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Category: history
Xeroxing the war
In 1969, when the Vietnam War was in full swing, a senior analyst at the U.S. Department of Defense was quietly copying a secret report about the war. This report, which ran to 7000 pages, covered the progress of the Vietnam war in exhaustive detail. The analyst intended to share this highly classified information with influential politicians and scientists, in the hope that it would quickly bring the war to an end.
That analyst was Daniel Ellsberg, a former officer of the Marine Corps who worked for RAND, the Pentagon think tank. As a result of his experiences in Vietnam and his meetings with conscientious objectors in the US, he became convinced that the war was wrong. With his insider’s knowledge, he already knew that it was militarily lost, but that the American government was misleading the people. Every day the Vietnam war took about eight hundred Vietnamese lives, more than two thirds of them civilians, and twenty American soldiers. Many more were seriously injured or maimed for life..
On June 13, 1971 The New York Times tried to publish a number of excerpts from these documents, but was blocked by the Nixon government through legal and political means. Senator Mike Gravel made a breakthrough by reading a large part of the document in the Senate. The reading of 4100 pages took a while, but the rules of the Senate do not allow a senator who is talking to be interrupted (the "filibuster"). Everything the Senator said automatically became part of the proceedings of the Senate and thus on the public record. The publication of this information was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam war and the start the process of withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Fast forward to 2010. The US is once again embroiled in unwinnable wars, launched on dubious grounds, that continue indefinitely without any clear strategy or goal. Every extra day that these wars continue, more civilians and soldiers die.
And now there are new people who leak secret information about the wars, in the hope that the resulting political pressure will bring them to a close. The Xerox technology in 1969 has been replaced by a global computer network that uses encryption to protect the identity of the whistleblowers. Even Wikileaks does not know their identities – this is safer for both the whistleblowers and Wikileaks.
But the media’s response is simply surreal. The bulk of the attention and the debate is about the Xerox machine – or at least the 21st century equivalent of it, the Wikileaks website. Questions such as "is WikiLeaks journalism?" and "should you be allowed to leak classified information?" are discussed in exhaustive detail by apparently intelligent media pundits – who with alarming regularity seem to have little understanding of the very technology they are discussing.
The first ‘big’ coup from Wikileaks, the “Collatoral Murder" video, led to a huge debate about the culpability of the helicopter pilots and whether or not it was reasonable for them to be able to distinguish between a camera and a grenade launcher. The key topic that was not discussed was the simple fact that the Pentagon had knowingly, for three years, lied to both Reuters and the families of the civilian casualties in Baghdad about the circumstances surrounding the shooting by an Apache helicopter, which was one kilometre away and which riddled two children with bullets from its cannon. The Pentagon made a statement in 2007 saying that it knew nothing of any injuries to children, even though it had been in possession of this video from day one and it leaves nothing to the imagination.
The deliberate lying from the start of the Iraq war continues to this day. The Dutch late night talk show, P&W, led the news on TV with "Dutchman involved in leaking attack video": that, after all, is news – apparently far more important than the fact that children were shot and there was a cover-up.
Wikileaks has already been the top story in the news for more than one week, and that’s a problem. The Xerox machine is not important. Illegal wars of aggression launched on the basis of lies are important. The torture of innocent citizens in secret prisons is important. Spying on UN diplomats is important. Messing about in the internal political decisions of other countries is important.
So why is the entire media is so busy with the Xerox machine and the person with his finger on the copy button? Dear journalists, you have been presented with a cornucopia of scoops, many of which make Watergate pale into insignifcance. If African dictators were doing the things Western countries are being accused of, they would be dragged in handcuffs to the International Court in The Hague. Get to work!
How the monkey got to Mars
Last year I was asked to contribute to a book by XS4All (PDF) about the history and future of the Internet. I decided to make some broad brush points on page 102. My colleague Menso also contributed (page 36), or here on his blog.
Long ago there were some monkeys on the African savannah. It was difficult for them as they hunted other animals that were stronger and faster. Other animals could digest the dry grass and live with little water. The monkeys could do none of these things. You would think they would never survive, let alone go on to play an important role in the evolution of the Earth. That they did so is through a unique combination of two things that led to everything else: an opposable thumb and big brains.
Separately, each of these makes little difference. Dolphins have large brains and are certainly intelligent. But without hands to apply that intelligence they cannot build complex civilizations. Chimpanzees have thumbs but lack the brains to make hand axes and build terabit optical routers. So dolphins and chimpanzees are in our zoos instead of vice versa.
Mankind dominates the planet by intelligence, not by running faster, breathing deeper or chewing through the hide of an elephant. Intelligence, the ability to create new solutions to new problems, is the key to all that we have and all that we are. First we use the thigh bone of an antelope as hand axes or javelins, and not long after (in evolutionary terms) we have the improved spear we call the “intercontinental ballistic missile”.
At the same time people tend to associate intelligence with book learning and unworldly academics. "You need more than intelligence to make it in this world" is often said, as if charisma and emotional sensitivity come from the kidneys instead of the brains. When you say the word “intelligence”, think not of a crazed professor but rather of the difference between humans and chimpanzees.
Technology comes from intelligence and has a fundamental influence on who we are and how we live. Fire, agriculture, bronze, the wheel, the domestication of animals and irrigation systems fundamentally changed our position in respect to all other animals. But with writing came a technology that improved on our most valuable feature. For the first time it was possible to record knowledge outside our brains, and save it over long distances in time and geography. This had enormous implications for the scale at which we could organize and the speed with which we could develop new ideas by building on the ideas of others.
Around 1440, the modern printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg. The effects of this invention pulled Europe out of the middle ages and into the renaissance, the scientific/industrial revolution and on the path to democracy. Suddenly books were affordable for an emerging middle class. There were books about issues, history, politics, science, and culture. For the Vatican this free dissemination of knowledge and ideas was a threat and it therefore hired troops to destroy all the printing presses across Europe. Fortunately the citizens objected and a few tough fights over the right to freedom of thought were the result. Currently, this fight is being repeated all over again by Scientology and the music and movie industry, with an equal lack of success.
Now that knowledge could not only be written down and shared but also cheaply reproduced on a mass scale, our civilization developed rapidly. Science brought new technology and soon the smoke stacks of the industrial revolution existed throughout Europe and then the rest of the world.
Then things really accelerated. The complex societies existing over a century ago needed counting machines and from this came all the computers we use today. The logical next step was for these computers to talk to each other, so the researchers who used them could work smarter together. Forty years later it is impossible to imagine our daily lives without the InterWeb. Now we all have a printing press with a global reach.
Access for all is the next step in the development of our civilization. It is a step that is as fundamental as ensuring everyone can read and write. It makes us smarter as we get more information, knowledge and ideas more quickly and cheaply and we have more people to share with. The Internet and cheap computers in everyone’s pocket create as much change the printing press 550 years ago. Only this time those changes will develop ten times as fast.
But it may be that the effects of networked computers obediently following Moore’s law are more fundamental. As computers make us smarter or even smart, they can be used to make more sophisticated systems even faster, which will in turn create more sophisticated systems, etc…. If the difference between us and chimpanzees ensures that we walk on the moon and the chimps are our pets, what are the implications of a system (artifical intelligence or human-machine combo) that is fundamentally smarter than the smartest man who ever existed? And if that cleverness is deployed to always smarter successors, a self-perpetuating process begins. This would reduce the entire information revolution of the past millennia to a very minor precursor of the real landslide that is about to happen.
How did the monkey get to Mars? By using his big brains, opposable thumbs and some technical tools. And the Internet is one of the most important of those to come along in the last 500 years.