Yes, Virginia, there is a Twitter© revolution

I appreciate The Economist sponsoring a debate on whether or not the internet is a net force for democracy. While that may seem too obvious seriously to question, one should not underestimate the malicious uses to which technolgy can be put if a repressive regime has sufficiently talented hackers in its employ. I posted the following to the debate discussion board:

Dear Sir,

It would be interesting to simulate a war game between an internet-equipped Lenin and Trotsky, on the one hand, and a similarly armed Pyotr Rachkovsky, on the other, to see who would win. Pessimists should doubtless be given their full due in this matter: in even not very sophisticated hands, the internet offers countless opportunities for malicious operators to discredit and disrupt forces of reform through planted posts, doctored e-mails and photos, and dishonest chat participants, not to mention more standard tactics such as denial of service attacks, stolen credit card and bank account numbers, and the like.

In the end, as I see it, this comes down to the old saying that the only way to get rid of alligators is to drain the swamp. The manifestation of the internet in modern life is such that the swamp can't be drained. Mubarak turned off the internet once; no one imagines that its proponents are idly sitting around hoping no one thinks to do so again. Safeguards are no doubt already being built. Technology experts polled by a journalist for the website Tech Republic for their views on Joe Lieberman's fantastic proposal to let an American President shut down the net responded that first, it probably couldn't be done and second, the net is so intricately connected with every aspect of modern life that if a western government tried it, the law of unintended consequences would exact its comical revenge.

The net, like Wordsworth's world, is too much with us and, absent a civilization-ending meteor strike, it will never be otherwise. It is true, certainly, that there are virulent pockets on the net even now who deny the holocaust and global warming, doubt our President's citizenship, insist on the deleterious effects of vaccines, and call for the relaxation of the age of consent for reprehensible reasons. Those diseased enclaves also will not go away, or will do so only to be replaced by other things equally as bad.

Having said that, the redoubtable Rachkovsky, were he back in operation, could recruit half the population to harass the other half, and he could still not, finally, overcome the fact that the net provides an unstoppable channel for any view of any description to become accepted worldwide, an opportunity limited only by the rhetorical skills of its advocates. Repression, grievous as it is, is like the Gulf oil spill; eventually, it is dissolved in the sheer volume of the medium in which it is suspended, and the oyster beds are found to have survived. This is no utopian hope but a simple reflection of the countless paths that cross online, and the myriad of opinions that travel them. Each has a hearer and an advocate; none can finally be silenced.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Google Warming

I'd heard about the losing battle that newspapers are fighting to stay afloat as they steadily lose ad revenue to the net, and perhaps that accounts in part for the article in yesterday's Times of London that painted Google as a carbon-spewing behemoth. But I see the article is actually carried in their online edition, so perhaps they are daring Google to block searches to their damning report and thus incidentally redeem itself from the sin of environmental spoliation. Or perhaps, since they draw a comparison between a Google search and the homely English cup of tea, it's a belated rebuke, 235 years late, to our disrespect of their favorite brew in Boston Harbor long ago.

In any case, the article quotes Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross as saying that two Google searches generate about as much carbon as brewing a single cup of tea, about 15 grams, and of course, if we multiply that by all the millions who are looking up baseball scores, their favorite celebrities, or their horoscopes online, instead of brewing a cup of tea and opening a paper copy of The Times, the worldwide impact could be severe. If Samuel Johnson could be made to understand the issue here, he, at least, would feel vindicated, since he is said to have consumed tea by the basinful after he gave up wine and liquor. On the other hand, he peopled his attic with a swarm of scribes to help him mark and copy passages from books for use in illustrating the definitions in his Dictionary. Presumably, he supplied them with candles, so perhaps their labors were not more energy-efficient than if they had used Google.

To be sure, the computer industry worldwide is not lagging in its efforts to burn kilowatt hours and is said to contribute to 2% of the planet's carbon emissions, about the same as world aviation. On the other hand, since greater energy use adds not only to the deterioration of the materials in networks and computers but to their operating costs, it's in the interests of information technology to discover better materials, more rational designs, and greater energy-efficiency. For that matter, the growing capacity of smart phones is leading us to a future in which much of what is done from desktop or laptop computers today is about to take place in the palm of the user's hand, instead. Meanwhile, the consumer who shops online, the reader who reads online, and the traveler who goes online and finds the quickest routes and lowest prices all contribute to saving energy, compared to older and more conventional means of accomplishing the same things.

Google published a response that denies Wissner-Gross's figures and asserts, instead, that the carbon involved in a Google search is many times smaller, involving, in fact, about the same amount of energy that the human body burns in about a tenth of a second. Indeed, Google says, its networks are so efficient that the the seeker's journey to the desired information consumes less energy than the computer sitting on one's desk.

Meanwhile, the Washington Posts's TechCrunch feature notes that the average book is responsible for 2,500 grams of carbon (Ayn Rand, you should have trimmed some of John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged!), while a cheeseburger accounts for an unseemly 3,600 grams, not to mention what it does to the profile and the digestion.

The London Times article certainly has a point in saying that a great deal of time and energy is wasted by sharing with the world what would have been confined to one's diary a century ago ("Walked the dog; it was hot today; rosebushes are not doing well," etc.). Indeed, that's one of the reasons that I've never seriously considered carrying a cell phone and would have little interest even if I had more room in my budget: I refuse to become part of an enterprise in which millions worldwide pay to say at a distance what was never worth saying face to face in the first place. Air quality isn't the only issue here; we also have noise, thoughtlessness, and what I'll call spiritual pollution to reckon with. Still, Google represents a force that, used wisely, ought to increase our efficiency and make knowledge more widely available, and at a lesser cost.

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

The purpose-driven inaugural

Many in Barack Obama's base feel betrayed by the planned appearance of Rick Warren at the inaugural ceremony next month, though their candidate openly avowed his opposition to gay marriage in his appearance at the Saddleback Church last summer. My fellow skeptics of religion can hardly feel similarly hoodwinked, since Obama is openly Christian. I could wish, though, that the President-elect had exercised as much taste as calculation in his choice and avoided selecting someone who represents the MacDonaldization of religion.

I won't complain that Warren's appearance makes it doubtful that he has made much progress in the time-honored religious virtue of fasting, since my own waistline has been overdrawn by several inches for some years now. But I must wonder what the fortunes of his church would be if there were a prolonged power blackout. The ancient church sustained their faith in darkened catacombs illuminated only by torchlight; they steeled themselves against the prospect of hideous deaths or were transported by religious ecstasies at the prospect of the Savior's imminent return to judge the world. The modern megachurch, by contrast, would silently implode after 3 successive weeks without electric power; its kind of spirituality, lacking tongues of fire, is sustained only by flashing lights, PowerPoint, large display screens, and high-priced sound systems. Its culture invites the attendee to be seated, be entertained, and be generous in support of this institution so happily designed to allow the worshipper to bathe in good feeling about himself.

It so happens that Saddleback and its pastor are apparently among the best of the breed—Warren not only accepts no salary from the church but has purposely repaid every penny of salary he received during its first 25 years of existence; moreover, he lives on just 10% of his income, donating the balance to worthy causes. Neither a sleazy hypocrite in his personal life, like Swaggart or Ted Haggard, nor a severe ranter on putative damnation for trivial offenses, Warren has actively worked to highlight environmental and social justice concerns among Evangelicals, giving in support of AIDS relief and differing markedly from his compeer James Dobson in raising awareness of global warming.

All this is to the good. Still, what kind of recommendation is it to praise him on the grounds that he is simply not as objectionable as other instances of a phenomenon that is meretricious at its core? Should we admire Warren and his church members because they have finally acknowledged what the International Panel on Climate Change has been documenting for nearly 20 years?

Really, why did Obama invite this man to be a central figure at his inauguration? It reminds me of what I wondered when I read an article in Time last week about the social contagion of happiness; I was startled to read that the odds of one's increased personal happiness were 34% greater if his neighbor were happy (and 10% greater if that neighbor's friend were happy, even if the neighbor's friend were unknown to the original subject!), the odds for happiness increased by just 14% if one's sibling were happy, and by only 8% if one's spouse were happy. One is tempted to leave that last point alone since, sadly, it isn't hard to imagine two married partners discovering that the happiness of each is inversely proportional to the contentment of the other, but still, you have to wonder. I suppose we must have evolved in such a way that whereas we assume a reciprocal commitment to each other's welfare in our relations with spouses and family members, we realize that our neighbor's benevolence is by no means so certain and, thus, feel an obligation to work harder to win his good will. If there is anything to that, I suspect that Obama is confident that his core supporters will trust the integrity of his voting record and formal beliefs, which are politically liberal, whereas he hopes to encourage Warren, a bellwether of Evangelical opinion, to lead his flock in a more centrist direction.

There's a great deal of political good sense in that, certainly, but as someone who declines to share Warren's metaphysics altogether, I still hope the day will come, decades from now, where a candidate for President, invited to come and be cross-examined at Saddleback or its like, will respond with a statement like the following:

Thank you for your interest in my campaign, and I welcome the support of all fair-minded voters. I will not accept your invitation, and I hope my opponent will join me in declining as well. I refuse not because I am uninterested in what your members think but because I cannot discover on what grounds a church is a fitting venue for examining the qualifications of a candidate for high office under the Constitution of the United States. I may happen to hold similar or even identical moral positions to those held by you or some of your members, but I cannot consent to have that agreement linked, in the public mind, to beliefs about a Sky Spirit that I simply do not share; in particular, I refuse to given even token consent to the very foolish notion that without believing in such a Sky Spirit, we would all revert to savagery. Those are your opinions, and you are entitled to them, but they have nothing to do with my ability to devise or implement policies that would make this country prosperous and safe. Instead of meeting in a temple of religious worship, I propose, instead, that we all gather in a more neutral environment where every voter of every shade of belief or no belief feels that he enters, and his opinion is valued, without regard to his views on matters that no one can ever prove.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.