Posted by Big Gav

A while ago I included a review of a couple of John Brunner books ("Stand on Zanzibar" and "The Sheep Look Up") that aligned closely with some of the issues that the peak oil world tends to obsess about (primarily population growth and environmental degradation for those books). During my February reading break I found myself re-reading his other classic work "The Shockwave Rider" as a way of further procrastinating the reading of various (unread) heavyweight tomes I have sullenly eyeing me from the bookshelves.



This book took a lot of Alvin Toffler's ideas from "Future Shock" and extrapolated them forward a few decades, most famously predicting the arrival of both the internet and parasites that infest it such as computer virus' and worms. While the book is probably only known today in hardcore geek circles, it also covered a range of other interesting ideas, such as:



- "ecofast" (energy efficient / sustainable) housing

- the destruction of an american city by a natural disaster and the inhabitants being left to fend for themselves by the government in "paid avoidance zones"

- a post oil world - public and electric transport rather than fossil fueled cars

- "the plug in lifestyle" - a highly mobile population (at least amongst the professional classes) that frequently moves houses and jobs

- alienation leading to widespread use of tranquillizers and other mood altering drugs

- the value of slowing down in order to make more progress

- the emergence of complete information transparency (for government and some corporate data)

- the breakdown of societal cohesiveness and the division of society into tribes

- the replacement of the "arms race" with the "brain race"

- the value of wisdom vs the combination of knowledge and greed

- delphi pools - using the "wisdom of crowds" by allowing the population to bet on a large range of important issues and the government then adjusting policy based on the results (well sometimes - the other tactic is to rig the market to adjust public perceptions)

- corporations which are favoured by the government (particularly in terms of access to information) based on their contribution to "national advantage"

- widespread paranoia caused by people knowing that others have access to more information than they do

- government being taken over by organised crime



I'll quote a few other reviews of the book from around the net and then launch into a rather long winded survey of recent news relevant to some of the ideas Brunner explored as well as indulging in some 1980's cyberpunk and cypherpunk era nostalgia (while science fiction isn't meant to be predictive of the future, its interesting to see just how well the book did as futurism rather than an extrapolation of existing trends).



"What the hell does this have to do with energy and the environment ?" some of you (those who aren't resigned to my not infrequent diversions from the topic at hand) might be asking ? As I'm prone to rant from time to time, peak oil, global warming, resource wars and my other topics of interest are all be-devilled by the problem of data quality. Oil data is incomplete, frequently held secret and manipulated at every level, which is why I don't bother with the day to day haggling over when the peak date is. Our resource wars over oil are clouded with endless disinformation and propaganda campaigns, some that have been going on for decades. Global warming science is also afflicted, with the best source of much of the information (various US government funded institutions) suffering from censorship and political interference, exacerbated by the fossil fuel industry's FUD campaign against the scientists. So Brunner's musings on the concept of freedom of information and related topics seem relevant to me - but if you just want energy news, the time to stop reading is now - come back again tomorrow. I will mention energy and global warming a few times along the way though.



First up, from Mac Tonnies "Utopian / Dystopian book reviews" :



John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider," published in 1976, is a fast-forward glimpse of a 21st century that -- unlike the vast majority of SF written in that distant era -- predicts some of our worst fears and reasons for hope. "The Shockwave Rider" is perhaps best known for its eerily prescient rendering of a government-controlled Internet alive with "tapeworms": Brunner's equivalent to computer viruses. With its mechanized ambience and hacker protaganist, "The Shockwave Rider" is one of the principal "protocyberpunk" novels, predating Bruce Sterling's "Islands in the Net" by a decade. But computers are merely the surface of this book. Beneath the veneer of techno and inventive slang is a challenging utopian discourse as engaging as B.F. Skinner's "Walden Two."



Like "The Sheep Look Up," "The Shockwave Rider" deals unflinchingly with where we're headed as a species -- and how to know when to apply the temporal brakes. Directly inspired by Alvin Toffler's classic "Future Shock," Brunner's novel is a serious -- but spirited -- examination of transcience on daily life. In a world lacking nothing, Brunner laments our lack of purpose; he proposes that Western civilization, while saturated with intelligence, has forsaken actual wisdom, setting the stage for collective psychosis and a depersonalized ruling elite. Prefiguring the online free speech movement, Brunner shows how a technocratic society can use information for good or ill and, moreover, suggests ways individuals can make the future more user-friendly.



"The Shockwave Rider," lamentably not as well-known as "1984" or "Brave New World," is one of the central social thought experiments of the 20th century -- and an effective rallying call for sanity in a world that, now more than ever, often seems like so much digital putty.

If The Shockwave Rider had been published a decade after its 1975 copyright date, there is no doubt it would have been lumped into that shifting, slippery, semi-solid body of work now called cyberpunk. But since it appeared in a time before the term "cyberpunk" had been coined, this novel was merely seen as a one-off about a future subsumed by data, corporations and the government. While it was not a commercial success, it did receive some critical note and it also became an underground hit in the high-tech community then evolving around computers.

Historical Note: In the 1980s, researchers at Xerox PARC dubbed the first self-replicating, self-propagating computer program a "worm" after the "tapeworms" Nickie uses to erase his previous identities.

But while The Shockwave Rider missed cashing in on the cyberpunk cachet, it nevertheless remains an important work. Brunner's hard-luck, gritty street-kid-cum-data-jockey foreshadowed the dozens of such anti-heroes that would appear in the 1980s. And his portrayal of a society enmeshed in data overload could, as the saying goes, be taken out of today's headlines. More than that, The Shockwave Rider is also a good tale, artfully told. Although it's slow (and perhaps a bit confusing) to start, the book quickly hits its pace and continues marching unrelentingly until the end, drawing readers along with it.



By the end of the book readers will have a keen sense of, if not the future at least a future, and what the role of both humanity as a whole and the individual as a piece might be in that future. It's a story as enjoyable and profound today as it was 22 years ago, and it's absolutely a must read for cyberpunk aficionados.

"For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it's wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia." --John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider", 1975. ...



To Brunner, control is control of information; either digital data or genetic code. Governments may use information to keep a lock on society, but individuals may take find power for themselves as well by controlling and manipulating information. The powers that be have access to the data-net, but "in theory everyone does, given a dollar to drop into a pay phone". Brunner identified himself with the political left (including anti-war actions in Britain during the sixties) but when he's read today, his outlook seems so much more concerned with the rights and dignity of the individual, rather than trying to social-engineer whole societies. This spirit is very much the "Internet ethos" we see today. ...

This book has always been popular with the techy-geeky crowd, but, since it was first published in the '70s, it missed out on the cyberpunk revolution of the '80s. It's too bad, because this is a compelling story of a future world tied together by a universal data network, a world that could be our tomorrow. It's a tense place filled with information overload and corporate domination, and nearly everything is known about everybody. Except Nickie Haflinger, a prodigy whose talents allow him to switch identities with a phone call. Nickie plans to change the world, if only he can keep from getting caught.

This 28-year old book not only decribed the internet as it will become very soon long before its inception, but computer viruses (called "worms" by Brunner) before the first PC too, plus a few other things and issues not even mentioned yet. Since a friend gave it to me to read many years ago, I've bought every copy of it I could find. I have kept one German and one English version and as I will not let them out of my bookshelf under no circumstances I gave all others away as gifts, still looking for more copies to give away. It has been sold out so often and for such a long time, each time and in each of those two languages available to me, that if one were to be a follower of conspiracy theories, well, the fact that this book is not reprinted as often as some other books of Brunner are would be reason for suspicion.

As the 20th century draws to a close, the "global warming; fact or fiction?" debate, and the international political paralysis over appropriate action, continues. Skeptics (some legitimate, some hired guns of fossil fuel-dependant industries) insist that the available data is insufficient to conclude that humans are affecting the climate. Meanwhile, the ten warmest years on record have occurred in the past fifteen years and the 1990s have already been warmer than the 1980s--the warmest decade on record--by almost 0.2F (0.1C). On the storm front, NOAA reports that the period from 1995-1998 had a total of 33 hurricanes--an all-time record, with 1998 being one of the deadliest storm seasons in history and 1999 predicted to be its equal. El nino, la nina, 500 year floods, record droughts, and the litany continues. Whether or not humans are the cause, it is difficult to deny that climate and weather are becoming increasingly tumultuous. And what about the long-range forecast?



Bruce Sterling provides a slice of future, thirty years down the line, in Heavy Weather. The low-lying coastal expanses, once the world's most populous and productive areas, are largely underwater. Heat, drought, and extreme storms make other regions, including the United States Midwest, virtually uninhabitable. Government relief agencies, powerless to do anything else, supply weather refuges with disposable paper coveralls, government-issue granola, and "happy talk news" of lottery winners and starlet weddings. ...



Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather is a engaging yarn about storm chasers of the future living outlaw-esque lives of high tech nomadic freedom on the Texas plains. The great tornado pursuit plot, spiced with international conspiracy, showcases a landscape decimated by climatic change and decades of land mismanagement. By narrating alternately through Janey's insider passion and Alex's fish-out-of-water viewpoint, Sterling creates an evocative picture of weather and life in the 2030s, liberally laced with geo-political insights and ecological object lessons. Heavy Weather is a snap-shot of a possible near future, and a warning that we are shaping tomorrow's weather, and world, today. Thoroughly enjoyable, Heavy Weather is consummate Bruce Sterling.

The environmental movement can be boring, strident, depressing; this is why I never quite became an environmental activist despite my initial interest and commitment in the sixties. It struck me as too burlap and granola. It felt reactionary (despite the great calendars). I think Bruce Sterling found himself in a similar quandary when, after researching Heavy Weather, he realized there was a significant climate problem. Who was going to take it on? Certainly not the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Conservancy, organizations cycling cash and promoting the great outdoors but not equipped to generate real soltuions to a problem like global warming. And certainly not the U.S. and other governments, whose attitudes are reflected by the Murray Hamilton character in the movie "Jaws." Lifesaving solutions are fine, but they have to wait til the tourist season is past.



Sterling figured design movements like futurism and dadaism had been effective in disrupting the lazier aspects of our consciousness and perception and driving new ways of thinking about the world and its problems, so he started the Viridian Design movement, beginning with the Manifesto of January 3, 2000

We have a worldwide environmental problem. This is a truism. But the unprecedentedly severe and peculiar weather of the late 1990s makes it clear that this problem is growing acute. Global warming has been a lively part of scientific discussion since at least the 1960s, but global warming is a quotidian reality now. Climate change is shrouding the globe in clouds of burning rain forest and knocking points off the GNP of China. Everyone can offer a weird weather anecdote now; for instance, I spent a week this summer watching the sky turn gray with fumes from the blazing forests of Chiapas. The situation has been visibly worsening, and will get worse yet, possibly very much worse.



Society has simply been unable to summon the political or economic will to deal successfully with this problem by using 20th century methods. That is because CO2 emission is not centrally a political or economic problem. It is a design and engineering problem. It is a cultural problem and a problem of artistic sensibility.



New and radical approaches are in order. These approaches should be originated, gathered, martialled into an across-the-board cultural program, and publicly declared -- on January 3rd

WorldChanging is one spinoff from the Viridian work, which continues apace at http://www.viridiandesign.org/.



It's worthwhile to reread the Viridian agenda at the end of the manifesto... which I duplicate here, encouraging comments and suggestion from today's perspective - six years later, post 9/11, post Katrina.



The Media



Today. Publishing and broadcasting cartels surrounded by a haze of poorly financed subcultural microchannels.

What We Want. More bandwidth for civil society, multicultural variety, and better-designed systems of popular many-to-many communication, in multiple languages through multiple channels.

The Trend. A spy-heavy, commercial Internet. A Yankee entertainment complex that entirely obliterates many non-Anglophone cultures.



The Military



Today. G-7 Hegemony backed by the American military.

What We Want. A wider and deeper majority hegemony with a military that can deter adventurism, but specializes in meeting the immediate crises through civil engineering, public health and disaster relief.

The Trend. Nuclear and biological proliferation among minor powers.



Business



Today. Currency traders rule banking system by fiat; extreme instability in markets; capital flight but no labor mobility; unsustainable energy base

What We Want. Nonmaterial industries; vastly increased leisure; vastly increased labor mobility; sustainable energy and resources

The Trend. commodity totalitarianism, crony capitalism, criminalized banking systems, sweatshops



Industrial Design



Today. very rapid model obsolescence, intense effort in packaging; CAD/CAM

What We Want: intensely glamourous environmentally sound products; entirely new objects of entirely new materials; replacing material substance with information; a new relationship between the cybernetic and the material

The Trend: two design worlds for rich and poor comsumers; a varnish on barbarism



Gender Issues



Today: more commercial work required of women; social problems exported into family life as invisible costs

What We Want: declining birth rates, declining birth defects, less work for anyone, lavish support for anyone willing to drop out of industry and consume less

The Trend: more women in prison; fundamentalist and ethnic-separatist ideologies that target women specifically.



Entertainment



Today: large-scale American special-effects spectacle supported by huge casts and multi-million-dollar tie-in enterprises

What We Want: glamour and drama; avant-garde adventurism; a borderless culture industry bent on Green social engineering

The Trend: annihilation of serious culture except in a few non-Anglophone societies



International Justice



Today: dysfunctional but gamely persistent War Crimes tribunals

What We Want: Environmental Crime tribunals

The Trend: justice for sale; intensified drug war



Employment



Today: MacJobs, burn-out track, massive structural unemployment in Europe

What We Want: Less work with no stigma; radically expanded leisure; compulsory leisure for workaholics; guaranteed support for people consuming less resources; new forms of survival entirely outside the conventional economy

The Trend: increased class division; massive income disparity; surplus flesh and virtual class



Education



Today: failing public-supported schools



What We Want: intellectual freedom, instant cheap access to information, better taste, a more advanced aesthetic, autonomous research collectives, lifelong education, and dignity and pleasure for the very large segment of the human population who are and will forever be basically illiterate and innumerate

The trend: children are raw blobs of potential revenue-generating machinery; universities exist to supply middle-management



Public Health



Today: general success; worrying chronic trends in AIDS, tuberculosis, antibiotic resistance; massive mortality in nonindustrial world

What We Want: unprecedently healthy old people; plagues exterminated worldwide; sophisticated treatment of microbes; artificial food

The Trend: Massive dieback in Third World, septic poor quarantined from nervous rich in G-7 countries, return of 19th century sepsis, world's fattest and most substance-dependent populations



Science



Today: basic science sacrificed for immediate commercial gain; malaise in academe; bureaucratic overhead in government support

What We Want: procedural rigor, intellectual honesty, reproducible results; peer review, block grants, massively increased research funding, massively reduced procedural overhead; genius grants; single-author papers; abandonment of passive construction and the third person plural; "Science" reformed so as to lose its Platonic and crypto-Christian elements as the "pure" pursuit of disembodied male minds; armistice in Science wars

The Trend: "Big Science" dwindles into short-term industrial research or military applications; "scientists" as a class forced to share imperilled, marginal condition of English professors and French deconstructionists. I would like to conclude by suggesting some specific areas for immediate artistic work. I see these as crying public needs that should be met by bravura displays of raw ingenuity.

This remarkable anthology reprints Hugo winner Vinge's (The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge) "True Names" (1981), the story that began SF's cyberpunk revolution, with 11 essays showing its effect on science as well as fiction. The best are the testimonials by pioneers in virtual reality, cryptography and artificial intelligence. The most famous contributors, Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis, also show the deepest understanding of Vinge's vision. The weakest pieces are science-fictional, appearing pale in the shadow of Vinge's story. The overall problem with the collection is its wildly unbalanced political stance. A quarter of the essayists are "crypto-anarchists," who see the ability of individuals to act secretly as the only defense against a totalitarian surveillance state.

Vinge, who was one of the first science fiction writers to conceive of cyberspace, formalized these ideas in an essay written for NASA in 1993 and published later that year in the Whole Earth Review. The article noted several trends that together or separately might lead to the Singularity: artificial intelligence, which could lead to "computers that are "awake' and superhumanly intelligent"; computer networks that achieve such intelligence; human-computer interfaces that "become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent"; and biological improvements to the human intellect. "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence," Vinge predicted, adding somewhat ominously that "shortly after, the human era will be ended."



A number of Vinge's novels, including Marooned in Realtime (1986) and A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), have dealt obliquely with the concept, typically by telling the stories of human beings who have escaped, one way or another, the Singularity's explosive transformations. But in his most recent book, last year's Rainbows End (just out in paperback from Tor), Vinge comes toe to toe with imminent change. Humanity, within a couple of decades of the present day, is on the brink of something transformational - or else on the brink of destruction - in large part because almost everyone is connected, usually via wearable computers, to tomorrow's In- ternet. The result is a struggle between those who would hobble our independence to make us safer and those who are willing to risk skirting the edge of destruction to see where the Singularity takes us. It's just the quality of speculation you'd expect from an author whose previous novel, A Deepness in the Sky (1999), won not only a Hugo Award but also a Prometheus Award for the best libertarian novel of the year.



Vinge is a mathematician and computer scientist as well as a novelist; he is now retired from his faculty position at San Diego State University to a life of writing, lecturing, and consulting. Contributing Editor Mike Godwin interviewed him, in part via email, in the weeks following his appearance last year as a guest of honor at the 16th annual Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference in Washington, D.C. At that conference Vinge spoke about both the Singularity and a "convergence" of technological trends that threaten to drastically limit individual freedom.



Reason: In your speech you foresaw efforts to build ubiquitous monitoring or government controls into our information technology. What's more, you suggested that this wasn't deliberate - that the trend is happening regardless of, or in spite of, the conscious choices we're making about our information technology.



Vernor Vinge: I see an implacable government interest here, and also the convergence of diverse nongovernmental interests - writers unions, Hollywood, "temperance" organizations of all flavors, all with their own stake in exploiting technology to make people "do the right thing."



Reason: Do you believe this pervasive monitoring and/or control might stall the Singularity?



Vinge: I think that if the Singularity can happen, it will. There are lots of very bad things that could happen in this century. The Technological Singularity may be the most likely of the noncatastrophes. Except for their power to blow up the world, I think governments would have a very hard time blocking the Singularity. The possibility of governments perverting the Singularity is somewhat more plausible to me. (Who wrote the story with the newspaper headline "Today Parliament Met and Abolished the People"?) In A Deepness in the Sky the Singularity didn't happen, but not because of governments. On the other hand, A Deepness in the Sky showed how government could use technology to create a whole new level of tyranny.



But in my speech, I also wanted to raise the possibility that these abuses may turn out to be irrelevant. There is a national interest, and not just in America, in providing the illusion of freedom for the millions of people who need to be happy and creative to make the economy go. Those people are more diverse and distributed and resourceful and even coordinated than any government.



Thats a power we already have in free markets. Computer networks, supporting data and social networks, give this trend an enormous boost. In the end that illusion of freedom may have to be more like the real thing than any society has ever achieved in the past, something that could satisfy a new kind of populism, a populism powered by deep knowledge, self-interest so broad as to reasonably be called tolerance, and an automatic, preternatural vigilance. ...

Sterling noted that the first stating of the Singularity metaphor and threat came from John Von Neuman in the 1950s in conversation with Stan Ulam---"the rate of change in technology accelerates until it is mind-boggling and beyond social control or even comprehension." But it was science fiction writer Vernor Vinge who first published the idea, in novels and a lecture in the early 1980s, and it was based on the expectation of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence. Vinge wrote: "I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030." Vinge was not thrilled at the prospect.



The world-changing event would happen relatively soon, it would be sudden, and it would be irrevocable.



"It's an end-of-history notion," Sterling drawled, "and like most end-of-history notions, it is showing its age." It's almost 2005, and the world is still intelligible. Computer networks have accelerated wildly, but water networks haven't---in fact we're facing a shortage of water.



The Singularity feels like a 90s dot-com bubble idea now---it has no business model. "Like most paradoxes it is a problem of definitional systems involving sci-fi handwaving around this magic term 'intelligence.' If you fail to define your terms, it is very easy to divide by zero and reach infinite exponential speed." It was catnip for the intelligentsia: "Wow, if we smart guys were more like we already are, we'd be godlike."



Can we find any previous Singularity-like events in history? Sterling identified three---the atomic bomb, LSD, and computer viruses. The bomb was sudden and world changing and hopeful---a new era! LSD does FEEL like it's world changing. Viruses proliferate exponentially on the net. LSD is pretty much gone now. Mr. Atom turned out to be not our friend and has blended in with other tools and problems.



Singularity proponents, Sterling observed, are organized pretty much like virus writers---loose association, passionate focus, but basically gentle. (They'd be easily rounded up.) "They don't have to work very hard because they are mesmerized by the autocatalyzing cascade effect. 'Never mind motivating voters, raising funds,or persuading the press; we've got a mathematician's smooth line on a 2D graph! Why bother, since pretty soon we'll be SUPERHUMAN. It's bound to happen to us because we are EARLY ADAPTERS.'"



Vernor Vinge wrote: "For me, superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed." Said Sterling, "A glut of technical riches never properly absorbed sounds like a great description of the current historical epoch."



Sterling listed five kinds of kinds of reactions to the Singularity. 1) Don't know and don't care (most people). 2) The superbian transhumanists. 3) The passive singularitatians---the Rapture of the Nerds. 4) The terrified handflapping apocalypse millennialists (a dwindling group, too modish to stay scared of the same apocalypse for long). 5) The Singularity resistance---Bill Joy killjoys who favor selective relinquishment. Sterling turned out to be a fellow traveler of the Resistance: "Human cognition becoming industrialized is something I actually worry about."



Vinge did a great thing, said Sterling. The Singularity has proved to be a rich idea. "In the genre of science fiction it is more important to be fruitfully mistaken than dully accurate. That's why we are science fiction writers, not scientists."

Jack Womack, one of the people who's been privy to the material and process throughout, offers the following take on it:



Spook: as spectre, ghost, revenant, remnant of death, the madness lingering after the corpse is sloughed off. Slang for intelligence agent; agent of uncertainty, agent of fear, agent of fright.



Country: in the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind. Where your bed is made.



Spook Country: the place where we have all landed, few by choice, and where we are learning to live. The country inside and outside of the skull. The soul, haunted by the past, of what was, of what might have been. The realization that not all forking paths are equal -- some go down in value.



The ground of being, pervaded with spectres. The ground of actuality, similarly teeming.



In traversing spook country, we ourselves have been transformed, and we will not fully understand how until we are no longer what we were.

Word from the Croisette has some of our posters gnashing their teeth at the possibility that someone who's made Britney vids might attempt a feature film of Neuromancer.



Discussing said possibility, earlier today, with Cory Doctorow, he said:

"I've noticed that everything in Hollywood always appears to be in a liminal state of nearly there, with enormous, gallumphing enthusiasm all around, then long periods of indifference. I get almost weekly calls about the amazing things that are just about to happen for me. I go to studio meetings with people who tell me about the amazing things we'll do together. Somehow, nothing much comes of it... It reminds me a little of bubble-era tech entrepreneurs, especially the business development people who always seemed about to close a GIANT DEAL."



If you're a novelist, or hope one day to be, and haven't yet had a film option, I suggest you remember that. It's as concise and accurate a description of this very liminal business as you're ever likely to run across. Myself, I'll be willing to entertain the idea that Neuromancer is really "headed for the big screen" when I'm watching it being shot. As the old saying goes, I'll believe it when I see it.



I *do* believe, though, that Peter Weir will not be going forward with Pattern Recognition. That is one utterly solid little factoid of film news, alas.



I no longer get very wrought up over the liminals, myself, except to be annoyed by people who seem to assume that feature films are the ultimate stage of novelistic creation, thereby relegating the book to the status of dull gray chrysalis.

Tachyon Publications has posted the Table of Contents for their "Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology" (edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel), and it's a killer line-up:



* Introduction: Hacking Cyberpunk by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel

* Introduction: Kessel-Sterling Correspondence by John Kessel

* Bruce Sterling "Bicycle Repairman"

* Gwyneth Jones "Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland"

* Jonathan Lethem "How We Got Into Town and Out Again"

* Greg Egan "Yeyuka"

* Pat Cadigan "The Final Remake of The Return of Little Latin Larry"

* William Gibson "Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City"

* David Marusek "The Wedding Album"

* Walter Jon Williams "Daddy's World"

* Michael Swanwick "The Dog Said Bow-Wow"

* Charles Stross "Lobsters"

* Paul Di Filippo "What's Up, Tiger Lily"

* Christopher Rowe "The Voluntary State"

* Elizabeth Bear "Two Dreams on Trains"

* Paolo Bacigalupi "The Calorie Man"

* Mary Rosenblum "Search Engine"

* Cory Doctorow "When SysAdmins Ruled the Earth"



That second "introduction" is actually a series of letters between Bruce Sterling and John Kessel starting in 1985, which sounds like it's about the heart of the cyberpunk-humanist split. I hadn't even suspected such a thing existed, and I can't wait to read it myself.

WHEN is a bicycle not like other bicycles? To begin with, when it has no brakes, or at least no visible brakes, or possibly just a front brake. That means you can't ride this bike very well on your first try, and certainly not very gracefully, easily or safely.



The rear cog is bolted directly to the hub, so that whenever the vehicle is in motion, the pedals go around, making coasting impossible. This bike doesn't have a shift lever or extra sprockets, and the chain is shorter and wider than on traditional bikes.



There are no fenders, and the rear wheels are probably bolted onto the frame to deter theft. You slow down by reversing the pedals, or skidding, or doing a skip stop. And that's just the beginning of the differences between your run-of-the-mill 10-speed and a track bike, or fixed-gear bike (fixie for short) as it is also known.



Many fixed-gear adherents contend that their bikes are the ultimate and all others are pretenders. And these fixed-gear zealots are a growing presence on the streets of New York. Perceived by some as nuisances, or as troublesome, anarchist Dumpster-diving punks who happen to ride bikes, they are occasionally reviled, but they are also the subject of curiosity and interest. Just as die-hard skateboarders 15 years ago stood on the cusp of providing a new lifestyle, so the fixed-gear bike culture could be the tip of something that nobody can accurately predict but something that is huge.



Riders of fixed-gear bikes are as diverse as bike riders in general. Messengers are big fixie aficionados, but more and more fixed-gear bikes are being ridden by nonmessengers, most conspicuously the kind of younger people to whom the term 'hipster' applies and who emanate from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn. You see these riders weaving in and out of traffic without stopping, balancing on the pedals at a stoplight and in the process infuriating pedestrians and drivers alike. ...

Fly Agarics are the famous red-capped, white-spotted (yellow spotted in North America) mushrooms of Siberian shamanism.Often characterised as deadly poisonous in mycology guides, the mushrooms are known to cause a range of distortions. They can make objects in the world seem much bigger or smaller, an effect lewis Carroll had incorporated into Alice In Wonderland (it is unknown whether Carroll had personal knowledge of the "bemushroomed" state). Gordon Wasson argued that Amanita was the Soma of the Rig Veda.



Here is how Fly Agarics inspired the Santa Claus legend: In Siberia, the mushrooms were rare and extremely valuable - apparently one mushroom could cost the same as a reindeer. Ibotenic acid and the other active ingredients of the mushroom concentrate in urine, and up to seven or eight people can share the intoxication by passing along their piss. Many Siberian tribesmen even preferred ingesting the piss as it caused less gastric distress. Reindeer also loved to drink the mushroom scented-piss. All a Siberian nomad had to do wa pour a bit of his piss on the ground and reindeer would come galloping over from miles around. This archaic, symbiotic relationship - reindeer, red and white capped beings bringing gifts from the other world, the frozen tundra - was incorporated, consciously or not, into the story of Santa Claus.

I took out the beer, turned around, and across the kitchen there were three huge mushrooms staring at me - a five foot tall, a four foot tall, and a three foot tall mushroom. The mushrooms were red and yellow and they had little eyes and little mouths. They looked just as solid and real as me or you.



Robert and the mushrooms stared at each other, until the largest asked, "Why did you eat us?" Robert thought, and then replied, "I was just following my dream."



The mushrooms conferred with each other. Finally they seemed satisfied by his answer. "But are you prepared to follow this path?" the tallest Fly Agaric asked. Robert answered, intuitively and without hesitation, "Yes I am." Whereupon the mushrooms vanished. Fifteen years passed before Robert realized that the path he had agreed to follow was plant shamanism.



A friend of Robert's who also ate Fly Agarics received a similar visitation, and was also asked "Why did you eat us?" But he answered, "I was trying to get high." The mushrooms told him, "Well, if you ever do this again, we're going to kill you."

The Shockwave Rider is the culmination of Brunner's near future prescience. Written in the early seventies, he explicitly acknowledges Alvin Toffler's Future Shock - an influential discussion of the change brought on by technology - though Brunner had already published a number of novels on the catastrophic effects of humanity's approach to the world and each other. The difference with this work is the far closer focus on North America and the decision to drive the plot through a single central character. The book continues to use the cut-up style Brunner had developed, with a variety of techniques used to offer other viewpoints, but this is essentially the story of Nicky Haflinger, a brilliant individual attempting to transform the "plug-in society".



The social etiquette of American society in this book expects everyone to move from one job to another and across the country once or twice a year.The rapid, repeated changes result in disconnection from any sense of genuine community and a tendency to make belongings and relationships interchangeable - a plug-in society. The inability of the average person to cope with this rate of change and the resulting loss of loyalty, commitment and real relation is solved by the use of drugs - primarily prescription tranquillisers which ameliorate the continual shocks of life. A comprehensive communications network, which started as a corollary to this mobile society has become central to its continuance, storing vast detail of each individual in the databanks. Such use of and reliance on computer data leads to the central paranoia of this world - a fear of what the records might contain and what might be used to your detriment by someone who has better access to data. In a world where no one is more than the sum of their computer records, Haflinger's ability to re-engineer his persona through reprogramming the data banks allows him to escape the government agencies and sample lifestyles at many levels of society. However, much of the story is framed as an interrogation so it is clear that his capture is inevitable. The extant powers fear his skill and the potential it has to give him great power. Yet, Haflinger's journey is not a search for power but for wisdom. ...

If moving to the US tends to put people at risk for psychological afflictions, clearly a strange cultural malaise is at work. And the problem appears to be getting worse.



Social epidemiologist Myrna Weissman at Columbia University, along with a lengthy list of collaborators, has explored this question in detail, looking at the US as well as other countries. Reporting in 1992 and 1996 in JAMA - the Journal of the American Medical Association - Weissman and colleagues found that more and more Americans are becoming depressed, they are getting depressed at a younger age, and the severity and frequency of depression is rising.



These results are neither small nor spurious. Each generation born in the twentieth century has suffered more depression than the previous one and since WWII, the overall rate of depression has more than doubled. A more recent study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2000 and conducted by another team of researchers, showed more than a doubling of depression in women from 1970 to 1992. Psychiatric drug use has skyrocketed as a result. American schoolchildren today are taking four times as many psychiatric meds as all of the rest of the world combined.



What's going on? The commonly sold narrative is that every instance of the blues, and certainly every case of clinical depression, is the result of some in-born biochemical imbalance - treatable only by serotonin drugs like Prozac. Yet these studies make it clear that something larger is at play. If your brain is indeed out of balance, the source of the trouble may very well reside in your cultural environment, not in your genes.

Last night was our inaugural reading at the Variety Preview Room, with Cory Doctorow and Rudy Rucker each reading, followed by a panel discussion and a signing. Cory Doctorow read a chapter from his upcoming hacker-vs-the-DHS novel Little Brother, which will be coming out next May. Rudy Rucker read from his short story regarding how Alan Turing, after eluding MI5 in order to have a tryst with his male lover, really died.

Interviewing Cory Doctorow is easy. You just flip the on switch by asking the first question, and he emits a constant stream of brilliant, insightful stuff. Editing interviews with Doctorow is easy as well. He generally speaks in coherent, whole sentences and frequently expresses complex ideas for some length that don't get lost mid-paragraph.



So it's a pleasure to present this conversation. For those of you have been living in a non-digital cave (actually, I rather respect that type of non-conformism), Doctorow is a science fiction writer, Boing Boing contributor, and the former European Affairs Director for the EFF from 2001 - 2006. His novels include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.



Jeff Diehl joined me in this conversation with Doctorow about Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present - his new collection of short stories.



RU SIRIUS: You make quite a prominent point about the fact that Over-Clocked is available for free under a Creative Commons license. You also write about the good experience you've had with this, as a writer who does want to get paid for his work. Do you think this good experience is universal? Do you know if this has been studied at all?



CORY DOCTOROW: Well, I don't know that anyone's done any kind of systematic study. But my anecdotal study finds that everyone I know who's tried giving away free books as a way of selling printed books has done it again with their next book. So, I think that's a pretty good sign, right? It worked well enough for people to do it a second time. I guess the definition of insanity is doing something twice and expecting a different outcome. Presumably people were happy with that first outcome. ...



RU: Let's move on to this collection. My favorite piece in there, and it's deservedly the longest piece, is called "After the Siege." Talk a bit about the theme of that piece.



CD: Well, I went to a little family reunion in St. Petersburg, Russia. My grandmother was born there, and her family still lives there. When I was growing up, she always used to tell me about the war, and about being a kid living through the Siege of Leningrad. And she would tell me how I would never understand the terrible horrors she'd faced. I didn't know much about the Siege of Leningrad, but my understanding was‚Äö√Ñ√∂‚àö√ë¬¨‚àÇ it wasn't anything like Auschwitz, right? Like, "Boy, how bad could it have been? You were a civil defense worker. You weren't in a death camp." And a couple of years ago, on one of those long St. Petersburg days, my grandmother walked us through the streets of St. Petersburg and told us about what she saw and did during that period. It really changed my perception of it. I went out and read some books, most notably The 900 Days about the Siege of Leningrad. The privation and terrors of the Siege of Leningrad can't be overstated. It was a nine hundred day siege. And Stalin bungled it so badly that people in Petersberg were also in bad shape. There was starvation and cannibalism and lots of people freezing to death. And my grandmother - this 12-year-old girl - was digging civil defense trenches in the frozen ground; and hauling bodies and throwing them out of fifteen story windows because they were too weak to haul them down the stairs. She was going to apartments where people had died and throwing them down, and then scraping them up off the ground. And she was seeing people who'd been rendered by cannibal black marketeers - who had parts of their body sliced off to sell on the black market.



They were the most amazing, incredible stories. And it got me thinking about writing about this as an allegory. At the same time, I've been doing all this work on copyright and related rights with developing nations, and with what they call emerging economies like the former Soviet territories. And these countries are getting really shafted in international copyright negotiations. They're being forced to sign on to these regimes that are totally out of step with what they need.



America became an industrial power by being a pirate nation. After the American revolution, America didn't honor the copyrights or patents of anyone except Americans. If you were a European or British inventor, your stuff could be widely pirated in America. That's how they got rich. Only after America became a net exporter of copyrighted goods did it start to enter into treaties with other countries whereby American inventors and authors would be protected abroad in exchange for those foreign authors being protected in America. But now you have these countries in Africa, in Asia, and in Eastern Europe, who are signing on to trade agreements with the U.S. where they basically promise to just take huge chunks of their GDP and export it to the U.S. It's a kind of information feudalism, you know? Info-serfs.



RU: Within the context of this book, and with the issues you're raising, you're not just talking about information. I think you're also talking about material wealth. You're also talking about AIDS drugs and stuff like that.



CD: Yeah, absolutely. You know, Russia just signed onto this free trade agreement with the U.S. trade representative in which - among other things - they promised that from now on they would license all their digital media presses and subject them to government inspection. So America, which fought a revolution over not wanting to have licensed presses, has just gone to Russia, where they've just had a revolution over licensed presses. And they've imposed a requirement that they license their presses. This is staggering, awful, apocalyptically bad policy-making on the part of both the U.S. and Russia. Frankly, as someone who pays taxes in the U.S., I'm embarrassed.



So I wrote this story from the point of view of a little girl. She's in a utopia where they've done what the U.S. did after the American Revolution. They've abandoned all international copyright and patent and trademark and knowledge goods treaties and they're just pirating everything. It's in a kind of nanotech world, so if they don't care about respecting the rights of the inventors who created it, they can make pretty much anything. As a result, they've become an incredibly wealthy nation in a very short period of time.



They've been driven to this piracy by a disease that turns people into a kind of zombie. It's this terrible infectious disease. And the drugs for it were very expensive. And they had these ineffectual leaders who were co-opted by the pharmaceutical companies. So eventually they took the last of these leaders, put them in a barrel and drove nails through it and rolled it down a hill. (This is, in fact, how the Hungarians killed the priest who converted the animists to Christianity.) And they put in a new Parliament that broke all ties with the industrial world and decided to pirate everything.



But a siege is laid against them. And in the siege, the enemy infects their computers and other devices with a virus that shuts down all their nano-assemblers. They all start to starve to death, and the zombie-ism comes back, and so on. And it's all told from the point of view of this little girl who comes of age in this world. It was a fun and hard story to write, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. It's been picked up for a couple of the "Year's Best" anthologies, and I've done a podcast of it. And I'm talking with someone about a film deal for it. It seems to be a lot of people's favorites. ...



RU: Is there a particular piece of non-fiction that has recently changed your view of the way the world works?



CD: I read a couple of really good books in the last year or so. One is Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Venkatesh. It's a serious economic, or ethnographic analysis of the underground economy in Chicago. He's mentioned in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. He's the anthropology grad student who goes and lives with crack dealers in Chicago's South Side and writes up how the underground economy works. And that economy goes from the ladies who make sandwiches and sell them without charging sales tax or declaring it on their income statement; to the loan shark, the homeless guy who will sleep in your doorway and make sure that graffiti kids don't tag it, to the crack gang and everyone in between. It's a fascinating book.



The other one that I really liked was by Yochai Benkler. It's called The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. It's such a good title! It may just be the best tech book title of the last twenty years. It's a book about common space peer production - the stuff that happens on Wikipedia and on blogs and with free and open source software. It's about how to understand that in economic terms, not as a gift economy per se, and not as an industrial economy, and not as volunteerism. He shows it as a third mode of industrial production that is neither the kind of gift economy or volunteerism that characterizes people who volunteer at a church; nor capitalism as we understand it, where people invest. Rather, it is an entirely different mode of industrial production. And I found that book really fascinating.



RU: If he describes this as a sort of alternative mode of production, does that imply that it will always co-exist with the other modes of production? Or do you envision the sort of Creative Commons/open source idea ever becoming a dominant mode?



CD: Well, it may not be the case that Creative Commons/open source/free software becomes the dominant mode - although I can imagine worse futures. But I think it's very true that knowledge goods, by their nature, have a different economic reality from other goods. It's very hard to enforce exclusive rights - the right to prohibit or the right to authorize knowledge goods. As the Motion Picture Association is discovering - in a world where we have ubiquitous networks and cheap and fast hardware - it's really hard to stop people from copying. I don't know whether it's moral or immoral to copy things - we can talk about that all day long. I just think that it's hard to stop it. So if you're a business person, your business can't be built on what you think people should do. It should be built on what you think people will do. And what people will do with information is copy it. So now that we're living in an information economy, I think we will have different kinds of production. It may not all be sharing, Creative Commons-oriented, but I don't think they're going to be based on exclusion or proprietorship. I just don't know how you could make that work; it just doesn't seem plausible to me. Bruce Sterling says, "The future composts the past". I think he's right. I don't think that the future makes things disappear; I think it builds on top of things.

Your Mars books were about terraforming Mars; the Science in the Capital series is to some degree are about terraforming Earth (to repair the effects of global warming). What are our chances of doing either before it's too late?



Robinson: We are the major force changing the surface and atmosphere of Earth now (we're faster than the natural processes changing it, I mean), so terraforming is indeed physically possible, but we're not used to thinking of ourselves in that role. It would require a changed paradigm, which admitted that we have become some kind of conscious "global biosphere maintenance stewards," and that environmental thinking now ought to include an openness to at least the concept of doing things deliberately to reduce our impacts. We have to reconceptualize wilderness as being a kind of ethical position as well as a piece of land, meaning active and conscious stewardship on our part. This is a kind of interaction with the Earth that has been going on semi-consciously since the beginning of humankind, but now it's become obvious, and it is a frightening thing to contemplate, because it's a stupendously complex system and we don't know enough to do what we now need to. And the unintended further consequences of anything we might try are hard to predict.



Even so, we may eventually agree through the U.N. or something else to try some things, if we get desperate enough. The crux may come if the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet begins to detach in a big way. About a quarter of the world's population lives very near the coastline, and the disruptions there could be so severe that we would contemplate mitigating actions.



Beyond that, I think it's best not to put the problem as a question concerning whether we are "too late" or not, because either answer leads to a kind of non-active response: i.e., if it's not too late, I don't have to change, and if it is too late, then there's no point in changing, so either way-party on! Also, in some sense, encompassing all life on Earth, it will never be "too late," in that even if we trigger a mass extinction event, the surviving life would quickly fill the empty niches and evolve onward. You can't kill life on Earth, short of toasting it in an expanding sun or whatnot. But you can kill a lot of species, and wreck a lot of biomes, and you can probably wreck human civilization for a time, which would kill a lot of people. So I think it's better to think of it in terms of "do we save more or do we save less," of the other species in particular.



Which of the global-warming fixes in the book could be accomplished right now?



Robinson: We could do almost everything I described in this series, although some of the actions are perhaps politically impossible (right now), rather than physically impossible. If we made the social decision to do it, we could certainly build clean-energy generation, and a clean transport system. We could decarbonize our technology a great deal. These are very big investments, but it's a very big economy, and retooling our basic technology is something we've done many times before. It's a business opportunity in some ways.



The biological mitigation schemes discussed in my novel, and unleashed in one case, are definitely not at all ready for deployment, and maybe never will be, for reasons I think my book makes clear.



The main thing we could do now is vastly increase our construction of clean-energy generation.

Well, this is certainly a change of pace for the fans of Kim Stanley Robinson's epic "Mars" trilogy. That series, of course, was an intricate meshing of hard science, ecological musings, adventure, and sociological speculations. In its scope and in the wealth of issues with which it dealt, it was not unlike Frank Herbert's classic "Dune" trilogy. "Escape from Kathmandu" is something far different.



For one thing, it is set in the Nepal of our own timeframe (or close thereto...the four stories were originally written in the mid-'80s). For another, the protagonists are not colonizers or scientists or eco-rebels...they're hash-smoking Western expatriates who hang about the Himalayas in a rather carefree fashion, living for the thrill of climbing. Happily enough, for those with eyes to see, the area is rife with yetis, hidden cities and tunnels, and reincarnated lamas. So adventure is never too far away.



The plots themselves are rather slight and uncompelling, and they creak somewhat under the weight of the political views heaped upon them. Tibet and the Dalai Lama = good, China = bad (the Chinese are portrayed as genocidal militant oppressors and poachers to boot, although in the current political climes, many would tend to agree with this assessment). The ruling elite of Nepal are villains. Governments are almost uniformly bad, but luckily they will someday be overthrown by enlightened spiritual types.



Nevertheless, the book does offer some insight into the impoverished country of Nepal, although an earlier reviewer notes that most of the information is wrong or misleading, so don't take any of the descriptions of conditions as gospel truth. It's especially weird to read this book now, given the very recent upheavals in the country in June and July of this year (the crown prince's killing spree and the resignation of the prime minister). Since some of the members of the royal family actually appear as characters in the stories, it's rather unsettling to find out their real-life fates lately.

Speed, notes journalist and author Carl Honore, has become a combining form: speed dialing, speed reading, speed walking, even speed dating. Modern life is stuck on fast-forward to such an extent, he notes, quoting Postcards from the Edge, that "even instant gratification takes too long." But there's a backlash brewing, he says, as everyday people start putting the brakes on. He concludes with the results of his own attempt to get in touch with his "inner tortoise."

If it seems sometimes that the pace of life has quickened, rest assured that it has -- by about 10 per cent over the last decade.



We can thank Richard Wiseman, a professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in England, for quantifying the unquantifiable. He did it by comparing the time it took pedestrians in cities around the world to walk 60 feet (18.3 metres) in a 1994 study with recorded times of city dwellers traversing the identical length of unobstructed pavement today.



The results show that on average we move at about 3.5 mph (5.6 km per hour), or 10 per cent faster than in the early 1990s, an increase Wiseman attributed to a frenetic lifestyle driven by technology and 24-hour availability.



"The psychology is basically that people's walking pace is determined by how much they think they're in a hurry; how quickly they think they should be doing things," he said. "What's amazing is that these days, you press send on an e-mail and, if someone hasn't responded in 10 minutes, you think: 'Where are they?' "



Not surprisingly, the pace in the so-called Asian Tigers has quickened the most, with pedestrians in Singapore walking 30 per cent faster than a decade ago, covering the distance in a mere 10.4 seconds; and in Guangzhou (China) 20 per cent faster, in 10.94 seconds.

I am an advocate of localization, simplification, self-sufficiency and fulfilled ontogeny. Slow food. Tribalism. A thousand other catch-phrases that, above all else, raise a singular objection from friends and critics alike: isn't your idealized vision starkly juxtaposed to your professed enjoyment of the finer things in life?



My response: on the contrary, my good friend...these worlds are in fact one in the same, only separated by the disinformation of the consumer economy.



I have spent, to be perfectly honest, more than my fair share of mornings slowly enjoying an espresso as the fog burns off the slopes of Mount Etna in the distance, the scent of blood orange blossoms mingling with the sharp aroma of coffee. This is the kind of perfect moment that embodies our cultural ethos: sacrifice enough of what you love now, and you'll make enough money that some day you'll be able to buy back those priceless experiences in the form of a luxury cruise, a meal at that new bistro or a beach house in Florida. The irony is that this perfect moment cost about 65 cents--that's less than 8 minutes wage for a cashier at McDonald's, and yet it's enough to make highly paid executives and professionals alike salivate. This should tell us something...



The finer things in life can generally be divided into two categories: material and experiential. Despite the relentless psychological barrage of advertising, most of us can readily admit that it is the experiential that is truly rewarding and fulfilling. Many even recognize their own predilection to fulfill their desire for the experiential by compensating with an excess of the material. Commercialism tells us that the experiential--that which requires time--is too costly, out of our reach. Our time, we are led to believe, must be sacrificed to meet the demands of the economy. But time is free for all of us. It is the great equalizer, something to which we all have equally random access. But in the modern economy, where average individuals cannot directly provide for themselves, they are duped into trading time for the basic necessities of life--necessities that are directly available to the poorest of the Earth. As this economic hierarchy has intensified over time, we continue to be duped into trading our time for material possessions--far beyond those required to survive. The memes of our economic culture have convinced us that the material is a fine substitute for the experiential. A nagging doubt, dissatisfaction with our own suburbanization, some unknown, unfulfilled yearning tells us that, despire the overtures of mass-media, even the materially rich among us still long for the experiential.



The sun on your face, playing with your children, staring at a fire until late into the night, sitting still in the forest listening to the wind rush through aspen leaves, talking with friends, laying on your back in a meadow and watching the clouds pass above you. All of these things are free--they require only time. Hunter-gatherers around the world spend, on average, less than 20 hours a week "working". The rest of their time was available for the experiential, the "finer things" in life. Perhaps this is why anthropologist Marshal Sahlins calls them "The Original Affluent Society", or why Paul Shepard says that humanity's time in the "hamlet economy" was the best it ever had.



The finer things in life are nothing more than a connection and a oneness with those things that modern culture insists remain separate or "sacred". This connection is available to all of us. Reconnecting to the finer things in life is not dependent on success within the modern commercial economy...on the contrary, my good friend, this reconnection requires that we take a new--or is it old?--approach to life. This is vernacular zen.

An interesting new article in Wired Magazine suggests that transparency is the new king and secrecy is dying. I agree that there are too many secrets, and wrote about the potential for "radical transparency" in everything from military operations to business back in 2004. The problem, as usual, is power, and the Wired article highlights this issue by ignoring it: transparency is good and secrecy is dying as long as it's profitable, and not before. There is a high cost to early adopters of radical transparency, and the failure to view this game as an infinitely iterated game will most likely prevent any adoption of radical transparency in most cases.



I'll go out on a limb and suggest that radical transparency ALWAYS makes sense IF you're the good guy. The quanum leap in radical transparency will not come until the public at large realize the corrollary to that rule: if you're not radically transparent, you're the bad guy.



This is so obvious as to be almost invisible.



Tony Snow: "...it's a reasonable and extraordinary effort on our part to help Congress do its job [by insisting that officials testify without a record and not under oath]"

The Internet has inverted the social physics of information. Companies used to assume that details about their internal workings were valuable precisely because they were secret. If you were cagey about your plans, you had the upper hand; if you kept your next big idea to yourself, people couldn't steal it. Now, billion- dollar ideas come to CEOs who give them away; corporations that publicize their failings grow stronger. Power comes not from your Rolodex but from how many bloggers link to you - and everyone trembles before search engine rankings. Kelman rewired the system and thinks anyone else could, too. But are we really ready to do all our business in the buff?



"You can't hide anything anymore," Don Tapscott says. Coauthor of The Naked Corporation, a book about corporate transparency, and Wikinomics, Tapscott is explaining a core truth of the see-through age: If you engage in corporate flimflam, people will find out. He ticks off example after example of corporations that have recently been humiliated after being caught trying to conceal stupid blunders. There's Sony, which put a rootkit - a piece of spyware - on music CDs as a secret copy-protection technique, only to wind up in court when bloggers revealed that the code left their computers vulnerable to hacker intrusions. There's Microsoft, this time on the wrong side of the transparent shower curtain, offering to pay people to buff up the company's Wikipedia entry. And Diebold, which insisted its voting machines were unhackable - until a professor posted a video of himself rigging a mock election on them. The video went viral and racked up some 300,000 YouTube views.



Secrecy is dying. It's probably already dead.2 In a world where Eli Lilly's internal drug-development memos, Paris Hilton's phonecam images, Enron's emails, and even the governor of California's private conversations can be instantly forwarded across the planet, trying to hide something illicit - trying to hide anything, really - is an unwise gamble. So many blogs rely on scoops to drive their traffic that muckraking has become a sort of mass global hobby. Radical transparency has even reached the ultrasecretive world of Washington politics: The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation has begun putting zillions of public documents in elegantly searchable online databases, leaving it to interested citizens to connect the dots. One adroit digger recently discovered that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert had earmarked $200 million for a highway to be built near a property he had a stake in. When the property was sold, Hastert made a 500 percent profit on his original investment, provoking a wave of negative coverage.



All of which explains why the cult of transparency has so many high tech converts these days. Transparency is a judo move. Your customers are going to poke around in your business anyway, and your workers are going to blab about internal info - so why not make it work for you by turning everyone into a partner in the process and inviting them to do so?

We, the undersigned, believe that broad dissemination of research results is fundamental to the advancement of knowledge. For America's taxpayers to obtain an optimal return on their investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible. Yet too often, research results are not available to researchers, scientists, or the members of the public. Today, the Internet and digital technologies give us a powerful means of addressing this problem by removing access barriers and enabling new, expanded, and accelerated uses of research findings.



We believe the US Government can and must act to ensure that all potential users have free and timely access on the Internet to peer-reviewed federal research findings. This will not only benefit the higher education community, but will ultimately magnify the public benefits of research and education by promoting progress, enhancing economic growth, and improving the public welfare.



We support the re-introduction and passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act, which calls for open public access to federally funded research findings within six months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Grabbing pictures of iconic Smithsonian Institution artifacts just got a whole lot easier. Before, if you wanted to get a picture of the Wright Brothers' plane, you could go to the Smithsonian Images Web site and pay for a print or high-resolution image after clicking through several warnings about copyrights and other restrictions -- and only if you were a student, teacher or someone pledging not to use it to make money.



Now, you can just go to the free photo-sharing Web site flickr.com.



A nonprofit group is challenging the copyrights and restrictions on images being sold by the Smithsonian. But instead of going to court, the group downloaded all 6,288 photos online and posted them Wednesday night on the free Internet site.



"I don't care if they sell the photos, but then once they sell it, they can't say you can't reuse this photo," said Carl Malamud, co-founder of the group Public.Resource.Org, advocates for posting more government information online. "You're not allowed to chill debate by telling people they can't use something because it's under copyright when that's not true."

While I'm awaiting publication of an article that I wrote on the escalating violence in Nigeria, I'll vent for a moment about an intelligence-related problem that I've continually run up against-as recently as yesterday.



The problem is collecting intelligence on our own forces - "Blue Force Intel."



It's a symptom of the deeper sickness of secrecy within our military. Open source warfare-the kind of thing increasingly practiced by outfits like al-Qa'ida-has far less of an issue with this. But the United States tends to guard information according to the classic method: the security of a secret is inversely proportionate to the square of the number of people who know it. Put otherwise, the US government doesn't tell the US government what it is doing, and especially not what it is planning to do.



My most memorable experience with this occurred during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As chief of intelligence for a squadron of electronic jamming aircraft (EC-130H Compass Call), I planned offensive and defensive components of our missions. Offensive components included jamming enemy communications infrastructure in the locations that most aided our advancing ground forces. This, naturally, required high-resolution understanding of what our ground forces were presently doing, and would be doing in the next day or two. Defensive components included avoiding those areas where our aircraft would be most vulnerable to surface-to-air fire. This, naturally, required high-resolution understanding of what our ground forces were presently doing (what areas they had cleared, what areas they had simply bypassed), and what they would be doing in the next day or two. Naturally, it was virtually impossible to get any of this information direct from the horse's mouth.



Sure, at some central operations center (actually only a few miles from my tent, but on an entirely different base that required driving a half hour through downtown Doha) there were people representing the exact units that I needed information on, but they didn't know what precisely their own units were doing any more than our own representatives knew what we were planning-it was a simple issue of information processing burden I hierarchy. We had enough time to plan our own missions, or communicate all the fine details of those missions to our representatives, but not both.



So, it turned out that the most effective way to get the information that we needed was to engage in our own, unsanctioned intelligence collection on our own forces. This may seem wasteful, but it involved significantly less information processing burden in a hierarchy the size of the US military than actually asking our army units where they are now and where they plan to be tomorrow. Plus, they wouldn't tell us anyway. Sure, we were on the same side, but specific operational details of the kind we needed are on a "need to know basis," and no matter how much we explained that we need to know to protect *you*, we still didn't have the right kind of "need to know." So we would debrief our own flight crews on their observations about our own units locations, we would deduce our own military plans from information that we could access about locations for our own satellite collections, UAV flight paths, etc., and we would scour the secure internet looking for ways to access other units mission planning files. It worked out OK.



Which reminds me about my favorite part of the TV show "24": the utter fantasy of how easily and fluidly they access information and electronic systems that magically tell them what they need to know. Trust me, it doesn't work like that.



Fast forward to the present. I'm still dealing with the same issues when I work with domestic infrastructure security matters. Consider the following scenario: assume for the moment that there is a possibility that we will attack Iran. Then assume that, after we attack Iran, Iran will retaliate by attacking inside the US. Now assume that you're tasked with protecting against that retaliatory attack. Wouldn't it be nice to know if, and when, we are going to attack Iran. Hah! It appears that I don't have the need to know these things. So, I resort to the same old tricks, and go to work using our own intelligence infrastructure to collect intelligence on ourselves.



Another example of the idiocy of hierarchy.

A young clerk with no knowledge of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown allowed a tribute to victims slip into the classified ads page of a newspaper in southwest China, a Hong Kong daily reported on Wednesday. The tiny ad in the lower right corner of page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News on Monday night, read: "Paying tribute to the strong(-willed) mothers of June 4 victims". An investigation was launched by Chinese authorities to find out how the advertisement slipped its way past censors.



Public discussion of the massacre is still taboo in Beijing and the government has rejected calls to overturn the verdict that the student-led demonstrations were "counter-revolutionary", or subversive. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed when the army crushed the pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989. Hong Kong's South China Morning Post said a young woman on the Chengdu Evening News classified section had allowed the ad to be published because she'd never heard of the June 4 crackdown.

I've long been a proponent of the core Viridian argument that "making the invisible visible" (MTIV) -- illuminating the processes and systems that are normally too subtle, complex or elusive to apprehend -- is a fundamental tool for enabling behavioral change. When you can see the results of your actions, you're better able to change your actions to achieve the results you'd prefer. I've come to understand, however, that it's not enough to make the invisible visible; you also have to make it meaningful.



The canonical example of how MTIV works is the mileage readout standard in hybrid cars. Almost invariably, hybrid owners see a gradual but noticeable improvement in miles-per-gallon over the first month or so of hybrid vehicle ownership. This isn't so much the car being "broken in," but the driver: because of the mileage readout, the hybrid driver can see what driving patterns achieve the best results.



A growing number of non-hybrid cars now include miles-per-gallon readouts; will we see similar improvements in driver behavior as a result?



Possibly, but not likely. The hybrid miles-per-gallon readout comes in two forms: an average mileage, whether calculated for the current tank or the total vehicle miles; and a real-time, current mileage display, which will fluctuate significantly while one drives. As far as I have found, the non-hybrids with mileage readouts only include the average mileage display, not the real-time display. (Update: Howard notes in the comments a few makes of non-hybrid cars that do have both the average and real-time displays. I would be very interested in an examination of driver behavior -- and possible changes in behavior -- for those cars.)



This is useful information, to be sure; it's good to know what kind of mileage a vehicle gets in real-world use. But as a means of MTIV, it's not terribly helpful, because it breaks the connection between the action and the result. After the first few dozen miles of a given tank of gas, the average mileage readout changes very slowly, and only with sustained greater-than-average or less-than-average mileage driving. Small variations get lost in the noise. This means that minor changes in driving behavior can't be mapped to minor changes in miles-per-gallon. Without that connection between "I did this" and "I got that," drivers can't as easily learn to drive in a more efficient way. The driver needs to be able to compare behaviors and results to learn what works best. Both forms of display are necessary. The average mileage is the context for the momentary changes, and it's the comparison between the two that provides meaning.



This dilemma isn't just an issue for cars.



Late last month, the UK's environment secretary, David Milbrand, proposed putting ecological impact labels on all food products sold in UK stores. These labels would focus on the amount of carbon emitted as the result of the production of the food item. In this, the UK government is playing catch-up with some of its businesses, as the grocery chain Tesco announced in late January that it would be adding carbon labels to the products it sold. And now the Carbon Trust, a UK non-profit that works with businesses to reduce their greenhouse impacts, has embarked on an effort to build a labeling standard for adoption across industries. (It should come as no surprise that I'm very much in favor of this sort of labeling!) ...

A report released today by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) concludes that the scale, the scope, and the sophistication of state-based Internet filtering have all increased dramatically in recent years. The survey highlights the tools and techniques used by countries to keep their citizens from viewing certain kinds of online material.



ONI is a collaboration among four leading universities: Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Toronto. The group's testing was carried out during 2006 and early 2007. ONI used a combination of tools that can remotely test filtering conditions within given countries. The group also relied heavily on local researchers who evaluated Internet conditions from inside certain countries. Some countries, such as Cuba and North Korea, were deemed too dangerous for either remote or in-country testing. But of the 41 different countries tested by ONI, 25 were found to block or filter online content.



"Over the course of five years, we've gone from just a few places doing state-based technical filtering, like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, to more than two dozen," says John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. "As Internet censorship and surveillance grow, there's reason to worry about the implications of these trends for human rights, political activism, and economic development around the world." ...



One interesting case is that of heavily wired South Korea, where ONI found Internet filtering limited to one topic: North Korea. "The South Koreans block several North Korean websites," says Nart Villeneuve, director of technical research at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. "They even tamper with the system so that when you try to access one of those North Korean sites, the URL resolves to a South Korean police page telling you, 'What you're trying to access is illegal, and we know your IP [Internet protocol] address.'" (An IP address could be used to locate the computer where the search is conducted, with the ultimate goal of identifying the individual involved.)

The head of a US intelligence agency told the Associated Press that commercial satellite services like Google Earth may need to be censored in the future in order to protect American interests.



Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, who heads the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, spends his days helping the government map the planet and studying imagery. Once the exclusive domain of the government, commercial satellite imagery has attained high-enough resolutions that the government is thinking about ways to restrict its use in times of war or other emergency situations.



"If there was a situation where any imagery products were being used by adversaries to kill Americans, I think we should act," he said in the interview. "I think we may need to have some control over things that are disseminated. I don't know if that means buying up all the imagery or not. I think there are probably some other ways you can do it."



The reference to "buying up all the imagery" refers to the government's practice of purchasing all commercially-available satellite data on Afghanistan during the early days of the conflict there. While buying up all available images may be one solution to the problem, the government may also be able to exert a different kind of pressure, as it provides nearly $1 billion in grants to major US imagery firms.



As the imagery market becomes international, though, the competing demands of local governments may be more difficult to sort out. The issue is already becoming tricky for companies like Google that offer popular products using satellite imagery. Google has already faced requests from Vice President Cheney to remove images of his residence and from the Indian government to blur sensitive military sites. Headlines in the UK have already claimed that Iraqi insurgents are using Google Earth to attack British troops.

More than 60 years on, the case of Helen Duncan, the last woman in Britain to be jailed for witchcraft, refuses to die. As her supporters seek a posthumous pardon, evidence has emerged that she may have been the victim of a plot involving British intelligence agents, including Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond.



In the 1940s Duncan, a Dundee housewife and mother of six, travelled the country performing seances for a war-weary public often seeking reassurance about their loved ones. As a 'materialisation medium', which involved her going into a trance and producing 'ectoplasm' through which spirits would take on earthly features to communicate with the living, Duncan built a reputation as one of spiritualism's greatest heroines.



However, during a sitting in Portsmouth on 19 January, 1944, Duncan, 47, fell foul of the security services when a sailor from HMS Barham is alleged to have formed in ectoplasm and greeted his surprised mother sitting in the audience. His death had been kept a secret by the Admiralty, which had been trying to conceal news of the ship's sinking three months earlier.



Fears that Duncan had access to secret information alerted the security services, and an investigation led to her trial at the Old Bailey, accused of contravening the Witchcraft Act of 1735 by pretending to 'bring about the appearances of the spirits of deceased persons'. She was jailed for nine months.



At a time when the military authorities were anxious to keep plans of the Allied invasion of occupied France secret, Duncan and other psychics were seen as a potential threat to security. Drawing on new research and trial documents released to the National Archive, an academic and award-winning film-maker, Robert Hartley, has claimed that the evidence points to a state conspiracy to crack down on security leaks ahead of D-Day by making an example of Duncan.



'In the run-up to D-Day, the authorities were paranoid about potential security leaks and Duncan was in danger of disclosing military secrets during her seances,' said Hartley. 'Helen Duncan was giving out very accurate information. There were other mediums round the country giving out news on soldiers that had died and someone in authority took it seriously, whatever the source of the information. D-Day was coming up and it was absolutely essential to keep the Allied deception plans intact.'



After examining all the documents, Hartley believes there is evidence to suggest that Duncan's conviction by an Old Bailey jury in March 1944 was unsafe. In a new book, Helen Duncan: The Mystery Show Trial, he suggests that among those responsible for the conspiracy to convict Duncan was Fleming, a key figure in the naval intelligence services, and John Maude, the prosecuting counsel at the trial. 'I am convinced naval intelligence were working with MI5, and when I began looking at that connection Ian Fleming's name kept cropping up as being involved with people either involved in the case or on the sidelines,' said Hartley.

Ah, patents. The topic has pretty much taken charge of my life since last week's column revealing the lack of any way to identify the top 10 living U.S. patent holders Apparently half the Earth's population has something to say about patents, and most of them are e-mailing me. My inbox has been blowing up like Anna Nicole Smith between diets But the deluge has its upsides. The column prompted a few patent database companies to take a whack at the question. Two - ipIQ of Chicago and 1790 Analytics of New Jersey - came up with answers.



So here, for the first time, is a list of the 10 most-prolific inventors. This is from ipIQ:



1. Shunpei Yamazaki, Japan, 1,432 patents. Yes, it seems to be true: The top individual holder of U.S. patents is based at Tokyo tech research firm Semiconductor Energy Laboratory. For decades, the popular assumption has been that Thomas Edison is the all-time patent king with 1,093 patents. Yamazaki blows away Edison, and he is still inventing and getting patents. ...



And then there's one other oddity, pointed out by reader Michael Ravnitzky. This would be the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951. It's possible that any patent list results are skewed because various government agencies have the ability to classify any patent as secret and make it invisible to the public.



The USPTO even keeps a chart of "invention secrecy activity." It shows that so far in 2005, there have been 106 "new secrecy orders imposed." There are 4,915 "total secrecy orders in effect.". So if among all those florist patents Weder and Straeter invented the quantum computing secret decoder ring, we'd never know about it.

According to the sleeve of his latest book, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security, 'in an Uncertain World, Bruce Schneier is the go-to security expert for business leaders and policy makers.' If only the policy makers would listen, we'd be safer, happier and still free.



Other books include Applied Cryptography, described by Wired as 'the book the NSA wanted never to be published.'



Beyond Fear deals with security issues ranging from personal safety to national security and terrorism. Schneier is also a frequent contributor to Wired magazine, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and many other fine periodicals. He also writes a monthly newsletter, Cryptogram.



RU: I want to get right into the political area of security against terrorism. You wrote that security works better if it's centrally coordinated but implemented in a distributed manner. Tell us a little bit about that and maybe say a bit about how that might work.



BS: In security - especially something as broad as national security - it's important that there be a lot of central coordination. You can't have people in one area doing one thing, and people in another area doing another thing, and then not have them talking to each other. So sharing information across jurisdictions and up and down the line of command is important. When things happen, you need a lot of coordination and you can see coordination failures again and again. In the aftermath of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina there was a lot of replication of effort. A lot of things that were obvious‚Äö√Ñ¬∂ everyone thought someone else was doing. But the other half of that is distributed implementation. You can't be so rigid that your people in the field can't make decisions. In security today, we see smart people being replaced by rules. A great example is the Transportation Security Administration. They will blindly follow the stupidest rule rather than using common sense. Security works much better when the individuals at the point of security - the guards, the policemen, the customs agents - are well-trained and have the ability to follow their instincts. Think about how September 11 could have been prevented. A field agent in Minnesota was really first to put her finger on the plot, but she couldn't get her voice heard. And she didn't have the power to do anything herself. When you look at the real successes against terrorism at the borders, it's not custom agents following rules, but noticing something suspicious, and then following their instincts. So security works best when it's centrally coordinated, but distributedly implemented. A great example is the Marine Corps. That's their model. There's a lot of coordination, but individual marines in the field have a lot of autonomy. They're trained well, and they're trusted. And because of that, it's a good fighting force.



RU: You're talking about de-centralization, basically - the organizations making decisions on the local level.



BS: Right. Another analogy is the human body. There's a lot of coordination, but it's a very distributed organism. The pieces of our body do things autonomously, without waiting for approval. There's a lot of communication back and forth, a lot of coordination, but different pieces have their job, and they're empowered to do it. And it's robust and reliable because of that.



RU: What about radically democratized security, like Open Source kinds of efforts involving citizens?



BS: It's good and bad depending on how it works. I like Open Source intelligence. I like Open Source information gathering and dissemination. There's a lot of value in that. The downside of that is something like Total Information Awareness - TIA - where you have citizens basically spying on each other. And there you get pretty much nothing but false alarms. People will turn each other in because their food smells funny or they don't pray at the right time. Done right, a radically democratized, distributed security model works. Done wrong, you get East Germany where everyone spies on their friends.



RU: They were trying to get the postmen to spy on us for a while.



BS: Right. They were going to have postmen and the meter readers. That will work well if the postmen are properly trained. Where that will fail: if you tell a bunch of postmen, 'Report anything suspicious.' Because honestly, they don't know what 'suspicious' looks like in this context. So the question is: given all the police resources we have, what should they be doing? I don't want the government chasing all the false alarms from the postmen and meter readers when they could be doing something more useful. So that's a bad use. If you train them properly, you'll have something better. But then you don't have a postman any more. You have a security officer.



Think of a customs agent. They're going to watch people, and they're going to look for something suspicious. But they're trained in how to do it. So they're less likely to be overtly racist or a fool for dumb profiles. They're more likely to look for things that are actually suspicious. So it's a matter of training. And that's pretty much true of Open Source security models. Think of Open Source software. Having a bunch of random people look at the code to tell you if it's secure won't work. If you have well-trained people who look at the code, that will work! Open Source just means you can see it, it doesn't guarantee that the right people will see it.



RU: Even with trained security people, it seems like they make an awful lot of errors. It seems like America, over the past few years, really has that 'Can't Do' spirit. Is there anything you can tell us about trained security people, and how they could improve their efforts.



BS: Well, they're always going to make errors. Fundamentally, that's a problem in the mathematics called the base rate fallacy. There are simply so few terrorists out there that even a highly accurate test, whether automatic or human-based, will almost always bring false alarms. That's just the way the math works. The trick is to minimize the false alarms.



You've got to look at the false alarms versus the real alarms versus the real attacks missed - look at all the numbers together. But terrorist attacks are rare. They almost never happen. No matter how good you are, if you stop someone in airport security, it's going to be a false alarm, overwhelmingly. Once every few years, it'll be a real planned attack‚Äö√Ñ¬∂ maybe not even that frequently.



With training, you're less likely to stop someone based on a dumb reason. When airport security stops a grandma with a pocketknife, that's a false alarm. That's not a success. That's a failure. It's, of course, ridiculous. So the trick is to alarm on things that are actually suspicious so you'd spend your time wisely. But the fact that almost everybody will still end up being a false alarm - that's just the nature of the problem.



RU: Most of us experience the so-called 'War on Terror' in one place, and that's at the airport. What are they doing right, and what are they doing wrong at the airports? Are they doing anything right?



BS: (Laughs) Since September 11, exactly two things have made us safer. The first one is reinforcing the cockpit door. That should have been done decades ago. The second one is that passengers are convinced they have to fight back, which happened automatically. You can argue that sky marshals are also effective. I'm not convinced. And actually, if you pretend you have sky marshals, you don't even actually have to have them. The benefit of sky marshals is in the belief in them, not in the execution.



Everything else is window dressing - security theater. It's all been a waste of money and time. Heightened airport security at the passenger point of screening has been a waste of time. It's caught exactly nobody; it's just inconvenienced lots of people. The No Fly List has been a complete waste of time. It's caught exactly nobody. The color-coded threat alerts - I see no value there. ...



RU: So if you were in charge of airport security, are there any things that you would implement?



BS: I think we should ratchet passenger screening down to pre-9/11 levels. I like seeing positive bag matching. That's something that was done in Europe for decades. The U.S. airlines screamed and screamed and refused to do it, and now they are.



Really, I would take all the extra money for airport security and have well-trained guards, both uniformed and plainclothes, walking through the airports looking for suspicious people. That's what I would do. And I would just give back the rest of the money. If we secure our airport and the terrorists go bomb shopping malls, we've wasted our money. I dislike security measures that require us to guess the plot correctly because if you guess wrong, it's a waste of money. And it's not even a fair game. It's not like we pick our security, they pick their plot, we see who wins. The game is we pick our security, they look at our security, and then they pick their plot. The way to spend money on security - airport security, and security in general - is intelligence investigation and emergency response. These are the things that will be effective regardless of what the terrorists are planning.



RU: You emphasize intelligence. Is there any truth to the claims made by various agencies that intelligence people couldn't do things that they should have been able to do to protect us because of the Church Committee rules in the mid-1970s?



BS: I think that's overstated. The controls that the Church Committee put in place made a lot of sense. The purpose was to stop very serious abuses by law enforcement - by the police, the NSA, and the CIA. If you look at the failures of 9/11, they weren't based on the Church Commission restrictions. So I think we're making a mistake by dismantling those protections. In effect, those are also security measures that protect us from government abuses. Unfortunately, those abuses are far more common than terrorist attacks. ...



RU: I guess the idea of Total Information Awareness would seem sexy to some portion of the geek population. That's where it came from!



BS: We're so desperate to find ways to harness technology to solve the problem. We're used to that working in other areas of society - just apply more computing power, you get better results.



This is fundamentally a human problem. It's not a data problem. It's a problem of human intelligence connecting the dots. If I'm looking for a needle in a haystack, throwing more hay on the pile isn't going to solve my problem.



I need a better way to methodically follow the lead into the haystack to the needle. Another lesson of the liquid plot is that if they got to the airport, it would've gotten through. It would've gotten through all the enhanced screening; it would've gotten through all the enhanced profiling. The reason it failed had nothing to do with airport security.



RU: Moving on from terrorism, but still thinking about haystacks - you have a bit in 'Beyond Fear' about learning about security from insects, which I found really fascinating. What can we learn from insects?



BS: There's a lot to be learned from security from the natural world in general. All species have evolved as security beings - we need to survive enough to reproduce. We need to be able to protect our offspring so they can survive. We need to protect our food supply. We attack other creatures to kill them and eat them. There's so much security interplay in the natural world. And it's a great source of strategies and anecdotes. I find insects particularly valuable, because they evolve so quickly. You see so many interesting strategies in the insect world, because of the wacky evolutionary turns they take. Evolution doesn't give you the optimal security measure. Evolution tries security measures at random, and stops at the first one that just barely works. So you tend to get really weird security in the insect world. You do get some real neat examples of distributed security measures. Think of the way ants protect their colony. There are ant species that just wander around randomly, and if they hit a predator or a threat, they run right back to their colony to alert everybody. Individual ants are very cheap and very expendable, so if you have cheap resources, you just sort of do random things.



The lima bean plant is interesting. Effectively, when a certain mite attacks it, it calls an air strike. I