“How long do you want these messages to remain secret?” Randy asked, in his last message before leaving San Francisco. “Five years? Ten years? Twenty-five years?”

After he got to the hotel this afternoon, Randy decrypted and read Avi’s answer. It is still hanging in front of his eyes, like the afterimage of a strobe:

I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.

– from Cryptonomicon

Whenever I’m tempted by some shiny future tech thing, or shifting some desktop task to an online service, I still hear the dubious counsel of a much younger self. It’s centralised. It’s proprietary. Don’t let them lock away your computers, man. Don’t let them own you.

It’s the voice of the me who built his frankenstein computers partly out of parts salvaged from skips. Who wasn’t comfortable using an OS where he didn’t compile everything from scratch. A boy with too much time on his hands.

It’s the voice of the me who hasn’t become completely resentful at the amount of time that years of personal computing has eaten up just with the tending, the watering and feeding. The upgrading and backing-up and restoring. And with every year our personal computers have become more tightly bound to our own real lives. What impact a broken phone when it’s also your keys or wallet? Or more. There are no “computer hobbyists” in the 21st Century.

It’s as if we’ve woken up into a world where letting a Tamagotchi die was punishable by law. Or karma. Or both.

So, while everyone else seemed to focus on the Music Match “pirate amnesty” that was offered at the end of the Apple WWDC keynote, the slide that caught my attention came about an hour into the presentation.

Almost as an aside, Scott Forstall mentions great features for “enterprise customers” such as encrypting email with S/MIME.

Of course, alluding to “enterprise customers” is like a fnord-wrapping it for a significant sections of the technology press. It conjures up images of the bloated, legacy-supporting suites of the Windows world. Bor-ing, what’s next? Apple can’t really do business business software. That’s not a slight, by the way. More that they don’t seem interested in adopting the fiction that “enterprise users” have fundamentally different requirements from normal users.

And normal users are apparently still happily sharing their secrets with the network.

But I’ve been thinking about this for a few days, and this seems like it has the potential to be something described as “controversial” in future news reports.

The me in the past started using internet email around the same time that PGP became widely available. Keys were signed. Fingerprints were relayed. And yet almost every mail I’ve sent since then has been clear text. Which is not to say in the clear. All my mail these days is submitted and retrieved over TLS encrypted connections, transmitted over TLS when available. Even DKIM-signed on some accounts. But still clear text. I haven’t sent an encrypted email in the last decade that didn’t include the word “test” in the subject line. I can’t even remember my old pass-phrases.

But just having the capability seemed important, even in a country not under rule of oppression. Not dissimilar a philosophy, I suppose, to owning a firearm you hope never need use. A deliberate analogy, since crypto was treated by the US government as a munition for which they attempted to regulate exports (and to a lesser extent still do). Computer security was effectively nerfed at a critical point in the mainstream adoption of the internet. Even downloading web-browsers with SSL support was restricted based on your physical location.

This happened just at the point where encrypting communications when from being a hardware problem to being a user interface problem. Before anyone had a chance to get it right, the webmail providers changed the game. While they’ll now happily offer an https interface, Google doesn’t want you to use effective end-to-end privacy – how would they be able to mine your communications for behavioural data-points to sell to advertisers? How can it be searched?

But perhaps a user behaviour that’s bad for ad-funded web-centric business can be good for an app-centric business?

In the short-term S/MIME is obviously a tick-box Apple needs before big corporate BlackBerry clients consider switching. For the same reason, I’d be surprised if the new iMessage system doesn’t end up with end-to-end encryption in the same way that iChat has supported it when the relevant certificates were available.

Full crypto tools have been available on OSX for years, but (literally) hidden away. Unless you’ve generated or imported a certificate with Email capabilities, the native Mail program gives no indication that it supports encryption. Install or generate a certificate using “Key Chain Access” and magically new “sign” and “encrypt” icons appear in the UI. (“Key Chain Access” is still a bit intimidating, but it’s far easier than pouring through the OpenSSL man page.) In fact, Apple used to offer certificates for .Mac customers that worked with both iChat and Mail. (The email support mysteriously disappearing in 2006… almost as if Apple was about to release a device without S/MIME email support.)

Signed tweets, anyone? Encrypted DMs? A second factor authenticator?

I don’t think it’s outlandish to imagine that S/MIME (and associated key management) integrated into the iOS ecosystem might be the trigger point at which personal crypto gains significant adoption outside of corporate contexts. The same push we see today toward https for social network access we’ll might see in securing the more sensitive of our communications.

And, while I make a point of not conflating institutional transparency with personal privacy, there’s a similar mental exercise we all need to perform in separating out the merely private from the confidential. Especially in communications we know to be stored. I’d expect certain high-profile politicians to be early adopters.

An open standard that’s supported out-of-the-box on the iPhone and iPad is as close to de facto as you’re going to get, and it might come to be expected on all competing devices (if it’s not already there). I’d expect to see signed receipts (non-repudiation) from online stores (iTunes already uses DKIM, but it’s not currently reflected in the Mail UI). Encrypted messages from doctors, banks. From lawyers. From the state.

And therein, potentially the source of future headlines. Some governments have a tendency to get grumpy when another source of intelligence ebbs away. BlackBerry has already been offering encryption, but (apart from those using its Enterprise Server) it’s not end-to-end so “legal” interception still remains a possibility. Not so on the iPhone if they’re offering unrestricted public-key , so I’d expect to see the threat of restrictions in some regimes. Not that I believe there are many nations capable of effectively keeping the shiny shiny out of the hands of anyone who wants one.

There’s cause for caution in how the world adopts cloud technologies congruently with an unprecedented increase in the unauthorised leaking of both personal and institutional data from online sources. Yet congruously Apple may have announced a potential Crypto-Ragnarök.

It’s almost a shame my younger self isn’t around to see how it plays out.

I wish I could sense these things, like an urban-superpower, rather than just having a more convenient way of looking at maps. (As I mentioned here ages ago, technology should require less human interaction the more advanced it gets, so how advanced could a phone be if you’re constantly jabbing at it?)

The Ovi Maps app, on a Nokia X6 I’ve used, had a nice feature where it would vibrate the phone in your pocket if it thought you’d taken a wrong turn. Of course it also successfully directed me to a random location 2km away from the destination I’d requested and almost completely ran down the battery. Untrusted, it was barely used again.

The Satnav in my Dad’s car uses the voice of a sitcom character to provide directions. While I do walk with headphones in, I’m sure I’d find this a little annoying when walking. Besides, I never plan routes, just point me in the right direction. I’m happy enough to use technology to navigate around obstacles when I hit them, rather than perpetually assuming their existence.

But, given I’m walking around with headphones on maybe the destination could announce itself like some kind of simulated urban racon (radar beacon). Every couple of minutes the audio you’re listening to drops out and you hear a ping from your destination. Your location relatively locatable (using simulated binaural techniques HRTF, distance conveyed in both volume and frequency). Any maybe not just a set destination, you might have distinct signatures for bus stops, cash points, your lost children, riot police, etc.

Is this something that already exists in some consumer form? Is it even plausible with current smartphones? I think the only iPhone app I’ve used with binaural sound is “Papa Sangre” and that doesn’t seem as good as some of the simple demo recordings I’ve heard.

Even assuming sophisticated audio processing, I guess one issue would be that, while a phone has the GPS, gyroscope and compass, it has no way of knowing what direction the user’s head is pointing. (Future PAN headphones should include tiny solid state compasses? Easy-adjust left/right configuration.) There are all sort of inferences it could make (e.g. you’re likely facing the direction you’re moving, rather than moonwalking) but, unless you can trust the information coming from a navigation device, it’s essentially noise.

Really, I ought to feel better prepared.

Way back, before that point in the mid-90s when “internet” became a thing that you had in your home, my networks consisted of dialing-in, off-peak, to Bulletin Boards.  Furtively, and with haste.  Phone calls were charged by the second and modems were slow.  Every file came to represent an investment of time and money (metered calls, puny baudrates).  And for the most part the information was of an underground nature, I mean… why bother downloading information you could read in a magazine or an easily findable book?  HaXxor philes, all manner of New World Order conspiracy missives, drugs and magicks.

A small box of floppy disks filled with samizdat.  Replicated.  Traded in the schoolyard sneakernet, peer to peer.  One day, “they”, would find out what was going on and they’d take away our modems. And while that might sound quaintly naive with distance, back in 1994 many of the Italian BBSes were seized by armed police during the night (shortly after Berlusconi had come to power). Even without the net we might distribute them on disks, keeping them alive like the living books from Fahrenheit 451, so that the people of the future would know about… smoking banana peels or whatever.

Then a zmodem’d copy of KA9Q. The actual Internet.  Like watching the introduction of Australia’s first rabbits.

Crypto was one of the early worries.  In the early nineties anything above 40bit crypto was considered munitions by the US government.  When the PGP code was distributed via Usenet, it’s author Philip Zimmerman was considered akin to an arms smuggler and investigated and intimidated for several years, but not charged.  It was released in response to US government plans to ensure there was a government back-door into all available encryption systems, something that European governments (UK especially) were also pushing for in the mid 90s. That possible future hasn’t yet come to pass.  And while almost everyone employs some level of encryption every day they use the net, I still feel a little ashamed for using my PGP key so infrequently that I eventually forgot its pass-phrase. Most messages sit there, in plaintext, in the cloud. A secret subpoena away from being revealed.  Or a snarfed password.

We’d worry about the state security agencies using Echelon to read our digital traffic and automatically build profiles, but by 2009 we discovered private companies were doing the deep-packet inspection (and injection) to build advertising profiles.  Not too far removed from the recent activities of former Tunisian government, using DPI and injections to steal their citizen’s passwords and remove online advocacy resources.  More often than not, those resources existing primarily as a means of… compiling and selling profiles to advertisers.

And while some spook or hacker could always have been monitoring your traffic, by 2010 a simple browser plugin made it reasonable to assume that anyone in wifi-range was doing it.  We’ve just been riding the arc from “science fiction”, to “like something from science fiction”, to the everyday mundane. If, ten or fifteen years ago, you’d have suggested it wouldn’t surprise me to discover my mother’s PC had been hijacked by Russian botnet gangs, and used to hawk pharmaceuticals, I’d probably have found the idea of my mother owning a PC alone as implausible – the rest strictly-Gisbsonesque. (When evoking William Gibson implied the future rather than the observed present, of course.)

And then Egypt, which we’re all still unpacking. If nothing else, it’ll have enshrined the “Internet Kill-Switch” as bogeyman for generations to come. The US governments reaction to WikiLeaks, at the very least, removed a lot of the “it couldn’t happen here” assumptions that the internet was somehow beyond powerful influence.

It’s a shameful confession: governments messing with communication networks are more likely to get my attention than if they engage in a sustained campaign of violence, intimidation, and torture.  I’m not sure what this means.  Possibly, I’m a monster.

Prior to, well, last week my assumption would have been that sites and fixed locations on the net could be vulnerable, perhaps certain narrowly used protocols might be targeted.  But the entire network? The counter-argument to any theoretical state-ordered net shutdown in the US is obvious, the economic damage would be considerable. No country of a large enough size and aspiration could possibly risk such action.  Messing with the net is messing with the money.

That’s why it’s always felt stronger than whatever anarcho-pirate-darknet we might have ended up with.

Yet Douglas Rushkoff has been sounding disappointed, and somewhat exasperated, with how the internet’s turned out.

“From its Domain Name Servers to its IP addresses […]  its flawed, centralized architecture made it ripe for conquest.”  Its central brain apparently infected by a corporate parasite, some Toxoplasma Negotii, compelling it obey only the routing protocol of Mammon.

I’d strongly disagree with this characterisation “highly centralised”. The centralisation of the internet is represented (by ICANN/IANA) in agreed protocol standards and registries of delegated authorities (which are themselves further delegated).  There’s no centralised mechanism that dictates the path a packet travels across a building or across the world. It’s a network of interconnected networks.

There’s no single authority that claims authority to molest both a domain name under .cn and one under .ch, they’re separate authorities in different jurisdictions.  (And although gTLDs such as .org and .com have been assumed to operate under US legal jurisdiction for decades now, not a month goes by without some foreign entity expressing shock that this could be the case.)

That consolidation and market forces have placed much of the critical application infrastructure (Amazon, Google, et al) in the hands of companies either in the jurisdiction of (or at the economic mercy of) particular governments only reflects weakness (or, arguably, rationality) of the users, than the network itself.

Rushkoff goes as far as proposing we “abandon the Internet” and set up some kind of 21C Fidonet.  Presumably one in which the transmission method is free from government or corporate influence.  So not via the phone lines then. Or pretty much the entire electromagnetic spectrum (aside from those tolerated unlicensed but regulated, frequencies). I eagerly await Mr Ruskoff’s future suggestions in this matter.  Perhaps by somehow transmitting QWK files over the “morphogenetic field”?

(My theory is, on a long enough timeline, all writers covering tech eventually become Clifford Stoll.)

Which is not to say I don’t support moving internet tools toward more decentralised networks covered by more appropriate controls and jurisdictions.  There’s been plenty of fresh activity in that direction in the weeks since WikiLeaks got yanked off the net (first by a DoS attack and then by the remarkable power of suggestion exercised by US politicians).  Activists deploying modified routers and hacking on ad-hoc mesh routing algorithms.  Slap an 8-bit-pixel Jolly Roger sticker on it and secrete it in some urban loft.

I heart that stuff, really.  It triggers an endorphin release from my residual cyberpunk receptors.

But I’ll probably never use them myself, not “in anger”.  Networks are strengthened by network effects, so even tiny barriers to joining (compile this daemon, flash this device, etc) weaken potential. You end up needing recognised standards groups (or market dominance) to encourage adoption.  And activism or rugged grid-independence are not quite compelling use-cases for corporate product development.

It’s easy to recognise the point in which a technology reaches the point of mainstream acceptability, when it’s “good enough”. It’s the exact same point at which the geeks lose interest and move on to something else.

Most mesh networks in the future won’t be initiated by tinkering with laptop settings… it’ll be someone powering up a device in the office that’ll latch on whatever the nearest station is.  A printer perhaps, a random piece of Cisco, an HP thingum.  Likely all talking IEEE 802.11s with whatever the lowest-common-denominator routing is (HWMP).

You’ll barely notice the OS update.  The extra tab on your router’s web config.  Smart-phone vendors unworried by battery-life consumer experience will add another unread bullet-point to their feature lists.

You’ll buy cheap little things you plug into power outlets with no (or almost no) configuration or administration.  Just wi-fi network extenders pitching the use of the home office router connection with “the TV in the den”.  Unseen black boxes, devoid of interface, devoid of emotional connection.  A rapid path to becoming smaller, more efficient, cheaper… almost to the point of disposability.

Then one day adverts for garden wifi extenders are routinely seen in the back of the Sunday magazine supplement.  Cheap solar-powered mesh stations. Foot-long spikes topped with teacup-saucer photovoltaic cell, like those solar garden lights.  Picture network Johnny Appleseeds planting these things as they move around, geo-tagging as they go.

But starting with the network and waiting for the apps to follow seems like the wrong way to go about things. Post-Napster filesharing is already way ahead here.  In the conventional realm, ad-hoc tools exist for Zeroconf discovery (Bonjour chat in iChat, collaborative editing in SubEthaEdit).  Does that scale to something like a completely decentralised ad-hoc equivalent to Wikipedia? What does an ad-hoc Facebook look like? Plexus? Distributed timely local information and mapping for example.  Walking around with an iPhone, you may be 50m away from something, but unless you’ve got a strong data connection available, you can’t access the mapping information from some internationally-hosted server to check.

One of the main problems everyone’ll hit when attempting to marry an ad-hoc dynamic network structure with the Internet architecture is not necessarily with the hierarchical distribution of IP addresses of domain names, but the design decision that meant that IP addresses were used as both host identifiers and network locators.  Not a bad decision in the 70s/80s where nodes were fixed points, but became increasingly problematic the moment the likes of DHCP, NAT and wi-fi were thrown in the mix.

A simple use-case might be safely corporate.  An executive takes a critical video call (over IP) on her hand-held device as she’s leaving an office to catch a train.  She continues the call in the cab to the station, then in the station, and during the high-speed train journey to another country – at each appropriate point switching over to whatever IP network is available or most suitable.  Battery and bandwidth issues aside, this wouldn’t be possible under the conventional IP model.  Even though the hardware and user remain the same, the network-centric identity changes for each different network which means disconnecting and reconnecting each time – with attendant authentication issues.  Imagine a mobile phone system that needed to hang-up the call and redial every time you wandered between cells.

Letting the application layer keep track of network layer identifiers is a little broken.  But for the last few years engineers have been working on separating them.  The most promising solution seems to be HIP, the Host Identity Protocol.  (Not least, because it’s got adorable acronyms such as HICCUPS and HIP BONE.)  I’ve no expert knowledge, but this is what I’ve understood from skimming several RFCs.

Off the bat, the main downside is clear: it requires modifying the network stack of every end-point system that wants to use it (changes should be mostly invisible to the network infrastructure though) and any application for which network identifiers are specifically needed rather than host identifiers (e.g. networking tools).  Not a problem if you’ve got mature code, but unsupported systems would be out of the picture.  It’s not all-or-nothing though, if you need to connect to an unHIP host it’ll fall-back to the direct IP method.

HIP works by establishing a new layer in the stack between the Transport and IP layers.  The HIP host creates its own identifier by generating a cryptographic key and identifying .  If fact the host can have multiple identifiers and they can be as permanent or temporary as desired.  Because they’re mathematically created, rather than allocated from an administered pool, they’re effectively disposable.  A fingerprint is also generated from the identity, called a HIT, that’s cunningly formatted to look like an IPv6 address located in an unroutable address range.

So when a HIP-enabled host (mobile.example.org) wants to contact, say, a HIP-enabled server (static.example.com) the following takes place: the site attempts to resolve static.example.com to a HIP identity, e.g. by looking it up in DNS but checking for a “HIP” record type (falling back to the usual “AAAA” or “A” records for unHIP sites).  If an IP address isn’t available in DNS, the HIP record can be used to discover the IP addresses of the host’s “rendezvous” servers which are basically the HIP-equivalent of a DNS server, keeping communicators updated about which IP addresses to use. The client then makes a HIP connection request to the server that involves them cryptographically authenticating each other.  In the  application layer of the server, the originator of the request is not a real IP address, but rather the IPv6-like HIT (and the same on the client).  Any messages sent to a HIT address are caught at the HIP layer and specially encapsulated.

All seems a little complex to keep a long mobile video-call connected, but there are considerable benefits to widespread adoption.  Firstly, multi-homing – the same host identity reachable via multiple networks, something that’s only usually achievable at the ISP level. Right now it’s possible to maintain multiple network addresses on the same machine, but they’re essentially separate identities. But imagine a multiple device that could slide between preferring a fixed wifi address or 3G based on a drop in signal strength.

Also, simple access controls.  Given both sides need to authenticate each other, it’s possible to restrict access to specific HIT addresses since they’ll be the same regardless of which network is being connected from.  Essentially, it’s an ad-hoc VPN.  And, given both hosts HIP are mutually authenticated, there’s a secure channel for exchanging a session encryption key. So, by default, all communication is encrypted at the HIP layer rather than requiring all application-level protocols be amended.  Also, the handshake mechanism helps defend against certain classes of DoS attacks since forged packets can be identified and discarded more easily.

And, for everyone still claiming that peak-IPv4 is “just a theory”, there’s built-in NAT-traversal to allow servers to run from private ranges.

Mobile clients making use of rendezvous servers on relatively stable and reachable addresses mean that they still benefit from relatively fixed chunks of infrastructure to operate.  And also there’s still a place for DNS and the domain name allocation infrastructure (and their inherent problems) while the use of human understandable unique identifiers are considered useful.

However, since host IDs are (potentially) permanent, there shouldn’t be a problem with aggressively caching them at the client end.  In fact, the host identities themselves represent a decentralised, distributed, naming scheme that doesn’t require DNS to function.  For example, via distributed hash tables.

Fully crypto’d, allowing graceful transition between a variety of networks, based on decentralised and distributed addressing schemes. Isn’t that beginning to sound like the foundations of that new and better Internet we’d want to run to?

The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops. (@JPBarlow)

“Cut off a limb, and two more shall take its place!” came the cry from the members of Hydra, a high tech criminal organisation in Marvel comics, taking its name from Greek mythology. A union, following the Second World War, between evil Nazi scientists and mystical Japanese-nationalist ninjas. While real world America was concerned with the “commie” threat, Marvel’s heroes – god bless ‘em – were still fighting WW2.

And while it has been a mainstay of comics since the 60s, it probably won’t be until July next year (when the Captain America movie opens) that it’ll have much recognition with the public.  Anyone who has seen Iron Man 2 will already be familiar with “S.H.I.E.L.D” the spy agency set-up (in the comics) specifically to deal with Hydra. (Although that’s a history that’s become far more convoluted recently.)

The high profile of WikiLeaks has had me thinking a lot about Hydra recently.
Not just due to the super-villain aesthetics of their mountain hosting centre, but the references to frontman Julian Assange’s thoughts on breaking hidden lines of communications to weaken conspiracies, while at the same time being the face of a mysterious and mostly anonymous movement itself. The masked heroes of information freedom, what comic book fan could resist?

One particular Hydra storyline that came to mind was from 1993, the early days of net hype when the concept of “cyber-terrorists” seemed science-fictional, rather than some necessary policy agenda.

A shadowy group, operating on behalf of Hydra, hires computer hackers to in preparation for a series of supposed terrorists attacks on New York city.  These hackers are then killed in order that the true intention of the attacks remain unknown – to gain access a secret government technical facility. The seeds of their failure are sown when, after a federal government system is compromised, an action hero from another technological age to take a suspected hacker into custody.

It’s not until I recently re-read the 1993 6-part Daredevil comic series “Tree of Knowledge” that I could recognise the parallels to 2007′s “Die Hard 4.0“.  Although while, like the other pretend-terrorists of the Die Hard series, it was merely an electronic heist, Hydra’s goal was slightly different.

Rather than gain and exploit access to the world’s secrets, Von Strucker’s plan was to destroy the government’s ability to intercept communication, stop the “Clipper chip”, and promote the widespread use of strong cryptography. Rather, I imagine, like some parliamentary wing of the EFF.

Between the end of European Communism and 2001 Hollywood seemed unable to deal with political or ideologically motivated Western terrorists – lest the audience sympathise with the bad guy? Indeed the the real world the word terrorist itself has been so casually mis-applied by those in influence that’s, it’s almost taken on the status of a fnord.

We had the likes of Gruber from Die Hard, merely playing terrorist to cover a criminal heist.  Sophisticated conspiracies wielding political and commercial influence abound, but not as a means to anything more. The conspiracy only exists to perpetuate itself. The movie The Net featured the shadowy “Praetorians”, straddling commerce and government, but gave little indication of their motivations.  Its weak spin-off TV series merely presented them as criminal organisation, committing criminal acts to fund their criminal activities.  Reminiscent of those shrill warnings prefixed to videos claiming that video piracy funded the activities of drug dealers. (Giving the impression that the actual dealing was more of a hobby, a way to meet girls?)

Many might disagree with my assessment of Michael Bay’s “The Rock” as being one of the greatest action movies of all time, but you’ve got to at least credit it for being able to present an interesting motive for a terrorist action (in that case: to have the military recognise and pay reparations to the families of servicemen that died on illegal missions).

Hydra themselves usually seem to be motivated by some nebulous idea of power and wealth. The master plan in this case was basically promote crypto-anarchism; Watch as a culture of secrecy ends up tearing society apart; PROFIT! (The irony of a fictional Nazi describing weakened governments resorting to “Gestapo techniques” passes without comment.)

But it’s not so much the culture of secret keeping, but the act of revelation that’s been dominating the real world’s news for the last couple of weeks.

Rather than distributing via networks designed for clandestine action, such as TOR or Freenet, the tools of WikiLeaks are conventional… almost mundane.  Using high-profile commercial services such as Amazon, EveryDNS, Paypal and then demonstrating those services will roll over and actually, without court orders, enforce their impenetrable Terms and Services by the merest whisper from an unhappy government.  Perhaps, from a network perspective, the biggest exposure has been, not of governments themselves, but the independent organisations and mechanisms that cannot be entrusted with the defence of freedoms.

Which may, partly, be the point.

WikiLeaks then requested that individuals mirror their beleaguered website, that they set up remotely updatable website mirrors that allow remote updating rsync over ssh.  A class of open tools that are freely available to any website administrator.  The code of the street, as it were.

Cut off one server, and perhaps two more will spring up in its place. WikiLeaks is the proto-hydra, now.  I note with amusement that the Senator Joe Lieberman has suggested it be countered with a proposed “S.H.I.E.L.D Act” (or perhaps it was Senator Leiber?)

As Mark Pesce points out, we’ve been here before.  Putting Napster in the dock didn’t kill Peer-to-peer filesharing, it improved it.  Weak points were ironed out, attackable centralisation was finessed away. Strike it down, as the children’s fable goes, and it will become more powerful than you can imagine.

“Anyone can be the Batman” was the thesis presented in a couple of pieces on grinding.be recently.  But, like Anonymous adopting the V for Vendetta mask, the opportunity now is for your electronic self to become akin to the cannonfodder henchmen of Hydra.

You can debate the ethics of, say, the cable releases all you want. Impedance to traditional mechanisms of governance are of concern, not to the public, only governments themselves. And if they’re as brittle as are being claimed, perhaps now is the time to engineer something better. You can question if the world’s governments are capable of holding themselves accountable, or whether democracy really requires an informed electorate to do so. Personally, I’m conflicted… WikiLeaks doesn’t seem like a good thing, but then a world in which many deem it necessary doesn’t seem so great either. It’s a symptom of some collective failure, so no wonder it makes so many people uncomfortable.

Ultimately, arguing about whether it should be allowed doesn’t matter. Someone, even if it’s not you or anyone you know, will be willing to share – and you probably wouldn’t choose to live in a world where it was impossible to do so. WikiLeaks, or whatever takes its place, will become an unstoppable Hydra – merely needing the wilful participation of anonymous actors.

And don’t pretend that, super-villain politics aside, the idea of joining a secret cabal of scientists and ninjas doesn’t appeal.

#ImHYDRA

That which comes to pass is mostly invisible, we only really recognise flawed predictions.  The Back to the Future house of 2015 with a fax machine in every room.  In fact, any future in which normal people use payphones. Even in movies from the nineties when cell phones were, to a lesser extent, around you still see them. But this was an era where mobile telephony was a yuppie-marker. Stick a computer or a videocamera in a public booth and it’s shorthand for more widespread technological advancement.

I particularly love the circa-2032 phone booth from 1993′s Demolition Man which offers positive affirmations to its users (“you inspire joy-joy feelings in those around you”), video calls, electronic banking, and encyclopaedia services.  Services expected from a circa-2010 smartphone (and search for “affirmation” on the App Store if you don’t believe me).

(Not just movies and ads, of course. I love all those future-projection corporate videos from the 80s and 90s.  Almost all of them will feature, at some point, an architect at an airport needing to make some kind of last minute project adjustment.  I kind of imagine that we’re now living in a world designed for that specific demographic.)

But, in real life, the phone boxes have become invisible in terms of utility.  Billboards with a shape historically determined. Vestigial street-furniture. Bizarro morris columns.

Councils want them gone.  They’re considered “attractive to vandals” (rather than as vandalism lightning rods?) and “mainly used by criminals”.  (It’s probably not what they mean to imply but, yes, in 2010 anyone without a cellphone is morally suspect.) Market-research on behalf of a cell-phone company suggests that the majority of people expect phone boxes to disappear by 2020.  And the majority of those, despite not needing them, will be sad to see them go.

The recent loss of a cellphone reintroduced new visibility for me. Late, alone, walking the streets in search of a working phone box to call my own number.  I’d not actually needed to used one in, probably, a decade.  A 60p minimum call!  I would later hear the voicemail I’d left for anyone who happened to find my phone. “Hi, this is my phone, my name is Lee…” That was 60p.

But if we still have affection for the things, but little actual use, what would justify them hanging around on the street?  Dual use?  Boxes which incorporate both a phone and a cashpoint exist around London.  I remember walking past what was once a payphone location and seeing it had been replaced with a defib unit – yeah, there’s probably far more utility in defibrillation than fixed-telephony these days.

The current “Nike Grid” game utilises phone boxes as waypoints in a running game.  Participants “code in” by calling a freephone number from a designated box, run to another and call in again.  The time taken between the calls is used to determine the player’s score. I’ve heard it referred to as “Die Hard With a Vengeance, but without the logic puzzles”

Oddly now, having replaced my lost phone with a new iPhone, they’ve become more visible to me.  One of the not-completely-seamless experiences of using a smartphone at the moment appears to be in moving between cellular networks and public wifi. Smartphone contracts, in the UK at least, usually offer less than 1GB per month of data, but supplement that with access to public wifi networks such as BT OpenZone.  You end up mentally segregating usage based on location, anything small and texty via 3G, uploads and downloads via wifi.  So you look around for the likely hotspot locations.  Pubs, coffee shops, and, in many cases, phone boxes.

And so, despite owning a phone capable of video calling, restrictions on using Apple’s FaceTime over cellular networks mean that if I wanted to make a video call, whilst out and about, I’d end up looking around for a phone booth.

Future.

“Oh, I wonder what Phil’s watching?” Naturally, respectful patron that he undoubtedly is, Phil would have ceased internet activity for the duration of the actual film. If I’d asked, I’d need to wait a couple of hours for a reply.  So I inferred it.

The original twitter posing was location tagged.  Control-clicking the link took me to the google maps page for the location.  Click on “Search Nearby” and search for “cinema”.  It’s most likely the Renoir. Oddly, even though it has the listings and knows I’m searching for a cinema, Google doesn’t offer up a link to the current listings.  A cold search for “cinema renoir” will return this.  And based on the time of the tweet, he was almost certainly watching “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow“. (He was.)

I just wanted to document this for future reference.  Certainly not as some impressive moment of Holmesian deduction, or some dire warning about the leaking of personal information. Just as a moment of oddness.  That choosing to give away one piece of information publicly, allows accurate inference of other things. Something that has always been true, but for which a new dimension has been introduced.  And that I’m somehow relaxed about actions that, if they’d involved any actual effort on my part, might have seem a bit stalker-creepy.

We imagine it’s the supercomputers of the directed advertising industry feasting on our facts. Multi-moonshots of computing power dedicated to predicting the best time to pitch us car insurance.  But I wonder how the ease of inference affect us socially.

Will it be considered a sign of taste or sophistication in a Twitter-age to leave details unsaid, merely open to inference?  A geotagged remark about a fine meal, restaurant unnamed.  Will easy inference cause people to be less or more open with information, to pre-counter the inaccurate or unflattering.

And how long before these public inferences are already made for us?

And despite the assumption that “The Social Network” was going to be a character assassination of Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg, it’s not really his story at all.  He’s… New York.

I’d read a few pieces about the movie online beforehand.  This was Hollywood attacking the culture of the Internet. This was the withering behemoths enshrining their own views on Intellectual Property.  That didn’t seem to be the film I was watching at all.

Maybe if you recognise the movie’s world as some corruption of your own, then that’s all you see.  For the majority of viewers there’ll be no character in this movie that doesn’t both start and end the story with more success and privilege than the viewer. So I suspect most people will see something that, situation aside, is more like a really well-made episode of “Dallas”.  A struggle without underdogs.

For me, the key – the synecdoche – of the story, is in the tale that Sean Parker tells Zuckerberg about the founder of Victoria’s Secret. Guy starts a lingerie business, sells it for a considerably large amount of money, the business then goes on to be far more successful, guy commits suicide.  In the telling the cause-and-effect of the last part is implied, the complexity of reality removing metaphor’s sting.

It’s not about the achievement of success, or about the moral sacrifices made in its service.  It’s the unintuitive truth that success doesn’t obliviate the bitterness of feeling you’ve lost out.

Besides, I never smile for photos. It’s my teeth for a start. A childhood incident involving concrete and gravity took a little chip out of a maxillary central incisor. Never motivated to have it cosmetically modified, I always had a more plausible candidate for poor self image.  Ongoing, teeth neglected. Rough. An unaesthetic patina courtesy the many Doctors Pepper.

So it’s a choice between a dimpled smirk or, my own “Blue Steel”, the quizzical arched eyebrows.  It seems to say: Check me out world, I’ve raised my eyebrows in response to something, but what? The mundane action of amateur photography, perchance?

Camera conscious, my tendency is to lean out of the camera’s field of view. I enjoy the flickr collections in which my presence is represented by a hand or sleeve. A face obscured by a pint glass. Chilling out in the untaggable periphery of social documentation.

But, I’ve been thinking about these images. This static projection of self.

Right now I’m kidding myself that I’m going to try throwing my hat into the Internet dating ring again.  Current blocker is getting some up-to-date photos done that would be suitable for a profile.  It’s a semiotic sniping range. “Don’t wear a hat, you’ll be assumed balding.”  Head shot.

It’s odd that, in a culture now saturated by shutterbugging, I’m finding it so hard to conceive an image for myself.  It needs to be natural, uncontrived… yet completely scrubbed of unflattering or unintended meaning.

In describing “The Cult of Me” in a recent keynote Dr Aleks Krotoski describes the motivation to “create a first-person archive of an idealised ‘me’.”

I think one of the things that makes me feel like an Internets old person is how I tend to conflate the vanity/narcissism aspects of internet participation with the ability to control self-projection.  Still hanging on to the Western idea that individual’s identity originates from within, and that’s it’s our right and responsibility to control it.  Defiantly claiming the right to “final cut” on ourselves.  The apparent desire to be seen smiling in every picture.

And while a strong instinct for editorial control remains, a combination of information saturation and literacy make it seem increasingly impracticable. Surely, by now, everybody recognises the MySpace angles (or as the always-nsfw Encyclopedia Dramatica puts it: Internet Disease). “They’re the same face! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

The reference point here is Magibon.  A YouTube phenomena consisting of a wide-eyed girl doing precious little on camera. The prize of her internets fame was a trip to Japan and an appearance on live television.  Somebody else’s lighting. Somebody else’s angles. A horrifying loss of control revealing a, previously finessed, cosmetic dentistry “before” image.

Like the Royal family, well used to controlling and approving media appearances for decades, we’re all on the cusp of some “It’s a Royal Knockout”-style dignity watershed.

Maybe this “idealised” self, with enough sharing going on, just ends up shifting closer to how we actually are?  The non-fictional can never plausibly pass themselves off as paragons. Clay feet are expected in a wider culture where celebrity often begins with disgrace.

I’d rather you thought me a little slimmer than I am today.  A little smarter.  Funnier.  But, maybe vulnerable?  Maybe weak?  A slow tease of personality disorders.  A disarming.

Dr Krotoski’s own flickr set “where i work“ is itself an interesting example of abandoning the natural tendencies for self-portraiture.  Subject, I assume, to editorial discretion but apparently not vanity.  Harsh shots portraying the frankly haggard, easily subsumed by a greater, largely flattering, online corpus.  The unintuitive idea that a river of self can be directed as well as a stream.

It recalls a moment in January 2005 when a high-profile blogger, who’d been sharing everything online for the previous 10 years, uploaded a video of a (self described) breakdown. Ten minutes of tearfully questioning if internet intimacy conflicts with real intimacy. And then it was gone, the blogging, and an ongoing internet presence – a digital self – along with it.  Five years on, almost forgotten, I imagine it seems like just another everyday youtube drama, of wider value only in autotuned-meme potential. But at the time I remember it seeming powerful and significant. Youtube was itself still several weeks away from being created.

On a recent video call with my ex, my attention briefly drifts to my own image in the corner of the display.  Am I looking ok?  Should I adjust my head to a more flattering angle? This is, of course, insane. How could I hope to mediate my appearance to the person most familiar with my unconscious, let alone unguarded, self?

That self we’re projecting, it’s a self that cries. A self that wakes up looking rough. A self that gets ill.

A self that once had really bad acne.

Part of me is thankful that I’m old enough that my skin cleared up, to not have to be fretting about the introduction of high-definition video chat. And if so, now is the time to get over it. Sooner or later the cameras will cease to be switched off.

The 2004 movie “Freeze Frame” reflected some of the late-90s weirdness of continuous webcamming, of the JenniCam and Josh Harris experiments. It concerns a man, acquitted of murder, digitally records every moment of his life as an alibi against future accusations. All rooms cammed up and recording.  All travel accompanied by a prosthetic attachment pointing a camera at his face at all times. And then, when actually accused of a crime, he finds the relevant part of his archive had been removed. Damned by that not retrievable.

The social-sousveillance won’t be introduced to your life like some Steve Mann gargoyle stuff. Or even those Microsoft SenseCam lanyards. For a couple of years it’ll be that guy in the club with the oversized bluetooth headset.  Always recording, always archiving, always streaming. The accursed early adopter.

And, before you know it, it’s mundane – built into jewellery, or the video spectacles from “Mission: Impossible”.  The bandwidth and storage free or close to.  Subsidised by agreement to allow for corporate analysis, voice and facial recognition, indexing and sharing.  With benefits. That conversation you had?  Here’s a transcript.  That appointment you made? Calendared. That beer you liked?  Added to your online grocery favourites. A Shazam for life.

And, regardless of how you feel about it, you’ll have a recurring role in 150 searchable Dymaxian Chronofiles.  Not the idealised, finessed, edited you.  The you you.  What could possibly go wrong?

The history of the Facebook begins with Facemash, a deliberate drunken act of insensitivity intended to draw attention to student profile photos that Mark Zuckerberg considered “horrendous”. Recontextualising images and feeding, with the validation of the crowd, their non-consenting subject’s vanity or, as likely, insecurity.

Sometimes we find our place, beyond individual control, in a cult of mobile vulgus.