Digital thoughts

At the end of last year, the US was about to pass a law to allow for the indefinite detention of anyone, without a trial. Since January 1st, that law has passed. Never mind that one of my American friends had a goddamn panic attack upon finding out about it; you'd think we're safe as citizens of other countries, at least.

Not so.

About a week ago, it was decided that a student from the UK, running a website that's perfectly legal in his own country, can be extradited to the US because his website is supposedly illegal there. Imagine Iran knocking on the British Empire's door with a similar request.

But that's not all. Just two days ago, in a move of unprecedented proportions, the FBI has shut down file sharing website MegaUpload and arrested everyone involved with it, down to the graphic designer. The problem? MegaUpload was operated out of New Zealand, with servers in the Netherlands and Canada, and the people arrested were citizens of various European countries.

Which begs the question: if a foreign thug can march into my own country and arrest me, just like that, why am I paying for an army and police force?

Apparently, so they can beat me up if I disagree with the government.

By now, you may have heard about the demonstrations in Romania. For over a week now, thousands of demonstrators in dozens of cities go out in the street every day to demand the resignation of President Băsescu and his cronies, including the Prime Minister (and all his cabinet). Ever since that started, the former is nowhere to be seen, while the latter is even more robotic than usual.

And ever since that started, a very curious dance happens almost every day. The demonstrators gather up in the early afternoon, demonstrate peacefully for half a day then, at the exact same hour -- 23:00 -- a few vandals pop out of nowhere, throw some stones and bottles at the cops and vanish, leaving them to start beating up on those people who were there the whole time and did nothing wrong.

Suffice to say, nobody was fooled, including the European Union who recently declared sanctions against Romania. Watching images of cops completely ignoring the vandals right in front of them only to arrest honest people moments later is telling. And how come none of that is happening in any of the other 60+ cities where such rallies are taking place?

That's frighteningly reminiscent of the "Mineriad" in June 1990, when thousands of so-called miners invaded Bucharest to break up the rally at the exact same place -- Piața Universității. Even as a naive kid (and I was horribly, painfully naive as a kid) I remember being struck by how all of them had impecable, identical clubs which looked nothing like improvised weapons.

Well, we're not in 1990 anymore. The sleeper has awakened.

"So, what if you could change the world, to make it just as you wish, what would you do? Beautiful question, my dears, I'm waiting for you live at Radio Capital, it's ten AM and there are 40°C in the shadow, not that there's a patch of shadow in our capital city, but before I forget my idea, dears, do you know what an old Chinese man answered?..."

The DJ's voice flows tirelessly from the earbuds, but you're not listening anymore, it's just a murmur in the thrumming of the street, like bloodflow in your ears. You add to it as you elbow your way through the crowd. Don't be ashamed, you're part of the city's blood. Come on, admit it, you wouldn't leave it for the world, however noisy, busy and hot it may be.

A row of store windows mirrors you whizzing by. You could be anyone in the baggy pants and oversized hoodie, all white but for the mirrorshades. Funny how a generation ago these were a fad, now everyone wears them, it's a necessity. Must have been the same with cellphones back in the day, but what do you know, that was before your time.

The neighborhood swallows you quietly through the narrow slit between condos. You cross with a shiver into the geometric maze, frozen whirlpool of gangways and stairs between dirty walls. It's a vast, mysterious place with its own rules. Every day the gangs rescue some careless downtowner, extracting just a small fee to teach them a lesson. They're useful, these downtowners, they give us running water and only ask for foodstuffs in return. It was worse back when they tried to play feudal lords, but then the food crisis struck and cured them of that idea.

But now the space opens again, you passed the test, you're home. Here there are still barricades, upturned cars and barbed wire, among giant grafitti, vegetable gardens and playgrounds full of color. Your condo looks like a jail, too -- a warning for loiterers to stay away. Inside it's nothing the like, doors are missing, it smells of cooking and little kids tromp around everywhere. There are ever fewer residents as you climb the stairs; a condo wind turbine holds up to a few lightbulbs, but not an elevator, and not everyone's young.

It's an ascent to heavens. Silence falls; light grows. The top floor, empty and white like a temple. In the last room of the last apartment, a bed slowly falls apart among ceiling-high piles of books, and next to it a tower of recycled electronics stands guard.

"...Beautiful answer, my dears, isn't it? But it's late and we're all melting, so sweet dreams from Radio Capital and I leave you in the company of music until tonight."

In 1963, the infamous Milgram experiment conclusively demonstrated that the vast majority of people will submit without a thought to anyone they perceive as something of an authority figure. And they'll commit the most horrible atrocities on a simple order.

Are you worried yet?

A mere 8 years later, the controversial Stanford prison experiment made it quite clear that perfectly normal people, once in a position of authority, will promptly and hideously abuse it.

Are you scared yet?

For half a century now, we've known that abuse is fundamentally built into the very nature of man, and yet society is still organized in such a way as to maximize the opportunities for abuse.

But there's more.

For half a century now, we've known that the world is changing at an exponentially accelerating pace. For the past decade or so, that trend has become obvious. And yet...

Modern work relationships are still organized much like the industrial revolution shaped them after 1750.

Modern armies and justice systems are still organized essentially like Napoleon made them around 1800.

Public schools are still organized EXACTLY like in 1850. No, seriously. And the system was already harshly criticized back then, by anyone who wasn't a bureaucrat of the Austro-Hungarian persuasion.

Are we all completely out of our minds?

For the past two decades, the open source movement has conclusively demonstrated that peer production outperforms traditional hierarchies by many orders of magnitude. Why do we still have hierarchies, again?

The easy answer is "out of inertia". Hierachical organizations were more efficient before the Information Age, and habits change slowly. And indeed, in the absence of certain technologies, communication is both slow and difficult, so you want to minimize the number of required channels.

But that's not the correct answer. Before the 1848 upheavals in Europe, revolutionary cells already operated on a peer-to-peer system, and it worked, even though the most advanced means at their disposal were coach-carried letters and the Vigenère cipher. Then what gives?

The answer is that hierarchies are built into our animal selves. Look at how big apes are organized: one alpha male, surrounded by a small circle of favorites, with everyone else arranged into a gently-sloped pyramid.

Just like every single political system mankind has ever tested.

See, ever since the Renaissance, society has operated on the premise that man is a fundamentally rational being, who will act in its own best interest when left free. Capitalism was based on this premise. Communism, too.

And it's been thoroughly shattered by neuroscience.

We now know that people always choose the path of least resistance. (Just like everything else in nature... what a surprise. Not.) Soft security works. The carrot-and-stick method doesn't.

We now know just how imprecise memory is, and how easily our senses can be tricked. We know that the only real way to learn is by doing. We know what a scarce resource attention is, and how many people we can truly get to know.

Last but not least, we know that nobody's special. Talent is only a myth. So is originality.

You draw the conclusions.

I'm tired.

I'm tired of explaining people that no, their uninformed, unverified opinions are not equally valid to decades of scientific research.

I'm tired of explaining that computers aren't magical. They can't read your mind, make decisions for you or generally perform miracles.

I'm tired of people refusing to understand that no, you can't have everything at once, and yes, there's such a thing as compromise.

This isn't elitism. This isn't arrogance. This isn't laziness.

This is common sense. And too many people seem to have lost every last shred of it, if they ever had any.

They say medical doctors are arrogant. But have you stopped to consider what it means to study hard for 6 long years, and then practice for 2 more, before you can even *begin* calling yourself a doctor? And do you think they stop there? Oh no. Doctors go right on learning all their lives. So do geeks. And artists. And programmers.

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

People keep comparing computers to cars. But do you expect cars to drive themselves? How about reading your mind and knowing where to go? Or go 300KpH when you happen to be in a hurry? How do you think an engineer from Mercedes would react if you went to them with such expectations?

Next time you feel like arguing with an expert, at least do your homework first. And no, money can't bend the laws of nature. Nor do they allow you to be a jerk.

On arrogance by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A recent Tweet pointed me at this funny story, which the tweeter jokingly suggested is indicative of time travelers. Never mind that actual time travelers would be a lot more awkward. (Anyone cares to guess at a rational explanation for the weird couple?) In any event, that prompted me to think about time travel again, and all the problems associated with the concept.

Sure, at the movies it's pretty simple: the big bad cyborg goes back in time to change history. Fireworks ensue. Things become complicated when it turns out it was the trip itself that enabled the future cyborg to be built at all. That's called a stable time loop, and it's crazy enough to give some people headaches. But it can be worse. Ever heard of the grandfather paradox? It goes like this: I went back in time to kill my grandfather... but now I was never born in the first place... so I couldn't go back in time to kill him... so I was born after all... so I went back in time... That's the exact opposite of a stable time loop, and it's unclear what would actually happen.

But that assumes changing history is possible in the first place, and if you stop to think about it, the grandfather paradox would apply to any such attempt. Let's take everyone's favorite example: killing Hitler before he gets nominated Chancellor. So, I went back in time and did it; now World War II never happened... which means I have no reason to go back in time... so nobody killed Hitler... so WW2 did happen after all... so I decide to go back in time...

Fun!

But even if history can be changed, there's another problem few people grasp: how would anyone ever know it? Think about it: someone goes back in time and kills Hitler. Now every single one of us will have grown up in a world where there hasn't been a second world war. For all intents and purposes, that's now THE history. How can you tell it was made by someone from the future, and not one of the dozens of Hitler contemporaries who actually tried to kill him back then?

Or perhaps you'd rather go with the many-worlds interpretation. So, you went back and made the big change. Now there are two parallel timelines: one in which the change never took place, and one where things were different from the start. In either timeline, for those who came after the events, history was always that way; there's no way to tell anything "changed".

For all we know, time travelers could be hopping back and forth all the time, tweaking events here and there. There's just no way to tell.

Luckily, this probably isn't happening. Relativity tells us it takes literally cosmic amounts of energy to bend time and space even a tiny bit; the scale required for time travel is just too big. But there's another possibility: if recent results from the Large Hadron Collider are correct, neutrinos may be traveling faster than light. If that's true, it means they're also moving backwards in time like the hypothetical tachyons... which means we could use them to message our past selves! The bad news is, of course, that neutrinos move only a tiny bit faster than light, and since they also move through space, that means you can only send messages into the past between distant stars. Not really useful until we have a galactic empire.

Don't despair, though! All this thinking about sending stuff into the past obscures a perfectly feasible way to travel in time. It's called "waiting", and while it can only take you forward, that can be remarkably useful. Don't believe me? Watch the mindblowing Dr. Who episode Blink... or ask any historian. They even invented something called time capsules for this very purpose.

I took such leaps in time myself, when visiting certain neighborhoods of Bucharest for the first time after twenty years (and the 1989 Revolution). It's a special experience that makes me think about roads not taken, and what we can do now to influence the future. Because for now that's the best we may hope for, and it matters, as we're going to live in that future.

Too bad we can't have the hindsight of a time traveler. Be wise instead.

Fun with time travel by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.