The Global Journal #17

Can Art Save Iran?

+ EXPOSING THE BIG DATA LIE + GUANTÁNAMO: THE ENDGAME?

+ WAITING FOR A PALESTINIAN GHANDI + THE DEATH OF HIGHER EDUCATION

#17

UNITED STATES $7.99, CANADA $7.99

« ,Q��WKH�JURXQGEUHDNLQJ�3LHUUH�-DTXHW�'UR]�HVWDEOLVKHG�*HQHYD·V�ÀUVW�HYHU�ZDWFKPDNLQJ�IDFWRU\��»

Grande Seconde Quantième, ref. J007030242Applied dial and ring silvery white. Stainless steel case.Pointer-type date at 6 o’clock. Power reserve 68 hours.WWW.JAQUET-DROZ.COM

JD_Corp_The_Global_Journal_September2012_CH.indd 1 06.08.2012 16:57:19

L ast year in Geneva during GLOBAL+5, our inaugural festival of global governance, David Held – a seasoned academic versed in the topic and born to be a member of

our jury – was very much preoccupied. As we walked together into the grand ball room at the Four Seasons hotel, where in the early 1920s ambassadors would meet to socialize and dance between daily meetings to build the fi rst global political entity, Held and I discussed the fact President Woodrow Wilson never received support from Congress for the United States (US) to become a member of the utopian Société des Nations.

This paradox is still part of the US vision today, in everything that touches on the broad sweep of issues constituting global politics. It is a yes-and-no position, which ends with a ‘no’ in most cases – from the law of the sea to climate change, reform of the International Monetary Fund and that too long list with which we are all familiar. Since the fi rst edition of GLOBAL+5, Held has co-written a book with two American academic colleagues about the state of contemporary global governance. Its title? Gridlock. Calling for a far more multi-disciplinary approach in the analysis of global issues, the authors wish to see vastly improved effi ciency in collective decision making at a crucial moment in our history.

Though I agree deeply with their call for a more holistic approach to global politics, something seems to be missing. The future is calling across many issues and the answers from our leaders have been found wanting. A vacuum like this cannot last. Voices will soon be heard, however, as always. One just might be Jaron Lanier’s. In the 1980s, Lanier was a leading mind driving us all into virtual reality. Now, this former digital idealist claims free content is bad for everyone, citizens and corporations alike. Today, apart from being a “technologist,” a serial entrepreneur and an employee at one of the largest US tech fi rms, Lanier is among the few thinkers one should pay attention to in order to learn why we are heading in the wrong direction when it comes to the digital world. Lanier’s new book Who Owns The Future? is THE book younger and elder generations should read together.

Amusingly, the question sounds familiar – uncertainty over “who owns the Internet?” has been haunting us for the last decade, since the US government and companies such as Google took it over. Lanier’s point is all about one word: “value.” Lost value, not added value, as the giants of the Internet are milking the value out of people while ultimately shrinking markets. “It’s a hard lesson to learn,” says Lanier. “As an idealist, I supported an open system for a lot of people to access information, but when a few businesses have the largest computers, it’s an ideal business proposition where these few actors demonetize the position of lots of people. It’s a non-sustainable solution.” The idea of the ‘for-free’ is indeed unsustainable. It has always been a pain for an editor like me – fi ghting to maintain an independent media voice and platform – to listen to the former Editor in Chief of Wired being paid a fortune to explain to others that ‘free’ was the big way to make money. That was certainly the case when he would tour the world being paid to say so. Today, as Chris Anderson is no longer a salaried staffer at Wired, he advocates for the 3D-printing revolution instead – obviously not a free-3D. Contrary to what one might think about politics at the global level, it will soon become the true business of many citizens and voters, as any real ability to change the world will always lie fi rst with us. This issue is full of fresh views and new faces – do not miss those from Iran, Indonesia and Switzerland – as we keep covering global politics for our responsible readers.

Jean-Christophe NothiasEditor in Chief

3

THEGLOBALJOURNAL.NET

EDITORIAL

Beyond Gridlock.

CONTENTS

4

THE GLOBAL JOURNAL + MAY & JUNE 2013

10 GLOBAL VOICES: Jaron Lanier

16 GLOBAL VOICES: Julia Bacha

21 OPEN VOICES: Guantanamo: The Endgame?

24 SHORT ESSAY: Moral Machines And The Future Of Warfare

32 FEATURE: The Art Of Subversion

42 FEATURE: Are We Killing Higher Education?

52 FEATURE: The Meteoric Rise Of Joko Widodo

60 PHOTO ESSAY: Field Of Dreams

74 THE GLOBAL REVIEW

82 FIVE QUESTIONS: Taha Bawa

CONTENTS

21

42

24

52

32

60

COVER IMAGE © NEWSHA TAVAKOLIAN

5


FEATURE

Climate change represents one of the majorglobal challenges of our time. That’s whyBayer wants to act to reduce its “climatefootprint”, a symbolic expression of thenegative impact of human actions on theenvironment.

Through the Bayer Climate Program thecompany is driving forward its activities toprotect the climate and respond to climatechange. The Bayer Climate Check, for exam-ple, is a new tool for reducing CO2 emissionsin production processes.

With the aid of modern biotechnology weare increasing the stress tolerance of cropstowards heat and drought, giving agriculturea chance to overcome the consequences ofclimate change.

To reduce energy consumption in officesand industrial buildings we have cooperatedwith partners to develop the “EcoCommercialBuilding”. Based on highly efficient polyure-thane insulation and regenerative energies it can meet its own energy needs – a globalconcept for zero-emission buildings that canbe implemented in various world climatezones. www.climate.bayer.com

Protecting the ClimateConserving Resources

Science For A Better Life

Climate_Footprint_200x274,64.qxd 18.06.2010 16:18 Uhr Seite 1

6


CONTRIBUTORS

ANTOINE HARARI

OMAR FARAH

CHRISTOPHER COKER

SARA SCHONHARDT

MICHAEL HANSON

THOMAS EPITAUX-FALLOT

Antoine Harari is a freelance journalist based in Geneva. A graduate of the University of Geneva, School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and the University of Neuchâtel, he has longstanding interests in sport, cinema and the political economy of culture industries. A keen traveller with an abiding passion for new experiences, he has directed and produced several short fi lms and co-hosts a weekly radio show, Sportakus, on Fréquence Banane.

Previously involved in international commercial arbitration, Omar Farah is a staff attorney in the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. Since 2008, he has represented prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay in habeas corpus litigation, while also focusing on a range of litigation and advocacy in response to abusive counter-terrorism practices. He is a graduate of Columbia University and the Georgetown University Law Center.

Christopher Coker is a Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics specializing in the nature of war. His most recent book, Warrior Geeks: How Technology is Changing the Way We Fight and Think About War, was published in February by Hurst & Co. He is a twice-serving member of the Council of the Royal United Services Institute, a former NATO Fellow and a regular lecturer at defence colleges in Europe, North America and Asia.

Sara Schonhardt is a freelance journalist based in Jakarta, where she has been reporting for the International Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor and other media for the past three years. Her stories have addressed a range of issues, from violence against minorities to the cultural infl uence of a growing middle class. Prior to moving to Indonesia, she lived in and reported from Thailand and Cambodia. She is a graduate of Ohio University and Columbia University.

A former professional baseball player, Michael Hanson is a Seattle-based travel and documentary photographer. He was recently named a PDN30 ‘New and Emerging Photographer’ and celebrated by spending a month in a canoe covering 500 miles for a documentary project in his native southern United States. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Outside Magazine, Monocle and National Geographic Traveller, as well as by Patagonia and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Thomas Epitaux-Fallot is a Lausanne-based freelance journalist specializing in migration, economic liberalization, nationalism and the rise of religious extremism. A graduate of the University of Neuchâtel, he has worked regularly for the regional section of the Swiss newspaper 24h and co-hosts a weekly radio show, Sportakus, dedicated to serious and not-so-serious discussions of the sporting world. With a longstanding passion for reportage, he has travelled extensively throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

CONTRIBUTORS

THE GLOBAL JOURNAL

Editor in Chief: Jean-Christophe NothiasDeputy Editor: Alexis KalagasDigital Editor: Nicoletta ZappileArt Director: Dimitri KalagasPhotographers: Rita Scaglia, Pascal Dolémieux SEO Manager: Florian BessonnatWebmaster: Moowax

Journalists & Contributors: Selin Bucak, Martina Castro, Christopher Coker, Kristina Collins, Paolo Cravero, Thomas Epitaux-Fallot, Omar Farah, Caitlin Hannahan, Michael Hanson, Antoine Harari, Julie Mandoyan, Alphée Lacroix-September, Sara Schonhardt, Lee-Roy Shetty

Thanks: Raphael Briner, Lars Borg, Bernd Breckner Van Damme, Valérie Fougeirol, Erich Inciyan, Harri Ihring, Martine Lamuniére, Pascale Lemoigne, Axel Moulin, Valérie de Palma Vincienne, Richard Pottecher, Jo Guldi, Thierry Soussi, Philippe Vignon, Ernest & the Nothias Family Offi ce

Advertising & Partnership: Sabrina Galante, +41 78 849 9089

Distribution (US & Canada): CIRC ONE/WRS Thomas Smith, +1 917 226 9754

Distribution (Rest of the World): Export Press, Jean-Marie Eyquem, Alain Lecour, +33 140 291 451

The Global Journal is published by Société des Fondateurs de The Global Journal SA, Geneva, Switzerland.

Palais des NationsAvenue de la Paix 8-141211 Geneva 10SWITZERLAND

Phone: +41 22 917 1297

www.theglobaljournal.net

Printer: Fry Communications, Mechanicsburg, US

Rue Adolphe Tschumi 61201 Geneva SWITZERLAND

The Top 100 NGOs

2013.

+ THE POST-DISASTER DISASTER IN HAITI+ REDISCOVERING IRAN

+ THE FUTURE OF PHILANTHROPY+ A RESILIENT DICTATORSHIP IN BELARUS

SPECIAL EDITION#15

SWITZ

ERLA

ND 15

CHF,

FRAN

CE, B

ELGI

UM, L

UXEM

BOUR

G 10!

, UNI

TED K

INGD

OM £9

10


GLOBAL VOICES

Exposing The Big Data Lie.

JARON LANIERTECHNOLOGIST

BY ALEXIS KALAGAS

Computer scientist, inventor, philosopher, composer and Microsoft “scholar-at-large,” Jaron Lanier has spent his career pushing the transformative power of modern technology, from coining the term ‘virtual reality’ to developing cutting edge medical imaging techniques. In his latest book, Who Owns The Future?, Lanier argues today’s information economy is the product of a dangerously flawed digital revolution, which if left unchecked will further concentrate wealth while washing away financial security for the masses at the heart of the ‘big data’ lie.

© JONATHAN SPRAGUE/REDUX

You introduce yourself as a “technologist” – what does this mean?

In a funny way, it might be more of a negative than affirmative designation, in the sense I’m a computer scientist, I’m an inventor perhaps – I am and have been called various things. What I’m trying to make clear is I’m not claiming to be a historian, economist, nor philosopher. Each of those fields includes people writing about topics that overlap my concerns, but doing it in very different ways. For instance, a world of Internet critics exists these days saying some things that are similar to what I’m saying. But I’m not really like them in that I’m dedicated to building technologies that improve the world. I place a higher value on actually working on technology than talking about it, though I think talking about it is important too.

I also do not make a great deal of effort to be inclusive in citing the canon of philosophers. Nor am I attempting to adhere to the rigor of historians or really work within the framework of economics, even though I overlap quite a bit with that in the book. I’m basically somebody who builds things, who is trying to build things better and persuade other people about what it means to build things better, rather than being a critic or scholar at a distance. It puts me in an odd position at times, in that some of the people who are interested in the criticism side occasionally want me to be tougher or more critical than I actually am. I’m in this intermediate place where I cannot necessarily please everybody in the ways they are used to being pleased, but I’m trying to be true to myself.

The notion at the heart of your book is that large-scale digital networking is enriching a few while moving the value created by many “off the books” – can you elaborate a little?

There are many different ways to approach this idea – I can follow maybe a dozen different paths to the same endpoint. But going back to the 19th century and even earlier, there was considerable anxiety that better technology would start pushing people out of work due to automation. The

reason this never happened is because the premise turned out to be untrue – new types of technology actually required better-trained workers, for the most part. That was happy news. A very strange sequence of events then occurred, however, in computer science.

In the mid-20th century, hope grew of building a standalone intelligent machine that could be genuinely automatic. But that hope remained unfulfilled. It was not possible to simply write a program that understood how to talk to people. Instead, this other idea turned out to work, which was called ‘big data.’ That is, where you gather a ton of information from a very large number of people and rehash it in order to generate machine behavior. So instead of a machine being truly autonomous, it is dependent on what real people do in very large numbers. The problem is the fantasy of the autonomous machine did not die, even though the technology associated with the fantasy did – or at least proved to be unfeasible.

We have ended up in a very strange situation where there is a continuation of what has always saved us from unemployment – new technology requires new types of human input. But what is new is that we still have this fantasy of autonomous machines. The combination of that fantasy with the way big data actually works generates the kind of gradual onset of unemployment that was feared in the 19th century. We have brought back an old problem that was previously put to rest. The pattern of unemployment is something with which we have become familiar. At first there is a hollowing out where only very highly skilled jobs and low-level, insecure jobs remain, while

wealth accumulates around whomever is channeling big data. As the technology improves, those who benefit begin to become more and more specialized and rarefied. It is a pattern we can absolutely avoid because it is not demanded at all by the technology – it is purely a result of a stupid fantasy that does not exist.

Big data is increasingly being heralded as the next frontier of innovation, but in the book you critique the “cheap illusion” of free information.

Well, the illusion is that there is some sort of intelligence online – some sort of intelligent algorithm that can choose who the right person is for you to date or who deserves to get a loan. It is not real. It is an illusion because machine autonomy does not exist, as I just pointed out. It is a rehashing of real people, and the illusion is only brought about because those people are not paid. Machine intelligence is really just a form of accounting fraud, if you want to put it very starkly. It is a little bit like the Wizard of Oz, where there is this illusion of great intelligence, or great power, but behind the curtain are the people who have control of and run the biggest computers on the network. Those individuals are in the position of a casino owner – they do not need to manipulate people directly, but can run a game that is rigged in their favor, almost without even meaning to.

If we decide information is free in order to support the illusion that machines can be intelligent, then we also create a very bizarre situation where whoever owns the largest and best-connected computers automatically become the richest and most powerful people in the system. Let’s suppose you had a bunch of people wanting to create a socialist utopia – and of course, this is something that has actually happened many times throughout history. You could say all people are created equal and they should all share. However, if some of those people have larger and better- connected computers than everyone else and everybody is sharing information freely, then as a matter of course – regardless of what their intent is – those people will become a ruling class, and an extremely privileged one.

‘Machine intelligence is really just a form of accounting fraud, if you want to put it very starkly.’

11


GLOBAL VOICES

12


GLOBAL VOICES

The only way to prevent that new kind of plutocracy would be to put a cost on information, so that it is not free. This is an uncomfortable conclusion to come to, because of course the popular idea – it is really orthodoxy at this point – is that information should be free and that is the path to real democracy. But in fact, even though people might be created equal, computers are not. Unless everyone is guaranteed to have exactly the same level of computer and the same level of access to other

peoples’ computers, then if you make information free whoever has the best computer will become a plutocrat.

You describe these kinds of computers as “siren servers” – what is the term meant to signify?

In a weird way, I’m talking about a problem without villains. In fact, because this happens regardless of the intention of the person or company with the best computer, it is something new in the world. It is a strange situation because usually problems are associated with intent. That is why I call it a “siren server” – the problem is that we are fooled. Perfectly reasonable people can be drawn into a system that is not good for them, because there is an initial treat that flows in both directions. If you are one of the people with the biggest

computer, the treat is that you can become incredibly powerful almost as if by magic. If you are someone who is just a user, you initially receive something for free – this might be in the form of an extremely easy to get mortgage, or of free services like social networking. But what is really going on when you are offered something for free is you are giving someone else your data and they will eventually grow rich at your expense.

My idea of a humanistic computing path is to acknowledge that you cannot have computing without humans, and that to imagine information or computing as some freestanding thing is a fake – there is no such thing. If we could just admit it is impossible to have computation and computers without people, that only people create the value, then we

‘Even though people might be created equal, computers are not.’

© MIKE SPRINGER

13


GLOBAL VOICES

might have a better chance at creating an economy that is not based on the financial fraud of denying the value of those people.

What is fascinating in your account is this notion of a progressive spread of “software mediation” across sectors we do not normally associate with big data.

The basic idea is that in all areas of human activity where people are currently paid to perform a job, you can imagine a way in which technology could perform that task in the future. It used to be we would say, “well, that won’t happen because a computer won’t be able to drive a car, or read and translate a text.” But while it is still true that computers cannot do those things, big data can. In other words, if you create a collage of what ordinary people have done using big data, then you can actually create the illusion computers are doing the things we used to think they could not do. The list is totally comprehensive. Every profession is vulnerable to the effect.

One example I discuss in the book is surgery – the potential for surgeons to be replaced by medical robots. These robots would not be intelligent in a freestanding sense, but instead would be able to create a collage of what surgeons have done in the past in order to further the illusion of autonomy. I call that “software-mediation” because while there is this illusion a computer is doing something people used to do, what is really happening is that software is gathering what people do in order to create a mash-up or collage of behavior that looks like it came from a computer. Software-mediation is just the creation of that illusion – applied to some kind of machine behavior that then concentrates wealth and power. It can be in a lot of different ways. It might be that people do not receive credit for what they have done. On a broader level, benefits are more narrowly applied than they used to be.

In the book, you suggest that unless something changes, companies like Google might eventually become an ouroboros – a snake that eats its own tail.

Right now, Google makes its money by selling what is called ‘advertising.’ I do not like that term for what Google does, because I believe it is really micromanagement of the options in front of people. It is more like a form of social engineering or behavior modification. But whatever we are going to call it, it is paid for by people who are actually selling something. Now the problem is that eventually for all those people who are selling something that is not a siren server, that product or service itself will become software-mediated. As the process continues, everyone who would normally constitute Google’s market will fade away because they themselves have become software-mediated through the process Google has been furthering. In effect, Google is undermining its own customer base.

You have also dismissed the idea of an open Internet as an “obsolete vision” – what are your thoughts on the current debate over the future of Internet governance?

Well in book my I’m really looking ahead decades from now. The whole idea of regulation of the Internet as it exists today is a bit small in scope compared to what I’m talking about. At the same time, the idea of an open Internet is a big lie. The reason is that access to information with vastly different computer resources is not a level playing field. So if you are saying, “oh, I have access to information on the Internet and so does the National Intelligence Agency, so do Google and Facebook with their giant servers located all over the world and so do the financial interests that analyze our data,” that is not equality at all. The idea of openness when people have access to different computer resources

is a huge fake and a giant disservice. It is a common, universal, almost orthodox mistake. It is a little like saying everyone has access to money so any possible economy using money must be fair. You have to take into account computer resources and connectivity, not just whether information is accessible and circulates. The notion of open information completely misses the point.

To rectify the illusion of big data and acknowledge where the value in the current system is created, you propose a “micro-payment” scheme – how would this work?

The original concept of digital networking – first articulated in 1960 – was one that included an economic angle. This was Ted Nelson’s early work. If you think computing and the very concept of information cannot exist without people, and if you want to have computing or the idea of information exist within a capitalist system, then to acknowledge those people you have to treat money as having value. What that suggests is having payments flowing between people on a constant basis. The original term used was “micro-payment,” although really, it would be in very small amounts – “nano-payments.” What that would result in is a world where capitalism is much more symmetrical than what we are used to. We are used to earning money in big chunks through salary checks, but spending money in dribs and drabs. In the future – at least a more advanced form of capitalism – you could also earn money in dribs and drabs. It would be a more symmetrical system.

Essentially, if information exists that turns into value, and that information would not have existed if you did not exist, then you would receive some payment proportional to the value created. You would always be earning little sums of money based on information value you brought into the world. For example, if you provided a translated phrase that was mashed up into an effective translation by a Google or Microsoft automatic translator, you would actually get a small payment, because you provided reused value. There would be giant networks of attribution. It would not be perfectly fair, but it would create a lot of small

‘The idea of openness when people have access to different computer resources is a huge fake and a giant disservice.’

14


GLOBAL VOICES

payments flowing to a lot of different people. In an advanced economy, we could actually have a middle class. That is crucial, because if we keep on doing things the way we are, with those who route the data amassing all the money and power, advanced technology runs counter to the interests of the middle class. It would mean the end of a middle class. What I mean by ‘middle class’ is a society where the mass of ordinary people can outspend the elite.

In a way, this brings to mind the shift from the iTunes to Spotify model of music distribution, where downloadable files susceptible to piracy are replaced by a system of micro-royalties.

It’s funny, because a friend of mine started Spotify and he himself was complaining that his girlfriend’s music career did not seem to be remunerative. It is all kind of comic to me. Spotify definitely concentrates benefits to whoever owns the biggest computer, and removes benefits and opportunities from those people who are really contributing the value. I’m very open-minded about where value comes from, and in the system I’m proposing, it is not just the musicians – that is, some designated class of creators – but instead everybody. It might be someone who is good at editing playlists, or someone who is good at promoting musicians, or styling them or blogging about them. It is whoever is providing value in the way documented in the network of dependencies online. Even something like Spotify is an enemy of the

middle class and creates more wealth concentration. In a European context, actually, the right way to understand this is that it creates austerity.

You have been described as a “spy who came in from the cold” due to your criticisms of a world you are also part of – do you think this accurately reflects your position?

Well you have to understand that from my perspective there has been no change whatsoever – it is incredibly simple. The ideas I’m opposed to now I helped invent at one time in the spirit of experiment and testing. In my view, it was an experiment that failed, so now I’m moving on to other ideas. It is all part of the same process. The only difference is some other people have begun to treat what used to be part of an open-minded experimental exploration as orthodoxy. They are the ones who have become close-minded, not me. I do not view what I’m doing now as being any different from what I was doing before. Once upon a time, the ideas I’m now criticizing seemed very fresh and experimental – and indeed they were. The problem is not that they were badly intended, the problem is when we had the chance to test them they just did not work out well.

It is not something anyone foresaw. So in my view, I’m just continuing with what I have always done. I find that in my world, the other people who were part of that original process and believe in thinking broadly, being experimental and accepting results, are very open to what I’m saying. It is not really me versus my community. It is not me turning back on anything. It is really a question of whether it is possible to have better ideas, or whether the old ideas of 25 years ago are the best that will ever exist and we’re now committed to them forever and ever and ever. I believe they are not the best that will ever exist. They have been proven to be problematic and the same spirit that generated these ideas back then should be applied to generate better ideas now.

And how optimistic are you that the kinds of change you envision can actually be achieved?

Remember I’m talking about decades into the future. If you were to ask me how optimistic I am that this could happen in the near term I would say: in five years, no; in ten years, probably not; in 20 years, maybe; and in 30 years, absolutely. The alternative would be disastrous. If we are talking about decades from now, either I’m totally wrong – which is of course possible – or if I’m right, then it is not a matter of optimism, but a matter of a necessary transition. We can keep going as we are for a period of time for the simple reason that technology is not advanced enough for the process of software-mediation to kill things – but it is already big enough to restrict economic growth and create other damaging phenomena.

As time progresses, the situation will become worse and worse – it will not be a matter of if, but when. So in the long term, I’m actually very optimistic. Let me put it another way. Some people have described the book as being scary or alarmist. I do not see it that way at all. There are far worse problems in the world – climate change, how to get food and water to the population when it peaks later this century and global geo-political issues. This is about economics in the developed world more than the developing world. It relates to a problem I think we will solve. I’m just pointing out what I think will be required to solve it.

WHO OWNS THE FUTURE?JARON LANIERALLEN LANE£20.00

‘The ideas I’m opposed to now I helped invent at one time in the spirit of experiment and testing. In my view, it was an experiment that failed.’

16


GLOBAL VOICES

The Illusion Of A ‘Palestinian Ghandi’.

JULIA BACHAMEDIA STRATEGIST AND DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER AT JUST VISION

BY CAITLIN HANNAHAN

An award-winning documentary filmmaker, Julia Bacha has focused on the media’s role in perpetuating violent conflict, advocating for the “power of attention” in changing the world for the better. Her philosophy is at the core of the work of Just Vision, an organization using documentaries as public education tools to embolden overlooked non-violent movements in Israel and Palestine. Placing power in the hands of the audience, Bacha is convinced in a society inundated by imagery, personal choices can and do matter.

© JUST VISION

17


GLOBAL VOICES

What got you started as a filmmaker in the first place?

I became a documentary filmmaker largely by accident. I had studied Middle Eastern history and politics at Columbia University in New York City, and upon graduation I wanted to continue my studies at Tehran University in Iran. But at the time, it was 2003 and the United States (US) was invading Iraq. Getting my visa was very complicated. So I was actually advised to go to an Arab country – since I was Brazilian and not American I would be able to get my visa. That is when I was put in touch with an Egyptian documentary filmmaker who needed an intern with experience in Middle Eastern history to help her with a film she was making about the war in Iraq. In particular, Al Jazeera’s coverage of the war.

Originally, I was only going to help for two weeks before starting my academic studies in Iran. Yet, when I landed in Egypt and started looking at all the footage she had of coverage inside Iraq and at central command – which was used as the US media headquarters during the war – I fell completely in love with the project and ended up co-writing and editing a documentary film called Control Room. That experience and the success of the film in the US really opened my eyes to the power of documentary making – not only as a creative outlet, but also the capacity of film to reach a much larger audience. I became hooked.

Aside from your broader academic specialization in the region, what led to your current interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict in particular?

After Control Room came out, an Israeli human rights activist, Ronit Avni, contacted me to join her in Jerusalem to make a documentary film about Palestinian and Israeli citizens who were working together for peace. Initially, I was not excited about the idea – during college I had been very reluctant to become involved in projects related to Israel and Palestine because I felt that too much attention was being devoted to the conflict as opposed to other issues in the world. Ronit talked me into it, however, by convincing me that

I could work on one film and move on. But when I arrived there I realized that the problem was not that too much attention was being paid to the conflict, but rather that too much attention was being paid to the wrong parts of the conflict.

When I got there, I realized there were these amazing individuals on the ground – Palestinians and Israelis – who were taking courageous action, yet were completely invisible to the international community. And I grasped that these people were the keys to unlocking the conflict and just needed the boost that non-violent activism requires through international attention to actually reach critical mass and change the conflict on the ground. I became very supportive of their efforts – to make their work more visible, valuable and effective across the world.

Your documentary Budrus depicts a non-violent movement in the West Bank – why did you want to tell this particular story?

Budrus is a village in the West Bank and like many other communities in the early 2000s, its residents had begun to experience the confiscation of their land for the construction of a barrier. Yet unlike many other communities in the West Bank at that time, they decided to resist non-violently. That story was so powerful to those who had experienced it. But the vast majority of the rest of the world – and certainly those in Gaza and East Jerusalem – were completely oblivious to this example of non-violence. I felt this was the perfect opportunity to challenge one of the greatest myths in the international community and Israeli society today – namely, that Palestinians are unaware of non-violent resistance. I wanted to use the story of Budrus to break that narrative. I wanted to convince the Palestinians themselves that non-violence worked. Historical experiences, particularly around the first Intifada, suggested to Palestinians that non-violence tactics didn’t work. I wanted to break this cycle by highlighting a local non-violent movement that succeeded in its goals.

Budrus was just such a movement. Residents of the village were going to lose 40 percent of their land and be

surrounded. This meant the population was going to have to leave the place where their families had lived for generations, just so they could remain connected to the rest of the West Bank and have access to hospitals, schools and work. They managed through non-violent resistance to hold on to 95 percent of their territory – instead of losing 40 percent, they only lost five percent. As a community they are still living under occupation, so by no means has their condition become the sort of life they want to live, but they have achieved the preservation of their community. Furthermore, they have been an inspiration to communities across the rest of the West Bank.

From your perspective, why do non-violent protests in Israel and Palestine receive so little press coverage?

I think there are two main problems here. One is the problem of narrative frameworks. For decades now, there has been this overarching media narrative that treats all conflict explicitly through a violent lens. If there is a violent incident, it gets media coverage. In the Israeli press, Palestinians are responsible for perpetrating most of the violent incidents. In the Arab press, the Israeli side perpetrates most of the violent incidents. But regardless, both sides have this prism through which the only events that are newsworthy are episodes of violence. There has been very little attention devoted to the activism happening using non-violent strategies. And that is obviously not exclusive to Israel and Palestine, but rather a trend in many conflict zones and indeed our media in general.

An American journalist, David Bornstein, has come up with the expression “information malpractice.” I really like this term. Information malpractice means that journalists today are interested exclusively in documenting and covering extensively all of the tragedies of the world. They refuse to understand that responsible journalism means covering the world as it is, not covering the world as it is horrible. There is a belief that those who report on non-violent movements are somehow involved in ‘good journalism’ or ‘peace journalism’ rather than complete journalism. And this is

18


GLOBAL VOICES

what I think is missing. So we try to get journalists to look at those communities and realize these places are not irrelevant.

If you look, for instance, at historical trends in Israel and Palestine, most of the groups in power today were grassroots movements once considered to be absolutely irrelevant. Zionism, for a very long time, was a movement in Eastern Europe. Eventually it gained a lot of traction, and today it is essentially the mainstay of the existence of Israel. A group like Hamas was very irrelevant for a very long time and actually propped up by Israel because it was seen as harmless. Indeed, it was a tactical movement on the part of the Israeli government to control the power of the Palestine Liberation Organization at that time. Now you can see the position of power that Hamas enjoys. Similarly, you can think of the settler movement, which in the past was not a powerful force in society, but today is one of the most influential.

Those groups started out as grassroots movements and then over time gained the power they enjoy today. Obviously those are bad examples that I’m citing, because the conflict has, unfortunately, taken a pretty bad turn. But you can apply this same idea to

positive examples as well. The feminist movement, for instance, appeared quite irrelevant in the beginning. But today, it has made one of the most significant strides in the past century. So I believe very much that this conflict – like every other conflict in history – will be solved by people. After all, it was caused by people. It is the responsibility of people within both societies to help identify the individuals who are working constructively for change.

And how can media organizations change the way they operate to assist in improving the situation?

When I address journalists, I do not ask them for help, because journalists don’t like to feel that they are helping anyone. They see themselves as objective reporters on a situation. So my focus with journalists is to show them how biased, incomplete and irresponsible their coverage has been in the context of their own journalistic standards. I tell them about what happened in various villages in the West Bank – villages that for a long time, up until very recently, were practically invisible in media coverage. They received almost no attention. Yet now, in large part because of the work of Just Vision, these areas are gaining more visibility.

At the same time, the changing nature of journalism is exacerbating the problem. Investigative journalism is practically a dead practice in the US. You have to get non-profits these days to be funding that type of work. The practice of having foreign bureaus has gone down dramatically. As news corporations’ budgets are slashed, the first ones to lose their jobs are the foreign reporters. It used to be that networks like CNN, NBC and CBS had huge bureaus in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Today, they rely largely on freelance reporters. All those shifts have contributed to a problem that was already a pattern – that is, failing to ask civil society what is really going on. We tell journalists there is a lot happening that is not making the front pages – but these things are still newsworthy events. The New York Times, for instance, devoted front-page coverage to the village of Nabi Saleh, and it was an extraordinary piece. To do it, we worked with a group of journalists, and the result expanded the definition of what is news in the Israeli and Palestinian context.

What is your personal position in terms of successful non-violent change in the region?

© JAMES DUNCAN DAVIDSON/TED

19


GLOBAL VOICES

I believe negotiations will eventually need to take place between political parties, but for negotiations to be effective you need a more level playing field. Israel has an enormous amount of power, so when the government enters into negotiations, it has very little incentive to compromise. This means that Palestinians need to find a strategy to enhance their bargaining power, so that whatever is negotiated is something both populations can actually live with in the long term. I believe, through historical examples, that the best way to do that is through a non-violent grassroots movement.

You see the beginnings of this in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Many communities today figured out how to use civil disobedience strategies, and achieve that through necessary critical mass. So these movements need to grow, and that is where I believe the international community can have a big role to play – that is to say, the international community holds the keys to supporting the people on the ground so the leaders of these communities can tell their communities “we are effective.” Non-violent resistance is finally entering mainstream media coverage. It is attracting the attention of the international community, and will be an effective means of building pressure to end the occupation.

That is the dynamic here. The international media has very symbiotic relationships with the grassroots movements, and media will always be responsible to the market. The market is us, we are the consumers. So the consumers need to demand what they want to see and what they want to hear – and they need to express when something is lacking. And of course for that they need to know there is something lacking, which is coverage of non-violent movements and peacebuilding. This is the work that we do at Just Vision. We work directly with journalists and communities. We work with interfaith groups, mosques, synagogues, women’s groups and youth groups. We educate these constituencies so there is more awareness, more demand, and more recognition that there are Israelis and Palestines who are working to end the conflict and build peace.

You often speak about the “power of attention” – can you elaborate on this idea?

Historically, non-violent movements can only become effective if they gain the attention of the target audience. Sometimes, in some conflicts, this is a domestic audience. But in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this is an international community. The point in this case is for the international community to pay attention to the non-violent resistance of Palestinian communities, so the international community can make the movement big enough to place pressure on Israel. But the international community cannot pay attention to something that does not exist, and for it to exist it feeds on attention. This is the dynamic we are in, and I often hear – and have heard for the last nine years working on this issue – where is the Palestinian Gandhi?

Instead of asking this question, why don’t we spend five percent of our time paying attention to people who are actually working for non-violent resistance? The next Gandhis or Martin Luther Kings. I promise you that five percent will give you a much larger chance of seeing that movement you are supposedly so eager to see come to fruition, instead of having an open ended rhetorical question that makes you feel really good about yourself. Questions like that make us feel we do not have any responsibility, up until the moment a Palestinian Gandhi emerges. But movements are not built like that – movements are built by people, by local people, and through examples. The civil rights movement, for instance, was not a movement in which Rosa Parks decided out of the blue to sit at the back of the bus, and then all of a sudden she’s on

the front page of national newspapers. It was not the first time she tried that tactic. Instead, she was trained and was picked by the leaders of the movement because she possessed certain qualities. It was a planned strategy and the explicit goal was to seize the attention of local, national and international media so it would be front and center of coverage in America.

So all of those movements are planned rather than coincidental. The Salt March, for example, that was planned. Gandhi owned newspapers – he knew he would have to own his own newspapers to ensure coverage. This is something that is rarely talked about, that Gandhi owned newspapers, but since the beginning he knew gaining media attention was absolutely key. Because action was only important if people were paying attention. So this is what I mean by the power of attention. Today we are bombarded with information and all kinds of news and stories that are basically fighting for our attention. In fact, there is something very powerful about the expression itself, “pay attention” – there is a value in the word pay. And this is the most valuable currency that we have today, our attention. We have to be very thoughtful about how we spend this currency.

And how did this philosophy of attention develop?

I think it truly emerged through my work with my colleagues – people like Suhad Babaa, Nadav Greenberg, Jessica Daveney and Rula Salahem. My colleagues – and we are a team of Israelis, Palestinians, Americans, and I’m Brazilian – come from human rights and journalism backgrounds. So for us, this is something that developed from the very beginning. Ronit Avni, the founder, interviewed over 400 peace-builders on the ground, and they confirmed the number one challenge they faced was invisibility. So this question of invisibility has been at the core of Just Vision’s work from the very beginning. As our work evolved, and as we became more knowledgeable about what was happening on the ground and more thoughtful about the dynamics and local communities, we were able to articulate that thought a little more clearly and a little more effectively.

‘I often hear – and have heard for the last nine years working on this issue – where is the Palestinian Gandhi?’

,Q�WKH��WK�FHQWXU\��3LHUUH�-DTXHW�'UR]�ZDV�WKH�ÀUVW�ZDWFKPDNHU�WR�LPSRUW�WLPHSLHFHV�LQWR�&KLQD��ZKHUH�WKH�(PSHURU�4LQJ�FROOHFWHG�WKHVH�PDVWHUSLHFHV�GHHS�LQVLGH�WKH�)RUELGGHQ�&LW\��:KLFK�LV�ZK\�%HLMLQJ�LV�SDUW�RI�WKH�HWHUQDO�OHJHQG�WKDW�LV�-DTXHW�'UR]�

7KH�(FOLSVH��UHI��-��MAJESTIC BEIJING Collection

:::�-$48(7�'52=�&20

(7(51,7<��7+(�8/7,0$7(�/8;85<

JD_Corp_Global_July_2011_CH.indd 1 27.06.2011 10:30:38

21


OPEN VOICES

Guantánamo: The Endgame?

BY OMAR FARAH, STAFF ATTORNEY, GUANTÁNAMO GLOBAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE, CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS

F ahd Ghazy is known at Guantánamo Bay as 026, his Internment Serial Number. These

numbers were assigned to Guantánamo prisoners in chronological order according to their arrival. Fahd has a low number because he was among the first prisoners sent to the offshore prison former President George W Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney established to detain and torture captives in the “war on terror.” Fahd was initially housed at Camp X-ray – a makeshift

arrangement of kennels recognizable from the iconic photographs of shackled men in orange jumpsuits and blackout goggles. He was just 17 years old, plummeting down a rabbit hole, unaware he had arrived at what would be his home for the next 11 years and counting.

A few months before Fahd’s arrival, it would have been impossible to foresee the tragedy about to befall him. He was married and celebrating the arrival of

his baby daughter, Hafsa. He had just received his diploma from Al-Najah, a secondary school near Beyt Ghazy on the outskirts of Sana’a, Yemen. An ambitious and capable student, Fahd graduated first in his class. Like any young father, he believed obtaining a university degree would guarantee his family a better life. Sana’a University is well regarded, so Fahd applied. He was admitted to the Faculty of Science and awarded a scholarship. The good news reached him in his cell at Guantánamo.

FAHD GHAZY, FROM YEMEN, HAS BEEN HELD WITHOUT CHARGE AT GUANTÁNAMO BAY FOR MORE THAN A THIRD OF HIS LIFE.

© CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS

,Q�WKH��WK�FHQWXU\��3LHUUH�-DTXHW�'UR]�ZDV�WKH�ÀUVW�ZDWFKPDNHU�WR�LPSRUW�WLPHSLHFHV�LQWR�&KLQD��ZKHUH�WKH�(PSHURU�4LQJ�FROOHFWHG�WKHVH�PDVWHUSLHFHV�GHHS�LQVLGH�WKH�)RUELGGHQ�&LW\��:KLFK�LV�ZK\�%HLMLQJ�LV�SDUW�RI�WKH�HWHUQDO�OHJHQG�WKDW�LV�-DTXHW�'UR]�

7KH�(FOLSVH��UHI��-��MAJESTIC BEIJING Collection

:::�-$48(7�'52=�&20

(7(51,7<��7+(�8/7,0$7(�/8;85<

JD_Corp_Global_July_2011_CH.indd 1 27.06.2011 10:30:38

22


OPEN VOICES

In 2007, the Bush administration rightly concluded that Fahd did not belong at Guantánamo and decided to send him home. When I began representing Fahd roughly five years ago, he showed me a worn piece of paper containing the official notice of his impending release. The letter is laconic, stating only that Fahd “has been approved for release from Guantánamo, subject to the process of making appropriate diplomatic arrangements for his departure.”

In May, Fahd will turn 29. He is still at Guantánamo. The notification of his release is meaningless, just a painful reminder of how different things might have been. Fahd and I spoke to each other a few weeks ago and he gave me some news: he is on a hunger strike and has not eaten since February. As The Global Journal reported in April, Fahd is not alone – at the time of writing, the mass hunger strike at Guantánamo had reached its third month. Fahd and the other men I represent report the strike has near universal participation in Guantánamo’s two main detention facilities, Camps 5 and 6. For all of its predictability, the impact on the prisoners’ bodies has been no less harrowing. Their weight has dropped so precipitously that some of the men are skeletal. Fahd has begun limiting his movements to conserve energy. Many prisoners are losing consciousness, some repeatedly. Others have been coughing up blood.

The less visible toll of starvation remains unclear. At Guantánamo, secrecy is paramount. Civilian access to the prisoners is severely restricted. No independent physician has yet evaluated the hunger strikers. Clinical research in the field, however, cautions us to brace for the worst. According to the World Medical Association, at day 40 of a hunger strike, irreversible cognitive impairment and physiological damage can occur. Death soon follows.

Remarkably, the United States (US) government seems untroubled. On 11 April, Under Secretary of Defense, William Lietzau, wrote to the Center for Constitutional Rights to assure us “detention practices at Guantánamo are humane.” He also reminded us the Department of Defense “support[s] the preservation of life through appropriate clinical means…” For the uninitiated, that means force-feeding through nasogastric intubation – strapping prisoners to restraint chairs, forcing rubber tubes up their noses and pumping liquid supplements into their stomachs. Eleven men at Guantánamo are being kept alive in this manner.

A crackdown by the Guantánamo guard staff triggered the current hunger strike. During cell searches in February, guards confiscated the prisoners’ personal effects, including family photos and keepsakes – items of monumental significance when memories of a loved-one are receding into oblivion. But worse, under the pretext of searching for improvised weapons, the prison administration reinstituted a policy of searching the prisoners’ Qur’ans – a decision as provocative as it was reckless. The Department of Defense knows from past experience that searching the pages and binding of the Qur’an constitutes desecration in the eyes of the prisoners and invites the very response that has now jeopardized the lives of dozens of men.

Hunger strikes are nothing new at Guantánamo. As early as 2002, prisoners resorted to starving themselves to expose the horror of indefinite detention without charge or trial. But this strike is different. It is desperate. Until now, my clients have been surviving at Guantánamo on hope. For Fahd, who has spent more

than a third of his life at the prison, an enduring hope that he will see his daughter again is his only comfort. But hopelessness is an equally powerful sentiment. It has convinced many at Guantánamo to risk their own demise to protest a system of such violence.

This may be the beginning of the endgame at Guantánamo. Four years ago, there was consensus across the American political spectrum that Guantánamo should be shuttered. So how did we reach the point where most of the 166 remaining prisoners are engaged in a potentially deadly hunger strike?

The explanation was glaringly obvious at a public hearing in Washington, DC last month. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the Americas’ foremost human rights body, called representatives of the Obama administration to comment on its Guantánamo policy. It was the first time they had done so since the President’s re-election. The IACHR asked two questions: does the US still intend to close Guantánamo? And, if so, what steps are currently underway to achieve that objective? After 11 years, 166 prisoners detained in perpetuity (all but a handful without charge), 86 men

‘But worse, under the pretext of searching for improvised weapons, the prison administration reinstituted a policy of searching the prisoners’ Qur’ans – a decision as provocative as it was reckless.’

‘According to the World Medical Association, at day 40 of a hunger str ike, irreversible cognitive impairment and physiological damage can occur. Death soon follows.’

23


OPEN VOICES

languishing despite being cleared for release, torture methods with peculiar names like the “frequent flyer program,” hundreds of attempted suicides and nine deaths, there was nothing else to discuss.

The IACHR posed the questions with the same urgency that recently led United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, to decry the suffering at Guantánamo and demand the facility’s immediate closure. Renewed international scrutiny of Guantánamo is driven by an abiding concern that President Obama’s course of action – inaction, really – threatens to normalize one of the most abominable relics of the Bush/Cheney era.

If the Obama administration shared that concern, detailed answers would have been forthcoming. They were not. Senior administration officials failed to offer a single measure currently underway to close the prison. It was a fine display of diplomatic rhetoric, but offered little for men like Fahd whose very survival may depend on glimpsing light at the end of the tunnel. The most obvious explanation for the administration’s silence is also the most disheartening. The President appears to have calculated he can withstand the political costs of continuing to operate the detention facility. He has made his peace with Guantánamo as an enduring part of his legacy.

Criticism like that seems pointed only if one ignores the President’s record, especially in regards to Congress. Obama met every legislative maneuver to keep Guantánamo open with acquiescence. Congressional obstructionism began with the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which barred the use of funds to transfer Guantánamo prisoners unless the Secretary of Defense personally certifies each man for release. Under the legislation, however, such an act is possible only after the Secretary of Defense determines the country slated to receive an ex-prisoner meets certain security conditions – a practically unachievable qualification.

Each subsequent iteration of the NDAA has included the same onerous restrictions. Congress correctly gambled that the President would

fold if the legislation even marginally increased the political cost of releasing Guantánamo prisoners – hence the cunning, and utterly effective, device of requiring the Secretary of Defense to personally sign off on each transfer. Still, even Congress could not have predicted Obama would abandon his plan to close Guantánamo altogether. Yet, that is precisely what he has done.

Administration officials disagree. They insist Obama is dedicated to closing the detention facility. Try convincing the prisoners. The numbers speak for themselves: transfers from Guantánamo have plummeted from roughly 71 in 2009-10, to just five in the years since – not including Adnan Latif, who left in a coffin in 2012. And as far as anyone can tell, President Obama never sought the certification of a single prisoner for transfer – not even one of the 86 men the administration itself cleared for release. Nor did he require former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, to invoke the waiver provisions that would permit the administration to sidestep the NDAA’s most severe restrictions. I see no evidence the President will make recently confirmed Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, break rank with his predecessor.

Equally devastating to Fahd, and the 90 or so of his countrymen at Guantánamo, is the President’s persistent defense of his moratorium on repatriations to Yemen. The moratorium was instituted in 2010 after the failed “underwear-bomber” attack, which was seen as proof that Obama was no longer “soft on terror” – a trope that is both cynical and starkly at odds with his wide-ranging and lethal drone program. The gambit paid political dividends, but with it, President Obama gained the unfortunate distinction of adding collective punishment on the basis of nationality to the litany of Guantánamo’s human rights violations.

Like Fahd, my client, Tariq Ba Odah, is trapped at Guantánamo under the moratorium. When I first learned of the current hunger strike, I thought of him immediately. Tariq is what is known at Guantánamo as a ‘long term’ hunger striker. He began his strike six years ago, in February 2007. Nearly every day since, he has been strapped to a restraint chair and force-fed through

his nose. But for Tariq, who has never been charged, to voluntarily accept food from his jailer would be to surrender the last shred of his humanity. He weighs just 90 pounds and is slowly withering away. Tariq recognized long ago that death is probably the fastest way out of Guantánamo. In any event, it is becoming the most common. More men have died in US custody at Guantánamo than have been convicted by military tribunal.

President Obama should be deeply concerned Guantánamo’s remaining prisoners are arriving collectively at Tariq’s grim conclusion: Guantánamo is a death sentence from which there is likely no reprieve. If indeed this is the endgame at Guantánamo, it will be an excruciating one for the prisoners. Perhaps the President can weather the political costs of continuing to operate Guantánamo. I wonder though if he has yet weighed the human cost. Inevitably, this will be the measure by which history judges Obama if he presides over the slow death of a population of exclusively Muslim prisoners at an offshore internment camp, most of whom are cleared for release and have never been charged or tried.

‘Tariq recognized long ago that death is probably the fastest way out of Guantánamo. In any event, it is becoming the most common. More men have died in US custody at Guantánamo than have been convicted by military tribunal.’

24


SHORT ESSAY

Moral Machines And The Future Of Warfare.

CHRISTOPHER COKERPROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

AT THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

In the second of a regular series inviting prominent members of academia to address key questions of global governance, international politics and the evolution of the

international system, Christopher Coker – a leading scholar of international security and military philosophy – refl ects upon how recent technologies are changing the face of war. As we enter a brave new world of cyber attacks and unmanned drones, Coker

warns that in a bid to make war more humane, we are increasingly relying on machines to automate human virtue.

© U.S. MARINE CORPS PHOTO BY SGT. PETE THIBODEAU

25


SHORT ESSAY

“F ifteen years after taking flight, Orville Wright predicted the airplane would make war impossible. Guglielmo Marconi thought the coming of radio

would make war “ridiculous” – a variation on Oscar Wilde’s idea that it would end once it became vulgar, rather than wicked. My favorite example is that of Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun, who when asked whether the invention would make war more wicked replied: “no, it’ll make war impossible.”

It was not the case that these failed to promise a better, or even safer, world. But each new development created more problems than it solved. Unfortunately, argues the great technology guru, Kevin Kelly, problems are the answers to solutions. Once a machine is built, we soon discover that it has ‘ideas’ of its own. Technology not only changes our habits, but also our habits of mind.

The Maxim gun was a case in point. Far from making war impossible, the weapon in fact made it all too easy for those who possessed this technical advantage to occupy the moral high ground. Because it originated in the West, the gun was deemed to be the product of a rational society. It followed that those who did not have access to such weaponry (for instance Native Americans) were being irrational in continuing to resist the onward path of westward expansion. Inevitably, American settlers used their newly acquired weapons to make the natives ‘see reason.’ And of course, it often worked.

By 1890, the American frontier was officially closed and Geronimo, the last ‘renegade’ Indian leader, finally captured. Fifteen years later – after authoring two commercially successful autobiographies – he rode in Teddy Roosevelt’s inauguration parade. Yet, it was all to end badly. Once Western societies turned machine guns against each other, they found themselves in a moral no man’s land of their own making.

The question we should ask, writes Kelly, is this: what does technology still want of us? Let’s be clear – unlike human beings, technologies do not have needs or desires. But when new technologies are aggregated they acquire a collective

property, just as we talk of the market ‘wanting’ things. And technological advances and insights often occur at about the same time in more than one place. The evolution of technology converges in much the same manner as biological evolution.

Kelly’s question can also be seen as a variation of Richard Dawkins’ influential idea of the extended phenotype. Dawkins suggests birds and nests are one and the same. Without nests, birds could not reproduce. Poorly constructed or poorly placed nests reduce birds’ chances of reproductive success. Conversely, well-built nests dramatically increase the evolutionary odds. Likewise, we are what technology makes us. No other species has such an extensive phenotype, or, more specifically, its own imprint on the planet.

Technology is simply the further evolution of evolution, and technological evolution results in a variety of gadgets, machines, tools and techniques, which increase again this ability to advance. The latest technologies are becoming smarter and offering new choices – not only in co-operation with human beings, but for the first time in possible competition. Technology is boosting human intelligence and innovation at the very time it may be about to develop an agenda of its own. Ray Kurtzweil calls it “the Singularity” – the day computers become self-conscious (the Skynet scenario for fans of the Terminator franchise).

Until that day arrives – if ever – technology will continue to give us choices. Choices without values yield little but new choices. Yet they may also ‘revalue’ old values, or devalue those qualities that have traditionally been held in high regard in war, such as sacrifice and heroism. It is simply too early to tell, although in my book Warrior Geeks I argue that this is precisely the direction in which technology is taking us. New developments are devaluing the sacramental ideal of war and persuading us to overvalue technical proficiency.

* * * * *

I ncreased specialization is one of the elements that technology has always ‘wanted.’ Evolution moves from the general to the specific. In primitive societies, every adult

male was a warrior. In state-centric societies, professionals tend to come into their own. Specialization also extends to weapons – from the basic spear, which most people could throw, to the trickier flintlock musket and finally today’s drones, which require expert training. War is developing its specialization in another critical respect – human input is decreasing.

The physical labor necessary for war has diminished gradually and will soon be reduced further. Even ‘grunts’ will enjoy skills enhanced by exoskeletons and possibly performance enhancing drugs. As Kelly argues, specialization domesticates us – at the cutting edge, war continues to demand what

‘Once Western societies turned machine guns against each other, they found themselves in a moral no man’s land of their own making.’

26


SHORT ESSAY

Mark Pagel calls “a more domesticated set of abilities.” By “domesticated,” both writers mean more cerebral. The ‘analytical warrior’ is in the process of replacing age-old stereotypes. Mental agility, communication skills and multi-tasking are the virtues required of tomorrow’s soldiers.

Yet, it is the digital age that is really powering the move towards ever-increasing specialization – further proof that evolution and technology have been running in parallel for some time. Both are born in generality and grow to specificity. What is unique to us as a species is the interplay between our genes pushing us towards a particular outcome, and our cultures producing technologies that respond to our talents. We are still predisposed, I would argue, to engage in war, and just as capable of waging it, though now within completely new dimensions. The prospect of war in cyberspace and the emergence of robots are a ‘game changer’ as significant as the invention of gunpowder or the atomic bomb.

* * * * *

“T he next war will be in cyberspace” were the unambiguous words of the first head of the United States (US) Cyber-Command. As

cyberspace becomes the next battle space, a new arms race may already be underway. The 15 countries with the largest military budgets are investing in offensive cyber capabilities while still figuring out how to integrate cyber warfare capabilities into military operations. Even if we are not yet militarizing cyberspace, we are wittingly or unwittingly militarizing the idea. We have already seen cyber-attacks on at least three countries (Iran, Estonia and Georgia), and these will not be the last. We now face all manner of cyber-prefixed threats from ‘cyber-espionage’ to ‘cyber-terror’ and even ‘cyber-geddon.’

Cyber war itself, however, may be some way off. An act of war must be instrumental, political and potentially lethal. In this respect, the cyber-attacks we have witnessed so far have failed to make the cut. In the cyber world it is 1929 – we are

still in the age of dirigibles and biplanes. But we are transiting into the future faster than we think. In principle, it may quite soon be possible to shut down a country or a city. Power grids could be sabotaged and air traffic control systems unplugged.

Although it is far from clear whether the same dynamics governing the use of conventional weapons will apply in cyberspace, we do know that cyber weapons will become more complex, especially when computer viruses begin to learn from their mistakes. A virus capable of ‘learning’ could assess its environment and act autonomously. If programmed with evolutionary algorithms, the virus would be able to ‘evolve’ in ways its original designers could not possibly predict.

Cyber warfare, however, is only one part of the larger cybernetic world in which we are situating the warriors of tomorrow. Science fiction has anticipated this for some time. Take the novel Ender’s Game – on the syllabus of the Marine Corps University at Quantico – about a young cadet who participates in a simulated battle sequence against an alien species called the Formics, only to discover the battle is not a game but real. Halfway through the novel is a sobering remark: “Ender Wiggins isn’t a killer. He just wins – thoroughly.” Wiggins is a striking example of what the poet T S Eliot, in a very different context, called the “dissociation of sensibility.”

Eliot argued that before the modern age, poets were able to express their thoughts through the experience of feeling. Later, they failed to unite their thoughts with emotional experiences and instead expressed thought separately from feeling (and were the lesser poets for it). The issue with digital technology is that it requires a high degree of imagination. Most of us will continue to live in a world determined by physical proximity and presence. We will continue to see the immediate consequences of our actions with our own eyes.

Cyber warriors, by contrast, will have to understand what is objectively real. For these individuals, reality will only be intelligible through cognition, which is problematic if they find themselves becoming less socially intelligent. They could, for instance, prove unable to empathize with the enemy.

From very early on in our prehistory, the mental capacity of human beings has fostered social intelligence. The

‘The prospect of war in cyberspace and the emergence of robots are a ‘game changer’ as significant as the invention of gunpowder or the atomic bomb.’

‘Even if we are not yet militarizing cyberspace, we are wittingly or unwittingly militarizing the idea.’

27


SHORT ESSAY

psychologist Nicholas Humphrey describes cultivating plants as a “conversation” similar to a mother talking to an infant – both processes are attuned to a plant or child’s “emergent properties.” Many of our most prized technological discourses, Humphrey believes, may have had their origins in the fortunate misapplication of social intelligence. But in privileging the new specialized cognitive domain of technical intelligence, will we be moving into a less socially intelligent world – one in which warriors may become more self absorbed and certainly more self-regarding.

Neuroscientists tell us the primitive pain center in the brain activates almost immediately when pain is recalled, but the ability to empathize with the prolonged suffering of others unfolds more slowly. It takes time to understand the moral dimension of a situation and this is largely communicated though reflection. Dissociation, in other words, is not just a mental attitude, but also a function of brain changes. The digital world, in turn, may already be beginning to alter the architecture of the human brain itself and, therefore, the very definition of what it means to be human.

A striking example of the direction in which we may be heading is offered by an article in The Economist entitled ‘Battle Ready,’ with its radical conclusion that “it may be necessary to vaccinate our soldiers against the trauma of war.” This might be possible if scientists could eliminate the conflicting emotions and challenges that have characterized war throughout history, denying soldiers some of the existential pay-offs. Writing in 1952, Isaiah Berlin warned that cybernetics (not the atomic bomb) marked the most disturbing change in the character of war. In the cybernetic battle spaces of the future, servicemen would feel and think quite differently. “This is what marks a real change”, Berlin argued, “and all the talk about ‘the atomic age’ is a kind of short-sighted vulgarity.”

* * * * *

W e are human only to the extent others recognize their own humanity within us. Or at least, that is the story Western societies have been telling

themselves for some time. The narrative may be difficult to maintain, however, when soldiers and robots begin sharing the same battle space. In June 2006, the first armed and remotely controlled robots in the history of warfare were deployed in Baghdad. As technology develops, robots will take many forms. Only excessive anthropomorphism encourages us to think they will look like the machines in the Terminator films.

‘Killer-robots’ are undoubtedly coming our way, but not all robots will be armed and not all armed robots will be without ‘humanity.’ Unlike most other technologies from the machine gun to the submarine, which were thought so terrible they would bring war to an end, no one has made the same claim

for robots. At the same time, critics such as Human Rights Watch have advocated strongly for the banning of robots before it is too late. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism even described the use of drones as a form of “industrialized killing.” Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. What is happening is part of a historical cycle. That is, the attempt to make war more humane. Some weapons are even deemed to have a ‘moral character’ because they allow us to be more discriminating in our targets. Since 2007, the US military has been trying to program the next generation of machines with a ‘conscience’ – a set of computer algorithms in place of the moral heuristics with which we are hard-wired by natural selection.

In the not too distant future, robots may be able to evaluate the consequences of their own actions. Indeed, the ability to reach value judgments will be part of the program. The fact empathy and compassion will be beyond their ‘emotional range’ will hardly matter, we are told, since both will be ‘offset’ by what really counts: consistency of behavior. Robots will not have personal or generic prejudices and will not misbehave under stress. The reduction of inhumanity will ‘offset’ the loss of humanity and the result may be a fighting force that is more humane than an all-human one. “I will stand my artificial intelligence over your humanity any day of the week,” a key American military commentator remarked recently, claiming technology would “create fewer ethical lapses than a human being.”

Robots, in other words, could radically change the face of war. They may certainly negate the need for courage and hatred – two of the ‘moral factors’ Carl von Clausewitz held to be central to the nature of war since our remote ancestors first sat by camp fires and sang war songs on the eve of battle. Hatred is the projection of our own identity on to others who are deemed to threaten it, or who (at best) are just deemed to be ‘different.’ Because robots would never hate anyone they could act more humanely on our behalf – a telling commentary on our lack of belief in our own humanity.

‘The reduction of inhumanity will ‘offset’ the loss of humanity and the result may be a fighting force that is more humane than an all-human one.’

28


SHORT ESSAY

Even John Gray, who questions whether we have any real agency, concedes we have at least some: to never have to make a choice. But such a human being, he adds, would have the perfect freedom of a machine (programmed to do someone else’s bidding). There is the rub. Instead of war being a moral environment in which moral conundrums are constantly tested and debated, we would instead rely on algorithmic gatekeepers (a computer program). Robots will assess human soldiers and report violations. We will be relying on machines to automate human virtue – programming soldiers to do the right thing by constraining their behavior through technology, rather than relying on ‘character’ to internalize ethics and the law.

I suspect the real game changer is what technology will eventually want from us. The use of robots may enable us

to replace human rationality with logic – cold, calculating and utterly relentless, like the Categorical Imperatives of Immanuel Kant (which are instantiated in Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics). It was Kant who said we should never lie. In real life we are not consistent. Even the state is sometimes willing to suspend the law so justice can be better served. Even scientists suspect logical reasoning. As nuclear physicist Nils Bohr once rebuked a student, “stop being so bloody logical, and start thinking.”

If this is indeed the direction in which we are heading, it would have surprised Clausewitz, even appalled him. In his great work On War, Clausewitz argued it was a “fallacy to conceive of war as ridding itself of human passion. The result, if one could, would be war by algebra.” But that is what may be on the horizon and it should give us cause to worry. Not because robots will be unable to perform the tasks we give them, but because war is not algorithmic.

Many experts are concerned that once we arm them, robots may turn their weapons on us. But the real challenge we face may be very different – should we really expect literal-minded machines to navigate our human-built world? One day, we may fi nd that even more misguided than our faith in their obedience is our trust in machines to negotiate the deeply ambiguous life we have constructed for ourselves.

* * * * *

‘Because robots would never hate anyone they could act more humanely on our behalf – a telling commentary on our lack of belief in our own humanity.’

© U.S. MARINE CORPS PHOTO BY SGT. 1ST CLASS KENNETH FOSS

29


SHORT ESSAY

O n current trends, more pertinent than the age-old question of how long human beings will continue to wage war against each other is another: how long

will war still need us? On the battlefields of tomorrow, soldier and machine will co-exist in an uneasy relationship, but there can be little doubt scientists will continue to reduce the human space of war even further. I am reminded of the film Sunset Boulevard in which the journalist, Joe Gillis, says to the former star Norma Desmond: “you used to be in pictures; you used to be big.” To which she replies: “I am big; it is the pictures that got small.”

Like the pictures, the future is shrinking. This may be because we have handed it over to the geeks and their gadgets. It would be pointless to complain. In Shakespeare’s famous play Othello, the alienated Iago describes his rival Cassio as a “mere arithmetician” who has learned everything about war in the classroom rather than on the battlefield. No one doubts Iago is a brave man and even better soldier, but his kind of warrior has been sidelined by history.

The future belongs to those educated in the new military academies, just as our future belongs to the more cerebral warrior, wired into a networked world. Today’s weapon of choice is the drone (the US has 20,000) and the model warrior is now the drone pilot for whom there is a new decoration – the Distinguished Warfare Medal – more important than either the Bronze Star or the Purple Heart. For the first time in history, it is possible to win a military honor while staying at home.

Fiction writers have long predicted such a future. In his novel Towards the End of Time, John Updike imagined a conflict between China and the US in 2020. Looking back at a “dwindled’ world,” his anguished hero regrets a war run by “highly trained young men and women in sealed chambers of safety reading 3-D computer graphics.” Sometimes, of course, truths that may grow labored in a novel are more deftly evoked in a short story. In Don DeLillo’s ‘Human Moments in World War III,’ Vollmer is a young 21st century pilot aboard an orbital space station

and a new breed of cerebral warrior: “an engineering genius, a communications and weapons genius.”

The moral of the tale lies not in the text but the subtext. War exists only on the margins of Vollmer’s consciousness – it has become “routine,” a series of housekeeping arrangements. War takes place at a firing panel where Vollmer can wear carpet slippers and a football jersey bearing the number 79, “a prime of no particular distinction.” At one point in the story, Vollmer tells his commanding officer that he is happy, only to be reminded that happiness is not one of the “mission parameters.” We gather both the world and war have grown smaller – the reason the protagonist’s gaze is cast upon his own inward vacancy.

Of course the world is just as large as ever, it is war that is growing smaller. Unfortunately, that does not portend its end. We tend to think of our minds these days as ‘software’ – absorbing and processing data and making the ‘hardware’ of our bodies perform the output. But the mind does not simply accumulate information – it thinks, it creates and it imagines. Imagination can be creative, but it can also be dysfunctional. We imagine unreal fears and insults and often behave unpredictably as a result.

Militaries have always tried to make soldiers ‘cheerful robots’ for that reason – to program the way they behave. In the near future they may finally succeed. Vollmer may be an avatar of the shape of things to come. Indeed, what I suspect we may be witnessing is only the end of the beginning: the story of war as a purely human activity (what Thucydides called ‘the human thing’). It is a little too early to judge when the first phase is about to end and the next to begin.

‘Instead of war being a moral environment in which moral conundrums are constantly tested and debated, we would instead rely on algorithmic gatekeepers.’

WARRIOR GEEKSCHRISTOPHER COKERHURST & CO£25.00

©- A

LS

TO

M T

ran

sport

/ D

esig

n&

Sty

lin

g -

Bein

g

www.alstom.com/transport

ALT0016 AP DP MultiSpe GB 200x274 G.indd 1 4/11/10 16:43:28

ALSTOM TRANSPORT

MEETING ALL NEEDS, FOR EACH CUSTOMERRolling stock, signalling, infrastructure, maintenance… Alstom’s multi-specialist cross-

disciplinary expertise, unique on the market, provides each customer with complete

solutions that guarantee optimum value for money.

ALT0016 AP DP MultiSpe GB 200x274 D.indd 1 4/11/10 16:44:29

ALSTOM TRANSPORT

MEETING ALL NEEDS, FOR EACH CUSTOMERRolling stock, signalling, infrastructure, maintenance… Alstom’s multi-specialist cross-

disciplinary expertise, unique on the market, provides each customer with complete

solutions that guarantee optimum value for money.

ALT0016 AP DP MultiSpe GB 200x274 D.indd 1 4/11/10 16:44:29

FEATURE

32


THE OPENING OF SARANG’S NEW EXHIBITION AT THE ‘SEMI-ILLEGAL’ AARAN GALLERY IN TEHRAN.

FEATURE

33


BY ANTOINE HARARI AND THOMAS EPITAUX-FALLOTT +PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF JONATHAN BRAUN

The Art Of Subversion.

34


FEATURE

AN ART EXHIBITION AT THE HOUSE OF CULTURE IN THE PARK HONOR EL MANDAN.

35


FEATURE

A t the House of Culture at Park Honor el Mandan in the heart of Tehran, around 300

people are gathering for an indie rock concert. An hour before the beginning of the show, the entrance is already heaving. All up the narrow stairs, veiled women and men are squeezed together, clutching cameras – most are young and would not dare to miss the opportunity to attend a performance of this type. Azarakhsh, son of a famous Iranian actor and a musician since childhood, is the group’s lead singer. Dark haired, disheveled and

bearded, he is, at 35, about to give his first ever public concert. “Without my father’s connections, I never could have organized such an event,” confesses the young musician, hovering at the door.

After the show, the sun disappears behind the towering grey skyline of the Iranian capital, as if melting into the smog. The early-evening March air is still chilly and the young musician re-buttons his coat before leaving the premises in a hurry. Azarakhsh later recounts how a mysterious man approached him, nagging him

incessantly to rewrite his songs according to verses of the Qur’an. Azarakhsh nodded politely, replying he would think about it.

Two weeks earlier, a pair of thieves were hung in the very same park, found guilty of threatening a passer-by with a sabre. Many believe the choice of location for the executions – an area cherished by artists and intellectuals alike – was no coincidence, but instead a tacit warning from the government. For others, however, it was simply linked to the site’s proximity to the crime scene,

GRILLING KABABS AT SAMIRA AND ESHKAN’S APARTMENT IN CENTRAL TEHRAN.

On 14 June, Iranians will go to the polls to choose the successor to outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Against the backdrop of escalating nuclear posturing, and with memories still fresh of the popular disaffection embodied in

the mass protests of the Green Movement, the world will be watching. Beyond the clichés, however, Iranian society is more complex than meets the eye. For Tehran’s artists and intellectuals in particular, each day is a delicate balancing act between

freedom and subversion.

The Global Journal #17

Documents

Transcript of The Global Journal #17