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When police suspected Danny Kyllo, an Oregon man, of growing cannabis in his home they drove to his house with a thermal imaging device to scan it. They found hot pockets in the house, which were used to obtain a search warrant and subsequently bust Kyllo.

Fortunately, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision ruled the scan an unlawful search under the Fourth Amendment, requiring a warrant the police did not obtain. Score one for privacy, but the government is about to have a far more controversial and dangerous tool at its disposal to monitor what’s going on inside your home.

Unlike a thermal imager, this device is already in your home – and you put it there.

How It Works

WiFi is electromagnetic waves in the 2.4 and 5 GHz ranges. It’s the same thing as the light you see, only it can penetrate walls due to its much longer wavelength. Just like light (and echolocation) these waves also reflect off various surfaces and, when reconstructed properly, can be used to create an image.

Development of this technology goes back at least as far as July 2005, where researchers claimed at an IEEE Symposium that they had created an ultra-wideband high-resolution short pulse imaging radar system operating around 10 GHz. The applications for which were explicitly for military and police use, providing them with “enhanced situation awareness.”

A few years later, in 2008, researchers at UC Santa Barbara created an initial approach for imaging with WiFi that they presented at IEEE ACC 2009. A year later they demonstrated the feasibility of this approach.

The Race is On

Sensing the potential of this new surveillance technology, other researchers began piling on. Progress was initially slow but, in 2017, two researchers in Germany demonstrated the ability to do WiFi imaging using techniques borrowed from the field of holography. According to Philipp Holl, an undergrad student and lead study author who worked with Friedemann Reinhard of the Technical University of Munich to develop the new method, “The past two years have seen an explosion of methods for passive Wi-Fi imaging.”

At the time, the technology could only make out rough shapes of things. “If there’s a cup of coffee on a table, you may see something is there, but you couldn’t see the shape,” Holl says, “but you could make out the shape of a person, or a dog on a couch. Really any object that’s more than 4 centimeters in size.”

The Controversy Begins

In 2018 the team at UC Santa Barbara published a paper titled “Et Tu Alexa?” examining the potential threats of this emerging technology. They examined the problem of adversarial WiFi sensing and the risk to privacy resulting from the widespread deployment of wireless devices, which could be used to track your precise physical location, movement, and other physiological properties.

Fortunately, they also propose some countermeasures for defending against such attacks to reduce the quantity and quality of the WiFi signals captured by the attacker, such as Geo-fencing and rate-limiting. These methods are not as effective with IoT devices, though, due to the frequency with which they make transmissions.

The Breakthrough

Up until this point it was necessary to use frequencies higher than commercial WiFi (2.4 and 5 GHz) to achieve decent imaging resolutions. That all changed in February 2019 when a team from Michigan State University published a paper in IEEE Access outlining how they were able to use signals at 5.5 GHz, which matches the 802.11n/ac WiFi protocol, to create a 2-D image of two reflecting spheres and a reflecting X-shaped target, concluding “full 2-D imagery is possible by capturing the WiFi signals present in typical environments.”

Adding AI and Going 3-D

At MobiCom 2020, researchers from the University of Buffalo, presented their WiPose technology, touted as “the first 3-D human pose construction framework using commercial WiFi devices.” This system uses the 2-D imaging technology previously discussed to construct a 3-D avatar of the humans captured by it. The system uses a deep learning model that encodes the prior knowledge of human skeletons in the construction process of the 3-D model.

In 2019, former DARPA contractor Ray Liu launched his first commercial product in the WiFi sensing domain. Pitched as a way of “Making the world safer, healthier, and smarter,” the original military and law enforcement usages mentioned when this technology was born in 2005 were cast aside. The company claims the technology is so accurate that it can sense your breathing using nothing but standard WiFi signals.

In a 2021 company blog, Liu discusses the development of IEEE 802.11bf, a new WiFi protocol, which is aimed at standardizing WiFi imaging across all devices – thus making it easier for companies such as his to exploit compatible wireless networks. Liu was elected to serve as IEEE President for 2022, and the new standard continues to be developed to this day.

Further refinements to the imaging technology itself have been made. In late 2021 another paper was submitted to IEEE outlining how the researchers were able to achieve high-resolution imaging results with commercial WiFi signals using beamforming on the 802.11n/ac protocol.

Ready for Production

The perfect WiFi imaging system may have just been introduced to the world in December 2022, when researchers from Carnegie Mellon University married the latest in WiFi sensing technology to a human form estimation engine known as DensePose.

DensePose is a technology developed by Meta/Facebook, beginning in 2018. It’s very similar to the WiPose system we previously discussed and aims at “mapping all human pixels of an RGB image to the 3D surface of a human body.” The researchers modified DensePose so that, rather than taking an RGB image, it would be compatible with the imagery being produced by state-of-the-art WiFi sensing technologies. The resulting system “can detect the pose of humans in a room based solely on the WiFi signals passing through the environment.”

Big Brother’s New Eyes

It’s telling how the pitch for this technology has pivoted from military and police use to keeping people safe in their own homes. The true purpose of this is obviously for law enforcement, the military, and intelligence agencies. We already live with mass digital surveillance and if you don’t believe that this won’t get incorporated into their plans to monitor everything you do, then you haven’t been paying attention.

Apart from putting CCTV cameras in everyone’s living spaces, this technology offers a comprehensive and supremely surreptitious way of putting eyes in every room of your house and place of work. Indeed, this just may become the norm. With nearly a third of Gen Z favoring the installation of government surveillance cameras in your home, this less-intrusive method may just find even broader support from the brainwashed masses. It will be possible to know where you are in the house and exactly what you’re doing, from sitting on the toilet to making love.

We’ve seen how easily intelligence agencies can get secret warrants to surveil anyone of particular interest. We’ve also seen just how easy it is for someone to become a target for surveillance. You very well might, one day, find your WiFi router and access points feeding imagery to an alphabet agency that didn’t like your social media posts, while armed thugs wait for the perfect moment to execute their next no-knock raid.

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Today’s post is an excerpt from the monthly edition of The Crypto Capitalist Letter for premium subscribers. To learn more about TCC and receive a free copy of The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto, join the Bombthrower list here.

I had a reader ask me about Silvergate Capital Corp. (NYSE: SI). They’re a bank holding company with a lot of exposure to the crypto currency space. I hadn’t yet analyzed them deeply, but I did notice that they recently announced a partnership with Facebook on their DiemUSD stablecoin.

Diem is Facebook’s rebrand of Libra. Libra was a private crypto currency Facebook proposed to launch which in my mind was a transformative event for nation states and central banks. That was the moment when the establishment elites realized that non-state money had arrived and it posed an existential threat to the status quo.

They were able to hold off Facebook’s Libra, for awhile. They fought dirty. US Senators sent straight up extortion letters to members of Facebook’s Libra Consortium threatening to investigate them for ostensible ties to child pornography on Facebook’s platform if they went through with the project. They all dropped out.

My heart didn’t exactly bleed for Facebook, but the incident was instructive. I wrote about it at the time, but I will repeat the salient point here:

Should a gigantic platform like Facebook successfully launch their own digital currency, a person’s Facebook account will become more important in their day-to-day lives than their nation state issued passport. Especially if we’re entering an era of drastically curtailed travel for plebeians. The battle between the US, France, et al and Facebook over Libra was an early round in the struggle between waning Nation States and ascendent Network States.

Facebook kept working on their Libra, first under a wallet program called Novi and now as Diem, and Diem USD will be their stablecoin.  One can only surmise that behind the scenes something has shifted so that Facebook thinks they can proceed with launching a new stablecoin.

This partnership with Silvergate, as well as relocating their Diem Association, which oversees their digital currency projects, from Switzerland back to the United States may be part of that calculus.

There have been some rumblings that the US is losing the Central Bank Digital Currency race and that one way to jumpstart a program would be to partner with a private entity who is already further down the road with it.

Who would be uniquely situated to provide a solution in some manner of public-private partnership? Facebook, for one.

When we think about what Fedcoin could reasonably be expected to do, my guess is:

• Provide the rails for UBI and other entitlement programs
• Be fully programmable (an example is Australia’s cashless Centrelink card which will provide welfare benefits that cannot be spent on booze, cigarettes or gambling)
• Be fully trackable: with everybody walking around with Facebook installed on their smartphone, it’s already baked-in.
• Ubiquitous: There are more Facebook users in the USA (190 million) than had voted in the last election (161 million).

Consider this, what everybody knows from all camps (pro fiat, pro Bitcoin, establishment, anti-establishment, et al), is that the days of the petrodollar are numbered. For an excellent summary of how the current petrodollar regime arose and has been enforced over the past 50 years, listen to “From the Petrodollar to a Bitcoin Standard” with Nic Carter  and Alex Gladstein on a recent What Bitcoin Did episode hosted by Peter McCormick.

As pointed out in that episode, the US has a track record of militarily enforcing USD primacy when countries like Iraq or Libya wanted to sell their oil for some other currency than USD.

What is different between Facebook’s Libra and Facebook’s Diem? Libra was to be backed by a basket of currencies, Diem is a stable coin pegged to USD. US lawmakers moved swiftly to kill Libra in the crib. So far there’s been at least silent assent on Diem.

It may be that the US policymakers  hope that USD stable coins may be the way for the US to preserve its Exorbitant Privilege and extend its run at the helm of a world reserve currency.

(But make no mistake: CBDCs will be pathways to dependancy and poverty by design. The antidote to being trapped in a system constructed to preclude wealth and capital formation are crypto-currencies. That’s our focus at The Crypto Capitalist, and you can read the overall thesis here).

Update:

After I sent this out an astute reader from the Bombthrower list forwarded me this piece citing Diem’s chief economist Christian Catalini’s talk at the Consensys event last week. Catalini said there have been “intense discussions” with the Fed, but at the end of the day, Diem plans to be an interim step only, and will “fade out” when the Fed’s release their own coin. I’ll believe that bit, when I see it.

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A few months ago I was on the Lite Show (Litecoin) podcast, we got to talking about Facebook’s forthcoming crypto currency, which hadn’t been named yet. I mused then that it would totally suck for the entire crypto-currency space to have come this far with Bitcoin, et al only to have Facebook swoop in and take all the marbles. (In marketing parlance this maneuver is called  “grabbing the microphone”)

Then Facebook announced their digital currency, it’s Libra, and it was met with immediate resistance. But the pushback, didn’t come from where one might expect it, from within the crypto community. There was plenty of commentary about it to be sure, but nobody from within the crypto space was saying that Libra had to be stopped.

No, the immediate pushback came from various tendrils of myriad states and government entities, including:

• Maxine Waters, immediately calling for Facebook to cease all work on Libra
• French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire warning against Libra becoming a sovereign currency
• and most recently the G7 (at least recent when I last worked on this post), the G7 forming a task force to address the issues Libra raises, and urging the “highest possible level of regulation” on it,

This instant pushback against Libra seems even more intense than any initial government condemnations against Bitcoin itself when it started to gain traction over the initial ramp up. Perhaps there are good reasons for this, such as:

• In the rear-view mirror, it’s possible that governments now view giving Bitcoin some room to run was a mistake, and it opened a Pandora’s box (from their perspective) which would be unable to be contained, and
• Facebook provides an identifiable target – governments can actually pinpoint them and (for now) regulate or threaten to regulate them. They can’t target Satoshi Nakamoto or an open source repository of computer source code.

I mused in my dayjob’s #AxisOfEasy newsletter #102  that we seem to be arriving in a scenario depicted in the Mr Robot TV series, where the  crypto-currency Bitcoin and a private, corporate sponsored e-coin dual for supremacy in the aftermath of a hacker induced economic collapse (In the series, Libra’s role is depicted as the fictionalized “Evilcoin” with Bitcoin starring as itself. The economic collapse also turns out to be a Trojan horse operation launched by China).

The only thing missing from today’s reality, as I write this, is the economic collapse part, but with stock markets at all-time highs, and the Fed cutting rates again in this ostensibly great economy, clueful observers the world over sense that something is about to give. Tangentially the stealth bull in precious metals and resurgence of Bitcoin, even in the face of Libra, all point toward the idea that not all of these economic indicators can be right at the same time. That means at some point a disorderly readjustment may occur.

Welcome to a New World Order. We call it “Snow Crash”

Snow Crash was the Neal Stephenson near-future thriller set against a backdrop in which national governments found themselves set back on their heels, competing against privatized sovereignties across a wide spectrum ranging from a multi-national pizza conglomerate to the global Mafia.

Why didn’t Bitcoin tank when Libra was announced? If one is to accept the superficial premise that Facebook will indeed swoop in and capture the digital currency space after Bitcoin softened the ground for them, the announcement should have had a similar effect to when Amazon announced it was buying Whole Foods, and grocers everywhere tanked hard. That didn’t happen, why not?

By contrast, Bitcoin has more or less held steady since the announcement, after giving back some ground after an initial spike higher post-Libra. In any case, there was no instantaneous death crash compared to when Amazon entered the grocery space.

The reason, I think, is because Facebook’s Libra isn’t challenging Bitcoin. Facebook, perhaps without even being aware of it themselves, is doing the same thing Bitcoin and crypto-currencies did when they emerged out of a financial crisis spawned by central bank manipulation and a currency regime so rigged as to destroy all market signalling capabilities: it challenged the prevailing economic order, and that order is the scaffolding of the nation state as we know it.

In other words, these crypto and digital currencies are ushering in a new era of competitive economic sovereignty, and with it, the decline of the hegemony of nation states.

One of the best books I’ve ever read that anticipated this disruptive shift in the nature of sovereignty was “The Sovereign Individual” by James Dale Davidson and the late Lord William Rees-Mogg (father of Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was once reportedly on the short list to replace https://bombthrower.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/shutterstock_1030471843-e1551983495127-1.jpg Carney to head the BoE).

According to that book: Nation states arose by capturing escalating returns on violence and force. The transition into the gunpowder era ushered in the rise of nationhood, and increasing returns on violence, right up until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The fall of Eastern block, they argue, was not an ultimate victory of the West over Communism, as Francis Fukuyama asserted in The End of History. Instead they posited it more as the death of a fraternal twin, that of nation statehood.

As the returns on violence decreased as can be witnessed by every military disaster the US has undertaken since WWII, the other twin is now sclerotic and withering. So what does have increasing returns now? It isn’t violence anymore. It’s information. The shift from one to the other means that the nature of the monetary system will also shift.

The old order monetary system was built on Bretton Woods – a global reserve currency backed by US military imperialism. That system is going away and everybody knows it.

Money does not issue forth from power, recall my prior citations of Stephen Zarlenga: who controls the money system, controls society. Power emanates from money. Nation states and central banks assumed they would retain control of the money system indefinitely. They assumed that they could continue to manipulate the money supply to further their own interests (Cantillon Effect driven benefits) and there was nothing anybody would ever be able to do about it.

But Revolution has a way of lobbing disruptive, explosive technologies from the periphery where nobody is expecting an asteroid to originate. Did the major music labels expect to be reinvented by Apple? Did the Hollywood studios expect to be elbowed aside by Netflix and Amazon? And did the nation states and central bankers think disruption would encroach and fundamentally transform all aspects of society but stop at the demarcation point of sovereignty and money? Why yes, yes they did.

I have said repeatedly – the incumbent system has overreached itself, and out of that necessity came Bitcoin and crypto-currencies. This was essentially the market re-asserting itself in the face of endless manipulation.

Money has evolved, and is now reinventing itself for the next ascendant wave of increasing returns: information. Next, sovereignty will reconfigure itself to adjust to the new format of money. This is the opening that Bitcoin opened up, and Facebook is the among the first to make a move into it. And that’s why ensconced governments are so up in arms about it. They recognize direct, real competition to their own authority and relevance. The nation state isn’t going away any time soon, but the rise of the platforms isn’t going to be stopped, either.

In the future, your digital single-sign-on credentials that you use to access various online platforms (or the one platform from which you derive your entire sustenance and livelihood) will be as important to you, perhaps eventually more so, than your government issued passport.

Governments want to regulate how the Age of the Platforms will rise, which is similar to how the Papacy once deigned to guide and arbitrate royal succession. But over time this will reverse and it will be the Platforms that increasingly set the terms for nation states. Given the accelerated pace things move at today, this process will not play out over centuries, the way the transition from feudalism to nation states did, but over decades, even years in some places.

Today nobody raises an eyebrow that the Swiss National Bank is Apple’s largest shareholder by printing francs and buying shares. What happens tomorrow, when Facebook issues some Libra, sells them for USD to pay their taxes? Or to settle one of the myriad fines levied, like Papal encyclicals of yesteryear, against these upstarts? My guess is governments will scream foul, “only we can print value ex nihilo!”.

But the reality is that anybody can create their own monetary instruments provided they can find a market to ascribe value to it. Money has always changed with the times and arisen privately, the states then adapt, co-opting whatever emerges as money at the earliest possible opportunity. Looking back on today that may be what Libra is to Bitcoin. The equivalent of a Federal Reserve of Digital Currencies (the Libra Founders Association looks hauntingly like a modern, cyber analog to the member banks of the Fed).

The Real Battle of the Future

One might think that this means the battle of our times will be between the falling (failing) nation states and the rising Platform challengers, but that’s not the way I see it. In many cases nationhood and platform will effectively merge, witness China, where tech giants like Google and IBM’s Open Power Foundation is helping the Chinese government build out their Sesame Credit total surveillance platform.

In other situations, platforms may prevail, if Facebook or some other technology upstart is successful in their machinations they may become more relevant than the State in many jurisdictions. They may effectively become the de facto state in some areas.

In both these cases the defining characteristic will be centralization and consolidation of power and authority.

Against this, will be the ascendency of decentralized, autonomous sovereignties based on crypto-currency models and the original ethos of Bitcoin. Where Western Capitalism vs Communism was the defining question of the now ending age of industrial nation states, the fraternal twins of the future may be that of platforms vs protocols. The former centralized, consolidated, authoritarian as anticipated by Fukuyama and fleshed out today in The New Digital Age, Google’s manifesto penned by Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt:

We collaborated first as writers of a memo to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about lessons learned in Iraq, and thereafter as friends. We share a worldview about the potential of technology platforms, and their inherent power, and this informs all of the work we do, both within Google and outside it. We believe that modern technology platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, are even more powerful than most people realize, and our future world will be profoundly altered by their adoption and successfulness in societies everywherer.

and the latter decentralized and anarcho-capitalist, anticipated by The Sovereign Individual and realized more now in George Gilder’s Life after Google

However it plays out, it will all be very cyberpunk.

(read on Medium)

(A long overdue review of Jaron Laniers’ “10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now“)

In 1978 a former public relations and advertising exec, Jerry Mander wrote “Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television”. Mander in essence argued that “the problems with television are inherent in the medium and technology itself, and thus cannot be reformed.” In his preface (“The Belly of the Beast”), Mander spoke of:

“learn[ing] that it is possible to speak through media directly into people’s heads and then, like some otherworldly magician, leave images inside that can cause people to do what they might otherwise never have thought to do.”

That was television. At the time it was the killer app of mass manipulation in the tradition of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud who created the art and science of “public relations” in the first place. As I’ve observed in a much earlier writing, it was Bernays who was among the first figures in modernity to fully grasp the the power of using the technology of the day to create all-pervasive narratives to shape public opinion. He embraced the term “propaganda”:

“Today, a new reaction has set in. The minority has discovered a powerful help in subjecting majorities. It has been found possible so to mold the mind of the masses that they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction. In the present structure of society, this practice is inevitable. Whatever of social importance is done today, whether in politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture, charity, education, or other fields, must be done with the help of propaganda. Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”

Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising, slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids, and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all received identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief of doctrine.”

— Edward Bernays, Propaganda

I quote this at length because it marks the far end of a continuum, reaching back to 1928. When Bernays originally put these words to paper, he described how a widespread sociological phenomenon, that of universal literacy, led to unexpected consequences. It was used by those who were given to a shrewder assessment of the burgeoning landscape to leverage their new understanding in order to manipulate, rather than emancipate the masses. Sound familiar?

Years later television emerged to bring these techniques of manipulation to a broadcast audience, in essence taking Bernays propaganda to an industrial level.

When that happened, Mander outlined his 4 areas of concern:

1. TV mediates our experience
2. TV colonizes our experience
3. The effects TV has on the human being
4. The inherent biases of television.

Compared to social media today, TV was a blunt instrument. As Mander came to realize:

“Because so many of us were confusing television experience with direct experience of the world, we were not noticing that experience itself was being unified to the single behavior of watching television. Switching from channel to channel, believing that a sports program was a significantly different experience from a police program or news of an African war, all 80 million viewers were sitting separately in dark rooms engaged in exactly the same activity at the same time: watching television.”

He called it “The Unification of Experience”. Even though we had (in the words of Pink Floyd), “13 channels of shit on the TV to choose from”, all of those channels were mass broadcasting uniform messages to a mass audience.

Continuing in the vein of “Who Owns The Future” and “You Are Not A Gadget”, Lanier departs from where Mander left off, and builds from his base of unassailable technology credibility to issue a dire warning:

The centralized, ad-driven business model inherent to most tech behemoths today is harmful to us individually and as a society; and it’s a dead-end economically.

On today’s end of the continuum (which I maintain started with Bernays), an important shift has occurred. Now, with our infinite scrolls, engineered dopamine hits, and highly personalized data streams, it’s no longer about separating us into isolation booths and then hitting all of us with uniform messaging. Today we are all terminally unique, we get custom feeds, and they aren’t designed to make us all think the same thing as much as they are all designed to make each of us do something specific that somebody else wants us to do. In Lanier’s view, now we’re all being individually manipulated by third parties.

Titling his book as a nod to Mander, he came up with 10 arguments:

Argument 1: You are losing your free-will
Argument 2: Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of the times
Argument 3: Social Media is making you into an asshole
Argument 4: Social Media is undermining truth
Argument 5: Social media is making what you say meaningless
Argument 6: Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy
Argument 7: Social media is making you unhappy
Argument 8: Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity
Argument 9: Social media is making politics impossible
Argument 10: Social media hates your soul

What started with what Bernays called “propaganda” and Mander called “mediation”, Lanier calls “BUMMER”. BUMMER is the social media machine and its accompanying economic model and he uses the mnemonic ABCDEF to fully describe the BUMMER machine:

A is for Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy
B is for Butting into everyone’s lives
C is for Cramming content down people’s throats
D is for Directing people’s behaviour in the sneakiest way possible
E is for Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everyone else
F is for Fake mobs and Faker society

What Lanier helps us understand is that this much vaunted micro-targeted world we now live in comes with some unforseen (or intentional!) consequences. We all end up alone, trapped inside these bespoke echo chambers.

A practical example of this was driven home to me the other day, when I was talking with an entrepreneur/CEO friend who was visiting from out of town:

As we were catching up the conversation turned to shared misery over the state of online discourse. While we were ruminating over the low signal-to-noise ratio the net had devolved into: flashmobs, post-truth, #fakenews and a phenomenon I personally call “hyper-moralization” it suddenly emerged that we were both saying the exact same things and levelling identical criticisms and observations, but we were doing it about diametric opposites of the political spectrum! He was talking about lunatic fringe Conservatives and I was talking about militant progressives.

Ever since the 2016 election (a fight I didn’t have a dog in being both a Canadian and a Libertarian) I frequently lamented that in social media, it was becoming impossible to remain a centrist or a moderate and whenever I was attacked for not embracing a position I felt too extreme in one direction, I tended to be repelled in the opposite direction.

I suspect this is happening to all of us.

(This may be a good time to mention the PEW research data I blogged about on Guerrilla-Capitalism recently, that the political/ideological centre has effectively collapsed, with all participants being pushed to one extreme or the other and what the ramifications of that are).

But what makes these attacks all this possible? What pushes people into a ideological siege mentality? Usually, Facebook and Twitter. Mobs.

Lanier observes that social media has an ability to flip an internal switch which is present in all of us, from individuals he allegorically termed “solitary wolves” into “packs”.

As individuals, we can have differences of opinions, like my friend and I, laughing at the irony that we were saying the exact same thing about the exact opposite camps. We’re still friends. But move that conversation over to Facebook, or Twitter, where roving bands of trolls glom onto the dialog and throw civil discourse out the window and then it morphs into something else entirely.

“When people act as solitary wolves, then each person is in a unique position in society and thinks in a unique way. Another example: Democratic elections are a genuine commingling of ideas, and have historically helped societies find paths forward despite controversy, but only so long as people are switched to Solitary. Democracy fails when the switch is set to Pack. Tribal voting, personality cults, and authoritarianism are the politics of the Pack setting.”

What I found interesting was Lanier’s choice of the word “pack”. There are many different types of groupings, and people have been examining  the dynamics of group behaviour as far back as Charle’s Mackay’s Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), or Gustav Lebon’s “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1895). As illuminating as those books were to their times regarding financial bubbles, panics and hysteria’s, they don’t capture the full spectrum of crowd behaviour in the modern age.

To do that you need Elias Canetti’s “Crowds and Power”, which in my experience is the definitive work on this subject. Canetti wrote entire chapters on the four different types of “packs” that he identified and what we see online, in Lanier’s BUMMER machine are specifically hunting packs, being aggregated and mobilized into “baiting crowds”:

“The baiting crowd forms with reference to a quickly attainable goal. That goal is widely known and clearly marked, and it is also near. This crowd is out for killing and it knows whom it wants to kill. It heads for this goal with unique determination and cannot be cheated of it. The proclaiming of the goal, the spreading about of who it is that is to perish, is enough to make the crowd form. The concentration on killing is of a special kind of unsurpassed intensity. Everyone wants to participate; everyone strikes a blow and, in order to do this, punches as near as he can to the victim. If he cannot hit himself, he wants to see others hit him. Every arm is thrust out as if they all belong to the same creature…. “

When I read this passage again after all these years, it gave me goosebumps. Canetti of course was referring to literal, fatal mob justice but this dynamic is so similar to what we see every day now on social media it kind of freaked me out.

Because Facebook, and Twitter, well they don’t just reflect this behaviour on their platforms, they optimize for it. And what makes it so attractive, Canetti elaborates:

One important reason for the rapid growth of the baiting crowd is that there is no risk involved. There is no risk because the crowd have immense superiority on their side The victim can do nothing to them. He is either bound or in-flight, and cannot hit back; in his defencelessness he is victim only. Also he has been made over to them for destruction; he is destined for it and thus no-one need fear the sanction… It is so easy and everything happens so quickly that people have to hurry to get there in time. The speed, elation and conviction of a baiting crowd is something uncanny. It is the excitement of blind men who are blindest when they suddenly think they can see.

In the online parallel of this, nobody is literally killed (most of the time), but careers are ended, companies are boycotted, people are outed, or just plain smeared, and doxxed. The assault may not be fatal, but the victims are routinely destroyed; always under a veneer of mob justice. The pack members are safely insulated from their role in the attack by the distance of the network, joining in from the safety of mom’s basement or whilst sipping a all-soy, fair-trade latté in The Safe Space Café.

Yet, I have to admit that as I was writing this I still wound up spending some time on Facebook, as I am in the habit of doing over my morning coffee. I found myself having second thoughts about the entire point of my review, and by extension, Lanier’s book. After all, I took part in a half-decently thoughtful discussion thread about Tesla’s suing my home province of Ontario over the ending of EV subsidies, and then I discovered the Hellacopters, a Swedish guitar-rock band of the 90’s – 00’s that I completely missed during my bohemian / musician days. Rock on, social media can’t be all bad, right?

In fact while I was reading “10 Arguments” I was also concurrently reading Joshua Cooper Ramos’ “The Seventh Sense”. Both books hit me at a deep level. But before I had finished them both I found myself wondering if Lanier himself was overreacting to the negative aspects of social media, while Ramos’ book seemed to be more dispassionately describing how cognizance of network architectures in general would be a required life skill going forward. So who was right?

After I had finished both books, and was able to ponder their substance, I came to the conclusion that they both were. Even without social networks in their present form, the Internet is here to stay. Networks are in the process of becoming the defining characteristic of our social order now.

My own take on all this is that the fundamental struggle now is not between left or right politically or rich/poor class warfare or even between any other factions or identities you care to use; sure all those tensions remain but the defining characteristic of the fault lines and power struggles going forward will be the organizational tension between centralization and top-down control vs decentralization and “edge-in” control.

To that end, social media may have had such a pernicious effect on our society because the incumbent platforms have spiked their own top-down silos right through the meaty parts of an erstwhile decentralized internet.

If it bleeds, it leads

On social media, the BUMMER content has an ability to crowd out the meaningful, thoughtful or poignant content. In much the same way journalist Eric Pooles coined the famous phrase “if it bleeds, it leads” in his 1989 New York Post piece, the modern day equivalent on social media is not that it shocks or terrifies you, it just needs to push your buttons: if it offends, it trends, or as Lanier laments:

“If owning everyone’s attention by making the world terrifying happens to be what earns the most money, then that is what will happen, even if it means bad actors are amplified”

This goes back to something else I talked about in another recent Guerrilla-Capitalism post, Charlie Munger’s famous observation: “Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome”, and this is an important undercurrent throughout 10 Arguments.

“Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results”.

If we were all to follow Lanier’s advice and delete all our social media accounts right now, we would instantly be free from the centralized, top-down, surveillance driven algos that are deciding what we see in our feeds, and are incentivized to make us “click” as much as possible.

On these platforms we’re all just monkeys, they can dangle bananas or they can shock and appall us.

As it stands now the data is telling them that the best way to drive engagement is to appeal to our lowest common denominators, to push us into polarized extremes and to get us hooked on the little dopamine hits their platforms are engineered to deliver.

Reading Lanier’s book gave me that uncomfortable sense of recognition… particularly around “Argument Three”. I get into b/s political and ideological arguments …with friends, with clients. It’s beyond a waste of time, it’s actually impeding my life goals, degrading my relationships even  worse, alienating customers.

Alas, I probably won’t delete my social media accounts just yet. Will you?

Practical Steps

As I mentioned in “Should You Delete Your Facebook Page?”, if we work in technology or own businesses that rely on it, it may not be tenable to completely delete our social media accounts. But what we can do is maintain a certain level of self-awareness around our social media usage and try to govern ourselves accordingly.

So lately I have been trying to no longer take part in ideological discussions on social media. No more snarky rebuttals on anybody else’s posts, no more complaining about things I don’t have any control over anyway. If it’s something I can control then I should just keep my mouth shut and deal with it.

My mantra lately has been “Hope that your competitors are wasting their time arguing politics and culture wars on Facebook. You have work to do”.

To that end, do:

• Use the social media platforms as antennae, not megaphones. We can harness social media to see which way the wind blows, not to spit into it.
• Delete Facebook from the mobile device: I still use Twitter to keep a pulse of things but we also have that automated somewhat so I should be able to delete Twitter from my phone too.
• Run social media in your desktop browser for specific tasks, and then close the tab when that task is done. Turn off all notifications. Catch up next time you log in.
• Use social media to spread your wares. Write something? Release a song? Issue a press release? Then use your social media channels to get the word out, not to argue idiotic ideological dogma.
• Use it to communicate with your friends and family, I notice that certain people I only end up talking with over one platform or another. In this context it’s less social media as much as an agnostic messaging channel. (Just be aware it’s being snooped six ways ’til Sunday)

(And as Troy Maclure would say), “the do not do’s”

• Don’t use social media to attack anybody, any reason. Just don’t. Even if they have it coming. Just remember that the Streisand effect takes youroutrage and turns it to their advantage, so just do yourself a favour and don’t do them any favours by simply minding your own business.
• Don’t pile onto attacks. Somebody wants to boycott some company because their CFO’s half-sister voted for the Satanist, let them. Meanwhile you decide for yourself what you will do and why. If you aren’t playing by your own game plan then you’re a pawn in somebody else’s.
• Don’t doxx anybody. Those go wrong more often than anything. We’re actually considering adding a new “no doxxing” rule to the easyDNS Plain English Terms of Service.
• Don’t shame, don’t smear. Imagine being on the receiving end yourself and if you wouldn’t like it, don’t do it. One of my first, near mystical experiences that started my love affair with the internet occurred in the early 90’s when I came across an all-text style ezine called “Scream Baby”. It was awesome. I think the guy’s name was Dave Smith. He once wrote, “never, ever forget, that whatever you’re about to type into that keyboard, is going to a human being on the other end”.

What is hopeful about Lanier’s book and what makes it especially relevant is that it not only discusses the problems created by social media, it does also put forward solutions. It helps us imagine a world where there are other business models than monetizing free services via advertising.

“We have enshrined the belief that the only way to finance a connection between two people is through a third party who is paying to manipulate them”

But there are other ways, many other ways.

“In some alternative universe — a universe we must build if we are to survive —there will be both convenience of an app like Uber and a sustainable social and economic fabric in which a lot of people build security with dignity.

I think this is already happening. Systems like the Brave browser, which I recently switched to and will be blogging about next, are capturing this ethos. Decentralized social media platforms like Mastedon hold promise and I think are gaining inertia.

The 800lb gorillas like Facebook and Twitter may have already hit their apogee (in fact the book I read after “10 Arguments”, George Gilders “Life After Google” explores this in depth, another great read I’ll tell you about soon). In the meantime, get this book, read it and  govern yourself accordingly.

In 1994 Wired magazine ran a short story entitled “Hack the spew” . This was back when Wired was actually cutting edge and not the insufferable Silicon Valley stroke job it became after Conde Naste acquired it. In it our antihero “Stark” finds himself inexplicably recruited as a kind of data scout, looking for viable consumer trends emerging from the fully immersive, all encompassing data field known as “The Spew”.

“When a schmo buys something on the I-way it goes into his Profile, and if it happens to be something that he recently saw advertised there, we call that interesting, and when he uses the I-way to phone his friends and family, we Profile Auditors can navigate his social web out to a gazillion fractal iterations, the friends of his friends of his friends of his friends, what they buy and what they watch and if there’s a correlation.”

The Spew of course, was the near future analogy of where the internet was headed, and when I went looking to link to it for this post, the piece turned out to be written by none other than Neal Stephenson. That means I read “Hack The Spew” and it made an impression on me before I even knew who Stephenson was or perhaps was on his way to becoming. Few would argue that Stephenson has a gift for seeing the general ambience of our oncoming future.  Cryptonomiconuncannily anticipated the impetus toward crypto-currencies; the current systemic dysfunction of national sovereignty worldwide was foretold in Snow Crash; so it follows that all this will likely culminate in something that resembles The Diamond Age.

Today, “The Spew” is not equivalent to the Internet itself, but it is more accurately analogous to say the social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, especially when combined with the twin monopolies of Google and Amazon, collectively are: The Spew.

It is like a global garbage pile of digital flotsam and jetsam, over which peasants scurry around and scour, looking for some morsel here, a crumb there, which can be monetized. If a trend or a trait is detected, even better. Those can be aggregated, syndicated, federated, even rehypothecated and at scale that can yield staggering financial payoffs and perhaps, even steer the course the history.

At least that’s the narrative since the Cambridge Analytica scandal blew up in Facebook’s …face. After a long string of successive privacy fails (a.k.a a pattern of abuse?) this time feels different, as if the chickens are finally coming home to roost for Facebook.

Cambridge Analytica is not unique

Ever heard of Kareem Serageldin? Probably not.

To date, he is the only banker to have been sent to prison in connection with the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis for his role in issuing fraudulent mortgage-backed securities (at least outside of Iceland). To be sure, he was a fall guy, a token sacrifice to demonstrate contrition for what was a systemic, institutionalized effort to inflate a bubble whose implosion nearly crashed the entire global financial system.

In this case while Facebook attempted to throw water on this crisis by ceremonially banishing Cambridge Analytica from its system, the longstanding pattern of abuse remains, and is perhaps now, finally, awareness of that is reaching critical mass with the public:

• Facebook scraped your call data from Android phones for years (iPhone’s are also vulnerable to privacy intrusions, see below).
• Facebook enables features such as “racial profiling” to advertisers
• Election rigging? Facebook approached major Australian political parties to micro target voters in 2016 election  (the Liberals turned them down, Labour took them up)
• And while there were key differences in the way data was used, (not to mention more informed consent) the 2012 Obama re-election campaign used the same data mining features and accessed the same data as the Cambridge Analytica app
• In fact it may be veritably baked into their ecosystem to such a degree that it is almost impossible to develop and create an app on Facebook that doesn’t harvest your data

https://bombthrower.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/shutterstock_1030471843-e1551983495127-1.jpg Zuckerberg has issued yet another “Mea Culpa” on CNN, and Facebook will take out full page ads in newspapers to apologize to the public. Yet, by now, “Groveling Zuckerberg apologies” are just part of the Facebook playbook, as Liz Gannes observed back in 2011, after Facebook had just settled with the US Federal Trade Commission over still more privacy violations:

“At this point, Facebook CEO https://bombthrower.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/shutterstock_1030471843-e1551983495127-1.jpg Zuckerberg’s pattern on privacy is clear. Launch new stuff that pushes the boundaries of what people consider comfortable. Apologize and assure users that they control their information, but rarely pull back entirely, and usually reintroduce similar features at a later date when people seem more ready for it.”

It becomes clear, as Futurist (and easyDNS member) Jesse Hirsh made this point on Steve Pakin’s “The Agenda” over the weekend: “Facebook ships with all privacy enhanced settings disabled” – further, my personal findings are that they use obfuscation to make it harder to disable data sharing settings. You have to jump through hoops to do it.

Should you #deleteFacebook?

WhatsApp founder Brian Acton, who became a billionaire when Facebook bought his company hasn’t let that dissuade him from telling the world what he thinks of all this:

Should you? Should easyDNS? Here’s my take on it:

If you are a business: keep your page but don’t be reliant on it

There is a difference between a business who uses Facebook as an antennae to provide additional ways to stay in touch with customers and those whose business model is completely dependent on Facebook. We started our Facebook page when we were pulled into the Wikileaks Crisis as a way to stay in touch with our customers while that entire fiasco played out. We maintain it today for the same reason, and people do frequently contact us through that page looking for support.

But some businesses are completely reliant on Facebook to survive. I subscribe to James Schramko’s Superfast Business Podcast. A recent episode had the founder of Dogtington Post on it, a site I frequented myself in my early days of being a dog owner (our family Husky).

You have to credit the guy with dominating his niche but I couldn’t help wondering what would happen to his business if something substantial changed at Facebook, or if some of his readers would feel “used” if they understood some of the myriad tactics some of these sites routinely use, via Facebook, to drive their own affiliate revenues.

It brings to mind 2 things:

1. My late friend and one of the original easyDNS customers Atul Chitnis who was among the first to observe “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”
2. My own maxim, which I introduced in the Out Of The Cave Overview that there are two kinds of companies, those that feed on customer ignorance compared to those who prosper via customer savvy . I think it is obvious to all, at least now, that Facebook needs customer ignorance to survive.

YMMV on your personal pages

I read a long time ago “don’t put anything on the internet that you wouldn’t want to read in the newspapers the next day”, and that has served me well as a guide over the years.

My basic assumption is that everything I post to Facebook, including “private” messages are wide open, being harvested, data mined, aggregated, used to target and retarget ads to me, build a profile and otherwise compile a comprehensive dossier, even stuff I’ve “deleted”. (If you’ve ever watched “Terms and Conditions May Apply” you’ll know that Facebook actually keeps the stuff you “delete”).

So I never say anything on Facebook or put anything on there that is remotely confidential or proprietary. It’s strictly a water cooler. I like it because it enabled me to reconnect with various groups of my friends and peers over the years, from the kids I grew up and went to high school  with in Galt, Ontario to the misfits from the London underground music scene in college, to the tech entrepreneurs from the mid-90’s on.

Would I use it to send anything to anybody that I  found myself hoping that it’s never going to leak or be used against me? Uh, no. That would be terribly naive.

So to that end, I’ll probably keep my personal Facebook page, even though I sometimes catch myself spending too much time arguing stupid pointless crap (like politics) with people I’d otherwise never associate with. But that’s a self-discipline issue, not a data soveriengty issue (although it is now also common knowledge that Facebook deliberately codes the platform itself to be as addictive as possible)

All that said…

At least #deleteFacebook from your mobile devices

Facebook harvests your contact lists from your mobile devices (don’t believe me, go here)
There are people in that list that I do not know. There are phone numbers from people who work for my competitors in there. My daughter’s (age 11) cell phone number is in there.

You can “delete” all this here: (but as you know Facebook never actually deletes anything).

Then when you go to “delete” all your contacts you get a message

“We won’t be able to tell you when your friends start using Messenger if you delete all your uploaded contact info.”

They say that like it’s a bad thing. But there is also this curious sentence:

“If you have Continuous Uploading turned on in the Messenger app, your contact info will be uploaded again the next time the app syncs with Facebook servers.”

I had deleted the Facebook mobile app from my phone a long time ago. I kept messenger installed because sometimes customers would contact easyDNS or Zoneedit via our Facebook pages for support.

But Writing this I wanted to turn off “continuous uploading” in the app. Despite this Facebook help article not explaining how to do it, while this third party article from 2016 did.

It turned out I had already disabled continuous uploading but I was surprised to find that the messenger app had defaulted permission to access my phone’s microphone.

After this exercise I simply deleted the Messenger app from my phone as well.

Personal Data Sovereignty is an idea whose time has come

I think it would be safe to assume, that barring some widespread public pushback (such as the one happening right now), this is The New Normal.

People who may have been complacently oblivious to the fact that their social network was pimping them as mere data points are realizing that they don’t like it as they have their faces rubbed in one data breach and privacy violation after another.

Given the outrages of Equifax, Facebook et al, we may have arrived at the crossroads and we may only get this choice once.

Do we push back and say “NO”, I own my own data, I control who gets it and what happens with it. ?

Or, do we calm down after a few days, or weeks and then it’s business as usual. Next year Zuck will apologize for some other new breach of trust ahead of his 2020 presidential bid, while us “shmoes” go ahead and vote for him.