The Culture of Secrecy, Disinformation, and Propaganda...
On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, Matthew Gaylor wrote:
When living systems - including people like us - spontaneously reorganize themselves, we call it hierarchical restructuring.
A hierarchical organization is like a tree. Hierarchical restructuring (as in plan C) results in a different, and hopefully hardier tree. Always though, trees can be cut with axes and saws. In a fully distributed state, the number of elements that have to fail in order to make the system not work is the same as the number of elements in the system. Fully distributed systems (as in plan D) have the structure of water. Water can also be cut with axes and saws, but what's the point? nothing outside the volume momentarily occupied by the axhead or sawblade is thereby changed. It is interesting that trees need water, but water does not need trees. Bear
Systems seem to be hardwired to do this when they become overwhelmed or baffled. It's as if life itself provides a Zen koan that confronts our reasoning with a puzzle that reasoning cannot solve. Some begin the process of restructuring but never complete it; some psychotic breaks, in fact, may be incomplete "conversion experiences" in which the fragmented psyche never finds a new center. But when it works, we discover ourselves reborn, aware and intact.
We have smaller, more evolutionary epiphanies too.
Forty years ago, I was standing waist-deep in cold Lake Michigan water at a beach in Chicago on a hot day. I was a summer counselor for a neighborhood club but my full-time work was getting a degree in literature, and I had been reading "Huckleberry Finn."
When I was young, I believed what I read in a primary, immediate way. The landscape of a novel was as real as the landscape of the city. Standing there in the water, I saw suddenly that the story of Huck and Tom was a myth and that myth was a lens through which we understood ourselves. Instead of living immersed in the myth, however, I saw the myth from outside, in relationship to the machinery that generated our constructions of reality. I glimpsed the engines of the technology of consciousness.
Another epiphany happened in a philosophy class when I heard that Immanuel Kant had said: "Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind." In other words, whatever is "out there" is intelligible only when it connects with our concepts, our beliefs; and, if our senses detect something that - literally - doesn't compute, we don't see it, we don't hear it, we don't believe it.
I think of those insights - how our myths filter experience, how we can see only what we believe - when I investigate reports of Unidentified Flying Objects.
No other domain, in my experience, includes so many of the puzzles that confront 21st century humanity as we try to locate ourselves in the cosmos and understand what's real. Investigating UFO reports begins with listening closely and deeply to the person telling their story, just like counseling. But that's just the beginning. The psychology of perception, the structure of myths and beliefs, the influence of UFO subcultures, knowledge of meteorology and astronomy, chemistry and physics, current aerospace technologies, all come into play. But as one studies the history of the "modern era" of sightings that began in 1947, one also enters a force field that turns all that data, so carefully collected and cross-referenced, into a hall of mirrors.
The United States changed after World War 2. The culture of secrecy, disinformation, and propaganda that had been deemed appropriate to wartime was extended into the Cold War era, and even though that era has supposedly ended, the culture has a life of its own. Senator Daniel Moynihan is eloquent in his critique of the culture of secrecy, showing how truth is much less likely to emerge from a process of data-gathering and deliberation that is isolated, constrained, and hidden. His book on government secrecy is a vote for the open source movement as a model for life.
In our brave new world, the design of myth and belief is highly intentional. It's called propaganda in the public sector, PR in the private, but the tools and techniques are the same, and the digital world only makes it easier. One cannot explore the history of UFO phenomena without exploring deception and disinformation, because it becomes clear that the playing field is not level. It's like playing poker with someone who tells you what cards he holds rather than showing them, then rakes in the pot.
"All warfare is based on deception," Sun Tzu said, but he also said, "The most important factor in war is moral influence, by which I mean that which causes the people to be in harmony with their leaders."
Contemplating the concentration of global media in fewer and fewer hands, the many points of contact between media and corporate and state intelligence, and the naivete with which we believe what we see on a digital screen, we find ourselves in a difficult position: the deception that Sun Tzu said must be directed at an enemy has been directed for two generations at "we the people," the ones who ought to be in harmony with their leaders. By practicing deception on their troops and treating us as the enemy, our leaders undermine our allegiance.
There are no ultimate truths, only interpretations, noted Nietzsche, saying in a way what Kant had said, that whatever is out there is filtered through our senses and our schemas. Percept and concept alike in the digital world are subject to manipulation and design. Both sense data and schemas must be deconstructed if our interpretations are to mean anything.
In the absence of truth, we make it up. We fill the void with outlandish projections, guesses, and fables. The Internet is full of them, especially in the realm of UFOs. But we can also take ten steps back to the basics of how we know what we know, how we gather data, establish patterns, come to conclusions. We may be left with only an interpretation, but it's one that plays by the rules and shows its cards.
I have learned in that hall of mirrors what Moynihan learned in the halls of the Senate, that without disclosure there is no truth, without truth no accountability. That's only an interpretation, of course, but it's all I've got.
The truth isn't "out there," it's hiding in plain sight.
As a civilization, we're poised for a hierarchical restructuring. In full possession of the facts, "we the people" get it right more often than not. We are worthy of being trusted. The enemy is not the truth that sets us free, the enemy is a general who deceives his own troops and holds the truth for ransom in that labyrinthine hall of mirrors.
April 13, 2001
For Joe K, my email pal, and Terry Hansen, author of "The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up"
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On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, Ray Dillinger wrote:
In a fully distributed state, the number of elements that have to fail in order to make the system not work is the same as the number of elements in the system. Fully distributed systems (as in plan D) have the structure of water.
Actually that's not accurate, it depends on the particular 'hyper-cycles' that the various components rely on in their existance. Simply because a system is distributed doesn't imply that each 'node' or participant is identical and non-unique (which is the problem with your water comparison). Even in a fully distributed crypto-anarchy system the individual are unique and non-interchangeable. Otherwise the entire 'pay yoru way' would fall down, there'd be no reason to pay anything for anything. If you were all interchangeable you'd already have whatever it was we were talking about exchanging.
It is interesting that trees need water, but water does not need trees.
Bullshit. If it wasn't for the biosphere trapping hydrogen in water it'd be gone a long time ago (ie no water). ____________________________________________________________________ The ultimate authority...resides in the people alone. James Madison The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------
On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, Jim Choate wrote:
On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, Ray Dillinger wrote:
In a fully distributed state, the number of elements that have to fail in order to make the system not work is the same as the number of elements in the system. Fully distributed systems (as in plan D) have the structure of water.
Actually that's not accurate, it depends on the particular 'hyper-cycles' that the various components rely on in their existance.
Simply because a system is distributed doesn't imply that each 'node' or participant is identical and non-unique (which is the problem with your water comparison). Even in a fully distributed crypto-anarchy system the individual are unique and non-interchangeable.
I was offering a definition for 'fully distributed.' It is possible for a system to be distributed without being fully distributed. The existence of structures, priveleges, or roles in some parts which cannot arise in other parts, or cycles where nodes can be excluded if other nodes are removed, are possible in some distributed systems. The subset of distributed systems in which they are not possible, I call 'fully distributed'. Napster is an example of a system which is partially distributed. If it were fully distributed, you could pull the plugs out of the servers at napster and the users would never notice. Usenet is an example of a system which is fully distributed. If all the backbone nodes went down tomorrow, a thousand linux geeks across the country could work out the news routing software and could put it back up without them inside of a week. Basically, they've already got all the software they need to deal with NNTP. There is specialization, but it is specialization chosen, not imposed by the protocol, and if the situation required it, the remaining nodes would simply change their specialization.
Otherwise the entire 'pay yoru way' would fall down, there'd be no reason to pay anything for anything. If you were all interchangeable you'd already have whatever it was we were talking about exchanging.
Not necessarily. I might have the means to produce it, but not the time or inclination or expertise. Specialization, among humans in meatspace, does not happen because people have different types of hands. It happens because people have choices about what they can do and they choose to do one thing instead of another. If the system isn't fully distributed, there are choices about what role to take in it that you can't make even if you want to. Napster users couldn't choose to set up their own site as an indexing node, for example; it was a reserved role. Some of them might have specialized in rap and others in pop, as a choice, and they had reasons to trade with one another. But none could replace a lost indexing node, so it was possible to shut the system down and put all the traders out of business, by shutting down one node. A critical error in design, tolerated because they were trying to set up a "toll booth" at the weak point in the structure. Government and many other organizations work the same way; there are irreplaceable nodes within them that, if shut down, spell the death of the organization. (Hint: it ain't the president of the US). What some here call crypto anarchy, may well wind up being only the fully distributed form of government.
It is interesting that trees need water, but water does not need trees.
Bullshit. If it wasn't for the biosphere trapping hydrogen in water it'd be gone a long time ago (ie no water).
Water exists in places where no trees are. Consider Titan. Bear
On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, Ray Dillinger wrote:
I was offering a definition for 'fully distributed.'
You were doing more than that, you setting boundary conditions on the 'participants' as well, it's overly strict and limits the definitions usefullness becuase it a priori eliminates some sorts of distributed systems. Strictly speaking simply having a 'distributed' system where each participant catches as catch can based on their particular individual strategies and resource 'windows' doesn't require that all participants have the same strategies or 'windows'.
It is possible for a system to be distributed without being fully distributed.
Granted, it's called a 'regulated market'. It is where each of the participants has a 'role' to play (ie is a member of a ' hyper cycle').
The existence of structures, priveleges, or roles in some parts which cannot arise in other parts, or cycles where nodes can be excluded if other nodes are removed, are possible in some distributed systems. The subset of distributed systems in which they are not possible, I call 'fully distributed'.
I'd say they are possible in ANY system, fully distributed or not. There are issues of 'transport delay' and 'diffusion rate' that all limit the effect of participants and help create situations where hyper-cycles become 'emergent behaviours' (eg life on Earth). Besides "Laws of the Game" by Eigen (which I've mentioned before) you should also check out, The Major Transitions in Evolution J.M. Smith, E. Szathmary ISBN 0-29-850294-x Signs of Life: How complexity pervades biology R. Sole, B. Goodwin ISBN 0-465-01927-7
Usenet is an example of a system which is fully distributed.
Actually this has the same limitations as the 'Napster' model, it requires a centralized
If all the backbone nodes went down tomorrow, a thousand linux geeks across the country could work out the news routing software and could put it back up without them inside of a week.
The same could be said for Napster or any other software once the 'intellecutal property' is widely enough know. Something to do with 'advancing the state' I suspect.
Otherwise the entire 'pay yoru way' would fall down, there'd be no reason to pay anything for anything. If you were all interchangeable you'd already have whatever it was we were talking about exchanging.
Not necessarily. I might have the means to produce it, but not the time or inclination or expertise.
Wow, that was easy. Thanks for recognizing my point. There are 'non economic' issues which effect the economic issues. This causes non-linearity or irrationality (depending on ones view) in the choises. This causes a fundamental disjunct with the 'all players are the same'. Now, the problem is what does cryto-anarchy offer as protection as abusive strategies in this environment? In mathematical words what does it offer to ensure that no 'hyperbolic' strategies are used? Nothing. This is a major failing because it means the 'market equilibrium' can be significantly effected by a single participant to the detriment of all. This is contrary to the point of a 'market' and most definitely the point of a 'free market'. The thesis behind a 'free market' is that the choices are numerous enough, and the product non-descript enough, that no hyperbolic strategy is allowed to exist a priori. This takes us right back to that famous question: Where does this stability come from? It is not inherent in the market itself. Since crypto-anarchy and Friedman style free-markets assume a priori this thesis there is a flaw in them.
Government and many other organizations work the same way; there are irreplaceable nodes within them that, if shut down, spell the death of the organization. (Hint: it ain't the president of the US). What some here call crypto anarchy, may well wind up being only the fully distributed form of government.
Actually in a representative government there aren't any such 'master nodes' if it's worked out right. Of course this runs completely contrary to human nature and most persons individual desires (they want to be indispensible and everyone else to be interchangable). Further, your broad assertion (implied admittedly) that all governments must have master nodes doesn't bode well for crypto-anarchy or free markets (as I've said for years). It implicitly admits the non-linearity of human desires.
Water exists in places where no trees are. Consider Titan.
No, ice exists. A distinct and important difference when we're talking about 'life' as the model of the system. Now if water is found at Titan AND no life is found then you'd have a single point of reference. But still incomplete. Because you would have to demonstrate that there was no flux involved such that the loss of water from Titan into space from evaporation (or whatever the technical term is, sublimation perhaps) isn't replaced from some other source. I find that highly unlikely. More likely you'll find life which traps the water in a hyper-cycle or else you'll find a net negative flow rate OFF Titan. Might take a long time but that's not the point. The assertion is after all that 'water exists without a tree'. This is clearly true, but the key point is the 'tree' which is a off handed reference to a hyper-cycle. Not all hyper-cycles must involve life. Which goes right along with my assertion that not all players in the game are identical or interchangeable. I would contend that no water exists on a planetary body of any size unless there is a hyper-cycle of some sort to trap it. ____________________________________________________________________ The ultimate authority...resides in the people alone. James Madison The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't know if Jim meant to send that reply about Usenet; the sentence was chopped off in the middle, just after the glaring incorrectness :-) Usenet's newsgroup conventions have been controlled by various Cabals over the years, but participation has always been optional, and John Gilmore created the alt.groups precisely to make it explicitly continue to be optional. That doesn't prevent most newsgroups from turning into permanent flamewars or dumping grounds for spammers.... But Usenet today doesn't really work the way the original decentralized Usenet did. NNTP allows clients to connect to big servers, and the volume of traffic has become too large for small sites to get a complete feed, so there's increasing concentration at the bigger ISPs' news servers. A few years ago, a friend who runs a small ISP estimated that a full Usenet feed required "3 T1s, or 1 T1 if you don't get the porn groups" and it's presumably gotten much larger since then. "Nobody goes there any more - it's too crowded." Napster was designed for a central index server, but that didn't scale and the protocols were reverse-engineered to make it easy to provide OpenNap servers that aren't part of the Napster.Com server cluster. It's still more vulnerable than Usenet or Gnutella, but the model does scale decently once everybody ignores the main Napster folks and moves to offshore servers :-) Jim Choate replied to Ray Dillinger:
Usenet is an example of a system which is fully distributed. Actually this has the same limitations as the 'Napster' model, it requires a centralized
If all the backbone nodes went down tomorrow, a thousand linux geeks across the country could work out the news routing software and could put it back up without them inside of a week.
The same could be said for Napster or any other software once the 'intellecutal property' is widely enough know. Something to do with 'advancing the state' I suspect.
At 12:13 AM 04/16/2001 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
... Napster is an example of a system which is partially distributed. If it were fully distributed, you could pull the plugs out of the servers at napster and the users would never notice. ... Napster users couldn't choose to set up their own site as an indexing node, for example; it was a reserved role. Some of them
A brief data point to add to Bill's interesting post: I had dinner with someone from alt.net during my not-exactly-voluntary visit to the Seattle area recently. He told me (this is from memory) that Usenet is now on the order of 300 GB/day and they get a full feed. 90 percent is binaries. -Declan On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 09:19:58AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
I don't know if Jim meant to send that reply about Usenet; the sentence was chopped off in the middle, just after the glaring incorrectness :-) Usenet's newsgroup conventions have been controlled by various Cabals over the years, but participation has always been optional, and John Gilmore created the alt.groups precisely to make it explicitly continue to be optional. That doesn't prevent most newsgroups from turning into permanent flamewars or dumping grounds for spammers....
But Usenet today doesn't really work the way the original decentralized Usenet did. NNTP allows clients to connect to big servers, and the volume of traffic has become too large for small sites to get a complete feed, so there's increasing concentration at the bigger ISPs' news servers. A few years ago, a friend who runs a small ISP estimated that a full Usenet feed required "3 T1s, or 1 T1 if you don't get the porn groups" and it's presumably gotten much larger since then. "Nobody goes there any more - it's too crowded."
Napster was designed for a central index server, but that didn't scale and the protocols were reverse-engineered to make it easy to provide OpenNap servers that aren't part of the Napster.Com server cluster. It's still more vulnerable than Usenet or Gnutella, but the model does scale decently once everybody ignores the main Napster folks and moves to offshore servers :-)
Jim Choate replied to Ray Dillinger:
Usenet is an example of a system which is fully distributed. Actually this has the same limitations as the 'Napster' model, it requires a centralized
If all the backbone nodes went down tomorrow, a thousand linux geeks across the country could work out the news routing software and could put it back up without them inside of a week.
The same could be said for Napster or any other software once the 'intellecutal property' is widely enough know. Something to do with 'advancing the state' I suspect.
At 12:13 AM 04/16/2001 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
... Napster is an example of a system which is partially distributed. If it were fully distributed, you could pull the plugs out of the servers at napster and the users would never notice. ... Napster users couldn't choose to set up their own site as an indexing node, for example; it was a reserved role. Some of them
And what has happened as a result is that for the most part it has become almost useless, unless you happen to be able to get an ISP with enough diskspace. My current ISP, ameritech, for all it's other faults, has the best newservers I've had access to in 5 years. There's literally *months* old posts on there, so you can follow whole threads. Most other ISPs keep a week, or less. Understandable, but worthless for the tech groups. I really wish they'd split usenet up-- take the binary junk elsewhere, although most ISPs will tell you it's the binarys that most of the customer base want, not the techie info. Declan McCullagh wrote:
A brief data point to add to Bill's interesting post:
I had dinner with someone from alt.net during my not-exactly-voluntary visit to the Seattle area recently. He told me (this is from memory) that Usenet is now on the order of 300 GB/day and they get a full feed. 90 percent is binaries.
-- Harmon Seaver, MLIS CyberShamanix Work 920-203-9633 hseaver@cybershamanix.com Home 920-233-5820 hseaver@ameritech.net
On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, Bill Stewart wrote:
I don't know if Jim meant to send that reply about Usenet; the sentence was chopped off in the middle, just after the glaring incorrectness :-)
Jim Choate replied to Ray Dillinger:
Usenet is an example of a system which is fully distributed. Actually this has the same limitations as the 'Napster' model, it requires a centralized
Ah, not sure why that did that... But, more to the point - you shouldn't try to read minds and draw conclusions from sentence fragments. You are not a good mind reader. .... a centralized group of servers to distributed not only content but the indexes. The only real distinction between the two is where the content resides, not a significant distiction since the system still has centralized servers. But more importantly the original claim which you just jumped right over about the intellectual property being somehow different between USENET and Napster and that if Napster fell down it would take significantly longer to recover than USENET is simply bogus. More 'let's give Jim shit because he keeps poking holes in our favorite thoeries' than 'stick to the topic at hand'. ____________________________________________________________________ The ultimate authority...resides in the people alone. James Madison The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------
participants (7)
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Bill Stewart -
Declan McCullagh -
Harmon Seaver -
Jim Choate -
Jim Choate -
Matthew Gaylor -
Ray Dillinger