Book Review: Yasha Levine - Surveillance Valley

Usually the news stories fretting about how much power tech companies have over our lives that appear every day are framed as the cost of doing business: for example, the reason why Google makes it so hard to turn off location tracking is that they just really want to serve you targeted ads. But while those privacy concerns can and often do boil down to simple greed, one reason why problems of tracking and control are so endemic is that Silicon Valley is intimately connected to the national security state/military-industrial complex, and though most popular histories of computers and the internet emphasize the free-spirited glamour of the hacker culture, one might as well think of the suite of apps on a typical phone as a voluntary counter-insurgency program that we carry out on ourselves. As Levine chronicles, much is made of the power of technology to aid people's fight for freedom, as in coverage of how the organizers of the Arab Spring revolutions used Twitter and Facebook, but less attention is paid to how governments use that same technology to monitor dissidents, control demonstrations, and prevent unrest before it ever occurs.

The connections between tech companies and law enforcement go much deeper than that police departments sometimes also use Gmail. Levine relates many seminal historical events like IBM's collaboration with Nazi Germany, the internet's origins in ARPA, the funding of many supposedly liberatory technologies like Tor by the government, the activities of figures like Peter Thiel who bridge PayPal and Palantir, and the CALEA mandate for telecom companies, showing that for every starry-eyed visionary who saw computers as "bicycles for the mind", in Steve Jobs' phrase, there was another steely-eyed capitalist with no qualms about furnishing governments with whatever they needed to keep tabs on restive populations. It's not that people don't care about privacy, as periodically NSA programs like PRISM become big news for a while, but anyone truly interested in issues like internet freedom has to pay attention to Silicon Valley as well as Washington. It may be that the idea that anyone could use the internet without being watched was always a fantasy, but while Levine doesn't present quite as bleak of a world as, say, Adam Curtis, who he cites a few times, anyone who's seen a few of Curtis' documentaries ("They had a vision of a new world, free from politics... but then something strange happened") will find much that's unhappily familiar here.

Book Review: Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning

This is one of those "everyone has read this" classics that contains a lot of hard-won wisdom, and whose insights are worth reiterating even if you've read similar books about therapy or happiness. It's two books in one, and the relationship between the two is interesting even above and beyond their contents. The first half is an extremely moving portrait of the horrors of his time in several WW2 concentration camps, and like a non-fiction equivalent to Varlam Shalamov's fictional Kolyma Tales, Frankl's near-death experiences are made even more powerful by his calm, detached narration. His dry descriptions of the camp, the guards, and the lives of the prisoners are set against the grim absurdities of his near-helplessness at the chance events which determined whether someone lived or died, and those physical struggles are contrasted with his emotional striving to find something to live for, the spiritual sustenance that is almost more important than physical sustenance for a human being to survive the worst that his fellow humans can subject him to. The second half is a brief description of Frankl's chosen psychological discipline of logotherapy, a type of therapy which seems to descend from Stoicism and have left a legacy in modern cognitive-behavioral therapy. It was not nearly as affecting as the first half, but as Frankl himself considers it the more important part, the two haves together are more valuable than either alone.

Outside of questionably authentic thriller novels like Papillon, prison literature tends to be on the grim side. It's just really hard to avoid emphasizing how brutal prison is, and that goes more so for anything about gulags or concentration camps, where death is typically the only way out. The short fiction of the Kolyma Tales remains my gold standard for depictions of bureaucratized horror, but the added realism of Frankl's experiences is not any less harrowing. This section is full of ethical dilemmas, inhuman atrocities, nightmarish gambles (should you volunteer for an extra shift of duty, which could bring you some extra favor but also carries the risk of a quick death?), and cruelty that is not any less cruel for being done out of impersonal duty rather than personalized malice. The only way to remain sane is to concentrate on the good, to find something to live for beyond yourself, yet with the knowledge that fate has its own ideas (Frankl mentions the fable "Death in Tehran", which I'd previously read as "Appointment in Samarra", wherein a man's efforts to avoid his scheduled death only hasten it). The peculiar mixture of constant background risk of death and unbearable tedium reminds him of a Bismarck quote: "Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already." To find your purpose won't save you from death, but without something to live for you're dead even before your body grows cold.

Though it's those narrative parts that will be most likely to stick with readers, in the Preface to my 1992 edition Frankl mentions that the first half of the book is really just an explication of the second half about logotherapy, which is very important to him: his precious manuscript which he lost on his first day in camp was about logotherapy, so it's interesting to see how his drive to see it through to publication helped him survive four different concentration camps before he even published it. I won't pretend to fully understand it - there are too many terms like "noögenic neuroses" and "the existential vacuum" for me to be really comfortable - but it's striking how the purpose of publishing the manuscript helped Frankl popularize a discipline that's intended to help people find purpose. There is much of his real life experience in that quotation from Nietzsche: "He who has a WHY to live for can bear almost any HOW." As he says:

Logotherapy, keeping in mind the essential transitoriness of human existence, is not pessimistic but rather activistic. To express this point figuratively we might say: The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest.

There's a great Kafka aphorism that I wish Frankl had referenced, because it bears directly on that insistence that logotherapy be attuned to action:

You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps the holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.

We know that not nearly all psychological issues can be solved by calm discussion with a therapist, no matter how well trained, and that sometimes suffering isn't ennobling but merely enervating. Frankl is a powerful example of someone who used his suffering to find meaning and achieve good things in the world, and he acknowledges that there were many others who tried no less hard who never made it out of Auschwitz. But while suffering is not a necessary or sufficient condition for finding a purpose, Frankl is absolutely correct in asserting that finding meaning is possible even in the face of seemingly unendurable suffering, which should cheer up people who are in circumstances less dire than Auschwitz (i.e. just about all of us). Perhaps meaning is where you find it, and the clear corollary - that almost any road could lead there - means that logotherapy is no shortcut to psychic satisfaction, but if "the journey can be the destination", and "the real meaning is the friends we made along the way", and so forth through those clichés, then merely by encouraging people to actively find meaning in their lives Frankl has done the world a valuable service, and proved his own point in the process. Not bad!

Book Review: Limor Shifman - Memes in Digital Culture

The MIT Essential Knowledge Series is the perfect venue for a book on something like this, and in keeping with its subject there's a lot packed into a small space. Memes and viral content are ubiquitous, and even if individually each shared image is trivial, in the aggregate they present a fascinating window into a fundamental aspect of human communication that the internet has vastly amplified. Richard Dawkins was the first person to fix the idea of the meme in the public consciousness, proving his own point by giving the amorphous concept of an informational analogue to the gene a compact, shareable name and definition. However, Shifman mentions two main conceptual difficulties with a neat meme-gene analogy: firstly that people commonly refer to a "meme" as both an individual unit of selection (a gene) and as a unit of transmission (a virus), which are different things; and secondly that people are not helpless vectors for meme reproduction but are actors and meme creators themselves. This is not simple nitpicking, since borrowing terminology from evolutionary biology and epidemiology without care can only lead to confusion and obscure actual insights, and though the book's 2014 vintage makes it practically antediluvian in its examples, its careful analysis of both human and memetic behavior is perfectly undiminished by time.

In one sense, the internet is merely the latest transmission vector for memes, not truly a qualitatively different medium from the books, TV, audio recordings, etc that people used to use to share ideas in the before-time. But even in addition to offering, for the very first time ever, the tantalizing prospect of quantified empirical data on idea transmission, the internet has vastly transformed three key aspects of memes: longevity, fecundity, and copy fidelity. Pity our ancestors: one imagines a poor farming family in the depths of Nebraska in the 1800s, waiting anxiously on the porch of their sod-roofed homestead for a quarterly meme update from the big cities back East tucked neatly next to the Sears Roebuck catalog... no longer! Thanks to what Shifman terms the "hypermimetic logic" of the internet, in practical terms there are more memes than it is possible to humanly experience, with memes mutating and spawning new clades and taxa so rapidly that much of the attention-based economy of the modern internet is based on either exploiting something that's already viral or trying to manufacture something viral out of nothing.

But again, a meme is not a piece of viral content, although the two are often used synonymously (side note: "piece of viral content" is a clunky phrase and "virus" sounds bad; would something like "vireme" work better?). Exact definitions are tricky to make, and nearly impossible to sustain, but the basic idea is that a piece of viral content is a single thing that spreads to many people, while a meme is a "group of content units", each of which could be modified while the whole thing is recognizably descended from a single image, which could then also spread virally. Thus, to use one of her examples, the infamous "Leave Britney alone!" video is a piece of viral content, which then became a meme once people latched onto various aspects (the hair, the eyeliner, the bedsheet, the "Leave X aloooone!" plaint) to make their own parodies/imitations/tributes. Some viral items are rich enough in imagery and hooks to inspire vast families of memetic descendants, "Gangnam Style" being the current best example, but even relatively absurd and meaningless viral content like planking or "Kilroy was here" can be memeified, as the latter was referenced with hilariously nerdy panache as a Kilroy-shaped band-pass filter by Thomas Pynchon in his novel V. It's very rare for something to go viral without also getting memed, but there's still a useful distinction between a dendritic "founder-based meme" such as "Leave Britney alone!" that has a clear original viral basis, and a rhizomatic "egalitarian meme" like LOLcats, where theoretically there must have been a single original Ur-funny cat image but currently consists of an endless sea of comedically equal variations.

Of course, truly proving why one thing goes viral and spawns a million memes while something seemingly identical doesn't is a vast and almost certainly impossible goal. Christian Bauckhage had a 2011 paper titled "Insight Into Internet Memes", lamentably uncited here, which fit the popularity (using Google search results) of various memes into a few distributions, but refrained from entering the "why" debate, as it seems beyond the power of data science alone to explain "why" one meme's popularity fits a log-normal distribution and another's doesn't. Surely it must be some mix of inherent latent virality and the random luck of being in the right place at the right time shared by the right people, if we could ever break down the exact factors. Duncan Watts' superb book Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer) raised many of these same questions in the context of influence in social networks and how some people get to be so influential while most of the rest of us won't ever be, or how some songs become popular while others don't.

Shifman has a more sociological theory of virality, however, and as she says, successful viral content checks off as many of the 6 Ps as possible: 

• positivity
• provocation of high-intensity emotions
• packaging
• prestige
• positioning in social context
• participation, maybe the most important factor. 

This makes intuitive sense - boring irrelevant crap made by nobodies that no one ever sees is unlikely to go viral almost by definition - yet for all the countless YouTube videos out there that master some combination of relatable protagonists, flawed masculinity, humor, simplicity, repetitiveness, and whimsical content that Shifman identifies as crucial to viral success (see Mark O'Connell's excellent short book Epic Fail for a more poignant meditation on the appeal of watching people fail at something), there are even countless more videos out there that no one besides their creators will ever see. The numberless descendants of "Gangnam Style" might make it the Genghis Khan of memes, yet it too exists in a meme ecosystem where the overwhelming majority of similar K-pop music videos make barely a ripple on the international stage.

And it is on that international stage where the potential existence of a formula for virality and memetic success can be most clearly investigated. The somewhat ugly term "glocalization" refers to the ability of viral content to originate in one culture or context, spread to another, and then acquire memetic aspects specific to its new home. Shifman uses the example of "I upgraded Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0!" and its gender-reversed counterpart as examples of an incredibly hackneyed joke that is nevertheless extremely popular worldwide because it plays on such familiar stereotypes (although with some significant modifications for some cultures, such as Arabic or Japanese, which don't always have exactly the same cultural signifiers). Same with the American meme Successful Black Man becoming Humanist Ultra Orthodox Man in Israel. Political memes often resist translation, since although some complaints with government are universal, others - the Pepper-Spraying Cop at UC Davis, the "grass mud horse" of Chinese battles against government censors, satires of Benjamin Netanyahu or Nicolas Sarkozy's attempts to take credit or be present for everything - require just a bit too much cultural specificity to go global. Political meme urges are universal, but as Tip O'Neill might have said, all political memes are local.

The final chapter is an admirably humble call for further research on a number of memetic avenues, all of which I second:

• The politics of meme participation. With rare exceptions, the demographics of successful meme creators, influencers, and users looks remarkably similar to the demographics of just about every successful anything: young, well-off, straight white males front and center. If the internet theoretically gives everyone an equal voice, what gives?
• Memes as a language. People use memes to pithily communicate an incredibly broad variety of mental and emotional states to others, yet not all of them translate well. What's the general distribution of memetic communication on the "universal" to "extremely niche micro-sub-culture" spectrum, and why do particular memes fall where they do?
• Memes and political change. Some political memes become popular, and some are then successful, but these paths are neither universal nor uniformly paced - how should we interpret the varying success of memes like "I am the 99%" vs "repeal the death tax"? What about "Carthago delenda est" vs "54-40 or fight"?
• Viral and memetic success. Here's where research like Duncan Watts' or Christian Bauckhage's is important: a better typology of memes can help with the etiology. Once we know the "what"s, then the "how"s and "why"s of memes become much easier to study.

And yes, the book does end with a meme.