking to information. And just today Johns Hopkins asked a professor to take down a blog post because he might have linked to classified material, which might be a crime (?!). I would like to add while I oppose the legal harassing, and the prosecutorial overreach in these incidents, such tools are far too common with prosecutors. It is just usually targeted at people flying well below our news radar.

Anyway, all of this brings me to the issue of secrets and democracy. I want to begin with a longish passage from Daniel Ellsberg's memoir Secrets. Ellsberg, of course, is the man who released the pentagon papers. This story takes place as Henry Kissinger, then just starting to work in government, comes to ask Ellsberg for advice.

 "Henry, there's something I would like to tell you, for what it's worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You've been a consultant for a long time, and you've dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you're about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.
"I've had a number of these myself, and I've known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn't previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
"First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess. In particular, you'll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn't know about and didn't know they had, and you'll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
"You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you've started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn't have it, and you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't....and that all those other people are fools.
"Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you'll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn't tell you, it's often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.
"In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: 'What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?' And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I've seen this with my superiors, my colleagues....and with myself.
"You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours."
....Kissinger hadn't interrupted this long warning. As I've said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn't take it as patronizing, as I'd feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn't have the clearances yet. (237-238)

As this makes clear, the state of national secrecy has a corrosive effect on the very idea of democracy. In this sense, there is no way to be taken seriously in discussions of policy, unless you already know the secrets. When we were discussing Wikileaks, I compared to this Philip K. Dick's novel The Simulacra.
The Simulacra tells the story of a totalitarian society ruled and centralized around a secret. As is described in the novel:

Any failure would have betrayed to the Bes [the underclass] the secret, the Geheimnis, which distinguished the elite, the establishment of the United States of Europe and America; their possession of one or more secrets made them into Geheimnisträger, bearers of the secret, rather than Befehlsträger, mere carry-outers of instruction. (p. 34)

Like the law with Kafka, the secret forms the very constitutive nature of society for Dick. And the society we are living in is not just Kafkaesque, but also Dickesque. Secret laws and lawful secrets drive to divide our society in the ways that Ellsberg understood: those who know the secrets, and those the knowers have to manipulate into caring out their instructions.

Beware the Cyborgs? On Augmented Reality Glasses and related matters.

By now you have all heard about Google Glass, probably more than you wish. For those of you who don't know what I mean, here is a decent overview. And of course, there are plenty of developers for augmented reality goggles, not just Google Glass. Anyway, there is already a movement to try to ban goggle glasses in certain public spaces, (and despite what Eric Schmidt says, these concerns are clearly not just from people "afraid of the future"). I really suggest reading and following the blog, Stop the Cybrogs. As you can see, the blog is about more than just wearable computing and augmented reality glasses, but more broadly, about the way that certain Big Data and computerizations are producing certain realities. This Ars Technica article/interview is really useful for an overview.

What is at stake here isn't any sort of traditional romanticization of privacy, but rather, a very different question is at stake. As Adam from StC has put it, google glasses has the potential to "destroys having multiple identities" and that "You're never going to see a stranger as a stranger again." Remember the time when we all thought the internet was going to make it so we got to be all genderqueer deconstructionist deleuzian radicals? Good times. But rather than the internet making it so that we have so many identities, we are all beginning to confront the reality that instead the internet is also good for fixing Macro and Molar identities. Or, as the StC puts it:

In the past interacting in the physical world was “private by default” and “public through effort” whereas, on the Internet, the reverse is true: What we do is “public by default” and “private through effort.”
Our point is that with wearable’s and the internet of things the physical world also becomes “public by default” and “private through effort.” unless we actively work to replace friction by law and by norms.

Clearly, this isn't some sort of wide-reaching critique of the internet, or a claim that there are not radical possibilities and realities of the internet, or anything of the sort. And, I know for most of us, this is all old, old hat. But yet, I think it is important to remember that Donna Haraway might have gotten this one really, really wrong. Rather than cyborgs being fundamentally hybrid beings, they are vectors of the the digitalization of everyday life. There is something about the singular identity and the removal of the stranger that is philosophically dense here.


Also, I dunno, it is part of my protracted silence for a while on this blog. I went on the job market, and I was encouraged by many to minimize my digital footprint (I did some stuff for things I said as an undergrad and early grad student, but couldn't bring myself to delete and remove most of my extensive online self). Who knows if that was or was not a good idea. But somehow even in the supposed pro-free speech and free thinking world of academia, I thought it was a good idea to curate my digital existence and enter a period of digital silence.

Wikileaks and Philip K. Dick

I don't have much to say about wikileaks, actually. Here are some thoughts, that are not definite and generally jumbled.

One of the common objections to wikileaks is that the approach is random. The documents leaked seem scattered, unconnected, leaked without any sort of thought as to why or for what reason. Maybe, but that all seems a better description of our current national security culture, one which is obsessed with creating more and more things top secret. Often without rhyme or reason. I think we can agree that such an attitude is dangerous and problematic.
This also reminds me of the novel by Philip K. Dick, The Simulacra. The Simulacra tells the story of a totalitarian society ruled and centralized around a secret. As is described in the novel:

Any failure would have betrayed to the Bes [the underclass] the secret, the Geheimnis, which distinguished the elite, the establishment of the United States of Europe and America; their possession of one or more secrets made them into Geheimnisträger, bearers of the secret, rather than Befehlsträger, mere carry-outers of instruction. (p. 34)

One of the reasons that national security culture of making everything top secret is so problematic is that divides our society, those who get to know the secrets, and those who don't. Those who do get to be the ones who set our policy, get listened to, have opinions that manage to shape and influence our foreign policy. Those who don't know the secrets, don't get to do that. We can't even be listened to, because we those who know the secrets know we don't, and therefore know we cannot know enough to be listened to. This splits foreign policy off from democracy, off from reasoned debate and input of the demos. The obvious example here would be the Iraq war, which was authorized based on all the secrets that Congress knew, all the secrets we didn't know and therefore we could not be listened on (though in fine Philip K. Dick fashion, those secrets turned out to be false, as well. And there was a secret within the secret, the secret that there was no secret). I am not sure yet entirely how I feel on wikileaks. I am not sure if I yet believe it is the right way to go about pushing back on these issues, but I certainly understand it and am sympathetic.

On using plagiarism detection services

Recently Dr. J and Joshua Miller had a insightful and vigorous conversation on the use of plagiarism detection services (the most famous being turnitin). Please see the conversations here, here, here, and here (and make sure you read comments).

I use to hold almost identically the same views of Dr. J (and I should add I've never used turnitin or any of its variants). However, I found Miller's arguments surprisingly convincing (and generally fit in with my current views of plagiarism). But before I go any further, let me say for the present conversation that I am bracketing the question of honor, and if honor codes exist in tension with services like turnitin (I think Dr. J may be right on this last point). Now, I am not bracketing this conversation because I don't think it is unimportant, but rather that not all of us work at institutions with honor codes or the same honor codes (for example, when I was at Oglethorpe, I had no proactive obligation to turn in other people). So, I think the question of honor codes might require a separate conversation, and one that can be held to the specific nature of those codes.

I have had two basic objections to services like turnitin: (1) The first is that I feel it violates the student's control over her own intellectual work product. In other words, it allows a corporation to extract surplus value from the student's work, without her being able to control that at all. And, (2) that is makes me into a cop, and one of those people who come to view all students with suspicion, etc. On the first point, I am still wary. This is not a fear that my students are legally having their intellectual property taken advantage of, but rather one of extracting surplus value to support a corporation rather they want to or not. On the other hand, there are any number of assignments that I think would be fine that would still force students into these issues. Any assignment that required them to post videos on youtube, or maintain a blog, or any number of other assignments about interacting with websites that use advertising and participation to extract value from the students' work. In other words, I think this is still a problem from turnitin, and I think we need to broadly be more concerned about the ways certain assignments force students to support corporations, but as long as we all agree assignments on youtube are legit, I think there is no reason to uniquely condemn turnitin. This brings us to the second point, which is the major one from Dr. J.

I'm not a cop, and I am never a fan of the way there seems a desire to turn educators into police. For a while I thought I would teach high school, but I have seen increasingly the pressure put on high school teachers to spend more time exercising disciplinary power than educating. Or, indeed, that education seems utterly interchangeable with disciplinary power. Foucault got it right, "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?"(D&P, p. 228). Now, what is so compelling from Miller's account is that plagiarism disappeared. Not, that plagiarists (whatever that being is) got caught, punished, given their just desserts. Rather, he stopped having to deal with plagiarism. If we agree that plagiarism is a problem, that is makes our jobs harder and hurts the student education. In other words, if we agree that plagiarism is something that we would have to confront if we discovered it (and I think we all agree with this), turnitin means I have to be less of a cop. I have to wield less juridical power. In this sense, turnitin becomes something like spell check, something that fixes a problem and comes to be an aid to students. I think this turns back Dr. J's arguments about universal belief in everyone cheating. I don't think everyone is cheating, but I always believe that there is a chance that a student could accidentally not cite something correctly through error, laziness, or ignorance. I no longer have to figure out if I am dealing with cheating or mistakes. It is a service that helps the students know what they need to cite, and it helps me not to have to punish students.
Now, Dr. J admits in comments of some of the posts that she thinks that the service that allows students to make changes before submitting reports to the professors are not as problematic. But, she feels that this isn't the primary function of turnitin and other services. I can't speak to that. I can say that professors looking to catch students and punish them, are obviously people who enjoy their position of power. I think that is clearly problematic, and pretty anti-educational. However, I don't see how using the plagiarism detection services in the way Miller describes is anything but a net gain (again, except for times with an explicit honor code, where I am less clear on the situation).

Is there some flaw in my thoughts here? As I said, this is a recent change in my outlook. And moreover, I have never used these services so there might be something obvious I am overlooking here.

Copyright as performative contradiction

So, one of the weird things I didn't talk about with Hardt & Negri's Commonwealth is that the book is, of course, copyrighted. Hundreds of pages, many of which deal explicitly with the need to move beyond property relations, especially in forms of affective and cognitive labor. That these forms of 'biopolitical labor' belong to the common, and by releasing that we only enrich each other and that labor by allowing it to stay in the common.

Now, I understand that publishing companies have a lot more to do with copyrighting than authors' wishes. But unless there is a back story I am unaware of (and if there is, please let me know) I sorta think that authors at the stature of Hardt and Negri could freely choose to publish with a smaller company without copyright or some sort of creative commons copyright without hurting their careers.

This clearly isn't the only case of copyright as performative contradiction, but it is one of most egregious I have seen.

More on academic napster, and inhumanities update.

First, Calarco has a new response up on Heidegger. I really suggest everyone read these responses, Matt has been both a straight up guy, and comes across even better in his responses than he did in his book.
Also, Greg has a new post up on the Levinas chapter. Go, read, comment. Agamben chapter post done by yours truly is up for early next week.

On a different note, G.H. has an interesting rejoinder on academic piracy. He isn't defending intellectual property, or the need to defend large publishers. But it seems that Open Court is a small, but quality, publisher gig. I don't know how many of these exist, honestly. But I can understand the feeling that ripping those people off might not be the best course of action. My belief is that short term, scans of books only increase the sells of books (I think that is the point Kvond was making in comments on the last post). However, I also admit that as book readers become more common, that very well could change. I don't have a good answer to that.

Lastly, I had gotten backlogged with emails, but I think I have answered them all. If I missed yours, let me know.

academic napster

Harman has a post about people searching stuff about him and being informed by academia.edu (which, I have to admit, is really weird when people search for me, considering there is no legitimate reason to do searches with my name. Crazy students, I presume).

Anyway, he seems shocked that someone is looking for a download of his Tool-Being, and furthermore seems surprised that there is a "napster" of books. Such distribution channels are only growing, and as things like the kindle make reading pdfs about as annoying as reading them printed off, I think we will see this sort of thing growing.

As at least some of you know, I use to moderate a forum on the internet that was for a while at the forefront of scanning and putting academic manuscripts online (done originally, if you want to know, to benefit mostly high school students). Most of the real action has, however, migrated over to gigapedia and scribd.

I know there is a real push by many in the academic blogosphere to see a significant increase in things like creative commons and copylefting instead of copyrighting material. I have to say I see no problem with taking this further with academic pirating. But that is just the type of crazy marxist I happen to be.

EDIT: Btw, GH, I just looked through the usual suspects and didn't find a copy of your tool-being on the pirate websites. Not sure if you should be sad or happy.