Alexis C. Madrigal

Welcome to one of the inner rings of The Establishment. We're near Dupont Circle, a short distance to the various centers of power in Washington, DC. The Capitol Building is not so far. The White House, too. The myriad National Associations dot the streets, and the K Street lobbyists and big law firms are a few blocks away.

Here we find The Brookings Institution, one of DC's oldest think tanks. When you think of people in suits coming up with policies that become laws, this is one of the places you're thinking about. 

Today's order of business was a panel about Anonymous, about hacktivism, about... the lulz. "Radical online activism is a new public-policy challenge, with groups such as Anonymous being described as everything from terrorist organizations to freedom fighters," the Institution billed it.

The speaker charged with explaining Anonymous' idiosyncrasies was Biella Coleman, an anthropologist who has been studying the group and its affiliates for months and months. An hour before she went on stage, she asked her Twitter followers, "The question for today: do I dare say 'Ultra-Coordinated Motherfuckeray' to the D.C. establishment in one hour?" (She didn't, sadly.)

This is the challenge Anonymous poses to the establishment. For those who think it is risky to wear a skinny tie, the group's argot and traditions are so alien that it's difficult to parse what the the group is. I have long imagined some DC lawyers gathered around 4chan.org with looks of horror and disgust on their faces. Even Coleman, who has spent massive amounts of time embedded among Anonymous and 4chan users, noted that the latter site was "teeming with pornography" and that many of its members communicate "in a language that seems to reduce English to a string of epithets." Which would, of course, be the point. Outsiders aren't supposed to understand.

So, when Coleman came to the microphone before the Brookings-blue logos of the stage, I was curious to see how her presentation of the social dynamics of Anonymous might be perceived. She described the group's birth on 4chan and the turn that some groups within the larger mass took to engage in activist politics in 2008, changes that came in the process of griefing the Church of Scientology in Project Chanology. Through that experience, various Anons developed the digital and physical moves that they'd later use on other organizations.

She covered several other notable Anonymous and AnonOps (separate group) exploits. What was fascinating about her talk was the way that it gave the impression that -- much as people would like to -- it is very difficult to separate out the different kinds of activities that define Anonymous' do-ocracy. Anonymous, a bit like Occupy Wall Street, is as much a platform for action as anything else, and individual efforts are largely separate from any other effort. This massive decentralization of power makes it difficult for Anonymous to stand for any one thing or even to ask that question of itself as an institution. It wouldn't make sense to say, "What are Anonymous' politics?" even if it seems clear that, in inchoate, intuitive form, there are some.

Coleman also highlighted the way Anons follow a strictly enforced "no fame" policy in which those members who seek celebrity are shunned. But inside the group, individuality is encouraged. The whole enterprise is "evasive, shifty, and nomadic," but not necessarily in a bad way.

That style is also a strategy. As Richard Forno, the graduate program director of University of Maryland, Baltimore County's cybersecurity program, explained, for those trying to defend their organizations an Anonymous attack, the very fact that no one controls the operation makes it difficult to strike back. Beyond any technical resilience the hackers build into an operation, the anonymity and decentralization create a social resilience. There's no one person to apprehend, no organization to strike, nothing to hit.

The last speaker was Paul Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig has a classic Washington resume: University of Chicago JD, lecturer at George Washington Law School, visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, various posts at the Department of Homeland Security, and a bow tie.

I have to admit that he did not strike me as likely to understand or feel much sympathy for Anonymous. But Rosenszweig did a fantastic job of framing the group's activities for the policy crowd. "I offer the comments with a great degree of uncertainty and trepidation," he began, and then used the nominal title of the panel, "Hacktivism, Vigilantism and Collective Action in a Digital Age," as a way of illuminating different aspects of Anonymous and how policymakers might respond to it. Far from the befuddled establishment lawyer that I expected, Rosenszweig's sensitivity to the multivalence of Anonymous impressed me. We can only hope that other people whispering into lawmakers' ears are as intellectually curious as he is.

"In some instances, [Anonymous' action] is hacktivism of a vicious sort or vigilantism of an even more vicious sort," Rosenszweig said. "And in some instances, it embodies collective action that has been a tradition and core part of what we in America think of as free speech and political activity."

These distinctions matter. If policymakers think of Anonymous as hacktivism, they may see it as a kind of insurgency that they would battle not solely with policing but also with a battle to win hearts-and-minds and rob the group of its moral standing. If they see the group as vigilantes, they might take a more crime-fighting approach. And if they see the group as embodying collective action, "that's a whole different kettle of fish."

"If it's a First Amendment sort of activity, the only thing that's legitimate is to police the margins and enforce the traditional First Amendment rules like preventing a heckler's veto, so one part of speech doesn't drown out another part," he said.

Rosenzweig tipped his hand a little as to how he sees the group, but with the utmost (and seemingly honest) humility.

"I tend to see predominant within Anonymous, the more adverse parts and more the criminality and the theft of private information," he concluded. "But I'm certainly willing to acknowledge that I might be wrong. And that kind of indeterminacy of the threat, if it is a threat at all, makes it very difficult, possibly impossible [to create] a coherent policy or a coherent legal approach."

All this to say that, given the yawning gulf between Anonymous and the DC establishment, I was shocked to discover that there are some among the elites that can be eminently reasonable about the kind of things that Anonymous does. Perhaps given the byzantine and bizarre ways that power flows in Washington, DC, it's easier to understand a strange group that has its own language and plays by its own rules.

Bots drown out anti-government speech in Russia, portending the rise of speech-canceling noise bots

The Internet's infrastructure makes stopping free speech slightly more difficult. People can post anonymously; people can post (or appear to post) from all over the globe; there are less central media hubs on which authority can be exerted. But it's not as if authoritarians are sitting by and letting speech resound. Instead, they're going to come up with ways to keep the messages of their opponents from getting out.

This week provided a great example of this. In Russia, charges of electoral fraud brought mass protests against the government. Some entity out there, directly aligned with the government or not, decided to drown out that dissent on Twitter. Here's Brian Krebs summing up the situation:

But according to several experts, it wasn't long before messages sent to that hashtag were drowned out by pro-Kremlin tweets that appear to have been sent by countless Twitter bots. Maxim Goncharov, a senior threat researcher at Trend Micro, observed that "if you currently check this hash tag on twitter you'll see a flood of 5-7 identical tweets from accounts that have been inactive for month and that only had 10-20 tweets before this day. To this point those hacked accounts have already posted 10-20 more tweets in just one hour."

"Whether the attack was supported officially or not is not relevant, but we can now see how social media has become the battlefield of a new war for freedom of speech," Goncharov wrote.

Trend to watch for 2012: speech-canceling noise bots.

Image: Vtldtlm/Shutterstock.

I have a feeling that I'll end up using this official embedding option alongside the more informal ways that I've developed to quote people from Twitter.

As my colleague Garance Franke-Ruta noted, a Rick Perry Iowa television ad went viral on YouTube yesterday, but not in the way that Perry intended. The video has been viewed almost 750,000 times and garnered 3,466 likes and 156,821 dislikes.

Traffic doesn't just flow to political campaign videos from nowhere. They get traffic the way any piece of content on the Internet does: links from popular sites and hits on social news platforms. While it's hard to know precisely which sites drive the most traffic to any given story, in this case, it looks like Reddit may have played a decisive role. From experience here at The Atlantic, we know that a single bit Reddit hit can drive six-figure traffic to a story. But we've never experienced something like what happened with this Perry video.

The way the site works, stories are submitted to individual subreddits like /video or /politics, these then accumulate points. At a certain algorithimically determined level, they go to the front page of that subreddit and then if they keep picking up momentum, they get splashed onto the front page of Reddit.com. That's when the traffic really starts to pour in.*

Yesterday, some time before 7:30pm**, two links to the Perry video went to the Reddit home page back to back, one from /atheism and the other from /video. Both were notably opposed to the video. The one submitted to /atheism read, "Rick Perry's new Commercial, and he's not ashamed to admit that he is a Christian," while the other was stronger in its critique, "Rick Perry's shockingly bigoted campaign video. Titled 'Strong'. Uh ...huh."

Again, it's hard to parse the specific numbers here, but an Atlantic article hit the Reddit front page a few hours after the Perry videos. Already, Reddit has referred 45,000 people to The Atlantic from that link. Extrapolating out the greater amount of time that the Perry links have had to generate traffic, that they hit at a higher traffic time, and that there were two of them, I think Reddit drove at least 150,000 people to the video. And that's not counting all the second-order effects of people who saw the video via Reddit and then shared it on Twitter or Facebook.

I go into this level of detail because Reddit has already emerged as a self-conscious community. Given the site's massive traffic-driving abilities, the site's users will play a bigger and bigger role in online politics (/RonPaul anyone?). And really, I don't think we know very much about the politics of Reddit or how its information amplification power will play into elections present and future.

A month into Google's experiment with the design of Gmail, we are safely past the reactionary phase of criticism. Now, we're on to the searing and increasing hatred phase. It feels like Steve Jobs' evil ghost doppelganger went through the interface and made everything just a little bit harder to use. The problems with the new Gmail are not about look and feel; they strike right at the core usability of the software. This is the biggest step back for email since I signed up for Gmail in 2004.

Let me explain why. I use Gmail all day, every day. I also chat with all of my colleagues here and elsewhere through Gchat all day, every day. Well, the new Gmail has made these two CORE functions nearly incompatible. That is to say, writing emails and chatting with people has become a huge hassle.

Here's the problem. See that big text box in which I type hundreds of emails per week? Well, it is obscured by chat windows that I use thousands of times per week. The two basic ways that I communicate are in direct conflict with each other.  

If this doesn't say it all about the ends to which we put technological means, I don't know what does.

The image is part of a series on Quickmeme going by the name "unimpressed astronaut," which is unfolding like a New Yorker caption contest for people who read Reddit.

There is a subtle difference between these two contest genres, though. Every New Yorker cartoon takes the universal New Yorker caption, "Christ, what an asshole." This image does not.

Via Garance Franke-Ruta

2011 was a big year for technology stories. It began with an explosion of protests across the Middle East and, alongside them, a debate about technology's role in their spread and power. The year has ended with a similar story -- the role of technology in the Occupy protests here in the United States. That's why, for 2011, mobile protests were the defining tech story. In between, the year saw growing competition among the top tech companies, the growth of the tablet market (dominated by the iPad), and the loss of one of the greatest tech leaders of our time, Steve Jobs. Here's our roundup of 2011's most important tech developments.

If newspapers go down, it's not just journalism we'll need but the digital bullhorns to get the word out

In my world, a new Clay Shirky essay about the future of news is an event. Shirky sets the terms of debates about the future of newspapers with casual realism and stylish prose. Supporters retweet endlessly, detractors retweet endlessly.

His latest is, nominally, a response to Dean Starkman's less-than-flattering profile of future-of-news thinkers, "Confidence Game." But it is a more substantial piece of thinking than that would imply. Shirky's piece is an elaboration of what news institutions really are and what they can and won't do.

Shirky can be hard to excerpt, but here's the key point:

Despite these challenges to newspapers, Starkman believes that we can and must "...find ways to preserve and transfer their most important attributes to a digital era, even as we push them to adapt to new financial, technological, and cultural realities." I don't believe we must do this, because I don't believe we can do this. That, I think, is the core difference between our views.

One reason for Shirky's skepticism is that when he looks at newspapers, he doesn't see an optimal newsgathering machine. "We need to support the people who cover hard news, but when you see a metro daily for a town of 100,000 that employs only six such reporters (just 10% of the masthead, much less total staff)," Shirky writes, "saving the entire edifice just to support that handful looks a lot harder than just finding new ways to support them directly."

Let's stipulate that real reporting is the civic reason to support newsgatherers of all kinds. But the rest of the edifice -- all the fluffy stuff and ad sales and all -- used to keep the amplification apparatus in good working order. The most fantastic thing about the institution of the newspaper, as we knew it, was that human beings built a culture that amplified things that made people in power uncomfortable, despite the risk that entailed. Their classified sales kept them fiscally sound and their distribution power was sufficient that they could inspire fear in politicians and business leaders.

To me, the real challenge for the future of news is *not* finding ways to support relatively tiny numbers of reporters to cover state legislatures and school board meetings. The problem seems to be in building an amplification apparatus that will reach a substantial percentage of the people in a given geography. There are some signs that this can be accomplished via a social news mechanism. Redditors, in particular, are getting good at pushing particular stories to popularity, like the video of a Texas judge hitting his daughter.

But social news efforts often draw on a national audience that's actually quite small in a given jurisdiction. That said, it's worth remembering that the newspapers were not the only source of amplification for local investigations. Rather, they often just gave stories the activation energy they needed to jump to local radio and television stations, which shamelessly plunder local papers.

So, if we were to imagine a future system that carried out the most important civic functions of a newspaper, we'd need to support a team of reporters -- and then a strategy for gaining the attention of interested locals *and* local broadcast media.

That's a tougher task than the one Shirky has laid out, but the amplification apparatus may be easier to scale than reporting or the old way of distributing newspapers. That is to say, once someone hits on a way of amplifying local investigative journalism, it may become less and less expensive as more cities join that civic immune system. And that would be very good news for hard news.

The Minneapolis museum makes a play to become a networked cultural powerhouse

The Walker Art Center launched a new website last week that should be a model for other institutions of all kinds. The site repositions the Walker, in the words of Artlog, "at the center of the global conversation about contemporary art," by incorporating ideas, words, and art from far outside the museum's walls.

The Walker is in Minneapolis, a wonderful city that is not near the physical centers of contemporary art production. Nonetheless, through smart curation and creative engagement, the museum has become an international symbol for how to make an arts venue work in a medium-sized city. From afar, it has always seemed like a place (much like MCA Denver) that was bursting at the seams of its geographical location. So perhaps it is no surprise that the Walker decided that it could succeed by becoming "a new creative platform" as director Olga Viso put it

In the physical world, cultural institutions thought their authority derived from their precious collections of irreproducible objects. On the Internet, every website is successful to the extent that people want to reproduce -- on their own screens -- whatever culture you happen to be making. So, it takes a considerable shift for museum directors and their patrons to somehow want their collections flung across the world, every single person making her own 'print' of a painting each time she opens a browser and surfs to a museum collection.

Museums have options. One, they can stay off the web, hoarding their treasures offline and doing what they've always done. Two, they can dabble on the web and try to use it as a marketing platform to maximize the value of their physical spaces. Three, they can take advantage of the Internet's reach and figure out a way to become valuable within the new paradigm. We've seen a lot of options one and two, but the Walker is a definitive step down the third way.

In a networked world, people and institutions become valuable by becoming important nodes. That means taking on some (but not all) of the attributes of a media company. Museums can continue to pull people inward, but they also have to push content outward. They have to learn to exist within different, overlapping ecosystems -- Tumblr, Twitter, the art blog networks, cultural institution sites -- and figure out how to receive ideas and content from those places, not just broadcast to them.

The Walker's director has called their concept "the idea hub." I tend to be suspicious of how hub-like an institution intends to be, especially if a marketing department is anywhere near the controls. But The Walker's new site is helmed by Paul Schmelzer, who has long run the excellent Eyeteeth blog. If anyone can figure out how to turn The Walker's website into an art mag frontend for the museum's collection, Schmelzer can.

What I love most about what the Walker is attempting to do is that they seem to have realized that they can do more than stave off a slow spiral into irrelevance. The Internet means that the Walker can become a global art powerhouse from the comfort of the upper Midwest.

Image: Walker Art Center.

Despite all the talk of Solyndra and Chinese solar companies dumping their products onto the US market, the development of projects in the US continues apace. Driven by falling costs for photovoltaics and California's Renewable Portfolio Standard, many utility-scale projects are in the works in the southwest United States. These seven mega projects were culled from Solar Energy Industries Association research on all the major projects completed, under construction, or under development in this country.

Looking over that list, there are two large questions outstanding.

1) Will concentrated solar power projects, which work like normal power plants but substitute solar heat for fossil fuels to generate steam, remain competitive with PV projects? CSP projects will be able to accommodate energy storage easier than PV, but PV costs are falling faster. Keep an eye on that going forward.

2) Will utility-scale projects out in the desert make sense, generally, going forward? Right now, all kinds of models are springing forth for getting solar onto the roofs of individual homes and businesses. While the cost to install the solar panels is lower out in the desert and the solar resource is better, the plants have to compete at wholesale prices. Solar panels on roofs are competing with the retail price of electricity, which is considerably higher.

What's certain is that all of these kinds of projects have powerful backers and so in the near-term, we're likely to see many different experiments trying to find what works best.

This morning, Herman Cain's campaign launched a new website called 'Women for Cain,' on which women can submit stories of their support for the embattled Republican presidential candidate. This is the leader image for the site.



If you've been around the Internet for a while, you can recognize a stock photo. And that is definitely a stock photo. Twitter user @delrayser even tracked it down on Shutterstock, which sells this kind of imagery for about $20 a pop. The photo is titled, "Four happy young women holding their thumbs up."

Just for fun, we cut it out and uploaded it to Google Image Search to see if any other websites had used the same stock photo. The most prominent usage came on AupairTracker.com, a site that still appears to be under development.

Mathew Ingram had a great post yesterday on "the rise of the new information gatekeepers" in which he looked at how technology companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple increasingly control access to news and culture.

This morning, Steve Lawson, a bassist from Birmingham in the UK sent out a string of tweets that I think highlight a key difference between the old information ecosystem and the new one. Everyone can use the new system's infrastructure, regardless of their 'official' capacity. Here's what Lawson had to say:

The info gatekeepers thing is interesting, but the parameters are WAY more porous than before. TV/Magazines weren't "gameable". The web is. Cable access channels aside (Wayne's World!), you can't 'use' broadcast TV for your own ends & ignore the broadcasters. Here, there's choice. ...so while twitter controls trending algorithms, promoted tweets etc, we can still build sub-networks on the same infrastructure. So I can use twitter/G+/FB to spread indie music, without the need of their 'support' as such. We can reshare it, and build our own network. Same for news, activism, art, culture...there's still a curated 'bought' mainstream. But the alternative is on the same platform. That's new.

And propaganda thrust into a community looks way more dodgy than propaganda in a paid ad on TV. We're more sensitive to it here. The big worry? the implications of ad-funding as THE model. If all our actions are made possible by that, we're complicit or parasitic... We either 'pay our way' by buying the shit that gets advertised, or we are happy to let someone else's untrammeled consumption pay for us.

What I think this analysis shows is that a simple recognition that there information gatekeeping remains does not mean that the new way of doing things is equivalent to the old way of doing things. The details of the system matter.

There's also something of a nerdy alternative media rallying cry in there: Ignore the broadcasters! Build the sub-network!

Now that two of biggest remaining occupations -- Los Angeles and Philadelphia -- have been evicted, the #occupy movement (or platform) finds itself at the end of the beginning. Individuals may try to reestablish themselves in public spaces, or as has happened in New York and Oakland, they won't. As occupiers debate this among themselves, it's worth considering what the logic of engagement of an occupation actually is.

After all, it's an odd strategy. Fifty years ago, Rosa Parks occupied the front of a bus, but that space was the disputed territory. Now, the protesters expend a lot of time and energy holding areas that don't have any real value. Any particular patch of city that their tents cover isn't strategic. They're not taking over the radio towers or something.

But then there is the fact that the occupations worked better than any civil disobedience movement in a very long time. If this is an "attention economy," the occupiers hit on a very profitable business model. Something about the occupations worked. Perhaps their fundamental inscrutability was actually the magic that kept people paying attention. It was difficult to get a read on what the occupations were, so it was difficult to write them off.

But another explanation popped into my mind, too. It derived from an explication of Julian Assange's political philosophy by Berkeley graduate student and blogger, Aaron Bady. Remember that Assange saw the state as essentially a conspiracy. Bady explained that it wasn't the nature of the leaks that mattered. The point was that any kind of leak could get the state to clamp down on its own network, impeding its own functioning.

"Increasing the porousness of the conspiracy's information system will impede its functioning... the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function," Bady wrote. "You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire."

I don't think Assange is a particularly great political philosopher, nor do I think the Occupy protesters are trying to emulate him. But I think this insight has occurred to the protesters: governments are now so powerful that direct resistance is pointless. No one thinks you could fight a real battle against the US military -- or Michael Bloomberg's own army, the NYPD. Instead, the power of the government has to be used against itself. Nothing else can touch it.

Let me float that the encampments are fundamentally about using government power against itself. By staking out a little ground and saying, "No, the government does not rule this space," it gets the mayors and police chiefs worked up. They deploy their increasingly militarized police officers to say, "Yes, the government does rule that space." Then, the protesters link arms and chant, and the riot cops come in with pepper spray and batons.

During the height of clashes between Occupy Oakland and police, I watched a livestream of protesters chanting, "Who are you protecting? Who are you protecting?" And kept watching as police launched tear gas into that crowd. The show of force was shocking. Now, that situation will pose a major political problem for Oakland's mayor going forward. 

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa handled the eviction of Occupy LA with one thousand police officers. One thousand! There might have been less violence Tuesday night, but Occupy's message (which was also Villaraigosa's) still got sent: overwhelming force will be brought against political dissent.

So, why occupy? The point is not to hold a city park. The point is to dramatize the struggle of weak against strong, which is also the struggle of poor against rich. If the dominant theme of the occupations is, as Jay Rosen succinctly put it, "public policy favors the rich," then having the public police arrest the weak becomes a powerful metaphor for the message of the movement.

During the Los Angeles Police Department's forcible removal of the Occupy LA protest last night, they chose 12 reporters and photographers to represent the media as a whole.* This is called a "media pool" -- and it used to be a fairly time-honored, if oft-derided, way of dealing with very specific types of situations. The original idea was that a select group of mainstream media journalists go into a military engagement, report their observations to a larger group, and then everyone could write from the same observed facts.

Growing beyond its military borders, the media pool concept has been deployed during political conventions, high-profile trials, and in a few other cases. In all cases, though, as summarized in the Encyclopedia of Television, the pool "offers those who employ it a way to manage media coverage."

It strikes me as significant that the compromise developed in the 1980s after the media was barred from covering the invasion of Grenada. It also strikes me as significant that we use the term "compromise" to describe it. The first and second meanings of compromised come into play: "to settle a dispute by mutual concession" and "to weaken (a reputation or principle) by accepting standards that are lower than is desirable."

All of that brings us to last night's media pool. The LAPD deployed this old-school method in a decidedly 20th-century way. First, they didn't select a single web-based publication or alternative news outlet. Instead they allowed the Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, AP, the big four television outlets, and a two radio reporters. Anybody not in that group -- which would include reporters for every website not affiliated with a newspaper in Los Angeles, not to mention all citizens performing acts of journalism -- were told that they would be arrested if they came too close to the eviction area.

The LAPD forbade their pool reporters from reporting the events live. (Update: See bottom of the post for details. The restriction was more akin to a kind of tape-delay than an embargo.) This helped to neutralize a key informational advantage that Occupy protesters have exploited. As confrontations with police begin, they are able to use the emotional imagery from those events to draw more support in real-time. Of course, in this case, there were some people writing about the events in real-time and others livestreamed, but only if they were willing to risk arrest.

Let's stipulate that there are real issues surrounding how charged situations can or should be covered by card carrying-media or citizen journalists. Fine. Still, my thought is that this sort of media choreography cannot survive for long. The tools to record and distribute information about the world are too widely distributed. A video of protesters getting pepper sprayed has impact whether it comes from the Los Angeles Times or some dude with an iPhone.

But institutions do not have to take this democratization of reporting tools lying down. Many organizations want to control -- and are used to controlling -- media narratives. They will (I can hear Evgeny Morozov whispering into my ear) have an institutional response to the deployment of new technology by political dissenters. In this case, the LAPD has come up with a way to say that they allowed media into the eviction and they can still arrest people that they don't want to cover the event.

City police departments share a lot of information and if the LAPD's strategy is seen as successful, expect it will be deployed again in other cities. More broadly, it seems plausible that government agencies will continue to buddy up to traditional media members, offering them exclusive access in exchange for agreeing to the exclusion of citizen journalists from important events. Sadly, the incentives of the elite media (many of which have never been all that fond of the non-professionals stealing their show) and the government are aligned here. That's a bad setup, even assuming (as I do) that the individual media members in the pool are acting in good faith.

* UPDATE 3:15 EST: I emailed with Dakota Smith, a Daily News reporter who helped cover the raid from inside the park. She gave me a more complete description of how the pool worked, which I think is worth spelling out. It gives you an idea both of how hard individual news organizations can work on something like this -- and how much the conditions can be altered to help or hinder journalism by the enabling force. In this case, it sounds like the LAPD did not hinder efforts as much as they could have.

"All of the print reporters filed directly to the pool. The POOL consisted of our our editors, editors of other print publications, and a central news service that anyone else (tv, radio, more print) could read," Smith told me. "Once we filed to the POOL... that info could go live anywhere. The premise was that we just couldn't be greedy and publish information from inside the park directly to our own site without first sharing with the POOL so everyone could have it at the same time. I don't know what the other pool reporters did, but I just sent in short news briefs all night long."

Once those briefs were live, that information could be published by any news organization. So, the LAPD did not technically prevent reporters from getting information out in close to real-time. Rather, the process of ensuring equal access to pool reports required time. As a final detail, here's how Smith described the mechanics of getting stories from inside the park onto the web.

"We were inside the park, but there were multiple reporters from each publication outside the park, doing more reporting," she wrote. "Our editors on the outside were reading the POOL and then also taking stories from outside the park, and crafting them for the web, so there were many eyes. So stories that we were writing from inside the park went live on the newspaper sites, and other news sites within minutes."

The Wall Street Journal has an accurate but easy to misconstrue story about the United States' energy picture. "U.S. Nears Milestone: Net Fuel Exporter," the headline reads. The article describes how the US, in a big change from recent decades, may actually export more petroleum products than it imports in 2011. Sounds important, right? And it is. BUT, there is a very big difference between being a net petroleum product exporter and being a net petroleum exporter. We're still importing 8 million barrels of crude oil per day!

What the numbers mean is that we have more refining capacity than we need to supply our domestic needs. So, we import the crude oil, refine it, use almost all of it, and sell a percentage of it to the rest of the world. The biggest surpluses are in "unfinished oils" and "motor gasoline blending components." Mexico's rising petroleum product use is a big part of the story, as you can see in the by-country net import numbers.

So, the Journal's story is good news, in a general sense, but let's not make it bigger than it is. We're still buying massive amounts of crude oil from other countries. Take a look at Atlantic alum Matt Yglesias' post for a quick economic analysis.

Few remember the second chimp launched into space by the United States. Even fewer remember the terrible equipment malfunction that subjected the animal to 76 electric shocks in orbit.



The chimps of space -- Ham, the first primate in space, and Enos, the second primate (after Yuri Gagarin) to orbit Earth -- have a special place in our memories of NASA. These animals paved the way for the United States space program by convincing biologists that animals' bodies *and* minds could function in orbit.

But there was a dark side to the missions. The chimps were the first to be trained by "avoidance conditioning" during which electric shocks were administered to the soles of their feet when the animals responded incorrectly in carrying out simple tasks. So, for example, the animals would be presented with three shapes and were trained to pick out the one that was not like the two others. They made their selections by pressing one of three levers that corresponded to the three symbols. On problem one below, the chimp should press the middle lever. On problem two, the chimp should press the right lever, and so on. Scientists call these oddity problems.


After Enos was in orbit, his first battery of oddity problems went as well as could be expected. After 18 problems, Enos had received 10 shocks. But on his next battery of tests, the center lever malfunctioned as did the switch controlling which question was presented. Enos kept being presented the same problem -- number one above -- in which the correct answer required pressing the center lever, but his center lever was broken. Enos, strapped into a space module orbiting the earth, was subjected to 33 shocks in a row, no matter what he did. The chimp kept trying to press different levers, NASA researchers record, but he kept getting shocked. Mercifully, the test ended after 35 shocks, and Enos performed normally on the other tasks he was given.

But then, as per the preexisting schedule, he was presented with the oddity problem again. Just like the time before, the apparatus malfunctioned and Enos was shocked 41 times. Even NASA scientists were amazed that the chimp soldiered on, despite the horrible malfunction.

Note that the malfunctioning of the center lever, which resulted in the subject receiving 35 shocks on the second session of the oddity problem, did not disrupt his subsequent performance. ... And likewise, the 41 shocks received during the third oddity session did not affect performance during the subsequent fourth session of the CA-DA tasks. Certainly, following a malfunction of this nature, it might be expected that behavior would be disrupted, but this was not in evidence.

Eventually, Enos' flight ended and he came back to Earth. His capsule did not land where NASA anticipated, so he was stuck in the capsule for 3 hours and 20 minutes. By the time the USS Stormes crew extracted him, "The subject had broken through the protective belly panel and had removed or damaged most of the physiological sensors," a NASA report records. "He had also forcibly removed the urinary catheter while the balloon was still inflated."

A little less than a year later, Enos died of dysentery. We know his body was inspected, but the location of his remains is unknown.

It goes like this: a technological innovation opens up the possibility for a new kind of more immediate, decentralized, less hierarchical media form. The people will be empowered! And sometimes, they are. (At least for a while.)

This is the dominant narrative of the Internet as communications medium. But what's fascinating is that if we look in the crevasses of history, we can find a set of people who were blazing the trail that social media advocates would later walk. The new technology that arrived in their midst was the videocamera, and their approach was flavored by the countercultural milieu in which they placed themselves. Throughout the 1970s, video collectives like the one I'll focus on in this essay, Ant Farm, tried to break the three-channel tyranny of the broadcast media long before computer networks were commonly used.

According to scholar Deanne Pytlinski, these groups wanted to "interrupt broadcast television's one-way flow of information." They created video with "the goal of liberating the mind from control by the mainstream media through decentralization... coupled with the desire for deeper and more authentic forms of interpersonal communication."
 
Unlike film, which had to be developed and was expensive, video could be fast, cheap, and on-the-go. This change allowed video collectives to experiment with new ways of producing *and* consuming moving pictures.

Their work is detailed in Pytlinski's essay, which appears in a new book edited by Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977, and in objects from Ant Farm productions at an accompanying show at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. The counterculture influenced the videomakers, who influenced more than just the counterculture. Their creative use of the new technology allowed new ways to think about media to spring up. Along with magazines like The Whole Earth Catalog, they promoted a pro-technology, anti-mainstream-media sensibility that was a far cry from neo-primitivism and much closer to the Internet pioneers of the 1990s.

While historian Fred Turner has described how the counterculture became cyberculture, the role of video collectives in creating new modes of networked media creation has gone unremarked upon. The collectives -- especially San Francisco's Ant Farm, Media Access Center, Optic Nerve, Video Free America, and TVTV -- were new media makers before there was a name for such a thing. But without networked distribution, they were forced to create fantastically creative spectacle and sneakernets to get their message out.

I am 65 percent not kidding when I say that the social-media ecosystem is basically the Ant Farm plus the Internet.



On July 4, 1975, the members of San Francisco's Ant Farm architecture and video collective staged what they called the "ultimate media event." After a bit of performance-art frivolity in which a John F. Kennedy impersonator gave a mock speech deriding the media -- "Who can deny that we are a nation addicted to television and the constant flow of media? Haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television?" -- the group took a heavily modded Cadillac and crashed it through a thin pyramid of television sets.

Local broadcast-television stations covered the event, mostly to mock it. KPIX, the CBS affiliate, cut back from its segment to the studio's two male anchors. "Now *that* was weird," one says, gesticulating with his pen. "You've got to say that that was pretty weird. The car going into the television sets and the Kennedy impersonator." He shakes his head as his colleague says, "I think it's over our heads." 

In footage from that time, KTVU's man on the scene looks into the camera with a clump of televisions flaming behind him and says, "So, what's it all mean? Well, presumably, the message is for the media," he says. "Get it?" The message is obvious to him, but the anchors back in the studio react differently. "I don't think I want to get it," says one anchor. "That's from the culture corner tonight," another anchor says as the third uncomfortably adjusts his jacket. The point, of course, was that broadcast television should burn! Even the faux bewilderment of the anchors shows them to be doltish squares because, really, who couldn't see what the message was? The brilliance of the stunt was to exploit the networks lust for spectacle to get them to broadcast the call for their own demise.

We know all about this stunt because The Ant Farm preserved it in a video piece called, Media Burn, which is now available for free on the art site UbuWeb. While they decried the artifacts and means of consuming moving pictures, they were simultaneously using the new technology of the videocamera to create counterprogramming. While contemporary people of all political persuasions like to paint the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s as a neo-primitivist affair, Ant Farm and the rest of the collectives were nothing of the sort. In fact, they were using the latest technology, a technology considerably newer than film cameras, and they were obsessed with cybernetics, an emergent framework for thinking about systems that emerged out of World War II war research. It is easier to paint all counterculturalists as reactionary anti-technologists, but the facts don't match up with the charge.



Ant Farm's fascination with technology went beyond video art. They were obsessed with inflatable buildings (!) because of their mutability, speed of deployment, and low-cost. As they describe in their "Inflatocookbook," a DIY guide to inflatable architecture, they could show up somewhere and create a building within hours with some plastic, tape, and "used fans from Goodwill." They were not against technology but merely optimizing for a different set of properties. The mobility of the buildings was especially important because the Ant Farm's desire for a networked world in which high-bandwidth communication was only possible face-to-face meant that they had to spend a lot of time physically traveling the country.

They did this traveling in considerable style. The group outfitted a van to enable the creation and display of video. As you can see in the print below, the purpose of the van was to allow them to show "unedited, unwashed people's TV" of political candidates debating things. We're so used to seeing politicians on YouTube and in other venues, that it's easy to forget how difficult it would have been to see politicians speeches in their unedited forms. Broadcast television networks had incredible control over how a particular politician would be presented. The Ant Farm Video Van wanted to end that, at least for people who wanted more viewpoints.

When the modern wind industry sparked to life in California during the 1980s, the maximum output of an average wind turbine was measured in the tens of kilowatts. Even stringing together hundreds of these machines only allowed a few megawatts of power to be produced, a far cry from the gigawatt-scale of a large nuclear facility.

But the past thirty years have seen remarkable development in wind technology. Individual turbines have gotten much (much!) larger, so that some individual units are rated at seven megawatts. That's hundreds of times better output than the initial small units. Some turbines are taller than the Statue of Liberty now. And operational experience now keeps wind machines online for a much greater percentage of the time, too.

Add up those changes and you can see a remarkable change in the scale of wind farms, which are measured in the hundreds of megawatts now, comparable to many fossil fuel facilities. Above, you can take a quick tour through the eight largest wind farms in the country.

Our machines' computational biases are not the same as our brain's cognitive biases, which is going to be weird

Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel laureate, eminent Princeton psychologist, and godfather of behavioral economics. So, when he speaks about emergent phenomenon, it's probably worth listening.

In this case, he submitted himself to a group Q&A by the readers of Freakonomics, and someone asked him about Apple's Siri and how artificial intelligence more generally might reflect human cognitive biases.

Q. With the launch of Siri and a stated aim to be using the data collected to improve the performance of its AI, should we expect these types of quasi-intelligences to develop the same behavioral foibles that we exhibit, or should we expect something completely different? And if something different, would that something be more likely to reflect the old "rational" assumptions of behavior, or some totally other emergent set of biases and quirks based on its own underlying architecture? My money's on emergent weirdness, but then, I don't have a Nobel Prize. -Peter Bennett

A. Emergent weirdness is a good bet. Only deduction is certain. Whenever an inductive short-cut is applied, you can search for cases in which it will fail. It is always useful to ask "What relevant factors are not considered?" and "What irrelevant factors affect the conclusions?" By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.

The emphasis above is mine. If what he's saying is a little opaque, let me unpack it. Human brains take shortcuts in making decisions. Finding where those shortcuts lead us to dumb places is what his life work has been all about. Artificial intelligences, say, Google, also have to take shortcuts, but they are *not* the same ones that our brains use. So, when an AI ends up in a weird place by taking a shortcut, that bias strikes us as uncannily weird.

Get ready, too, because AI bias is going to start replacing human cognitive bias more and more regularly.

Via @FelixSalmon

Image: imredesiuk/Shutterstock.

Don't ask me how I stumbled on this photo. But I did and I thought you might want to share in the glory of a technologized Santa. In fact, I thought you might like to participate in the caption contest below. (Image via Southern Methodist University Central Library.)