This defence of Australian internet censorship is more disturbing than the censorship itself

For those who have been living under a rock (i.e. not checking reddit) recently, the government here in Straya is planning to censor our internet access in a clumsy stunt aimed at cornering the “think-of-the-children!” vote. Veteran lefty Clive Hamilton’s defence of the filter, however, is no tabloid hack job: although he couldn’t resist including some choice examples of porn site copywriting, the worst spectre he bothers conjuring is “evidence” that “indicates” some porn-hound boys may develop “perverse attitudes towards girls, such as being disgusted by pubic hair.” Gasp.

Indeed, with such slim pickings for the knee-jerk moralists, it’s hard to figure out exactly who Hamilton is trying to convince. The thrust of his argument seems to be that the selfish libertarians who want the internet to stay free should not be allowed to get in the way of parents who “club together and decide that it is too difficult or untenable for them to protect children by themselves and want their governments to help them”. Exactly why the parents needs the government’s help is never made clear – even if they really are incapable of monitoring their children, in itself a strange assumption, why do they need the government’s help to do so, and why should it involve intruding upon the private lives of all Australians? If they are already clubbing together, why can’t they solve this “problem” on the level of civil society and voluntary participation, leaving the rest of us out of it? Particularly perplexing is this oxymoronic declaration:

[Parents] don’t want to be the household spy and policeman, forever looking over their children’s shoulders or checking to see what they have downloaded on their mobile phones. They want governments to help them.

A word to the wise, Mr. Hamilton: when your opponents are accusing you of authoritarianism, it’s best not to associate the words ‘household spy and policeman’ with ‘government’ in your response. Is he really suggesting that most Australian parents hold a deep desire for governments to take over an aspect of parenting – guiding the child’s media consumption – that requires enormous trust, discretion and communication with the child? And why on earth did he couch this assertion in words that make the police-state overtones of the censorship plan so explicit?

Hamilton’s piece descends almost into self-parody with this brazen admission:

I have deliberately not considered the question of whether it is feasible to effectively filter extreme and violent pornography on the internet.

Why not? Because, of course,

We need a community debate on the question of whether we should do it before we consider the question of whether we can do it because too many internet libertarians and industry spokespeople cover up their refusal to countenance any sort of regulation by insisting that it won’t work.

That’s right: we need to decide that something should be done before asking whether it is possible, in order to prove that the reality-based nay-sayers were only saying it was impossible in the first place because they thought it shouldn’t be done. Where does the (incredibly well-evidenced) fact that it really can’t be done fit into this decision-making rubric? Nowhere. Catch-22.

I can’t even tell who is trying to convince who of what anymore in this bizarre and scary debacle. I just want my usually sane and reasonably free country to give itself a good kick up the arse and close the book on internet censorship for good.

Sydney protest, December 13 (Facebook event)

Australia to filter internet access

I made a conscious decision after the last federal election to stop following Australian politics. It took me a little longer than most Aussie children to realise that, like Australian history and Australian film, Australian politics is largely dumb, boring and irrelevant to daily life. So it was a little surprising to read today that our benevolent rulers plan to force ISPs to filter ‘illegal’ material from all internet traffic, and to block pornography and other ‘inappropriate content’ from users who do not specifically request an opt-out. This is idiotic for so many reasons I don’t even know where to start.

Firstly, let’s look at the practical aspects. As anyone who has come into contact with content filtering software at school or in a home knows, there is no way to filter internet traffic with any reasonable accuracy. Rivers of ‘objectionable’ data are going to get through, and lakes of perfectly unobjectionable content will be dammed behind insensate walls. If this ridiculous plan is actually implemented, this will result in incredible pressure on the government to ‘do something!’ about all the nasty stuff still getting through, and to ‘do something!’ about all the good, important stuff still getting blocked, which will drive the government to ‘do something!’ to make the filter more complicated, more expensive and a bigger speed hump for Australia’s already sluggish internet access. To top it off, for anybody who actually wants access to ‘objectionable’ material, there is no shortage of workarounds ranging from simple browser extensions to the old-fashioned methods of bringing smut across national borders. According to the government’s own report, none of the candidate filters work on non-web protocols such as P2P or instant messaging networks. In the worst case scenario, the government will thus begin cracking down on circumvention technologies themselves – and we all know how well that’s worked in the past. In short, any ‘great firewall’ will be both ineffective for its intended purpose, and a hassle to everyone regardless.

Second come the reasons for having such a filter at all. According to the current plan, there will be two blacklists: one covering illegal material, which will be universally applied, and one covering ‘not child-friendly’ material, which will be opt-out. What possible justification can be given for this second filter other than the most blatant, cynical populism? Anybody who wants to filter their children’s internet access can go out and buy an inaccurate, easily circumvented filter to install in their own homes. Why do we need an inaccurate, easily circumvented filter for every ISP? What if parents want more fine-grained control over their filtering? Who takes the blame when parents rely on centralized filters, and something slips though the net? What poor souls at the ISP will be forced to field tens of thousands of tech support calls from confused, angry parents? How is will the opt-out be administrated anyway? Will the government subsidise ISPs for the administration costs involved?

When it comes to the illegal blacklist, the ramifications do not need to be spelled out. I’ll simply say that anybody who thinks the chance of a ’slippery slope’ into Orwellian state censorship of thought is overblown should note that this is exactly what is being explicitly proposed. No slippery slope is required. Sedition is illegal under Australian law; the filter, as described, would universally block access to material critical of the government. Information about other illegal activities, such as drug use or euthanasia, could also be blocked. It would be naive to think the filter will meticulously remove all content of dubious legality; given that it is a purely populist proposition, it would be a counterproductive to introduce any drastically unpopular restrictions. On the fringes, however – and to many people sedition, drug use and euthanasia are decidedly fringe topics -  there is plenty of room for incredible restrictions on free speech which would go largely unchallenged by a majority of the population.

For what it’s worth, should the great firewall ever come to fruition, I pledge to post any and all circumvention methods I hear about to this blog. Let’s hope that it never has to come to that.

ADDED: Check out this blog, this activism site and this amusing parody site.

I’m putting in the poll below purely to try out the new WordPress polls thing. Have fun with it.

Children are not second-class humans

What’s wrong with this picture? (Apart from the over-repetition of a phrase I would be hypocritical to condemn).

It took me a little while to figure out why it bothered me so much. Take a look at the list of possible ‘policy violations’ and ‘inappropriate behavior’: no chewing gum or public displays of affection in this school. Who gets to decide what language is inappropriate, or what behavior is disrespectful or disruptive? Could not accepting “no” lead to – never! – independent thought?

I’m not insensible to the fact that children will generally grow up to be ratbags unless given boundaries while growing up. In fact, I would go as far as to say that parents have a duty to moderate the behavior of their children in the same way that they have a duty to provide them with food or housing. Yet this is too often taken to mean that children are a second-class kind of human, not yet ready for the rights of self-ownership and freedom magically endowed upon them us the second we turn eighteen. If parents have a duty to limit and guide their children, this unconscious logic goes, surely it is reasonable that they have the right to do so.

This ‘duty to infringe a right’ is true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, the way our societies treat children goes far beyond the license allowed by this reasonable position, yet we are so used to seeing children as second-class humans that we completely fail to recognize it. We take it for granted that schools are authoritarian cages, because we know that without discipline most schools would be madhouses. Yet the need for discipline is a specific reason to allow for specific limits on the freedom of children; to assume that these specific cases excuse authoritarianism in all aspects of the life of a child is a case of faulty generalisation. The default status of children, as it is of all humans in the libertarian conception, is total self-ownership and freedom. Reasonable cases can be made for encroaching on these freedoms, but these must be argued one at a time and never taken for granted.

This is especially true when children are compelled to go to school. In adult life, we accept limits on our behavior when we are on or using other people’s property. Although we are free to smoke, we accept that a shopkeeper has the right to throw us out of the store if we light up against their wishes. Thus, the imposition of rules on in schools seems doubly legitimate: children need to have their behavior limited, and the teachers have the right to enforce standards of behavior on school grounds. Yet children are compelled to go to school, and rarely even have a choice in which school to attend. They are forced to spend a significant portion of their waking lives on somebody else’s property, and therefore to follow somebody else’s rules. If an adult was kidnapped and held by force on somebody else’s property, we would not consider it illegitimate for them to flout the property owner’s rules.

Again, this is not to say that all school discipline is illegitimate. I am simply pointing out that the criterion by which it can be justified is narrow and specific – namely, that the encroachment on the child’s freedom is part of the parent’s, and by extension the teacher’s, duty of care – rather than broad and unrestricted. The onus is on the adult world to demonstrate, in each and every case, why a right should be taken away. This includes an onus to demonstrate that there is not a better, more free way of achieving the same end. Libertarian paternalism tries to increase freedoms in the adult world by influencing rather than controlling behavior. Yet the idea of ’soft’ behavior modification often seems absurd in the school context, and not infrequently in parenting: we argue out loud that children will run wild given half the chance; and believe subconsciously that there is nothing really wrong with encroaching on their freedom anyway.

The second point I have already delt with. The first is, again, quite reasonable on the surface. Children get up to enough trouble in school and at home as it is; it seems natural to assume that, if the boundaries are lifted, their behavior would become correspondingly worse. Again, this is a faulty generalisation that breaks down when we look at specific cases.

Let’s go back to the detention note linked to at the beginning of this post. Assuming that the school is in the US, the code of ‘uniform violations’ is probably targeted at crude or bigoted slogans or images. (Most uniform codes at non-US high schools, such as the one I went to here in Sydney, cover such heinous sins as ’sleeves too long’ and is are not worth even trying to defend). Since dictating what a person can and cannot display on their clothes is a violation of their freedom of speech and expression, there must surely be a correspondingly weighty benefit to the child’s upbringing of this policy. It can’t be reasonably argued that this benefit accrues to the child wearing the clothing: they would have seen it anyway, so it’s not protecting them from any unsavoury ideas; and they are free to wear it outside school, so it’s not modifying their behaviour in any real way. Is it to protect other children from crude language, sexual content or so on? Anybody who thinks that children are not exposed to sex, drugs, violence, bigotry or crude language and could thus have their innocence shattered by a t-shirt slogan is a fool with a very poor memory of their own childhood. Is it out of fear that it will provoke unruly behavior in the other students? This is possible, yet unlikely; and it is a very thin premise on which to restrict so fundamental a freedom.

The most reasonable explanation for uniform policies, and ironically the one generally given to students in Australian schools, is to maintain appearances. School administrators have strong incentives to find simple ways to cause big gains in the perceived quality of their schools: private schools have money on the line, and public school administrators have their reputations, performance-linked pay incentives and ultimately their jobs. Enforcing a uniform policy is a cheap and effective way to present a more polished image. It costs only the freedom of students, which nobody cares about, and the cost of enforcement, which is marginal and accrues mainly to teachers. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and when a school administrator is given near-absolute power over their students, it is natural that they will frame rules in their own interest.

Not all school rules are of this type. Many are reasonable restrictions on behaviour which generally do advance the care of the child. Others, like ‘no littering’, are reasonable compromises between a school administrator compelled to maintain the property over which they hold stewardship and the compulsion of students to attend in the first place. Nobody has ever mastered the art of parenting or teaching, and there will always be difficulty in establishing what is genuinely worth forcing children to do. In general, however, the socially accepted level of control lies far, far over the line into unjustified authoritarianism. The rule against ‘public displays of affection’ (PDA) may have had the wrong-headed intention of preventing promiscuity among teenagers, but in reality simply curbs their freedom of association and social interaction while pushing out of sight what they’re going to do regardless. If you want a reality check when considering a rule imposed on children, consider the same rule being imposed on yourself, or upon an adult if you are a child. How would an adult react if forced to spend 6 hours a day on somebody else’s property, and then told that kissing their partner during that time was forbidden? It is not exaggeration to say that this is the kind of authoritarianism for which the west routinely condemns Islamic states, yet it somehow it can be imposed upon children without a hint of outrage. Many adults may find (or pretend to find) the idea of teenage sexuality repugnant, yet repugnance has never given anyone the right to tell another what to do.

Children are not second class citizens. They are humans with the full rights and freedoms naturally accorded to us all. The only difference between a child and an adult is that children are owed a duty of care from their parents, and that when well justified, this duty can extend to putting boundaries on the child’s freedom. These boundaries, however, must be constantly justified, and the least freedom-infringing methods constantly sought. This doesn’t come naturally. The second-class position of children is ingrained into our culture and our institutions. This does not, however, make it right. Worse, children do not have anything like the voice that adults do in defending their rights. Power corrupts, and adults routinely exploit this defenselessness to take what rights from children they can. This does not make it legitimate, and it does not make it right.

Drug offenders are political prisoners

From Wikipedia:

A political prisoner is someone held in prison or otherwise detained, perhaps under house arrest, for his or her involvement in political activity.

In other words, a political prisoner is somebody who hasn’t hurt anyone but whose actions threaten the reigning political view – even if the ‘offender’ is not trying to make a political statement, but simply go about their life. Drugs such as cannabis, ecstasy and LSD are less physically harmful and probably less addictive than alcohol and tobacco. Even if they were not, what drug users do with their own bodies is none of anyone else’s business, least of all the government. However, through a grotesque quirk of history, all nations still find it acceptable on at least some level for politicians to summon false moral outrage against drug users and lock them up. This only feels normal because we’re so used to it.

Why I would like to try Modafinil

Today is just one of those days. I stayed home from the lab, thinking that with my backlog of experiments temporarily clear I could get stuck into the mountain of written work that has been languishing lately. Instead, I have somehow managed to sit in front of the computer for hours with absolutely nothing to show for it. It’s not that I have been procrastinating. I’ve written hundreds of words of literature review, played with a number of primer designs and even written the opening paragraphs of a few blog posts. It’s that the muse has simply gone mum, a haze has descended on my brain and while my fingers are moving on the keyboard, only garbage is appearing on the screen.

We all have days like this, and we all wish we could do something about them. I first heard about Modafinil a few months ago, though I’m not sure where. Cliched as it is, the phrase “too good to be true” has never been more appropriate. Modafinil is supposed to increase alertness, focus, and functional intelligence, and eliminate sleepiness without preventing the user from sleeping whenever they want. Side effects include such horrors as not wanting to eat as much as you normally would and the minute chance of a headache. There is no chemical addiction, no come down or hangover, no long term effect on body or mind. You don’t feel the jitters like you would from speed, nor experience any kind of hallucination. Modafinil sits squarely in the class of “nootropics” or smart drugs. These are not your grandfather’s conciousness expanders: boosters of Modafinil say it’s the real, transhuman deal.

So why isn’t everyone popping a Modafinal each morning instead of a jolt of caffeine, with its addictiveness, hyperstimulation, painful comedown and the rest? Journalists Johann Hari and David Plotz have both written of their experiences road testing Modafinal and their accounts are surprisingly similar. Both took the drug on working days, and both worked better and more efficiently then they ever had before. They continuously caught themselves having just breezily completed a task that would normally have meant hours of procrastination interspersed with tedious effort. Both guinea pigs had friends or coworkers comment on their energy and sociability, and both relished the control it gave them over their sleep and fatigue. Yet both, within days, stopped using the drug and put it away with a firm resolve to use the pills only on rare occasions. They were afraid that it would become a addictive psychological crutch.

Jonah Lehrer, responding to Hari, also had words of warning about the drug although it seems he has never taken it himself:

If only intelligence were so easy. Before you run out a get an illicit supply of Provigil [Modafinil], let me remind you that the brain is a precisely equilibrated machine. Even drugs that don’t appear to have any negative side-effects – who wouldn’t want a more focused brain? – can actually have deleterious consequences.

In this case, the tradeoff involves creativity. Some of my friends who relied on crushed Ritalin during college used to joke about how the drugs were great for late-night cramming sessions, but that they seemed to suppress any kind of originality. In other words, increased focus came at the expense of the imagination. It makes perfect sense that such a cognitive trade-off would exist.

It’s not impossible that such a trade-off exists. However, Lehrer offers no direct evidence for it. Even if it did, is that really a worse trade off then, for example, buying energy now to pay back later with caffine? How about buying euphoria at the expense of decreased intelligence and motor function, as well as a constellation of health risks, with alcohol? Having never tried the drug, I can’t comment on Hari and Plotz’s fears. It’s entirely possible that, after a few days, the sense that you are on the verge of addiction is truly overwhelming, despite the lack of any addictive properties in the clinical trials. I think a more likely explanation is the naturalistic fallacy.

Yes, the brain has evolved to be a precisely equilibrated machine. This does not mean that altering the brain will always result in a net loss of function. The naturalistic fallacy is to assume that the brain as it is now is the best it could possibly get. My computer, too, is a precisely equilibrated machine, with incredibly intricate system of components all working in harmony. If I hit my motherboard with a sledgehammer, this would almost certainly result in a net loss of function. However, if I opened the computer and installed more RAM, this would result in a net gain. There’s no particular reason to assume that, with the right drug, the human brain cannot also be improved. In fact, as with the examples of caffeine and alcohol, we often accept side effects and health costs to get the benefit of a drug. Why not Modafinil?

Here in Australia, Modafinil is only available when prescribed for conditions such as narcolepsy and hence is illegal off-script. I won’t go into my views on drug legalisation, but suffice it to say that I don’t consider the government’s opinion relevant when deciding what to put into my body. Of course there are ways in which the drug could cause harm; going without REM sleep for extended periods, for example, is never a good idea. All drugs can be abused.

I would like to have sharp focus and motivation all through the day. I would love for the mental haze of fatigue to lift more often, and productivity to become a normal state rather than a rare pleasure. If the hype is true, this is possible through the use of a simple and reasonably cheap pharmaceutical. If it’s not, there’s nothing to lose but a little money. I can’t be the only one who would like to try Modafinil. So why is the drug described as ‘viagra for the mind’ still so little known and used by so few?

Nothing is natural

Daniel Florin ridicules the easily-ridiculed notion that the world can be divided into the “natural” and “unnatural”:

It used to be the counterculture that was confused about this, but now it has seeped into consumer culture. Thus almost every bag of food now says “all natural ingredients,” which means nothing.

I don’t entirely agree. Consumer culture has always cared about what is “natural” and what is not. It’s just the categories themselves which have changed. As Daniel and countless other have noted, things which are considered natural have no inherently unique properties; they are imbued with “naturalness” by our own minds. The natural has connotations of both the expected and the familiar, as well as the untainted and the pure. Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory attempts to explain why these matter so much to us, and why we often go as far as to make moral judgments based on perceived naturalness. He proposes that our moral judgements differ depending on the value we place on the following “foundations”: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity.

The purity aspect of naturalness slots easily into the purity/sanctity foundation. Haight links this directly to the primal disgust response, which possibly explains why we seem so concerned with naturalness in substances which come in close contact with our bodies: food, cosmetics etc. Mobile phone companies do not bother to hide the fact that their phones are made of “unnatural” ingredients, but shampoo advertisements constantly tout the “natural” credentials of their products.

The aspect of the expected and familiar – “the natural course of action” – falls under the ingroup\loyalty and authority\respect categories. Things feel natural and familiar because we are used to doing them, and this is usually because we have been told to do them or seen everyone else do them.

Here’s where things get interesting. According to Haidt’s empirical research (pdf), liberals (that’s the left for my Australian readers, not the Liberals) tend to value harm/care and fairness/reciprocity much higher, while conservatives value all five foundations, placing more emphasis than liberals on the last three. According to popular stereotype, left-liberals are organic legume munching, all-natural soap rubbing greenies, while conservatives are happy to eat whatever crap they can get their hands on and would bathe in crude oil if it wasn’t so expensive. Apart from fair trade and similar niche movements, the liberal image seems to have little to do with harm/care or fairness/reciprocity, while the conservitives’ concern for purity/sanctity doesn’t quite make it through to, say, environmental policy. Is the stereotype, Haight’s model or my association of “naturalness” with the last three foundations of it wrong?

For what it’s worth, I scored low on all axes when I took Haight’s test. I’m not sure that this would be a universal result though. A lot of libertarians are social conservatives with religiously derived notions of purity; they just believe in not forcing this morality on others.

Show Me More Ads!

The only thing better than a free lunch, IMHO, is a free book. In the last six months I’ve made my way through dozens of great ebooks and audiobooks that I got for free, completely legally, because their authors chose to release them under Creative Commons licences. Cory Doctorow claims that he releases his books for free because it drives up sales of his print editions, and I have no doubt that, for him, this is true. As attractive as this sounds, it is not a long term strategy. Releasing high-quality works under CC drives up print sales because it is still a rare enough event that potential readers who would otherwise not have heard of the work become aware of it. Doctorow acknowledges this when he paraphrases Tim O’Reilly: the problem artists face is not piracy, but obscurity. If all artists were to release their media under CC, overall they would get poorer: their works will still be just as obscure, and those handful who are interested in it can just take it for free.

I’m addicted to the Economist’s audiobook edition. At first I tried to obtain it legitimately, but soon discovered that the legit route was an incredibly painful one. Their distributor’s website refused to accept my registration for days, crashed constantly, and generally spread misery. After a few weeks of this, I gave up and started getting the download from bittorrent, painlessly, freely, and illegally. This is file-sharing, and it’s not going away. As long as media can be digitised, they will be shared. Why waste money and effort on something that can be obtained freely and easily?

So giving media away for free won’t work, and people are not going to stop pirating and sharing the non-free stuff. A world in which the only cultural products around are labours of love, or government backed, or donation-supported, would be a world in which the pool of cultural products would be tepid and a good lot smaller. None of the commonly predicted equilibria – musicians living off live concert profits, authors living off donations and hard copy sales – are remotely plausible except for the top percentile of cultural products. Markets are supposed to find the equilibrium that nobody could ever have guessed, but this isn’t a typical public goods problem: how does a market function when there are no realistically enforceable property rights?

Rather than backing bold and implausible schemes, I think the better part of wisdom is to sit back and see what happens, while supporting the partial solution that has worked for many a non-excludable good in the past: advertising. Please, keep writing your books and audiobooks, and please keep releasing them under CC. But make sure you’re still making money for yourselves. I’d rather hear or read a few ads then have you shut down production entirely. And Economist, I have no idea if your audiobook is breaking even in the face of file-sharing. It’s in my best interest for you to remember though: nobody is ever going to stop pirating your audiobook. However, the world would be a worse place if you stopped producing it.

The Coconut Scourge

SMH: World’s Biggest Ecstasy Bust

Yes, I know this has been done before, but it bears repeating.

—PRESS CONFERENCE—

SMITH: …making it the world’s largest ever coconut bust. Any questions?

GOLD: Emma Gold, Herald. Commissioner Smith, how many people are killed by coconut consumption in an average year?

SMITH: Excellent question, Ms Gold. I would like to remind your readers of young Jane, who died tragically last year when a coconut she was attempting to pick from an illegal plantation fell and cracked her skull. Her parents have asked -

GOLD: Excuse me, Commissioner, but how many are killed by actual coconut consumption each year?

SMITH: Coconut consumption alone is not the killer, although several credible studies have linked coconut milk to obesity, high cholesterol and other health hazards. The real threat to our community is the danger posed by misguided youth who do not understand the risks of illicit coconut use and are killed trying to climb trees, or break open coconuts, or who are given other deadly fruits disguised as coconuts by unscrupulous dealers. In this year alone, 11 young people so far have died, most of them from falls while trying to pick coconuts in dangerous illegal plantations. Two from consuming coconuts cut with other illicit fruits – very traumatic for their friends and families.

PIPER: Joe Piper, Banner Sun. Commissioner, couldn’t those kids have survived if coconuts were available through well-regulated, legitimate channels?

SMITH: Joe, it hurts me to see how many young people are still dying despite our efforts to protect them. Who knows how high the death toll would climb if the coconut legalisers had their way?

PIPER: But -

SMITH: Let’s keep this moving please. Dorothy?

DIX: Can you release any information about those arrested this morning? Did you catch the ringleaders?

SMITH: We can’t release any specific information as there are still a lot of loose ends and the investigations are ongoing. However, I will say that we have arrested the head of the largest coconut import network so far uncovered in this country, as well as three of his deputies and over a hundred associates and other persons of interest. This man is a well-known figure in international organised crime with proven links to arms and people smuggling. He is thought to have been directly involved in this March’s underworld murders, and the public prosecutor will probably bring charges against him related to those killings as well as today’s haul. Joe, going back to your question, is this really the kind of person you would want to be selling coconuts – hell, selling anything! – to your children?

PIPER: But Commissioner, if -

SMITH: Sorry Joe, we’re nearly out of time. One more question.

NG: Allen Ng, Tribune. How much has this operation cost in total?

SMITH: Including the surveillance operations, around $10 million so far. I’m sure you agree the taxpayer’s money was well spent.