THIS IS NOT ABOUT HACKING

This post is in steps that go from the very specific to the universal.  The subject is the Internet and its degeneration towards paralysis.  This is not about hacking.

Picture a little old lady in her nightie at 4AM composing a message for an English publisher of an article she wrote.  Suddenly her computer is turned off by some outside force.  In a minute there is a message that comes on -- though the computer is off -- in a little label to say that in another minute it can be turned back on.  This is true.  An automated message is sent to Apple.  The heading is “Panic Response” and the rest is code.

LOL mentally pictures a transmission tower destroyed in the nearby forest fire; or the sun’s current outbursts sending a tongue of destruction to all satellites; or WWIII breaking out and Dick Cheney is at the door; or a tsunami.

Later in the morning LOL (me) contacts the techies in Great Falls who have the contract to “support” 3Rivers, my provider.  They are very selective about what they consider “support” and simply give me lots of boiler plate.  There’s a little edge of sarcasm.  “If these people don’t know what they are doing, they should stay off.”  They don't listen to what I say, but have prepared speeches for the most common problems and talk right over the top of me.

I call friends.  Then Google.  The story is that Yosemite OS is wiping the entire hard drives of MacBooks, destroying Wi-Fi, installing hard-to-remove malware, and generally raising hell.  People are scrambling to get rid of Yosemite, which is not easy.  There’s a thing called Mavericks.  Maybe I’d better think about Linux.  IPhoto won't work unless I update, but the update is not available in the US.  IPages won't update but at least it works.  It won't update because of "security reasons."

The only reason I signed up for Yosemite was that my social websites and movie providers claimed they wouldn’t work without it.  Clearly an underground collusion for extortion.  And we worry about China.

_________________

Now picture a little community on the prairie that is dependent on industrial agriculture: that means small grains and alfalfa raised under irrigation from the mountain run-offs with giant ag machines, many chemicals, and a storage and shipping system that reaches around the globe.  The town only supplies amenities for the few hundred people on ranches and so on:  schools, stores, library, gas pumps, a bank branch, churches, one grocery store.  One or two little businesses few of whom know how to run a business online.

Everyone keeps their heads down.  Computers are for kids and men, who only operate spreadsheets and monitor the commodities market.  TV is for vegging out with exhaustion after a hard day.  Few can get up enthusiasm for town council meetings, infrastructure meetings of any kind.   They will not join together to make the town computer-friendly.  If surveyed, they say they want to eliminate dust, potholes and chickens. 

The power infrastructure produces “dirty” electricity and every now and then there’s a “brownout” that destroys some machines -- fridge, computers.  The telephone is old and faulty-- lots of wrong numbers, ringing when no one is on the line, etc. 

Power and telephone are operated by cooperatives but they are not TRUE cooperatives because no one has the time, energy or information needed.  3Rivers contracts out  tech support to a Great Falls organization that serves several outfits.  They have a steady stream of techs because of the Air Force base.

The techs are not likely to be local, though computer adept kids are close to being ready, but with those skills they can travel.  Malmstrom people follow orders.  No questions.  They see MAC on something like the same terms as high school rival athletic teams, sort of a necessary evil.

______________

All the prairie states are corrupt.  All states are corrupt. Places where large territories are privately owned (ranches) or leased from the government (ranches) then the power goes to people who have territory (ranches).  Now the problem is not lots of little people who live out to the edges of their income, but corporations who pretend to be people and bend the laws to suit themselves.  They are quite possibly in Japan. They do not join telephone cooperatives.  They might own their own satellites.  (Sat phones work on ranches a lot better than cell phones because of terrain.)

Prairie states are full of legal and technical artifacts  because there is not enough population to insist on updating and because the young tend to leave rather than reform.  Old folks control many institutions for the same reason.  They lose brain grip but deny it.  In their minds, their health is based on endurance and mental health is based on dominance: so long as they can dominate, they’re okay.  They do not want to give up, nor do they want to go to a doc who might be a youngster or a girl.  Sometimes the doc himself is losing it.

Once people get a foothold on corruption, they know where the bodies are buried and can use threats to reveal to deflect regulation.

No one has ever made a study of the many old ranchers, miners, loners, obstinate hermits who have died with no will or family.  Where does the ownership and money go?  Lawyers know.

________________

On the ground floor, this shuffle is shafting people through something they had come to think of as a pleasure, a communal possession, and a safety device in case of national attack. They are surprised, indignant, but they don’t have any connections or power or understanding of what the problem might be.

___________

The economy has now dumped out a lot of potential tech coders into a world they thought would be better because of their college and grad school degrees.  To keep employed because of their massive student loan burden, they are taking dumb jobs that only SEEM like they pay well because rents and food in the area are so high and because their work is grindingly boring.

But the bait is strike-it-rich (the ‘49ers could have told them) brilliant new ideas that will put them on top.  Instead they mostly think up ornamentation that demands more time and attention from users.

The internet is international, universal.  National boundaries will not hold back the predators, even if they are aimed at the nation.  The internet is one of the humanities, just like the arts.  No boundary can hold the humanities.

Power goes to violence as enforcer when the offense is material and the fruits of most piracies are material goods.  So the punishment is also material goods, maybe human bodies or habitations.  Maybe priceless cultural treasures, not sold but destroyed.

We are discovering that, like the relationship between energy and matter, communication translates to structure.  But how?  Terms? Consequences?  DE-struction or CON-struction?  But that’s way too complex and abstract to help an old woman at 4AM caught in a revolving door of passwords.  And must she check yet again to see whether her IP is blacklisted for spam at someone else’s computer?

________________

Maybe I should rethink everything.  Streaming films means being limited to pop trash.  Putting energy into daily blogs means the long manuscripts are neglected.  Maybe I’m too tied to an old-fashioned system or old-fashioned notions of what writing is about.  Maybe my cloistered life is not protected enough.  Maybe it’s TOO guarded and I’m not getting the big picture.  Or maybe it’s not me at all.

All this is over-reacting to a simple common struggle with the internet?  I don’t think so.  It’s just a symptom of something bigger than me, maybe bigger than all of us.  And it’s growing.  I think of global warming.

Almost immediately I get this comment that couldn't be posted:  . . ." I really liked your piece this morning. I tried to make a comment but I was closed out a couple of different ways, proving the point of your writing!"  He used my email, but it is often blacklisted.  I checked Spam.haus.org.  It was okay, but it doesn't list everything.

IT'S SO AWFUL WE'VE GOTTA DO SOMETHING.

Maybe it’s just the company I keep (which is mostly online and thus necessarily framed) but I’m aware of much more intense and intentional effort to do something constructive about the state of the world.  It’s so bad, it can’t be ignored anymore. So much violence, so many incarcerated, so many rebellions, so much corruption, so many rules and so few of them effectively enforced -- some of them with side-effects that make them more damaging than the original prompting.  Should we be MORE alarmed that government at every level echoes helplessness and stubbornness and cluelessness?  Or can we assume there's one cause that runs through them all?

On the reservation we’ve been following the accusations that a former professor was embezzling and working kickbacks; in town we elected a mayor who made similar accusations here but turned out to be incapable of managing a council meeting; in the state we have a legislator accused of violence against his family -- and then there’s national and international scenes.

Warren Olney

Warren Olney’s “To the Point” from PRI is one of my dependable sources of optimism, not least because he will often engage people with quite different points of view but NOT to pit them against each other.  Rather to find the unities they share.  Most recently he had several guests who work in the African NGO realm, one of the most frustrating places on the planet to try to help people.  Recently I watched Madonna’s AIDS film,   “I Am Because We Are”  http://www.iambecauseweare.com  which was barbed by controversy, accusations that the little boy she adopted was not as orphaned as represented, demands to know her HIV status, elaborations of her early relationship with a man who died of AIDS.  The footage of slender 49-year-old woman with a gap in her front teeth walking in a Malawi village with a baby in her arms and a little fellow by the hand -- staged or not -- was moving.  How many people sat down and wrote checks is debatable.  Where would they send them and where would the money go?

And that’s part of the problem.  Celebrities who try to help get caught in accusations of bad motives, demands for more money, and opportunists who crowd in to “manage” in ways that celebrities are unsuited to do.  Tyrants get just as starstruck as anyone else.  But high-powered careers cannot be conducted from Malawi.  Superstars have to go home sooner or later.  

Anyway, no one is really sure what would help most with a problem like HIV.  Here’s the podcast version of the relevant program.  There doesn’t seem to be a transcript.  http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp140307does_foreign_aid_to_?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kcrw%2Ftp+%28To+The+Point%29    This is an hour-long program and not all of it is about Africa.  I’m sorry I can’t clip out the relevant parts, but I thought it was worth linking in case you’re interested.  The digest follows:

Should Western Values Be a Condition of Foreign Aid?

Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni has broad support in Uganda for a new law imposing sentences up to life in prison for homosexual acts. Nigeria and many other sub-Saharan nations also have anti-gay laws. Such harsh anti-gay laws in African countries have the US and other donors threatening to reduce foreign aid. Norway, Denmark and the World Bank have withheld or diverted some $110 million in aid. President Obama says the US is "reviewing ties." Is it right to withhold food and medicine based on acceptance of western values? Will attaching strings to foreign aid make targeted leaders stronger than ever? Will African soldiers continue to protect western interests? Finally, does aid do more harm than good by making nations dependent? Would the money be better spent to help them help themselves?

Guests:

Heather Murdock

1. Heather Murdock: Christian Science Monitor and Voice of America, @heather_murdock

William Easterly

1. William Easterly: New York University, @bill_easterly
   
   John McArthur
2. John McArthur: Brookings Institution, @mcarthur
   
   Dayo Olopade
3. Dayo Olopade: journalist and author, @madayo

Links:

1. Easterly's 'The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor?'
2. Olopade's 'The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa'

I started to reformat this, but decided to leave it alone in hopes the links will transfer.  I’m not so much interested in Africa as I am looking for ideas about my own small town and the reservation, but I'm impressed by how young and bright these people seem.  What are the local millennials thinking? How much are they aware of experts on ag issues or government who are out-of-state?  (Some have found the state resources for small towns.)  Who are the Blackfeet voices who stand above the rest in terms of constructive ideas, inspired leadership, and general calm?

I’m not looking for Africa-specific, AIDS-specific, or even reservation-specific information.  What I want is structural, shift-able, re-framing, new insights.  I was struck by Bishop Tutu saying,  “Africa was once a place to go for refuge, an hospitable continent.  But now people are afraid to come here.”   (Not unlike the rez.) At the moment Uganda and Nigeria are dealing with HIV-AIDS by conflating it with homosexuality and criminalizing to the point of death sentences for people in either category.  (HIV is a blood disease.  Will they kill everyone who has blood?)  Broad-based emotional support for this attitude evidently has its roots in European religious homophobia.  But homophobia and neglect of the poor are supposed to be against modern “Western Values,” particularly among “Millennials,” the young adults. 

Dutch

The liberal Scandinavian countries are so offended by the African attitudes that they are withholding financial help.  (Ironically, “aid.”)  This has invited investigation of the whole picture, including World Bank abuse, dictator indulgence, and general toleration of aid abuses.  Some of Africa uses Spanish Inquisition-type punishments while joining with US terrorist resistance, or so it is supposed.  But they themselves are terrorizing.  

Our choices seem to be between actual aid and the use of military force.  The two are entwined: militaries have the power to divert aid to their own uses.  Looting aid either physically or via bookkeeping is common everywhere on both ends of all funds.  One strategy has been to “earmark” money to go to specific efforts.  We used to do that in the church so that pledging could be directed to “the building fund” or “developing the choir.”  Of course, that frees up the other money to use for, say, the unpopular minister’s sabbatical.  In Third World places bookkeeping and monitoring just fails.  Another corruption was “tying,” for instance, paying to set up a transportation network that is funded on condition that they purchase Harleys to be the necessary motorcycles.

Murdock said something I had not heard before: back country impoverished indigenous people are not engaged in testing or clinic projects because they don’t know that there IS such a thing as HIV-AIDS.  When the people fail and die, they believe it is because of witchcraft.  They have no concept of viruses or any experience with Western medicine.  They DO know about MSM, though not the European ideas about what is “gay,” but they see it as a moral problem, a characteristic that should be criminalized at a capital level.  I expect that’s not too different around here.  But here they DO know who Madonna is and are more likely to listen to her.  But food aid’s relationship to ag support can overwhelm thinking with emotion.

Murdock, who seems to me much plugged into reality, says that big-shot experts get too fascinated by rules and money.  She suggests that it does not take money to simply point out that the strong should protect the weak rather than game them for money.  She takes the “fishing-not-fish” idea to the manufacture of HIV drugs -- why can’t there be local factories?  Is it so difficult to make a antiretroviral?  A lot of little things can go where a great big thing cannot.  An underground movement can be more effective than a public thing, but the dark side of the public goes underground.  Sometimes they meet in the tunnels.

We’re seeing the failure of governments that are based on boundaries.  Maybe they’re just pot-bound or gerrymandered, with aggressive, greedy people dominating without any intention or ability to protect people -- one of the important American values.  Some of these efforts everywhere are ingenious enough to work, in ways that can be seen.  But they are likely to be local and elemental.  They are not likely to be based on punishing scapegoats.

The Scapegoat

YOU'RE NEXT. (Fiction)

It was an ordinary mid-morning, beginning to chill down into winter but no snow sticking yet.  X sat in her office squinting at the spreadsheet on her computer screen, wondering whether it was time to get her eyes checked again.  But she liked her familiar frames and Indian Health Service was always a hassle.  Maybe she was looking at too much data at one time, so she should simply enlarge the font, but she liked to see a lot of data at once because of the complexity of interacting forces.  They were always like that when you were dealing with government money.  Someone somewhere had built in stipulations, exceptions, thresholds, and a million other threads that held down innovation.  The people in her office just did their best and usually it was okay.  No one wanted to come this far north this time of year to check facts and figures.

Someone knocked on the door though it was standing wide open.  She left it that way even when she was gone in case someone needed to borrow her stapler or something.  Three people were standing there, two men and a woman so they probably were neither FBI nor Mormons, but they had that strange formal tense look of people on a reservation who weren’t used to Indians.  

“We’d like to have a little talk,” one of them said, and the woman closed the door.  

The other man said, “Maybe you’d like to close out your computer so you can give us your full attention.”

“What is all this?” she asked, thinking, “Wow, maybe this is a Hollywood scouting team planning a movie!”

“We are investigating fraud and corruption,” said the older man, and all three produced credentials, none of which she recognized or understood except that these were clearly not movie scouts.  “The Designated Division for the Closing Down of Crime and Corruption in Outlying Regional Territories.”   DDCDCCORT.  Garble.

Her first thought was not for herself but for her program.  It served kids and they would suffer without it.  Who was cheesing in on their money and what was their angle?  But they were grilling HER, about her personal life which they evidently found shocking. Obviously they were from a superior class that -- like I said -- knew nothing about life on a reservation: the poverty, the incarcerations, the families jammed together without even really being genetically related, the frayed relationships, the unappeased hunger for some kind of control or stability that often gave way to substance and behavior abuse. These people appeared to be modern versions of Procrustes who wished to force conformity to their standards, no matter the collateral damage.

Why had she dropped out of college in 1988?  Why did her grades suddenly improve at a certain point -- was she getting help of some kind?  How much money did she make in 1995 and how was she able at that income level to buy a new pickup?  What relation was she to Y and did she know what prison he was in right now?  Who gave her the job she was in right now?   

The rest of the building was strangely quiet.  No one rattled the doorknob, meaning to enter, nor did anyone seem to be passing in the hall.  The entire staff had put themselves in lock-down as though a shooter were in the building and in a way, there was.

Her mind was fogged with guilt and shame, always her default emotion.  She couldn’t think properly.  But after a few hours of repetitious and intrusive grillings about things she had thought of as innocent until then, and flashes of scenes from old television shows, she began to remember a conversation she had overheard on a seminar in Denver, not part of the official program but talk between men in a booth behind hers. 

“This is the long-game of taking down the reservations,” said one.  “We’ve learned it from the sociology of war in the Middle East but it works very well here, especially in a place with Third World conditions.  First we begin to raise “concerns” about something everyone can agree is bad, for instance a health threat or an environmental problem or maybe something that deprives kids.  When the media has begun to get interested and is actually finding documentation that supports this 'issue', we can move.”

“Always make the other guy do the leg work,” remarked the second man, his mouth muffled by his hamburger.  She heard his beer mug go back down on the table.

“Right.  Then we go into the situation, target someone at the center of the ‘problem’ . . .”

“Manager.  Tribal councilman.  Someone with a few enemies.  Anyone effective will have enemies.”

“Right.  Someone is always waiting to capture control of assets.  Then we surprise that person on their own territory.  Rock them back on their heels.  Convince them that they are in grave danger, facing years of incarceration.   That’s the way we get them to give us names.”

“Get them to squeal, rat out their co-workers!  Brilliant!”

“It gets better.  We withdraw, write a lot of paper indictments, and then wait.  Schedule trials.  Suggest we might make deals.  Revisit the situation to keep it alive.  Wait for them to react.”

“And the info comes in, stuff you never even suspected.”

“Yeah, the pockets get turned out.  Eventually, we have enough to drop the small fry and take down our real targets, the ones who constantly oppose what we’re trying to do.”

“How long do you figure it will take?”

“Oh, we can wait years.  We’re patient.  The final rewards justify it.  Anyway, politically, a quick jerk to our dragnet can often bring people into line with our goals.”

She never found out who these guys were, never dreamed that they’d be interested in her little pocket of the world.  But she should have thought about the big picture -- not just regional or national, but about planetary forces like resource development.  Who had time to reflect about it when it took so much energy just to drive the ten miles to the office through a blizzard, or figure out what to do when all the toner in the whole town had been used up and it could only be gotten by driving to the county seat which would take hours, but an application to a trust fund that would only accept paper (fossils!) had to be put in the mail today?  

“Why is it you don’t always answer your cell phone?”  (Someone didn’t pay the bill.)  “Why are you paying your relative to assist you?  (She was the only qualified person available.)  “Do you call personal friends from work?”  (My co-workers ARE my personal friends!)  “Do you rob Peter to pay Paul?”  (Who doesn’t?)

It was like the movies, which was not reassuring.  She did not have the superpowers of the heroines in movies.  For a rez person she had a lot of experience, but she was essentially a country person who operated by reputations and families.  

Back in the office, there were more questions:  “What about Z?  Do you think he’s really qualified?  Does he come to work on time?  Does he drink?  Does he party when he’s out of town?”

When the little trio left, they had a page of names with notes attached.  They took X’s computer, cell phone, pager, tape recorder and spread sheets along with them in storage boxes.  The team woman would be assigned to sift through them, boring work the men didn’t want to do.  “It’s like netting fish,” said one man to the other, as they drove off, both in the front seat.  “You never know what will come up from the bottom.”

The team woman slumped in the back along with the boxes.  She was cold and wondered whose phone X would borrow to call people this very minute.  Of course she was.   Would she warn the people she had named?  What would happen if she knew a reporter well enough to be honest and the reporter was clued in enough to get the big picture?  A movie plot.  But an old one.  Probably only a TV show.