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This story is co-published with Sluice, the London-based experimental artist collective, and appears in its Autumn/Winter 2019 number, "Mycorrhiza and Extancy." Grateful thanks to Jack Smurthwaite and Karl England.
Toward the end of September 2019 Jaron Lanier, a computer pioneer often referred to as "the father of virtual reality," published a video in the New York Times called " Jaron Lanier Fixes the Internet." The piece expands on ideas Lanier has written about for a long time, notably in his 2013 book Who Owns the Future?

The linchpin of Lanier's vision is that people should be paid for sharing their data. According to him, this innovation would solve the problems of the World Wide Web as it is currently constituted. But exactly how people (symbolized, in the video, by a handsome couple in a very large loft, celebrating the arrival of what is quite clearly a plastic baby) will "make money" by sharing their personal news is left entirely undefined. In the video, three one-dollar bills float down to the happy couple from an undisclosed source above them.

"We'll have to invent a lot of things," Lanier says breezily.

I totally agree with Lanier that people should be compensated for their participation online in order to restore a fair and egalitarian spirit to the global human network that constitutes the Web. I also agree that "we'll have to invent a lot of things" to get there, and have even gone ahead and invented some, with the help of our friends and colleagues at Popula and before that, with our friends at Civil.

Where Lanier and I differ is that I believe it will be necessary to ensure that middlemen are eliminated, so that nobody can get rich, or acquire any kind of monopoly power, over this new and better network. In the specific case of media, the complete elimination of middlemen is the only way I know of to protect privacy, speech rights and press freedom.

Various ideas similar to Lanier's have begun to take shape in recent years, particularly since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009. Blockchain technology provides an attractive vehicle for network innovation because it was invented specifically in order to produce incorruptible, distributed recordkeeping systems, and (relatedly) because of its spectacularly brilliant, efficient means of handling currency-like transactions.

The Brave browser, for example, a blockchain-based system with its own crypto token (called BAT), compensates users for their attention to advertisements. Ad networks pay Brave, and Brave shares a portion of these funds with the ad-watching users of their browser, keeping a cut for itself.

But both Brave and Lanier's proposed systems interfere with the organic operations of the network by introducing a central authority-a platform, middleman, or gatekeeper-perhaps a better word would be "ruler." The ruler of the network has the ultimate power to control the flow of information, compensation and connections between its users. This centralization of authority ensures that the ruler will, eventually and invariably, come to concentrate solely on the arrogation of profits to itself, reducing network participants to virtual sharecroppers or worse.

OR WORSE
Screenshot: YouTube

This pattern has emerged at every large platform: Google, Paypal, Facebook, Amazon, eBay. Where there is power to control interactions within the network-and money to be got by it-the human aspects of the network erode, and eventually cease to exist as such. Eventually, inevitably, the network's organic functions degrade into a single business function: all is subsumed into a source of fuel for the ruler.

Note that Wikipedia, where control is distributed and in the hands of users, was spared this fate.

Such networks may begin (as Facebook, Paypal and Google did) as free- or low-cost, ad-free providers of desirable services, but they all slowly devolve into bloodsuckers. There's no reason to believe that the same won't happen to Brave, as it would to the vague system Lanier describes.

So long as there is a middleman to skim something from each transaction, that system will eventually deteriorate; rather than serving people's interests, people will inevitably be made to serve theirs.

One possible way to combat this tendency is to eliminate middlemen entirely, as we are doing on a very small scale here at Popula. Popula is a journalist-owned independent publisher, whose equity will be continually held in trust; 100% of the company's ownership will be retained on behalf of the people who work here, for as long as the project exists.

That means nobody can get rich from it, or buy it, or invest in it. By this means we ensure Popula's complete editorial freedom, and also protect the project from the control of would-be censors and/or profiteers. The only money that flows into Popula comes from readers and direct donations; it can only be used for the project. Direct donors receive nothing in return except the continued existence of the project. Protecting the business aspect of the network against profiteering and censorship come first.

Secondly, as the beginnings of a system for compensating participants, we've designed and launched microtipping features so that authors can receive tips (in ETH cryptocurrency) directly from readers who've enjoyed their work. Popula takes no cut of these transactions. Because crypto is so frictionless, tips between Popula users can be very small and delivered at minimal cost.

Paying Popula subscribers can also make comments on any piece, and those comments are themselves eligible for tips. We have a lot of plans for expanding on this system, which we'll be sharing as we go.

Popula's fledgling cryptoeconomy demonstrates

how comment moderation costs can easily be lowered

how to enable a more egalitarian flow of resources within the network, and

how even a small publication can offer these benefits sustainably.

There's a lot of nostalgia now for the World Wide Web of the 1990s, before the platform companies began to turn the internet into a surveillance machine and a petri dish for authoritarianism-before they'd begun torpedoing the world's democracies. What began as an organic network comprised of free individuals, a naively diverse and egalitarian ecosystem, in about fifteen years succumbed to the opportunistic strain of monopolistic activity represented by the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg.

Marshall McLuhan said in a 1969 Playboy interview that "the computer... holds out the promise of... universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the Logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of harmony and peace." If that were to happen, it would mean curtains for the Man, which is why they are fighting us information activists tooth and claw.

There are two key questions to keep in mind as you consider your participation in the online future:

1) Am I spending money?-and if I am, who is ending up with it? and,

2) Am I receiving adequate value in exchange for my participation, time and attention?

You might not think that just one person's answer to these questions is so important, but it is. Each person's answer is crucial. We're facing a moment where most of the human race and our information economy will either develop into a true, global, egalitarian network, or succumb to slavery.

As a veteran of Internet 1.0 who founded my first commercial website more than twenty years ago, I've watched all this happen with increasing alarm. But the free spirit of the original Web is not entirely at an end-not even in oppressive nations like Cuba, Hong Kong, China and Egypt, where, despite vicious authoritarian clampdowns over the internet, inventive people are finding and developing all kinds of clever workarounds in order to publish and communicate freely, away from the control of autocrats, censors or profiteers. It's possible to move forward from where we find ourselves-one modest proof being the fact that you're reading this-and to reestablish the Web as a free, egalitarian space for communication, rather than a controlled space for profit-making.

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This story is co-published with Sluice, the London-based experimental artist collective, and appears in its Autumn/Winter 2019 number, "Mycorrhiza and Extancy." Grateful thanks to Jack Smurthwaite and Karl England. Toward the end of September 2019 Jaron Lanier, a computer pioneer often referred to as "the father of virtual reality," published a video in the New York Times called " Jaron Lanier Fixes the Internet."

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One of the big plotlines of the 2020 edition Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which ended last Friday, was the story of 5G internet. T-Mobile, fresh off its merger with Spring, made a big promise for this year: its own 5G coverage will extend to 200 million customers all across the U.S., and it will offer more than a dozen phones with 5G capabilities (currently there is only one in its lineup).

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I will be the first to admit I spend too much time online. You probably do too. It is all too easy to think, well I have to wait a couple minutes for the microwave, might as well log onto Twitter. And then an hour later you find that your leftovers are back to being cold and you have become embroiled in multiple feuds with strangers. This may mean you suffer from the affliction known as being "extremely online." I have been afflicted since 2008.

This condition can, admittedly, be a satisfying experience. Twitter is not nearly as big as Facebook, but it is more public, less dictated by preexisting social ties. It is a place where powerful and influential and oftentimes batshit figures in government and media, like our president and Joy Ann Reid, are forced to occupy the same space as the rabble. There is a human urge to react to being addressed, even by an adversary. In this setting, that reflex sometimes prevails over the tendency of the elite to position themselves above the fray. This means that those people are prone to embarrassing themselves in ways they would not have been elsewhere. That's where the fun begins.

I've been a willing participant in this process - known by the names of "shitposting" or "trolling," and honed to a fine art by a seedy underworld of shadowy vigilantes - sometimes to great effect. By any definition, I have been a troll, and if I address trolls here, I also speak as one of them. I once managed to get Piers Morgan to respond repeatedly to my insistence that he was misspelling his own name (it's "Pierce"). I've found that overachievers with avatars of themselves as talking heads cannot resist provocations that include strategically placed grammatical errors. You can get an incredible response from people correcting you by graciously responding "thank's." Ruining some D.C. lobbyist's day is not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

The guy who called me a moron for ending a sentence with a preposition has a thing or two to learn about apostrophes. https://t.co/pSR6XM8UK3
- Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) January 13, 2020

It's 'Piers'. https://t.co/xsEnOVmIsp
- Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 17, 2018

But this capability is now potentially under threat. Last week, at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Twitter announced a new feature it has given the new agey name "Conversation Dynamics," which will allow users to control who can reply to their Tweets. This follows a feature it introduced last fall, enabling users to hide replies after the fact. It's part of what Twitter's product lead Kayvon Beykpour described as an overall focus on "health, conversations, and interests."

Twitter has long been under pressure from users to limit the ability of its worst users, often in white supremacist or misogynist conglomerations, to harrass ordinary people expressing banal opinions. Cresting waves of organized harassment are a genuine threat, potentially fostering correlated activity in the real world. But this new function confirms that Twitter's primary concern remains its marquee members. In a conversation with , Beykpour gave an example of how it all might work: "If you wanted to have a fireside chat on Twitter where Bill Gates and Elon Musk were talking about the future of climate change, it's very difficult for the two of them to have a controlled conversation without a cacophony of other people joining the conversation."

Arguably, the cacophony of other people "joining the conversation" is the only potentially worthy outcome of the kind of nauseating event described above. But Twitter would like to allow Musk and Gates to prevent you from making your own contribution, whether it's a well-deserved dunk on Musk's cult-like demeanor, or a legitimate inquiry into the political implications of Gates's philanthropic activities, or the always-relevant observation that these fucking guys have too much fucking money. According to Twitter's director of product management, Suzanne Xie, the new options will give users four categories into which they can place their tweets: Global, which anyone can reply to, Group, which enables replies from anyone the original poster follows or mentions, Panel, limited only to those mentioned, and Statement, which allows no responses at all.

For average users with low follow counts, who don't expect the public to engage with their tweets, this is not going to be all that useful. What use is it restricting replies if you hardly ever get any? Those who log onto Twitter primarily to keep up with the news or interact with friends could be forgiven for not giving a shit. The changes seem to be targeted at higher-profile users, who are most likely to complain about not liking the way the plebiscite responds to their Statements. It doesn't really do much for those who, through the random and chaotic process of virality, end up facing the most insidious harassment the website has to offer.

Xie described the new functions as a way of dealing with "getting ratioed, getting dunked on, the dynamics that happen that we think aren't as healthy." Tellingly, the storied "ratio" is a phenomenon that users of Twitter and administrators of Twitter see irreconcilably differently. For the uninitiated: the ratio is the name for a pattern of engagement to a tweet, wherein replies vastly outnumber likes or retweets. As an article in put it, "by and large, the way Twitter works is that to reply means to disagree." A ratioed tweet is a modern expression of an old form of discourse: a gathered crowd shouting down a king in the town square.

Typically, contrarians bristle at this kind of organic consensus. At the , Yascha Mounk has suggested that "the ratioed tweet - or, for that matter, the widely panned op-ed - can claim a proud inheritance: that of the banned book, of the argument made before its time." Socrates, Jesus, and Copernicus would have been ratioed, he says. This is, if I may, a little extra. But it is not entirely incorrect. There are obvious cases where a ratio is not illustrative of any kind of objective assessment.

An announcement of a personal tragedy is more likely to be met with condolences than thumbs up. A tweet that poses a question is going to get more responses than retweets. Given that quote tweets aren't factored into the numerical count of replies, a tweet that should be counted as ratioed might not be. When people respond "just here for the ratio" - inflating the number of replies without actually having a reply - it all starts to get so self-referential as to no longer be related to the matter at hand.

Those who never get ratioed, Mounk writes, show only "a consistent willingness to censor themselves whenever their opinions are less than fashionable." That kind of self-censorship certainly exists. But Mounk is making the same mistake as those he disparages. The convergence of a large group of people is not necessarily an indicator of truth or moral credibility, but it is also not an indicator of importance or relevance. A group does not necessarily materialize because it represents conventional wisdom; it may also be an organized assembly of people who hold a dissenting position. Anti-war protests often reach numbers far larger than the number of members of Congress; regardless, the smaller group is the one with the power to declare war.

On Twitter, the same flattening effect that forces elites behind proverbial palace gates to pay attention to the rest of us sometimes can elevate random members of the throng to positions of false prominence. It happens on a regular basis, to some small-time journalist, or obscure podcaster, or uncredentialed civilian whose post has been algorithmically elevated beyond proportion. Anyone can become, as a canonical tweet puts it, the "main character" of Twitter.

Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it
- maple cocaine (@maplecocaine) January 3, 2019

Sometimes these figures become recurring characters, and their every take is publicly received, in certain circles, as though it were a Supreme Court decision. This attention is often unwarranted, not only because it has the tendency to make fringe opinions seem more prevalent than they really are, but because it fixes attention on a person who does not merit it. Twitter has been a godsend for polemicists, allowing them to reverse-engineer trends. It is a ready source of egg-shaped straw men. If you need a convenient counterpoint to argue against, it's pretty much guaranteed that someone has articulated that point of view on Twitter. (One recent example was a New York Times op-ed about Greta Gerwig's Little Women, claiming that men have been dismissive of the film. That phenomenon may well exist. But the piece cites just a single tweet from @surfcitymowmowm, a user in Ohio with a couple thousand followers whose bio reads "Appalachian lowbrow art.")

As Twitter stumbles its way through addressing issues of user safety, we're going to see a lot of chin-stroking. Is Twitter good for democracy? Is social media a vehicle for individual self-expression, or a force for conformity? Is the internet a society, and do we live in it? These questions tend to miss the point. When hierarchies exist offline, they are likely to be reproduced online. But they may also be obscured. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out in his study In the Swarm, unlike organized labor, "online shitstorms prove unable to call dominant power relations into question. Instead, they strike individual persons, whom they unmask or make an item of scandal." The only way for the citizenry to use Twitter in our favor means keeping track of who's who, and treating them accordingly.

Twitter seems like its own world, but it exists in the real one. Just imagine quote tweeting IRL. It is one thing to heckle a speaker at a podium who is addressing a crowd. It is another thing to eavesdrop on a private conversation in a public place and repeat something someone just said, louder, with your own annotated commentary. You do have the right to do this, both on Twitter and in the park. But is it a good use of your time?

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I will be the first to admit I spend too much time online. You probably do too. It is all too easy to think, well I have to wait a couple minutes for the microwave, might as well log onto Twitter.

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Take a look at anyone's Frequently Used emojis, and you'll likely see the section dominated by a number of beloved yet predictable ideograms: one of the cheery smilies, a heart, an alcoholic beverage, and maybe even one they use when they're overcome by randiness. But among the universally beloved options, you'll probably see a more obscure one that will give you pause.

Yesterday, Unicode Consortium - the organization that births new emojis - unveiled the 117 new extinct animals and weird vegetables and people-doing-activities it will be introducing in the coming year, including a dodo, a gender-neutral Christmas elder ("Mx. Claus"), and a green pepper. At first blush, many of these things may seem impossibly niche - but then again,we all have that one weird emoji we hold close to our hearts, one that your friends associate with you because no one else really uses it, most likely because you've assigned your own arbitrary, unhinged meaning to it.

So, in the spirit of transparency, we are sharing which obscure emojis we love the most - and which, consequently, give disturbing insight our minds.

Female detective 🕵️‍♀️

I'm prodigiously talented at Instagram stalking, so my friends tend to come to me whenever they develop a new crush. I am always sending the female detective emoji to people for this reason ... she is just like me, with her magnifying glass and cool lipstick, cracking very important cases. -Callie Beusman, news editor

Fencer 🤺

My favorite emoji is the little fencing person, because its a fun way to invite or diffuse confrontation in conversation. Personally, I like to use it if someone disagrees with me or if someone is being rude. It's also good just to send without context. -Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz, senior writer

Ogre 👹

As long as we've had fancy emojis, we've discussed which ones are The Horny Ones - a conversation that typically includes the eggplant, or the peach, or even the devilish purple face. And almost every time, I'm disheartened by the unforgivable exclusion of the best horny emoji, which also happens to be my personal favorite: the nasty little ogre. To be clear, I don't always send this perverted freak when I'm In The Mood - I just think he's the best representation of horniness, because look at that sick grin plastered across his face. I love him for how shameless he is ... a true nasty icon. - Amanda Arnold, staff writer

Leg 🦵

I like the shapely disembodied leg emoji best, and flew into a small panic when I couldn't find it among the Slack emojis approximately ten minutes ago. (It is still on iOS, phew!!) I cannot imagine a regular scenario in which this swole leg would be the natural choice - like, when are you just texting about a leg, when you have all these other emoji options for people getting around, using and not using legs? When you are texting about dismemberment?? Who looked at the emoji menu and thought EUREKA, I HAVE JUST WHAT WE NEED! Detached from its body, this leg is also detached from any context, which I think makes it a solid all-occasions emoji. -Claire Lampen, night editor

Deciduous tree 🌳

My favorite emoji is the deciduous tree. He's become rounder, maybe a bit "cuter," in recent emoji updates, which makes me a little sad, but I still love him. (He used to be leafier.) He's useful in any situation: If you want to say hello, you can say, "tree." If you want to respond to situation is awkward or not good, you can say, "tree." If you want to express a little bit of joy, you can say, "tree tree tree tree tree tree tree." He's perfect. I'll love him no matter how round he gets." -Kelly Conaboy, writer-at-large

Cowboy + frog combo 🤠🐸

It's not the most obscure, but in lieu of a standard smiley, I like the combo of cowboy hat and grinning frog: It's clearly conveying something positive, but a little unexpected too. -Rachel Bashein, managing editor

Running woman 🏃‍♀️

I use her a lot. To my mind, it's unambiguous that she is running toward something, not away or for the sake of it. A real go-getter, the "Woman Running" emoji knows what she wants and how to get it (by moving at a clownishly brisk pace). This bitch will expend all her energy arriving to drinks with her friends no more than 30 minutes late, or getting to the grocery store before the free samples run out. -Hannah Gold, writer

Fairy 🧚

The fairy is dainty and adorable and, in my opinion, deserves as much attention as the Red Dress Lady! She's perfect for when you need to leave a conversation with some mystery, or if you ever need to reference Tinker Bell. - Jennimai Nguyen, editorial intern

Bonus: the yet-unreleased green pepper

One rarely discussed aspects of modern parenthood is that you're constantly texting people about groceries. I just searched my old texts and found hundreds of exchanges between me and my husband about whether we have enough peppers. There are also exchanges with my parents and my in-laws about how we're coming to visit and they don't know what to feed my kids (peppers). I assume this is rarely discussed because it's boring. I'm bored just typing this. But, the green pepper emoji - well, maybe that will make texting about peppers very slightly less boring. I also think you could use it to denote very mild sexual innuendo. -Izzy Grinspan, deputy style editor

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Take a look at anyone's Frequently Used emojis, and you'll likely see the section dominated by a number of beloved yet predictable ideograms: one of the cheery smilies, a heart, an alcoholic beverage, and maybe even one they use when they're overcome by randiness.

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I took a look back through my mailbox recently and found an email from a colleague on May 17, 2016 titled: " ALERT: Proposed press and media law would kill Mada," and realized we have been debating what Egypt's new media law might mean for independent media organizations like ours for more than two years.

On Sunday, October 21, Mada Masr's legal representative went to Egypt's Supreme Media Regulatory Council (SMRC) to clarify whether or not we are expected to submit papers for registration under the new media law. But confusion still abounds over whether or not existing websites must register within the next two weeks, and of what, exactly, this process of payment and registration consists. Uncertainty has surrounded the law since its inception.

In December 2016, the government submitted a new media bill to Parliament detailing the establishing of the SMRC, and two other oversight bodies-the National Press Authority (NPA) and the National Broadcasting Authority (NBA). At the time, Parliament recommended splitting the bill into two, in order to enable the regulatory bodies to be established quickly and to allow more time for consultation (officially, at least) with media professionals. The second part of this bill never passed into law as it had been expected to do, and in June 2018, an entirely new media bill was presented in Parliament, quickly endorsed, ratified by the president, and published in the Official Gazette on September 1, 2018. This new law replaces all previous legislation, effectively disbanding the regulatory bodies formed in 2016 and giving the newly formed SMRC oversight over all state-owned and privately owned media outlets and broadcasters.

Under the new law, individuals or groups wishing to establish a website with any media or broadcasting content in Egypt, including media sites existing before the new law was ratified, must first seek permission and a license from the SMRC in order to publish.

The fee for registering e-newspapers listed in the law is LE100,000 (US$5,600), but the details concerning the fee are not yet entirely clear. When Mada Masr's lawyer went to the SMRC to enquire about registering, he was informed that LE50,000 should be paid immediately as a registration fee (non-refundable, and separate from the total fee specified in the law). The media law stipulates also that half of the total listed amount should also be deposited in a bank account recognized by the Central Bank of Egypt for a year before the website or company is created, as a guarantee. For print newspapers and broadcasters the total fees vary, from LE6 million for a daily newspaper, to LE1 million for a monthly publication or regional daily newspaper (this doesn't apply to public bodies).

The contentious law has been making its way through Egypt's Parliament since 2016; the final bill, consisting of three new draft laws, was agreed to by a majority of parliamentarians in July, and was ratified by the president on September 1. Superficially, the law seems to be based around the safeguarding of journalists, and a desire to protect the public from "false information," but the context in which it is to be enacted, the trajectory of its passage, and its ambiguous phrasing reveal the authorities' ambition to control Egyptian media, not merely to regulate it.

As with other legislation curbing personal and organizational freedoms in Egypt over the last five years, like the NGO and anti-protest laws, the president, pro-regime figures and government bodies will have the ability to interpret and enforce this law arbitrarily and selectively, in order to serve their state-led crackdown on dissenting voices.

The new law hands sweeping powers to the SMRC, which is comprised of nine figures, most of whom are presidentially appointed, whether directly or indirectly. Whereas previously Egypt's prosecutor general had the power to order the censorship of print publications, broadcasts or online material through the courts, it appears that the newly reconstituted SMRC will now have the power to restrict and censor information pretty much at will.

Even the provisions detailing the rights and duties of journalists-and their guarantee to a fair trial-will only apply to those who are registered with the Journalists Syndicate, and who are recognized by the SMRC. Meaning that many of those who already work in independent media companies, particularly online media, will not be permitted to register with the Syndicate unless they fall under the umbrella of more formal, state-recognized media outlets.

This is a detail that is particularly worrying for organizations like Mada Masr, as, in order to register within the allocated timeframe (two weeks from Monday, October 21), even with the sum of money required, independent organizations would likely have to change the makeup of their staff writers and editors to include at least 70% traditional journalists with a background in print or formal media-those who are already registered with the Syndicate.

In addition to the new licensing fees, the new law also empowers the SMRC to consider how to implement further taxes on websites and social media accounts-and it is not clear if this is just for media sites. While one might understand the opportunism of the Egyptian government in a time of austerity to attempt to capitalize on a sphere that hasn't previously been taxed, this will likely be hard to implement across the board. Although again, the real purpose of the law may be to provide a legal basis for prosecuting those whom the government wants to silence or restrict, as with the NGO and protest laws before it.

Article 6 of the new law also grants the SMRC the power to withhold a license from or to block any media website or broadcaster, but it is Article 19 that has caused the most controversy: "Any personal website, personal blog or personal profile with 5,000 or more followers" shall be liable to be treated as a media site, effectively giving the SMRC carte blanche to block or suspend any personal website or social media page it perceives to be "publishing or disseminating false news, inciting violation of the law, violence or hatred, discriminating between citizens, calling for racism, slandering individuals, or abusing the divine religions or religious beliefs."

While hundreds of websites have already been blocked over the last few years in Egypt ( including Mada Masr)-some based on "terrorism"-related accusations or for their assumed affiliations with individuals, groups and countries the authorities deem suspicious-the legal grounds for doing so have not always been clear. The loosely defined "dissent from social norms" under the new media law has widened the gateposts of legalese within which the authorities will be able to block or suspend websites and to arrest journalists and media personnel. Article 4 of the new law prohibits media and press from "publishing or broadcasting anything contradicting the Constitution, calling for the violation of the law, or violating the code of professional honor, public order, public morality, or promoting discrimination, violence, racism or hatred."

Egyptian authorities have a deep understanding of the power of spaces that hold the potential for dissent, particularly in the wake of mass protests in 2011 and 2013, and the new media law must be read within this context. The anti-protest law introduced in 2013 ensured a legal basis for cracking down on peaceful assembly. While many countries have laws mandating official registration for public protests, in Egypt the authorities have combined these with an antiquated assembly law to empower themselves to charge anyone in the vicinity of an 'illegal protest' with any crime committed by those nearby. This clause has enabled the arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of opposition figures for things like: the possession of weapons, attempted murder, disruption of public order and attempts to undermine the Constitution (one of the government's favorite charges against Muslim Brotherhood affiliates).

Even if the pretext of the new law is to protect media professionals, we have reason to fear that it is being enacted by officials and systems with dated conceptions of societal, religious and cultural norms that are not shared by the whole of society.

The restriction of online spaces through legal processes that are subject to the whims of a regime that fears dissent will be a huge setback for Egyptian civil society. Because of Article 19, the new law won't just impact online media sites like Mada Masr, but also many of the individual webpages, blogs and websites set up by citizen journalists over the last few years to fill the gap where state-influenced media has largely reported the government's official line. Facebook pages like Sinai News 24 (which began in 2013) andKhawater Sinawy (Thoughts of a Sinai Resident) both rely on eyewitness accounts and networks of local volunteer reporters in Sinai to convey information about the government's ongoing war on terrorism in the peninsula and its impact on local residents.

Under the guise of preventing the spread of 'false news' and/or 'harmful content,' the new media law is sending a blatant message that it is not okay to oppose the state line. Through Egypt's new cybercrime law, passed by the President in August this year, the regime is additionally attempting to enlist service providers to collect and share data on users who 'constitute a threat to national security or the economy', and a number of public hotlines have been set up to encourage citizens to act as moral police and report those who are spreading information in violation of the law. But the law itself does not make it clear what constitutes 'fake news'; this is left to the interpretation of the SMRC. Via the SMRC, the Egyptian government will effectively have the power to monitor, censor and criminalize media companies and individuals who are perceived to be spreading information that violates its own conceptions of social, political or religious norms.

For organizations like Mada Masr, this is at once incredibly threatening, and not. We are well used to working in an environment of precarity. As our chief editor, Lina Attalah, has written, at times we even thrive in such a state. Our website, which publishes news and in-depth political, cultural and society features in Arabic and English, has already been blocked for 17 months, and we are currently publishing in Egypt via a mirror site and on social media. Mada Masr is legally registered as a media services company, and we have found many different ways to continue working under restrictive laws, amid a general atmosphere that is suspicious of independently owned media outlets that depart from the party line.

Such precarity is, of course, intentional on the part of the authorities, as the permanent state of uncertainty it provokes is both tiring and disabling -will they go further than blocking us to raiding the office or making arrests? Will we be able to register under the new law or not? Will the Syndicate widen its reach to include media websites?-such uncertainty is effective, to a great extent, in terms of threatening staff morale, but it also pushes us to be more creative, and to keep finding new ways of telling stories.

It is now crunch time. If Mada Masr and other independent news websites are not accepted by the SMRC for registration (which we should know within the next month), we will need to drastically rethink our plan for publishing in Egypt in the future.

Laura Bird

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Egypt is seizing control of the internet

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I took a look back through my mailbox recently and found an email from a colleague on May 17, 2016 titled: " ALERT: Proposed press and media law would kill Mada," and realized we have been debating what Egypt's new media law might mean for independent media organizations like ours for more than two years.

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2019 was less than a week old when Elon Musk narrowly avoided being sued for murder. Broadly speaking, he was responsible for a Tesla killing somebody. But the (ridiculous) details matter: the Tesla Model S in question was in self-driving mode, and, more importantly, the person he hit, Promobot, was a robot. Putting aside that Promobot's company, also called Promobot, likely set up the whole incident as a hoax, I have to ask whether, and in what sense, we can "kill" or cause harm to an artificially intelligent system, and as robotics technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, what it is that sets human life apart from a robot at all? Why do I have to ask this? Because I am a philosophy graduate student.

It is well-documented that humans' feelings about AI's are... complicated. In 2013, American soldiers in Taji, Iraq held a 21-gun salute funeral, replete with the bestowing of a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for a robot known simply as Boomer (he/him pronouns, obviously). Boomer was a MARCbot, a shockingly inexpensive (read: roughly $20,000) brand of robot used for the vital function of detecting bombs. That Boomer was personified in "life" and "death" is especially striking when contrasted with familiar military dehumanization techniques. We talk of strikes, not killings; collateral damage, not civilian death. We certainly did not hold funerals for the thousands of Iraqi civilians who died the same year that Boomer did.

A cynical read on this disparity would be that soldiers saw Boomer as more human than nameless casualties. While this could explain why Boomer got a funeral, we might instead think that it was funeral-worthy because of its value to humans and human-centered projects. The funeral is held for Boomer honoring what it was able to do for us, not because Boomer was the sort of thing worth honoring in its own right. But if this is right, what could we say of other vital objects, like an office water cooler? They have value to humans, and yet a funeral would strike most of us as bizarre.

Boomer would then be contrasted with humans, whose lives are honored and valued not (just) because they're useful to other people, but because they possess "rational capacity" (i.e., the ability to think logically). Boomer might be able to do stuff once we program it, but humans can think for themselves; this is why we value them and not just what they do for us.

The philosopher Jeff McMahan takes a further step and proposes a tiered model of moral status based on psychological capability. The more sophisticated a being's rational capacities, the more value your life has (up to a given threshold, above which all persons are equal). According to McMahan, humans are in a higher tier along with animals that demonstrate high intelligence, such as dolphins, octopi, etc.

Although McMahan does not directly address AI in his work, such a tiered model would rank AI, if sufficiently advanced, above certain human beings. Cognitively complex AI's would be valued for its (their?) own sake. Even the Silicon Valley types who salivate over the opportunity to twist open a Soylent and explain the awesome power of the singularity have reason to be concerned with this outcome. Elon Musk has described sufficiently advanced AI as an existential threat to humanity, perhaps explaining the idea behind his girlfriend Grimes' maybe-ironic song about bowing to our robot overlords. While other experts doubt that AI intelligence can ever surpass human intelligence, McMahan's argument adds a new dimension missing from this discussion. It is not just a question of whether robots can overtake humanity by intellectual force, but rather whether we will owe them their freedom and whether they would even owe us the same.

McMahan's way of thinking does make a certain amount of sense when applied to AI: if what we value about human lives is ultimately their rational capacities, then there are going to be some non-humans that end up getting slated in the top tier. But applied to people, this tiering of psychological capability has lead McMahan to some highly questionable conclusions, particularly around sexual assault and culpability.

Now, this is a big "if," one that was perhaps best tackled in the pop-culture sphere on The Good Place, the most annoyingly very-much-about-philosophy show on NBC. Think of the scene from the first season, where the protagonists have decided to "kill" Janet, an omnipotent, omniscient robot-like being who manifests as a human being. Janet assures them she can feel no pain, since she is not human, but, as a failsafe, if anybody comes close to killing her, she has been programmed to beg for her life through the most human-like display of emotions conceivable. They have no problem approaching the kill switch as she assures them she will feel no pain, but as she starts screaming and pleading for her life, they can't bring themselves to go through with it. What happened here? Did they suddenly remember that Janet is an omniscient, omnipotent being with rational capacities running Jeremy Bearimies around our own? Or was it her emotional display that made them less willing to take her life?

Rational capacities be damned, it was the AI's getting hungry that made participants more willing to kill anonymous strangers in their place.

Similar results came out of a study published in the academic journal Social Cognition, questioning whether human beings would save robots instead of "anonymous human lives," should the robots show sufficient emotional capacities. Indeed, humans happily sacrificed robots to save human lives when the robots looked and acted like robots, but the more the robots looked and acted like humans, the more human beings were willing to sacrifice unknown humans in order to save their robot pals. Rational capacities be damned, it was the AI's getting hungry that made participants more willing to kill anonymous strangers in their place. The study's authors ultimately concluded that the more robots demonstrate emotional capacities, the more likely human beings are to attribute moral status to them - in other words, to think that it is wrong to harm the robots.

If this study is right, then it suggests that intelligence has very little to do with why we care about AI. This isn't just one study, either. The literature on how humans view robots is nascent and disjointed, but it's growing: several studies by Dutch Industrial Design professor Christoph Bartneck, dating back to 2007, have argued that giving an AI a physical body makes people less likely to harm it, a conclusion replicated by German researchers in 2018.

If researchers indeed have proof that humans might one day see robots as 'more human' than humans, that would be front-page news. This might explain why Science Daily, in summarizing the Social Cognition anonymous humans study , ran with "Robot saved, people take the hit," as its headline. This is an overstatement: it is not clear what conclusions about the relative value of human and robot life we should draw from how people behaved in an abstract thought experiment. Additionally, we should consider that these experiment subjects were college undergraduates, and the robots in the study were presented as white dudes.

What mattered is that these objects and robots took on the features of being human, by performing tasks so vital to the people who depended on them.

What we can say is that a human's emotional attachment to a machine is dependent on context, but that level of attachment can change if that machine is humanized in some manner. The example of Boomer, as well as other machines like Opportunity, the Mars rover that was terminated this past February, falls within the scope of the first category. Why was Boomer given such an elaborate funeral? Because humans developed a particular kind of social relationship with these machines, and the mourning of their loss is understandable within that given context. Boomer "served" on the battlefield for a long time, and war always creates weird bonds. The same can be said for Opportunity, the Mars Rover that after 14 years "died" in a ferocious dust storm and was honored by a final transmission of Billie Holiday's "I'll Be Seeing You" from its NASA crew back on Earth.

Neither Boomer nor Opportunity had a particularly "human" appearance, and humans' attachment to them was not grounded on being physically recognized as such. What mattered is that these objects and robots took on the features of being human, by performing tasks so vital to the people who depended on them.

The flipside of this is is perhaps a more familiar sentiment, that people can ascribe human qualities to inanimate objects in front of them while disregarding the lives of humans who appear to them as if off-screen. Consider how Trump talks of caravans of illegal immigrants and not families seeking aid, or Obama's talk of " overcoming" terrorism while deliberately obscuring his administration's own policy of drone murder.

Much remains unclear about how humans will relate to highly intelligent robots, especially those designed to resemble humans. But once AI's do look and act more human, in the sense of experiencing and physically conveying feelings and desires, then people may treat them as more human than they would if they were clearly robots.

So if we shelve the click-baity question of "would you kill somebody to save Siri?," we can ask ourselves something a bit more honest: What qualities make humans valuable for their own sake? Science alone won't be able to answer that.

JJ Lang is a Ph.D candidate in philosophy at Stanford University. Previously, he wrote for The Outline about the concept of dogwhistling.

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2019 was less than a week old when Elon Musk narrowly avoided being sued for murder. Broadly speaking, he was responsible for a Tesla killing somebody. But the (ridiculous) details matter: the Tesla Model S in question was in self-driving mode, and, more importantly, the person he hit, Promobot, was a robot.

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This week, the internet has gifted us with a delightful new stress reliever in the form of " Dinosaurs in Love," a stirring new viral hit by a "nearly 4-year-old" singer-songwriter named Fenn.

"Dinosaurs eating people/Dinosaurs in love," Fenn croons over an emotional piano line, provided by her father, musician Tom Rosenthal. He tweeted the song on Tuesday after composing it with his daughter for fun. Inevitably, love turns into a tragedy, as the "big bang" comes and the lovers perish. "Dinosaurs fell in love/But they didn't say goodbye," Fenn finishes, somehow tapping into the universal experience of longing and loss in a few simple phrases.

Fenn, my nearly 4 year old daughter, recorded her first ever solo song today. She came up with all the words herself and I helped her a little bit with the tune. It's called 'Dinosaurs in Love'. 🦕❤️🦕 pic.twitter.com/erCgG0sUvP

- Tom Rosenthal (@tomrosenthal) January 28, 2020

At press time, this stirring track had racked up more than 40,000 retweets - including one from London's Natural History Museum. It's been listened to close to a million times since it was first tweeted.

"I think she's got a really good sense of timing," Rosenthal told CNN. "She can just about count to 20, so she doesn't really get it if I say that half a million people have listened to the song. I told her that her grandma liked it and she wasn't that fussed about that. She enjoyed doing it, she listened to it when it was done, and then she was gone."

A true artist knows that even the greatest works are ephemeral. As Kansas say, "All we are is dust in the wind." Much like the dinosaurs in question.

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Three-Year-Old's 'Dinosaurs in Love' Song Is a Real Tear-Jerker

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This week, the internet has gifted us with a delightful new stress reliever in the form of " Dinosaurs in Love," a stirring new viral hit by a "nearly 4-year-old" singer-songwriter named Fenn. "Dinosaurs eating people/Dinosaurs in love," Fenn croons over an emotional piano line, provided by her father, musician Tom Rosenthal.

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"Professor Dawkins' speech transmutes into an auto-tuned song about internet memes..." is not a sentence you expect to read in a press release about the evolutionary biologist. However, it's precisely what he signed up for at Saatchi & Saatchi's New Directors' Showcase at the Cannes Advertising Festival this week.

Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" in his 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene. The word -- which is ascribed to an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture -- has since been reappropriated by the internet, with Grumpy Cat, Socially-Awkward Penguin and Overly-Attached Girlfriend spreading virally, leaping from IP address to IP address (and brain to brain) via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

In recognition of this, advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi has recruited Dawkins to participate in the theatrical piece alongside installation artists Marshmallow Laser Feast. The aim is, presumably, to create a piece of content that will itself become a meme, as happened with last year's performance involving 16 flying robots. Within the piece, Dawkins explains how an "internet meme" is a hijacking of the original idea and that instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, they are altered deliberately by human creativity. Unlike with genes (and Dawkins' original meaning of "meme"), there is no attempt at accuracy of copying; internet memes are deliberately altered.

In advance of this extraordinary performance, Wired.co.uk caught up with Dawkins to talk about his own favourite internet memes, Twitter, molecular genetics, false memories and, er..., Celebrity Big Brother.

Wired.co.uk: How did you get involved in the New Directors Showcase?
Richard Dawkins: I was approached by Saatchi & Saatchi, who had this idea of centring the event around the theme of memes, so they asked if I would get involved and I was rather pleased with the idea.

I hear you are going to be playing a musical instrument on stage...
I might be playing the EWI (pronounced e-wee), which is an electronic clarinet. I used to play the clarinet and saxophone and I find the new electronic version rather appealing. It not only plays the sound of the clarinet and saxophone; it also does the trumpet, cello, violin, tuba, sousaphone and the oboe etcetera.

How do you feel about your word meme being reappropriated by the internet?
The meaning is not that far away from the original. It's anything that goes viral. In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of The Selfish Gene, I did actually use the metaphor of a virus. So when anybody talks about something going viral on the internet, that is exactly what a meme is and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.

Do you see many internet memes?
I suppose I do. It's viral. I get infected by viruses as much as anybody else, so yes I pick them up from time to time.

Have you seen ones in which you feature?
There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young woman at a lecture I was giving -- she came from Liberty University, which is a ludicrous religious institution. She said "what if you are wrong?" and I answered that rather briefly and that's gone viral.

Another one is when Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the astronomer, taxed me for being too militant and I replied to that with a joke that seems to have gone viral. Those two you could probably call internet memes.
Are you aware that your appearance has been compared to Emma Watson, who plays Hermione Granger in Harry Potter?

Yes I have seen that. That puzzled me a little bit because I suspect that's been doctored to make us seem a bit more alike than we actually are. You know about morphing software? Somewhere somebody has done a morph between my face and hers.

You made a fantastic video in response to questions posted to Reddit, where you read out your worst hate mail? Do you still get a lot? Have any stood out for you?
That's certainly been a very popular video. It's one I get more requests to do again than any other I think. I have indeed done it again but it hasn't been edited. So we have a new version of the hate mail, which I won't say any more about. It's going to be released fairly soon. The hate mail mostly goes to my website and gets filtered for me so I don't see it all, but if you want to look at it there's a place on RichardDawkins.net called The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. If you look at The Bad and The Ugly you can get a good sampling.

Have any stood out for you recently?
They go straight out of my mind I'm afraid. There are things like "hope you get cancer" and "we'll enjoy laughing at you frying in hell" and that kind of thing.

I read an interview with you in 2010 in which you said you wanted tighter moderation of your website to reduce the number of vitriolic comments. Have you managed to do this?
Yes I think so. Our website is actually pretty good as they go. I'm afraid the internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language. I'm in favour of ridicule, but not abuse and I think we do a pretty good job on RichardDawkins.net of controlling the abuse.

Part of the problem all over the internet is anonymity. Because people are anonymous they would say things to other people that they would never dream of saying to their face and would never dream of saying if they had to sign their own name to it. But if you call yourself Tinky Winky or something no one knows who you are or where you are. It's a little bit like when you are driving your car and because you are separated from other people driving cars by the wall of your two cars you give them v-signs and things, which you would never do if you actually met them in the street.

"There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing what you have to say to 140 characters and it's something that I quite enjoy attempting to do"

You are quite active on Twitter and seem to get involved in some healthy debates there. And sometimes you seems to stir up Twitstorms -- recently you were accused of Islamophobia following comments about Medhi Hasan. You also made some comments about abortion. Do you think Twitter is an effective communication channel for these sorts of conversations?
There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing what you have to say to 140 characters and it's something that I quite enjoy attempting to do. As for Islamophobia, I get accused of avoiding talking about Islam and only talking about Christianity just as often as I get attacked for Islamophobia. People attack one tweet and don't take into account everything else one has written. I am actually an equal opportunity anti-theist. I do attack Islam but Islamophobia is, of course, a ridiculous word. Islam deserves no more protection from being ridiculed than Christianity does and nobody talks about Christianophobia. It's a public relations coup that somebody has achieved by inventing this word. It is a ridiculous word; it should never be used.

What do you think about the fact that many modern atheists see atheism as part of their identity?
I didn't know that was the case. It's undoubtedly true that many religious people see their religion as part of their identity, but I thought atheists were largely free of that.

Do you still stand by the "Dear Muslima" comments you made about Rebecca Watson?
I'm not saying anything about her.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
I've changed my mind in science. One theory that I pretty much ridiculed in The Selfish Gene was the Handicap Theory, which was put forward by an Israeli biologist called Amotz Zahavi, which said that the reason why peacocks are so brightly, gaudily-coloured is because it is a handicap. Nobody denied that it was a handicap, but Zahavi was suggesting that it was favoured because it was a handicap. So a peacock is advertising "look how strong, fit, clever I must be because I've managed to survive in spite of carrying around this ridiculous ornament on my back". The theory was pretty much universally ridiculed in the 70s and I have since admitted that I was wrong. That was because of an extremely clever colleague of mine called Alan Grafen who produced a brilliant mathematical model which, contrary to all intuitive expectation, showed that the handicap principle could work. So I had to climb down over that and was very glad to do so. It's one of the virtues of science that we do change our minds when the evidence warrants it.

What are the most important unanswered questions in biology?
A perennial one in evolutionary biology is what's the good of sex. That's the subject of active theoretical research. The origin of life is a major unsolved problem -- it's a hard one because it happened a long time ago under very different conditions. So the research has to consist of making theoretical models of what might have happened. And the evolution of subjective consciousness is probably the biggest of all outstanding problems in evolutionary biology.

In biology more generally, the relationship between genes and embryological development is a very flourishing, active important field.

What would you say is the most interesting piece of research that you've seen recently?
I think the most interesting general field of research in terms of the sheer volume of results coming in is molecular genetics. There's a sort of breakneck improvement in the speed and cheapness of sequencing DNA, which has led to extraordinary advances in all sorts of different fields of biology. In my own field, evolutionary biology, it helps to work out what animals are related to what. It's an extension of the method that was available to Darwin but with huge amounts more data because DNA sequencing is so fantastically data rich.

What are you working on at the moment?
I am literally half way through my autobiography. I have completed Volume I, titled An Appetite for Wonder, and it's coming out in September 2013. That takes me up to the end of writing The Selfish Gene at the age of 35. Volume II will take me up to the present and will be published in 2015. After that I have no particular books in mind though another children's book (like The Magic of Reality) might well be on the cards.

Can you tell me about your writing process?
I am very inefficient I'm afraid. I have bursts interspersed with non-bursts. I don't have a routine of getting up and doing two hours before breakfast I'm afraid.

What's been the most challenging part?
The first half has been reasonably easy and I've had the advantage of being able to speak to my mother about early memories and she's been extremely helpful. She's 96 and has a good memory for the distant past. For my school days I've got a pretty good memory myself although I never kept a diary. And then I went into my scientific career, working for my doctorate at Oxford, then Berkeley California, then back to Oxford and writing The Selfish Gene. The second volume will be harder.

Why will the second half be harder?
Maybe I'm wrong to think it will be harder. Volume I I did pretty much chronologically, Volume II I think I'll divide into topics like books, television, activism, that kind of thing. I really haven't made a start on it at all so perhaps I shouldn't even be talking about it.

Since you give so many interviews, do you find yourself referring to your recollections of retelling your memories, as opposed to the memories themselves?
Psychologists like Elizabeth Loftus have done research on what they call false memory, which does seem almost unbelievably powerful. Elizabeth Loftus herself claims to be able to plant a false memory in anyone. One of these days I must take up her challenge.

I think one of the problems is that you tend to remember not the event itself but subsequent retellings of it. When you've been interviewed a lot as I have, you tend to have to repeat the same thing quite often. It's very easy to repeat the repeating rather than retell the original story.

It's like when you come back from holiday and people ask you how it was and you end up picking three things that you end up saying every time, even though they aren't really representative of the holiday as a whole...
That's right and it's possible that I along with everybody else have some false memories. There was one incident in my childhood where my memory is a bit different from my mother's. I was in Africa and I was stung by a scorpion. We both agree about that, but my memory is a little bit different. Mine was that I was walking across the floor and I saw what I thought was a lizard -- god knows how I mistook a scorpion for a lizard -- and I thought it would be fun to have the lizard walking across my foot, so I put my foot in the path of the lizard and the next thing I knew was a blinding pain. Well, my mother's memory is that I got down from the table at a meal and stepped on the scorpion, which was under the table. A different memory.

Which do you think is right?
Well obviously I think mine is because I have a very clear memory of it, but I am mindful of the fact that psychologists do tell us we have false memories. I suppose it's possible that the extreme pain -- I think I passed out -- could have done funny things to my memory. So it's possible that my mother's is more reliable in this respect. But mine is extremely clear.

What's the most unusual appearance request you've had?
I was filmed by a Japanese television company and the conceit of the programme was that they'd dress an actor, an Englishman, up as Charles Darwin and he would come and knock at my door and we would have a conversation about the changes that had happened in the subject [of evolutionary biology] since his death. So I told him all about modern genetics and things like that in a way that would have interested Darwin because it would have answered one of the major questions that he himself was worried about. The actor was quite good at playing the part of Darwin, doing good "old man" acting and repeatedly saying things like "yes, that's it!", although he was heavily made up and bits of slap kept on dropping off him the whole time. Then we went out into the street around Oxford and he was pictured being bewildered by traffic and dodging his way through cars.

What was running through your mind?
I was quite enjoying it. It was quite an unusual experience to be confronted with this Darwin look-a-like and have the privilege of talking to him.

I was looking at your Twitter feed from last night and you were retweeting some of Ricky Gervais's negative comments about Big Brother. Have you ever been asked to appear?
Oh yes, I think I have. Of course I said no. It was Celebrity Big Brother or something like that and I said absolutely no. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.

You can read about Dawkins' meme-tastic appearance on stage at Saatchi & Saatchi's New Directors' Showcase here.

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Richard Dawkins on the internet's hijacking of the word 'meme' (Wired UK)

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"Professor Dawkins' speech transmutes into an auto-tuned song about internet memes..." is not a sentence you expect to read in a press release about the evolutionary biologist. However, it's precisely what he signed up for at Saatchi & Saatchi's New Directors' Showcase at the Cannes Advertising Festival this week.

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To reflect on the "political implications of the Internet" today is both arrogant and futile. What we call the Internet-computers and routers but also smartphones and the Internet of Things-is invading our existence. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; properly designed and governed, it could actually be a healthy development for democracy. But once the Internet is everywhere, a question like "What are the political implications of the Internet?" loses much meaning, in part because it is like asking "What are the political implications of everything for everything?" or "What are the political implications of money?"

The "Internet" is a set of services, platforms, standards, and user behaviors that vary across cultures. Online platforms that are popular in Russia-LiveJournal and VK-have different modes of governance, free-speech policies, and functionality from the platforms popular in either America or China. These platforms, shaped by the peculiar political conditions in which they emerged, give rise to different citizens and different politics. The totality of platforms, behaviors, and users constituting "the Internet" in one country is not the same as "the Internet" in another country. It never has been and never will be the "same Internet"-not even in the context of a single country.

There is no Platonic ideal of the Internet, or a stable abstract object around which we can build a philosophy, or a social science with implications on which we can reflect. The Internet certainly exists as a ubiquitous presence in our public debate, but this is not the Internet as it is experienced by actors on the ground-those who are actually making politics.

View the full article provided by BBVA OpenMind:

* The Internet, Politics and the Politics of Internet Debate

Social networking, for example, is different in Egypt than it is in China. Users in Egypt expect and do different things on social networks than do people in China-which makes perfect sense given that they live in different cultures, with different political, social, and cultural concerns. In Egypt, much social networking happens on Facebook, an American site; in China, social networking happens on local sites that are tightly controlled by the government.

China probably has a team of native speakers to do censorship-not necessarily the case in Egypt/Facebook. Such differences have profound implications on users' freedom, ways of relating, and ability to openly express discontent, as well as on the ability of state authorities to monitor users' actions.

Is social networking good for protesters? For dictatorships? For democracy? These are not questions we can answer in the abstract. The idea that social networking-or other technologies such as search engines, databases, Wikipedia, smartphones, sensors, Big Data, and algorithms-will have similar effects across political cultures seems delusional.

Questions about the utility of Twitter for protest and the challenges involved in containing the sprawling apparatus built by democracies require a lot of soul-searching and force a lot of uncomfortable questions, about the future of capitalism, privacy, personal data, responsibility of companies and governments, the Western obsession with the war on terror, and so forth. None of these questions will be easy to answer on their own, but they will get maddeningly difficult to answer if we also confuse ourselves with an unnecessary urge to somehow make sure that our answers cohere to some vision of the Internet as a singular network.

Given the immense technological resources available, the failure to predict the Arab Spring looks far more remarkable than the failure to predict the fall of the Soviet Union. Should we give up trying to predict anything, and just blindly hope that somehow, now that everyone has access to a smartphone and Google, things will work themselves out and democracy will eventually prevail? Well, no: this would be too irresponsible. The best we can do is to develop a better set of optical tools-the ones that would allow us to zoom in on particular practices and notice the actual bits and pieces of the many infrastructures hiding behind the Internet label-and embrace a form of epistemological modesty where, when we are asked to opine on "what does the Internet do to Subject X?", we politely decline and stay silent. Or, if we are of a more dissenting breed, we point out the explicit danger of asking such questions.

Evgeny Morozov is a contributing editor at the New Republic and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (PublicAffairs, 2011) and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (PublicAffairs, 2013). In 2010-12 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. In 2009-10 he was a fellow at Georgetown University and in 2008-09 was a fellow at the Open Society Foundations (where he was on the board of the Information Program between 2008 and 2012). Between 2006 and 2008 he served as Director of New Media at Transitions Online. He has written for the New York Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. His monthly Slate column is syndicated in El País, Corriere della Sera, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Folha de S. Paulo, and several other newspapers.

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The Internet, Politics, and the Politics of Internet Debate

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To reflect on the "political implications of the Internet" today is both arrogant and futile. What we call the Internet-computers and routers but also smartphones and the Internet of Things-is invading our existence. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; properly designed and governed, it could actually be a healthy development for democracy.

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Can the internet really bring about political change? Optimists point to the green movement in Iran, when the reformist campaign showed the power of new technologies to organise resistance and to break the stranglehold of censors on information; but the episode also showed that technology alone is not enough to secure democratic change.

As the Iranian regime cracked down on protesters and on international media, the story of the green movement was often brought to the world by those on the streets. Without mobile phone video, Neda Agha-Soltan might have become yet another protester denied a proper burial rather than the face of the struggle. The Iranian regime could send international journalists packing, but they couldn't stop the flow of information via Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and email. It is not surprising that technology played such a role in Iran. Over the past decade, internet use there grew faster than any other country in the Middle East, and more than a third of all Iranians are online. Iran is a country of bloggers, with many journalists turning to blogs after their newspapers were shut down.

However, only cyber-utopians believe democratic change is just a mouse click away and toppling dictators is simply a matter of " just adding the internet". Despite Iranians' net sophistication, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains in power. The enemies of democracy are also learning to counter cyber-activism with cyber-repression. But when real change is afoot, technology can force the pace - whether under a repressive regime or an established democracy. As Britain looks forward to an election with the scandal of MPs' expenses still fresh in the minds of voters, parties must use the internet to re-engage disenchanted voters not to resist real change.

Following Barack Obama's successful use of social networking, British parties have redoubled their rush on to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. A few engaged MPs use such sites not only to broadcast their views but also to listen to their constituents. However, too much political effort online simply mimics traditional marketing-driven campaigning - treating voters as little more than shoppers, and policies as slickly packaged products. The overlooked lesson of Obama's campaign is that it treated voters as citizens with active roles in a democratic society rather than passive consumers swayed by party marketing.

As the campaigns ramp up, parties poking voters on Facebook or tweeting their latest policy proposals that amount to nothing more than business as usual is likely to end in farce. Facebook voters will simply rage against the political machine.
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The internet and politics: Revolution.com

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Can the internet really bring about political change? Optimists point to the green movement in Iran, when the reformist campaign showed the power of new technologies to organise resistance and to break the stranglehold of censors on information; but the episode also showed that technology alone is not enough to secure democratic change.

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How did Labour get such a walloping the last UK general election when everyone you knew on Twitter was a #Milifan? Or, alternatively, how could Ukip be such an electoral damp squib - in terms of seats, if not votes - when everyone you chatted to on Facebook was on Team Farage?

The answer - and it's not a new concept - is filter bubbles. As we spend more of our online lives on social networks where we've chosen the people we follow or friend, there's a risk that our belief of what "everyone" thinks will be disproved when the real-world everyone goes to the polling stations.

Or, as David Cameron put it in his last Conservative Party conference speech: "Let me put it as simply as I can: Britain and Twitter are not the same thing."

This, and a number of other topics around our digital engagement with politics, were discussed in a Guardian-moderated session at last week's Web Summit conference.

The panel? David Tomchak, head of digital at 10 Downing Street; Mary Aiken, director of the RCSI CyberPsychology Research Centre; Matt Mahan, chief executive of political/tech startup Brigade; and Marc Burrows, senior community moderator at the Guardian. Here are some of the key talking points:

Filter bubbles and the amplification effect

Filter bubbles are certainly at work online around any big political event, agreed the panel. "Within your network - Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn - you're probably within your own bubble of opinion," said Aiken.

"All social networks are by definition a self-selecting audience: you're picking the people that you want to hear, and that means you start to see the world only in terms of the people you connect with," agreed Burrows.

This goes beyond politics: Burrows cited the example of a recent debate in the comments section of the Guardian website about women being paid less than men in Hollywood. When Bridesmaids was described as a successful movie with women in the main roles, one commenter claimed that it "didn't make an impact at the box office". In fact, the film grossed more than $288m.

"This guy had thought: 'I didn't go to see Bridesmaids, none of my friends went to see Bridesmaids, no one I know liked Bridesmaids, thus nobody in the world went to see Bridesmaids.' You just see that snapshot, that little slice of life, and you project that on the whole thing," said Burrows.

He went on to suggest that in the political sphere, filter bubbles don't just lead us to the wrong conclusions about an election or other event - they can sometimes amplify mob rage.

"The anger and the poison that gets generated by Scottish nationalism especially. If you look at the reaction that JK Rowling got for being just a nice lady who writes about wizards, and then made one comment about Scottish nationalism and was torn to shreds," said Burrows.

"It amplifies exponentially, and it does create a kind of false consciousness. A lot of people genuinely believed right up to the night that Scottish independence would happen because of that bubble on Twitter and in [online] comments."

Trolls just want to have fun

Mary Aiken said that Rowling experienced one of the most negative aspects of current political debate online.

"When a woman expresses an opinion online, it can be very difficult for some people to take. When a woman expresses an opinion about politics or technology, it can just be unbearable," she said, pointing to a research paper called Trolls Just Want To Have Fun, which linked online trolling to personality traits like sadism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism.

"The bigger issue in a societal context is one of causation / correlation. When you look at this behaviour, is it that technology brings out this behaviour in humans - that they act in this sometimes despicable and misogynistic and racist way online?" she said.

"Or is it that this is human behaviour - that's what we are? And effectively technology just allows us to shine a little light and illuminate this behaviour? I would hate to think that is true, but maybe we are all just Game of Thrones underneath it all?"

Some trolls may just want to get paid. Burrows talked about the Guardian's experience of "state-sanctioned trolling" where governments pay people to push their agenda on news sites, forums and social networks around the world.

"We struggle constantly with genuinely organised and powerful astroturfing campaigns. And a lot of states do it," he said, citing North Korea as a prominent example: "You can spot that a mile off: it's comments talking about 'Great Leader'."

Burrows said that Russia causes the most problems on this front. "Any article that touches on Russian politics will be flooded with comments from people with untraceable IPs, with very suspiciously similar party lines, who are very carefully edging the conversation away from the agenda above the line, to whatever agenda they've been given that day," he said.

"We know these exist, we know there are warehouses full of people in St Petersburg who are paid to do this. Genuinely, paid, state-sanctioned trolling is a thing. Israel does it, Russia does it, North Korea does it, China does it. Eritrea does it!"

From clicktivism into activism

Matt Mahan preferred to look at the internet's political potential positively. "What's interesting about it as a tool is that it's decentralised. It puts more power in the hands of individuals," he said.

"Now, there can be a downside to that: we were talking about activists and fringe movements, and they can pick up more steam faster because of the internet, certainly. But the counterweight to that is that the internet provides a platform for ordinary people to reconnect with civic life, with the political process."

Brigade has some heavyweight backing - its initial $9m funding round came from a trio of tech luminaries: Sean Parker, Ron Conway and Marc Benioff, which may tell its own story of Silicon Valley's desire to play an even greater role in the political process.

Its iOS and Android app encourages people to share their opinions on news and issues, compare those views with friends and join campaigns being run by likeminded organisations in the US.

"We believe in collective action, where you can quickly, efficiently find other people who share your views and pool your resources together," said Mahan, citing a recent trial of its technology in Manchester, New Hampshire, which provided citizens with information on candidates in the municipal elections.

"As these elections move on to the internet and get to internet scale, you're going to see some real changes in electoral math," said Mahan.

"The internet is the most powerful and capable communication platform that we've ever built, and we're in the very early stages of its development. I think over the next few decades we're going to see people harness what's uniquely powerful about the internet as a platform for communicating."

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Photography shaped public attitudes to the Crimean War just as it does to refugee crises now. Photograph: Roger Fenton/Getty Images

Digital noise or digital decision making?

It's possible that we - meaning those of us in the filter bubble of tech-literate, politically-engaged people - are still a bit too keen to see technology as having an important effect on elections.

"Was this [2015] the first digital election? We've been asking that since at least 2001, if not before," noted Burrows. Tomchak said that over time, the debate about how to get people more engaged with politics through digital means will fade out.

"As the tool, the internet, grows and becomes even more part of people's lives from the very beginning, I think we'll see a shift," he said. "The things we're talking about now - why or how do we get people more engaged - will be non-issues. It'll just be a case of 'it's a space, people inhabit it, so let's just get into it'."

Tomchak also pointed out that politics isn't just about party politics: his job includes working on the digital aspects of public information campaigns for the government, which are more issue or campaign-based.

He and Burrows agreed that new technologies - particularly social media and its ability to spread first-hand photos and videos from breaking news events, from street protests and natural disasters to refugee crises - can change people's views on specific issues.

"Twenty years ago it was exceptionally difficult to film these situations, whereas now you are able to broadcast on a mobile device, which is a massive change," said Tomchak.

"That's how technology has worked historically. That goes right back to when we first took cameras to the Crimean war, which was the first photographed war," agreed Burrows.

"Suddenly people at home could see the impact of war, and could see what it looked like... and that generated a revolt. You can extrapolate that to a babe in arms in a refugee camp being filmed on a smartphone: it is almost exactly the same concept."

The Guardian's Web Summit panel on digital politics. Photograph: Emily Case/The Guardian

The panel agreed that smart use of technology - often by the people directly involved in a specific event or issue - can change views and have an impact.

"One fantastic evolution is crisis funding, where you can actually do something. You see something tragic and you can donate," said Aiken. "I can do something, I don't have to just live in this negative state of observing this terrible information. I can try and help. I think that's a really positive thing."

And while the 2015 UK general election may not have seen online Milifandom trump traditional media in terms of influencing voters, digital activism did play an important role in the subsequent Labour party leadership election.

"That bubble really did roll, which possibly says a lot more about left politics and the way us trendy right-on lefties were communicating! Because that ball did start rolling, it did gather pace and there was nothing false about it whatsoever," said Burrows.

"We know that clicktivism - which is a terrible term isn't it? - isn't always that effective. It doesn't generally translate into real action. If you click on a Change.org petition, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to man the barricades. But in the case of the Labour leadership election it could, because all you had to do was pledge your £3, pay, fill out a form and you could make your contribution," he said.

Mahan warned against both overestimating or underestimating the influence of technology on politics.

"When we talk about the role of digital in politics, we have a tendency to want a very simple answer. It's kind of binary: this election's outcome was totally determined by digital technology, or it didn't matter at all," he said. "The reality, of course, is somewhere in between."
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Digital politics: are we trapped within our online filter bubbles?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How did Labour get such a walloping the last UK general election when everyone you knew on Twitter was a #Milifan? Or, alternatively, how could Ukip be such an electoral damp squib - in terms of seats, if not votes - when everyone you chatted to on Facebook was on Team Farage?