Used to Be Nobody Died on the Internet... RIP Bartcop

Word came yesterday that one of the pioneers in the online liberal/progressive activist community died on March 5, in Tulsa.

Terry Coppage, aka "Bartcop" was hailed and reviled and adored and condemned far and wide beginning at a time when there barely was an internet, and online communities, especially of the not-far-enough leftish-wing sort -- were practically unknown.

Bartcop.com was an original and a necessary tonic against the ridiculous resurgence of rightist populism, corporate subversion of democracy, and the bizarre and bewildering media tilt toward ever more rightist propaganda.

He told it like it was, and when he did, he made those who saw his skewerings and insults laugh out loud and roll on the floor.

I can't say exactly when I first stumbled on Bartcop online but it must have been around the time of or shortly after Clinton's impeachment pageant, for I can recall some of the illustrations that Bartcop put up ridiculing and satirizing the proceedings. And by the time of the Bushevik installation in the White House, the site was in full cry and full glory.

Good times.

And Media Whores Online, the Horse.

When I heard yesterday Bartcop was dead, of flu and pneumonia and leukemia, it hit hard, like a gut-punch. Damn!

And I'm still broken up about it.

Used to be nobody died on the internet. This one is missed...

Link to a random issue: #702

Let Us Reason Together -- the Panopticon (5)

The Panopticon was Jeremy Bentham's 18th Century enlightenment notion of how it would be possible for a very limited staff of keepers to control a large population of inmates by making it possible for one keeper to look into any cell simply by turning around. The beauty of it was that the inmates would never know whether and when they were being watched, and that fact would work with innate human nature to enforce proper behavior within the prison. Rebellions and uprisings wouldn't occur. They couldn't. None could be organized without detection. There would be less need for brutality and the usual cruelties prisoners were subjected to. Harmony would reign.

Well, there was more to it than that, of course, but the general idea of the All Seeing Panopticon seemed perfectly rational at the time, and in due time, versions of Bentham's vision were tried with varying results. Part of the rationale for the Panopticon, in addition to the ability to watch prisoners at will, was the isolation of inmates, each to their own cell, rather than being held en masse in cages in the dungeons. A way to control unruly types through isolation was long known and understood, but employing it in general was considered too expensive. But the Panopticon made isolation economically reasonable because it reduced prison staffing requirements substantially.

Ultimately it was understood more or less widely that the simplest way to keep prisoners and reduce rebellions was to hold them in isolation and keep watch on them in ways they could never fully know while severely punishing any infraction of increasingly arbitrary and draconian rules.

Harmony would reign.

Then it was realized that the same principals that underlay the Panopticon for Prisons could be applied to the general population, thus curbing non-conformity and rebellion among the Rabble. The only problem was that there was no technology to do it efficiently and broadly until very recently. But even with more or less inefficient and primitive tactics, the principles of the Panopticon were employed in all sorts of social and political situations The watched actually become the watchmen and women and enforce conformity of mind and body without the necessity for an overly large and intrusive surveillance apparatus. Sure enough, it worked.

Until it didn't.

Harmony reigned temporarily, sometimes for quite a long time, and then it broke down.

Studies have been going on ever since to figure out why that breakdown occurred and to ensure that it never happens again, at least never again in that way. Our Chinese friends may be furthest along in figuring out how to suppress rebellion and enforce conformity on a more permanent basis. But that remains to be seen. As China undergoes as thorough a remaking of its social economy as it has ever endured, rebellion is constant. At the same time, there seems to be a level of relative harmony and peace, in the midst of fierce competition, that is unprecedented. From the perspective of many social engineers, China is obviously doing something very right. But what it is and exactly how they are doing it isn't entirely clear.

The recent hoo-hah around the world about the NSA and to a lesser extent (much lesser extent) about the more or less pervasive corporate and lower-level law enforcement surveillance of entire populations is related directly to the notion of the Panopticon and the principles of its operation. What we have learned is that the keepers now have the technology to keep an eye on every one of us essentially all the time or whenever they want, and we can never know for certain whether we are being watched at any particular moment. Thus our behavior is controlled in theory and largely in fact just by our knowing that we can be watched and any deviation from accepted norms in our behavior noted -- and can be used against us at any time our keepers choose. Even if we don't necessarily deviate from the norm (whatever that is declared to be at any given time), patterns of behavior can be manipulated to create false "deviations" which can then be utilized for prosecution or persecution -- or to sell you something you neither want nor need but which your "pattern" suggests you are susceptible to purchasing with the right persuasion.

It's a wonderful thing from the point of view of those who make and operate these surveillance/marketing/and population control systems. As for the general public, what I've taken to calling the Rabble, it's not so wonderful, but as long as it is not too intrusive, it seems, most people don't much mind that it is going on. Many may actually appreciate it on a visceral level.

Think Facebook, Twitter, and the endless devices of our modern world which make instant communications possible and inevitable and which for the most part provide the user with no privacy at all. Anyone can observe anyone else, and many, many people want to be observed in practically every aspect of their lives pretty much continuously. They can easily get their wish, more easily than ever before in human history. Nearly the entire world can vicariously participate in nearly anyone's life through modern technology.

That includes governments and their private sector sponsors. (Increasingly, "government" and "corporate" are distinctions without a difference as they subsume one another.)

The Panopticon principle as it is today is a versatile and useful tool of population control employed by corporate-governments on a broader scale than ever before in history. Because so many people are eager to share their lives with others through social media and the like, it is remarkably easy to get people in general to adopt technology which utilizes the Panopticon principle for control.

The notion that one can have privacy under the circumstances is absurd. You can't. No matter what you do, you cannot opt out of the technology of observation and surveillance that is built in to the devices, hardware and software of our lives, and even the loudest "privacy advocates" know this full well. There is no "secret place" within our devices where we can whisper secrets to one another without being overheard, any more than inmates in Bentham's Panopticon Prison could ever be sure they were unobserved.

The Revelations we've been exposed to the past few months are the details of a surveillance regime that is pretty much universal at this point and cannot be undone.

Where did the idea that electronic communications were somehow private come from?

It came from marketing. Marketing which obscured the facts.

One was sold the idea of encryption and secure communications, but it was never real in the sense that your online communications were ever truly private  and inaccessible to interested parties -- as we're finding out with more and more detail. A few adepts may have been able to temporarily secure and privatize their own communications, but for most internet users, there never was a time when the bulk of communications couldn't be accessed either by the carriers or by governments whenever and however desired. And there's never been a time that I was aware of that carriers weren't eager to sell their bulk information on their customers to government. The architecture of the internet is purpose-designed for this very practice, as most of us once knew but seem to have forgotten.

The ability to surveil the activities of users online -- constantly and automatically -- is one of the key industry ideals and motivations, both to be able to sell something to them and to be able to keep tabs on their potentials for disruption and rebellion (what's generally called "criminality.")

This has always been true of the intranets that gave birth to the internet -- which itself has never ever been either "free" or "private." Marketing myths that have long been sold to the public promise otherwise, of course, but they are simply false and always have been.

The notion of "privacy" itself is actually a recent social development that is in many ways tied to marketing ideas of the early 20th Century ("Blame Bernays.")  What I think the idea of universal privacy and the right to privacy came out of was the understanding that the Overclass of the 19th and early 20th centuries used their position to live private lives out of the view of the Rabble and more importantly to develop products and policies in secret from the public, policies and products which were then imposed often by main force, without consultation with or approval by the public. The idea was that if the public didn't know (at all or very much) about how their Betters lived their lives and what was being planned, they wouldn't be able to object or rebel before the policy was instituted, and they could be induced to admire rather than object to the lives of their Betters.

The idea of "privacy" as a general matter turned that understanding of what was being done to the public by the Overclass on its head by proposing a general right for everyone to the same sort of private lives their Betters had long enjoyed.

That's where I think the idea of "privacy" as it is commonly understood in the western world came from. It was heavily marketed as something desirable and necessary to a full and rewarding life -- because Our Betters had it. And you want to be like them, don't you?

Which is not to say that personal space of some sort ("A Room of One's Own" as it were) has not always been with us. It is the fetishization of privacy as the defining characteristic of what it means to be "human" that simply never existed before very recent times, and for most people, it doesn't compute at all.

Most societies exist under forms of formal and informal surveillance. The discovery that Our Own (Exceptional) Society is also under surveillance, and that our corporate-government is a -- or perhaps the -- leading purveyor and employer of surveillance technology is much less of a surprise than our media is making it out to be. We knew, but we made less of it, for the most part, than apparently we are supposed to now that we really know.

Yet there is no plan or movement to reduce or eliminate mass surveillance, quite the opposite. Instead, we are seeing any number of calls to restrict surveillance activities of government while leaving in place or even expanding corporate surveillance -- on the false premise that corporate surveillance is benign. It is not. It is extraordinarily invasive and potentially more dangerous to individual liberty ("") than anything the government might be able to do. Which is of course why corporate surveillance gets a pass.

The current drive for online privacy has many components, of course. One of them is intended to make it difficult or impossible for government to have access to certain aspects of one's life online, akin to the constitutional restrictions placed on government regarding reasonable search and seizure of one's home, papers, and effects requiring a warrant issued by a competent court before any such action can be taken. This is the Fourth Amendment restriction -- which unfortunately has been so riddled with holes and exceptions that it's all but moot in today's world. If some court actually wants to return the 4th to something akin to its original intent, I'm all for it, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Meanwhile, it's hard to imagine real online privacy unless the whole architecture of the internet is reconfigured to provide it, and I don't see that happening any time soon, either. Well, at least not on the "free" internet that most of us use.

There could well be another, "secure" internet established for use by "members," say by subscription -- and I'm not so naive to imagine such a thing doesn't already exist in some respects, I'm just noodling for the moment. This is where I see the "privacy" movement (such as it is) headed. We'll have a two-tier "public access" internet, part of which is "free" -- in that use does not require payment (whereas access still will) and which is essentially open to corporate-government surveillance, and there will be another, more costly, internet (parts of which already exist) that is not quite so open -- though still not entirely secure -- for use by those who choose what we might call a higher level of service, and there will be a multiplicity of proprietary, highly secure, internets not available or accessible to the public at all, which will be used by the High and the Mighty. All of these things are essentially already in place, they just need some tweaking to become the standard.

When the Snowden Thing first broke, Naomi Wolf expressed some reservations about it based on her personal knowledge of whistleblowers and how they had approached their duties and actions in the past. The Snowden Thing was a distinct outlier compared to previous episodes of whistleblowing. She noodled for a bit wondering why it might be so, and she suggested that there might be an ulterior reason for exposing the doings of the NSA in the way it was being done: when people know they are being watched -- or rather, can be watched at will -- they tend to modify their behavior, "conform" in a word, almost instinctively. Letting people know that the NSA was "watching" them was, she thought, a useful way to ensure conformity. It's based on human psychology and the principles behind the Panopticon.

Snowden partisans immediately denounced and smeared Wolf for daring to raise questions about the true nature of the Snowden Thing. It was done in a manner that formed the template for denouncing and smearing anyone who expressed reservations about Snowden's motives or authenticity. These denunciations are a form of propaganda -- quite obvious to anyone who has made a study of propaganda and its effects -- a form that was raised to practically an art form by previous totalitarian regimes (Stalin, Hitler, Mao...) and it's effective, at least for a time.

And then it isn't.

SOPA, PIPA and The Megaupload Thing

Well, whoever has been put in charge of riling up the online masses certainly managed a threepeat this week what with the shutdown and blackouts of various sections of the interwebs in protest against the online piracy bills sailing through Congress and the quite dramatic seizure and shutdown of Megaupload and the arrest of a number of its luminaries in New Zealand followed by Anonymous disrupting the web-presence of the DoJ, FBI, and various parasitical entertainment corporations.

All in a week's online fun, isn't it?

I haven't followed all the intricacies of the online piracy bills, so I won't address them directly, but it seems to me that if the DoJ can command foreign agents (not just in New Zealand, apparently) to round up whomever they designate, and can on its own and in collaboration with others seize whatever pelf they choose in whatever amounts they can find, on accusation alone, and, further, can destroy one of the most popular websites in the world, again on accusation alone, then the bills in Congress are simply redundant. The Government already has the power to do whatever they please, apparently at the command of certain entertainment conglomerates, and there's nothing you can do about it.

That seems to be the "message" being sent here to all and sundry, far and wide.

Your internet operation exists on sufferance alone.

I used Megaupload infrequently but occasionally, because I could sometimes find things there that I couldn't find anywhere else, not even from corporate sources. This is the value of this kind of file sharing. People have stuff that you may be looking for -- or related to what you are looking for -- and they are able and willing to share it through sites like Megaupload, much as a neighbor or library might have done prior to the advent of the Internet.

This is not "piracy" by any stretch of the imagination.

I'm so old, I remember a time before the Internet and all its filesharing sites and the controversies surrounding them. It wasn't as easy as it is now to do independent research or to find interesting diversions from research. But it was certainly possible, nonetheless, and copyright issues rarely arose.

Imagine, if you will, a newsstand in the Bygone Era. They still exist in a somewhat truncated form. There was one in San Francisco I visited frequently when I lived there in the 1970's; it had a vast array of periodicals and publications, from all over the world, and I would sometimes stay in there for hours browsing the racks, reading freely from whatever caught my eye or interested me. I would usually buy one or two periodicals if I wanted to keep particular articles at hand -- I still have some of them -- but most of them I just put back on the shelf, as did pretty much every other customer.

I'm looking at one of my bookshelves as I write this, and I'm remembering where some of these books came from. Some were purchased at that news stand in San Francisco back in those days, some were books given to me by relatives or friends well before or after that, some were purchased second hand for 50 cents, some were mail-order, some are college texts, and so on. In other words, they have been acquired over decades from all kinds of sources, and some of them are now fairly rare and difficult to come by.

Some were purchased at standard or discount retail, but many were not. Quite a few were not purchased by me at all. They were purchased by someone else and given to me. Or I bought them for a few pennies at a thrift store or from a discard bookrack on the street or at a library sale. In other words, the copyright holder was only paid once, if at all, for these books. And at a library or newsstand, I could read anything on the shelves without paying a fee to the copyright holder.

I could share any of the copyright material in my possession -- no matter how I acquired it -- with anyone at any time without running the risk of arrest or seizure for copyright violation, and the copyright holder had no right to payment when I did so.

What I couldn't and didn't do was claim someone else's literary or artistic work as my own, and I certainly never tried to profit from someone else's literary or artistic work. But I could if I wanted to -- without violating copyright.

I own a lot of paintings and books, some of which have a market value well beyond the price I may (or someone may) have paid for them originally. I may sell those items for whatever I can get for them in the market, and assuming a profit in the sale, that profit is mine, not the copyright holder's or the original artist's.

I may never have paid the copyright holder or artist for these books and paintings, but I can profit from them freely -- except that I cannot legally claim copyrighted literary or artistic work as having been created by me if it wasn't. And I wouldn't do that anyway.

In addition, anyone who wishes and who I give access to can view any goddamn thing on my shelves they want to, and if I let them, they can have it for whatever purpose they choose -- without payment to me or to the original copyright holder.

The same is true of my entire recorded music collection, all the 78's, 45s, the 33 1/3rds, all the CDs, all the DVDs. No matter how I acquired them, in other words, anyone I give access to can listen to them. They can watch any movie I have on tape or DVD. It's no violation of copyright, nor is it even remotely piracy, to do so.

What I can't do -- and wouldn't do -- is republish copyrighted works as if I owned rights to them. I can pass on and resell books and other copyrighted material I own, but I cannot print copies of copyrighted books and sell them or make new recordings of copyrighted music or videos without a license to do so.

Since the advent of the InterTubes, however, some copyright holders have decided that every view by every viewer on the Internet must be paid for. The informal or formal sharing such as has long been done in homes and libraries is somehow piracy when it is done on the Internet. Same with the selling of material: you can sell a copyrighted book or recording on the Internet through eBay or whathaveyou, but apparently you cannot charge to view or listen to a copyrighted book or recording on the Internet, nor apparently can you make it available to view or listen to over the internet for free, nor even link to it in some cases, unless you have a license without being accused of piracy.

This situation is absurd.

From what I know of Megaupload and other similar sites, the site provided a platform for people to share with others all sorts of copyrighted and other material that they had access to, for free or at a very small charge (for faster speed not content.) To me, this is exactly what I can do with printed and recorded material in my home, any time I want, and without having my property seized for doing so.

Somehow, back in the Old Days Before the Internet, copyright holders managed to get by without charging every viewer or reader or listener every time they looked, read or listened to a copyright work, or by so restricting access to copyrighted material that it couldn't even be referred to without a license (as has been the case with AP news stories from time to time). They managed to survive even though purchasers of their works could do anything they wanted with them -- including re-sell for a profit -- without owing the copyright holder a damn thing. They even survived the advent of public libraries, book fairs, reading circles and so on. How did they do it?

But now, provide a platform for people to easily share copyright material on the Internet and you'll be subjected to arbitrary arrest and seizure of all your property, goods, and chattel. Download some copyright material via this platform and you might be subject to criminal prosecution yourself.

This is copyright control gone crazy.

I realize that the argument is that filesharing through services like Megaupload is akin to unlicensed republishing, since the work can be distributed widely rather than passed on in individual copies (that someone purchased at some point) and that such distribution is thought to diminish the value copyright holders derive from their product. But many lines of evidence show that's not the case. The wider the distribution, the more familiar the creator/author's work becomes to a far wider audience, and that can easily lead to a much higher value than it otherwise might. Many creator/authors are actually in favor of Megaupload and other file sharing sites because they do allow works and their creators to become much more widely known than they otherwise might. The ease with which one can gain access to the work is the key.

It might be "unlicensed republishing" if someone is literally pirating and making money off the work, but for the most part, they're not. Filesharing is free or very low cost to users. The works being distributed are generally (though not always) attributed appropriately. Those who make money off filesharing make money off the service itself or off of advertising, not off "unlicensed republishing" of copyrighted work. They are not stealing anything from copyright holders, they are in many cases enhancing the ability of copyright holders to make even more money off their works. This is the newstand and lending library model in hyperdrive. Copyright holders should love it.

The gross authoritarianism of the SOPA/PIPA/Megaupload Thing is its most troubling aspect to date. What was done to Megaupload and its people I think was meant to terrorize those who engage in "unlicensed" anything. The implication being you're next. And there's nothing you can do about it. The US Government can go anywhere in the world and do anything they want to you, and they will.

They don't need SOPA and they don't need PIPA; they'll just do it, and you are powerless in the face of such determination. They can and will seize everything you own. They can and will shut down your websites and deprive you of a livelihood. You can do nothing about it. And they will do this on behalf of an increasingly mindless corporate sector that seeks not simply profit but endless revenues by coercion, compulsion -- and government enforcement.

And people wonder why there is a revolt under way...



[Note: I left out any discussion of the file storage aspects of Megaupload, and the loss of that storage seems to be the factor that is currently raising the most ire among users, since file sharing is still possible through other sites. A lot of large files that were being kept at Megaupload so as to free other space are now gone, and most of these stored files were never available for more than very limited and usually in-house sharing. In some cases, valuable proprietary files -- copyright material owned by the user -- is now inaccessible because of the disabling of Megaupload in its entirety. Depending on exactly what has been lost -- and by whom -- this situation could have extraordinary repercussions.]

Random Comment On the Egypt Thing

"All Mubarak would have to do to make the protests stop is turn the Internet back ON."

That's rude.

But there is a ring of truth to it, nonetheless.

As many have pointed out over the years, the Internet, for all the positive things it has to offer, has been one of the most effective means of preventing protests, uprisings, and revolutions, especially in the United States.