Vint Cerf sees his invention reflected on Black Mirror
npr.org
npr.org
> ... in retrospect, some of the decisions his team made seem hopelessly naive, especially for a bunch of geniuses.
> They made it possible to surf the Internet anonymously — unlike a telephone, you don't have a unique number that announces who you are. We know how that turned out. People with less lofty ambitions than Cerf used that loophole for cybercrime, international espionage and online harassment.
The primary bad actors on the internet are not individuals exploiting anonymity.
Clearly NPR and myself have very different views on what makes the Internet what it is.
Also, I love me some Vint Cerf - and his contributions have unquestionably been massive - but no one person invented the Internet. Please let's leave the cult of personality for the "unwashed masses" as NPR calls them.
Sure, a letter takes longer to arrive than a TCP/IP packet but you have the same basic understanding that sovereignty of individual signatory states must not interfere with the Network's ability to move data between peers. Dumb network, smart endpoints. The local user pays and everything works out in the end. And so on.
And if you had to pick someone, it would probably be someone like Licklider, [1] given that the ARPANET pre-dated TCP/IP. But, as you say, singling out any one person is pretty silly in any case.
I see it more as Vint Cerf being instrumental in the creation of the Internet, and Tim-Berners Lee of the world-wide web.
Now, if any one person were to be credited for the creation of the Internet as a whole, that honour would undoubtedly go to Al Gore.
Exhibit A: https://goo.gl/X8D3yb
https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt
Here's an excerpt from the first paragraphs:
Al Gore and the Internet
By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
Specifically because Gore has been a supporter of science in general as a politician.
Makes me sad to think that if a Supreme Court decision had gone another way, or Florida had had a different ballot, then the US would have ended up with a technocrat in office and probably not invading Iraq. Missed opportunities...
I don't think Al Gore claimed to have literally invented the Internet, and believed that was the gag this whole time.
Have people been walking around thinking he actually believed that this whole time?
I like to think that a bunch of people worked on a bunch of technologies which together became "The Internet".
Other notable people are Robert Metcalfe, David Boggs, Robert Taylor, Charles Herzfeld, Douglas Engelbart, ...
Was there shitposting then?
Oh yes. Shitposting galore.
I can feel the age getting at my bones.
I had a Google recruiter use the exact same phrase to me (and like you I flinched).
Yes. It's embarrassing. NPR favors that gonzo folksy editorial style over attempting to appear impartial.
> The primary bad actors on the internet are not individuals exploiting anonymity.
"international espionage" are not 'individuals'.
Exactly, but that example still shows up as part of "people abusing anonymity".
After all, the article gives us "unlike a telephone, you don't have a unique number that announces who you are" - judging by that line and the chosen examples of online misbehavior, shouldn't we expect telephone scams to be nonexistent?
Still, worse than IP addresses are IMEI numbers, on your person frequently, as you move from place to place, trackable in crowds, and from aircraft overhead.
For quite a while, there was a race between those seeking free long distance and companies trying to stop them.
Landlines may have been unique identifiers in common usage, but they weren't identifiable when someone was seeking to misbehave. Which is exactly the problem with the metaphor.
Vint Cerf and the guy from Black Mirror were super interesting though! It would have been a better report with more direct audio from their interviews.
Brooker ("the guy from Black Mirror") is kind of a cynical jerk, but he's always been really prescient as well as super funny.
Watch Nathan Barley some time if you get the chance, and keep in mind that it's 13 years old at this point. (Don't know how other stuff like Dead Set or Brass Eye holds up).
He also used to do a weekly wipe show (sort of a Last Week Tonight before Last Week Tonight), and later a yearly wipe, but he seems to have abandoned those after 2016. I also always read any op-ed he writes in the Guardian as they're generally insightful (and funny).
I can imagine, if someone is primarily concerned with the free expression of ideas, then individuals exploiting anonymity to harass people are actually pretty bad. There are huge swaths of public opinion that simply don't show up on the internet because they're the kinds of opinions internet bullies tend not to like. That's a big loss to free speech.
Anonymity enables people to speak without fear of repercussion. Possibly having an anonymous account being called some names by other anonymous individuals does not really compare to the possible consequences of making unpopular statements when your traceable identity is connected to what is said. So on the same note if somebody is concerned enough to decide to not speak, even anonymously, for fear of anonymous messages from others - would they really be confident enough to then state such things with their name and identity attached to them? Ultimately I think the positive value gained by people being able express themselves positively and anonymously far outweighs the negative cost of people stating intentionally malicious things under the same guise of anonymity.
You see anonymous speech as a hindrance to the free exchange of idea's, where from my view of the world where you have people in many nations persecuted for their speech, where you have outrage mobs that use their collective outrage to get people fired or removed from organizations, employment, events over their "controversial" speech, where you have protests over "wrong think" speakers... in this world I see anonymous speech is required for the free exchange of idea's
I wonder how the founding of the United States would have changed if the Authors of some of the most important papers and commentaries where disallowed from using pseudonyms when their letters where published in the popular press. Would they have self censored or been less than forthcoming with their thoughts...
This tactic is not new. But in the context of media, it has really taken root, and it's become so incredibly destructive that I am not certain that there is a workaround for this problem; and I feel as if the very foundations of our modern civilization are under existential threat, as a result. And from my point of view, I'm honestly not pushing hyperbole. The Socratic method has been rendered almost completely useless.
I've got a soft-spot in my heart for our Founding Fathers and how they accomplished their goals of Liberation from the British Monarchy.
I'm virulently opposed to the methods of the Mercers, the Kochs, Brietbart, their various operatives, LLC's, think-tanks, and affiliated networks of organizations who seem to be driving towards destroying our country and turning it into a feudal thugocracy.
And TBH: I would never post something like this using my real name, because it sounds like crazy tin-foil hattery, and I value my professional reputation.
This doesn't require some edgy 'right to be bigoted' claim here, either. I'm thinking about people in Turkey (or Germany!) mocking Erdogan safely. Or doctors who advocate for legal euthanasia, and worry they'd lose their jobs doing it under their real name. Or cult escapees fearing harassment - internet anonymity has done more to combat Scientology than a dozen governments combined.
I believe anonymity has both effects, which leaves me frustrated by watching people toss out single examples of good and bad consequences as though they settle the argument. I'm not sure how you could possibly gather enough data to assess the net effect of anonymity; my general instinct is that we benefit most from having a mixed-rules system with anonymous, pseudonymous, and named spaces.
(The most troublesome spaces appear to be mixed spaces like Twitter where speakers are often named and harassers are anonymous. The asymmetry creates a problem worse than either norm on its own.)
Twitter is indeed, an example of the WORST of both worlds - and holy shit man it's bad. I've seen some of the bad actors stage doxxing and outing and extortion events; and catfishing. It's a fucking sewer, that Twitter could fix; but instead of fixing, they post a bunch of fake PR campaigns, and tweak policies that do nothing. It wouldn't be a problem if Twitter weren't actually SO influential to events in the real world. Honestly, it is basically just a game, masquerading as a messaging system, calling itself a social network. (you level-up your character by impressions and likes and retweets). You can script your characters and cheat just like kids used to do with WoW back in the 2000's.
The one argument (that I think dates back to WWII, but is probably far older) that seems to be ignored in all these debates is that it's a logical fallacy to tolerate intolerance. And to that end, it's incumbent on everyone to either argue from an honest position, or to work very hard to root out when someone is arguing from a dishonest position, and if that dishonesty conceals intolerance, you have to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.
In the case of fascism - (capital-F and lower-case-f), it's already been demonstrated repeatedly (with great loss of life and material progress), that this kind of intolerance must be stopped early and often.
These are not "new ideas which must be explored". Nor are they "consciences yearning to be free to think what others dare not". They want to kill you. And often for some invented reason like: your skin contains too much melanin. Often the invented reason is only to justify: because you're living on land I want to steal; but as long as I can con people into believing they're part of some "master race" or "god's chosen" - that excuse will do.
If shutting down fascism makes me an "internet bully" then, give me your lunch money, wimp.
This is your political bias coming through I think. I assume you self identify as "left" as such you easily see the extreme harm that comes from fascism, but I bet you do not view communism and socialism as being equally dangerous. They are.
The danger to society however is not Fascism, but is Authoritarianism / Totalitarianism. That is what needs to be combated with arguments, and education. Fascism is a type of Totalitarianism, but lets identify the root cause of the problem and fight it. Lets oppose all forms of Authoritarian control over people, not just the economic "Right".
Education is really the key, an educated society generally, and naturally wants to have more liberty, they trend more libertarian. This is why one of the first things a Authoritarian society does is limit education to only those groups that the people in power believe will be loyal to their Authoritarian power structure.
My biggest issue with your comment is you have not defined what "shutting down fascism" looks like. You can only defeat (truly defeat) an oppressive dogmatic ideology like fascism with logic, reason, and education. You might be able to temporarily suppress it with guns, violence and "internet bulling" but all you are doing is covering up a festering wound.
Change your tacit, Oppose Authoritarianism, Support education (not schooling), support teaching people how to think critically, support rigorous debate.
DO NOT support censorship, curbing of freedom, violence (i.e Punch a Nazi), or even bullying, that will never defeat ideologies like Fascism, and in some ways to strengthen them
It's not exactly novel, though. Since online harassment on message boards and games started, people have been calling for an end to anonymity as a cure. Either a total end, meaning real names everywhere, or partial, meaning providing real names to sites that can be looked up if you behave badly. Wil Wheaton called for it loudly a few years back, and a string of other generally-progressive, internet-savvy voices have done so before and since. (Along with a lot of raving loons who know nothing about the internet, like Jack Thompson.)
There seems to be a pattern in these calls that I think explains it: they all come from people whose identities are already public and controversial online. Laura Sydell and Wil Wheaton spend lots of time being non-anonymous on the internet, and so their experience would probably improve if everyone else was 'onymized'. Meanwhile an awful lot of anonymous private individuals, especially from groups that get targeted for harassment, would suffer far more online.
However: we still have anonymity in the form of; - abusive telemarketers/harassers who spoof caller id. And get away with it. - criminal organizations who use LLC's and shell corporations to illegally launder money, hide wealth, peddle influence, sell drugs, sell weapons, bribe congressmen.. . etc. (LLC's are the "sock puppet" accounts of the business world - let that sink in). - Facebook: you have to use your real name (even if you're Trans, right?) but Ivan can pose as "Bob Jimbob" and get you riled up about them libruls coming to take your guns.
It's all bullshit, and giving up our anonymity and privacy amounts to unilateral disarmament while our enemies are holding us hostage at gunpoint.
It occurs to me that many of the nastiest online spaces are ones with mixed anonymity levels. On Facebook, you use you real name but can mostly block out harassers. On 4chan, you can't stop harassment but you can detach completely from your identity with each post. On Twitter... well, on Twitter professionals using their real names get hounded across the internet and into real life by anonymous eggs. It's asymmetrical, which favors the people behaving abusively.
The temptation to crack down on those eggs is understandable, they're the ones misbehaving, but it assumes we can actually succeed. If we don't, and the history of mail and telephone misbehavior should lead us to expect failure, we've rendered every space asymmetrical, and given the benefits of anonymity exclusively to bad actors. Unilateral disarmament indeed...
I think it usually depends on how far they step outside their area of expertise. I've always gotten an Ivy league liberal arts vibe from NPR correspondents. In some of their side shows you can hear them expound on some great classics author or another. My perception has always been that many people with that background tend to discount the usefulness of science fiction.
Depends on the author, sometimes definitely yes.
The primary bad actors though, are certainly anonymous. IMO the worst of the internet are child abusers, who have absolutely thrived on anonymity.
The fact that it’s also lead to a bunch of good things shouldn’t mean that we ignore the negative outcomes. Something as simple as mandated egress filtering would make life harder for a lot of abusers but a bunch of companies want to shirk even that low cost.
Tech: "we can solve all problems with blockchains and an ICO / token sale!"
Am I the only one who thinks Black Mirror is not that good?
I've seen around five episodes and the only one I genuinely thought to be good was the very first one.
1 - The technology is extremely vague. There is no way to really gauge it's impact besides what the writer explicitly shows.
2 - The episodes are extremely moralist. They usually take a stance of "Look How Bad This Is", usually using appeals to emotion. They don't show the other side, the good side of that concept.
3 - In my opinion, the story of most of them is uninteresting. The most egregious is the "eye camera" one. The whole episode drops you hints of how that technology affects society, but we are focused on a lovers quarrel.
4 - None of those show anything really new. If you removed the new concept, it would be _really_ easy to replace it with known stuff. In a world with a new disruptive technology they write people acting like they always did!
5 - This is mostly my elitism, but I hate most people's reaction to it. They see the episode, adore it, and just take it at face value. I watch it, think it's crap, and spend the next hour discussing it and thinking about it. Most people don't think beyond what is shown on the episode. I fear that that, coupled with (1) and (2), is making people fear technology [1].
(I have to add that the last minute of the "robot boyfriend" episode are so nuanced, subtle and insidious that I'm amazed the writers managed to slip that through. Especially how dumbed down the whole episode was)
/rant
[1] I think people should be careful with technology. I have a bit of "privacy paranoia". But that should come from reason.
The people being people thing is _right_. A good antidote to the sort of beliefs we easily trick ourselves into here is to go read Samuel Pepys personal diary. Read about a year's worth, doesn't matter which bits, start in 1666 if you want to actually connect events to history (that's the year of the Great Fire of London). Pepys is over 350 years different in time from us. Yet he's not really different at all. He worries about money, he suffers illness, he moans about incompetent people, he lusts after pretty people who won't sleep with him (and to be fair, some who do). I say Pepys partly because he wrote this stuff down for his own records, whereas most earlier writers have an audience in mind and so we must assume they self-censor, and partly because he wrote just after English had settled down, his meaning is easy to follow without a modern translator between you adding their own interpretation.
I see it as a collection of short movies and not like a series. With that mindset, I only watch a few of "episodes" each season.
Since I only watch the movies that interest me, I really like Black Mirror.
Seen that way, it makes sense. I wouldn't watch a lot of those episodes if they were feature lentgh movies, so I don't watch them as short movies.
Every episode that interested me at first glance did not disappoint.
I think Altered Carbon is a better dystopian tech story though. The actual plot is not even really the point. The setting, backdrop and society that it envisions feels more plausible than any episode of Black Mirror.
The best sci fi dystopian stories imprint our current economic and social structures onto a new future with technology: the world of Altered Carbon asks what if we had our current economic system, which creates a class of impossibly powerful oligarchs who hoard all of the world's wealth and act with impunity while the poor suffer and die, but now these technologies allow their power to extend and expand indefinitely, past death?
The crux of every tech sci fi dystopian story is the question: What if we progress technologically but refuse to progress economically or socially? What if we encourage people to study STEM and sneer at the humanities forever? What if economics is always taught as an exercise in cheerleading for our current system?
Media like this makes us think about the changes that need to be made as technology more and more amplifies the (potentially bad) choices we make about the world we want to live in.
It's easy to get caught in the echo chamber of "technology good, disruption good, gadgets fun" especially living in the tech world so I think it's great stories like these make us take a step back.
Overall, like a lot of anthology series, you could probably pick the best N (where, for me in this case, N is probably somewhere between 5 and 10) and easily skip the rest.
The other episodes are outstanding, because they show how technology affects human issues.
Now, may be there's something in the first episode you feel identified with, so either you are the prime minister or a hacker that can control all TVs.
But that doesn't apply to most people. Having relationships even failed ones, on the other hand is something we can all relate.
Vint Cerf was also the "prototype" for The Architect in Matrix, and probably it wouldn't shock me if he played another very similar role in other movies, too.
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.
The story about the artist and the scientist, the wise visionary and the foolish tinkerer, is a tired and unrealistic trope being forced onto events that have nothing to do with those themes.
The internet was not "designed without unique identifying numbers", and no lack of such facility is what has led to or what would lead to "all this dark stuff" -- everything about that construction is wrong. It's nonsense. It's most upsetting to hear that wrongness presented as fact via a nearly-all-context-cut discussion clip with Vint goshdarned Cerf, because if you said it this way right to him he'd be like, "well, whoa, wait hold on".
It's also absurd to imply that the internet was designed in a vacuum, or without thought to its implications, or by just one or a few people, in any short span of time. Beyond that, the things the design of the internet may have been hopelessly naive about are far more complex than and different from "it could allow Bad People to operate anonymously". Some may be directly the opposite!
Gibson did have a remarkable vision in Neuromancer, but that absolutely did not have to do with imagining Russia vs the US at its time of release in _1984_. Warring meganational companies had been featured in many earlier dystopian novels: Bester did it in Tiger, Tiger! (aka The Stars My Destination) in _1956_, Brunner did it repeatedly in Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up from the start of the 70s. These were not the new ideas! In Neuromancer the world was different, the space, the mood, the means, the words. These were cool and unique and new -- the combination of all of this in a pretty package is what made it predictive and powerful and popular.
Why is Black Mirror even involved here? Because it's dark? I love the show, but it has come to have very little to do with taking our nature 10 minutes into the future and a lot more to do with "spooky SciFi", and it's never been a far-out predictive powerhouse. Maybe Gibson's name just wasn't enough for the editor? Black Mirror does add that click juice. Maybe it's thematic. Is the piece going to challenge us to think through consequences of decisions deeply and have higher standards for ourselves and society, the way the show once did?
No, instead, we get a whole 7 minute audio narrative that will play as a timefiller between segments, with the trite payoff that "only artists know human nature never really changes, even with some new toys." mixed in with just a sprinkle of "it takes all stripes".
Did it actually take talking to all of Vint Cerf and William Gibson and Charlie Brooker to get there? Did presumably several minutes (I hope not hours) of their much more interesting words and thoughts get cut so we could hear the journalist's baseless or cliché ideas instead? Just for more woo-woo pessimism? It's like asking Elon Musk to comment on a local science fair rocket and concluding that the next generation holds promise.
Imagine the possibilities we _had_ here: hearing Vint Cerf and William Gibson actually reflect meaningfully on what Black Mirror means to people today in the context of their works, and what it suggests for the futures of literature and technology. Imagine if all three people interviewed had a real discussion together! That could be a real and lasting contribution to the human canon. But we got this instead.
Maybe these guys had nothing better to be doing. Maybe this tech writer and their editors just don't know about IP addresses, or at least think that no one listening does or should, that it's too complicated for regular people and correspondence with reality doesn't even matter. Maybe no one is even listening.
But people are listening. Someone who isn't steeped in the technical world may hear this piece and from its total lack of depth or nuance assume it is obviously-true. They may take away that "the internet's creator didn't even think about its consequences! Tech people are so clueless. Just shows you that Black Mirror is true. The future sounds bad."
Something this banal and stupid presented by NPR, and making direct use of the time of these amazing people for it, is a sign (among so many others) that we're setting the bar far too low on intellectual curiosity, on journalistic character, on technical literacy, on societal introspection, and hell, on basic imagination.
So let me try to transform this thread into something useful: what do you think about the current state of the internet and its culture vis-a-vis what's being presented in neuromancer and other cyberpunk novels?
Did it ever, though? Not gonna lie, I never quite got why all the hype. The show has never seemed to me so much to challenge one's consideration of consequences and standards, so much as one's resilience against despair - not so much "this is a world we might end up in if we don't watch out", as "this is a world we are in, or that's inexorably coming".
You seem to have a fairly nuanced reading of the show, I think likely more so than mine. I'd be grateful for the benefit of that perspective, if you should like to expand upon it.
Trying to find "second" in the article, nothing found. Is this bad writing?
Ideas aren't more valid due to votes in a millenial's echo chamber. Stupid popular things aren't necessarily less stupid out of popularity by a similarly uninformed collective.
Whenever a new iOS was announced I'd search the docs to find out whether it allowed Pebble to get more interesting functionality on the OS. Usually the result would be that no interesting API's were added. People would downvote my summaries because they didn't want to know the truth...