I visited Levantine Syria [1] for three memorable days in 2008 and was struck by the welcoming, friendly nature of the Syrian people, their effusive pride in Syria’s multicultural heritage, and a pervasive atmosphere of optimism. I had the impression Syria was emerging from the darkness of the Hafez Assad dictatorship. To be sure, his son, Bashir Assad, had inherited the deeply entrenched thuggish Ba’athist machinery and ruled as an autocrat, but it seemed also that he was a struggling reformer of sorts, perhaps a well-intentioned young man in over his head. Based on my limited conversations with the locals, I sensed (perhaps erroneously) the average person on the street was empathetic to his problems and willing to give him a little time to sort things out. Without exception, everyone I talked to on this subject said he was far better than his father.
Bear in mind, I was heart of Ba’ath country. Levantine Syria is where the Syrian Ba’ath party has its roots. It is where the most of the Alawites and Christians are concentrated, but there are plenty of Sunnis and even Turkomens, Kurds, Circassians, etc., in a rich polyglot that is evident in this etho-religious map. In contrast to the prevasive sectarian atmosphere in the similar, but perhaps less complex culture of Lebanon, sectarian tensions in Levantine Syria, to the extent that they existed, were not in evidence in the areas I visited in 2008. The economy, although very poor, showed signs of considerable foreign investment and seemed to have a latent vibrancy. Syria’s contentious relations with its neighbors, especially Turkey, were improving and there was even a modus vivendi with Israel, notwithstanding Syria's alliance with Hezbollah and tense relations with the Lebanese government. In short, optimism was in the air.
Perhaps my impressions were fanciful, because today, that image is in ruins. Syria is in the grip of a vicious sectarian war that, as Rami Khouri explains forcefully below, is being stoked by outsiders having all sorts of agendas, many hidden in a smokescreen of the blind unreasoning fear of chemical weapons [2]. This civil war could easily escalate into a regional war, if as is becoming increasingly likely, these outsiders, including the United States [3], become actively involved in it.
Can emerging technologies aid in filtering out the untrusted and unverified chattering of the masses? Using the recent Boston Marathon bombings as an example where this kind of technology would be useful, the MIT Technology Review article “Preventing Misinformation from Spreading through Social Media” explains some possible solutions on their radar.
When people play detective on Reddit and other social media sites with the goal of sharing information quickly as opposed to ensuring accuracy, false accusations can be made – such as the case with Sunil Tripathi. Researchers from Masdar Institute of Technology and the Qatar Computing Research Institute plan to launch Verily as a platform that could combat situations like that one.
The article states:
“Verily aims to enlist people in collecting and analyzing evidence to confirm or debunk reports. As an incentive, it will award reputation points—or dings—to its contributors. Verily will join services like Storyful that use various manual and technical means to fact-check viral information, and apps such as Swift River that, among other things, let people set up filters on social media to provide more weight to trusted users in the torrent of posts following major events.”
This will be an interesting sector to watch as there is a growing awareness of social media’s distortional lever.
This one's quite speculative, and it's technically speaking still in the proto-science phase. But it'll only be a matter of time before scientists get a better handle on the human noosphere (the collective body of all human information) and how the proliferation of information within it impacts upon virtually all aspects of human life.
Similar to recombinant DNA (in which different genetic sequences are brought together to create something new), recombinant memetics is the study of how memes (ideas that spread from person to person) can be adjusted and merged with other memes and memeplexes (a cohesive collection of memes, like a religion) for beneficial or ‘socially therapeutic' purposes (such as combating the spread of radical and violent ideologies). This is similar to the idea of ‘memetic engineering' — which philosopher Daniel Dennett suggested could be used to maintain cultural health. Or what DARPA is currently doing via their ‘narrative control' program.
Little by little we are slowly learning that the network of life is far subtler and more complex than we have ever understood. Personally I think this idea of nanoscale sound waves is unlikely to be true. Conceptually it is preposterous. At nano scale a grain of sand would be like a mountain. It is very hard to see how the level of possible sound propagation a plant could achieve could get through the ground. I think some kind of nonlocal link! age is more likely but we will see.
The word in the garden is that basil is good to have around. Plants are known to communicate with each other via shade, aromatic chemicals, and physical touch, promoting processes such as growth and defense against disease, as well as attraction of bees and other pollinators.
Now, online today inBMC Ecology, researchers report a new type of mechanism that some plants use to communicate. The team planted common chili pepper seeds (Capsicum annuum, pictured) near a basil plant, with barriers that prevented the basil from deploying its usual growth-promoting tricks. Despite the separation, chili seeds germinated faster when basil was a neighbor, suggesting that a message was getting through.
Because light, touch, and chemical “smell” were ruled out, the team proposes that the finding points to a new type of communication between plants, possibly involving nanoscale sound waves, traveling through the dirt to bring encouraging “words” to the growing seeds. Understanding this novel communication could help growers boost crop yields and increase global food supplies. How neighborly.
Remoteness & Abstraction: The Undoing of Humankind
Those are probably the best two words to ever describe the contemporary problem in simple terms.
Americans supports wars because we are shielded from the horror. The more intelligent among us know that our military often kills tens of thousands of innocent people. But we don't get a sense of it because we don't see the dead when they're frozen in their moment of horror. The numbers are abstract and the reality is remote from our awareness.
I'm just trying to express the fact that these two words are key to understanding the broad social dynamic, the fog of perception that perpetuates the horrors. If you would like me to elaborate, I'll try to do that.
And of course anything that makes the remote more local and the abstract more concrete are the antidotes to society gone mad.
LONDON—A tiny tip of the vast subterranean network of governmental and intelligence agencies from around the world dedicated to destroying WikiLeaks and arresting its founder, Julian Assange, appears outside the red-brick building on Hans Crescent Street that houses the Ecuadorean Embassy. Assange, the world’s best-known political refugee, has been in the embassy since he was offered sanctuary there last June. British police in black Kevlar vests are perched night and day on the steps leading up to the building, and others wait in the lobby directly in front of the embassy door. An officer stands on the corner of a side street facing the iconic department store Harrods, half a block away on Brompton Road. Another officer peers out the window of a neighboring building a few feet from Assange’s bedroom at the back of the embassy. Police sit round-the-clock in a communications van topped with an array of antennas that presumably captures all electronic forms of communication from Assange’s ground-floor suite.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), or Scotland Yard, said the estimated cost of surrounding the Ecuadorean Embassy from June 19, 2012, when Assange entered the building, until Jan. 31, 2013, is the equivalent of $4.5 million.
Britain has rejected an Ecuadorean request that Assange be granted safe passage to an airport. He is in limbo. It is, he said, like living in a “space station.”
“The status quo, for them, is a loss,” Assange said of the U.S.-led campaign against him as we sat in his small workroom, cluttered with cables and computer equipment. He had a full head of gray hair and gray stubble on his face and was wearing a traditional white embroidered Ecuadorean shirt. “The Pentagon threatened WikiLeaks and me personally, threatened us before the whole world, demanded that we destroy everything we had published, demanded we cease ‘soliciting’ new information from U.S. government whistle-blowers, demanded, in other words, the total annihilation of a publisher. It stated that if we did not self-destruct in this way that we would be ‘compelled’ to do so.”
“But they have failed,” he went on. “They set the rules about what a win was. They lost in every battle they defined. Their loss is total. We’ve won the big stuff. The loss of face is hard to overstate. The Pentagon reissued its threats on Sept. 28 last year. This time we laughed. Threats inflate quickly. Now the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department intend to show the world what vindictive losers they are through the persecution of Bradley Manning, myself and the organization more generally.”
Assange, Manning and WikiLeaks, by making public in 2010 half a million internal documents from the Pentagon and the State Department, along with the 2007 video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters journalists, effectively exposed the empire’s hypocrisy, indiscriminate violence and its use of torture, lies, bribery and crude tactics of intimidation. WikiLeaks shone a spotlight into the inner workings of empire—the most important role of a press—and for this it has become empire’s prey. Those around the globe with the computer skills to search out the secrets of empire are now those whom empire fears most. If we lose this battle, if these rebels are defeated, it means the dark night of corporate totalitarianism. If we win, if the corporate state is unmasked, it can be destroyed.
Even comparative moderates in the futurological sweepstakes tend to swoon when the subject is the pace of technology-led change. Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT's Center for Civic Media, argues in his new book, Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, that it is an entirely realistic goal for humans to “take control of our technologies and use them to build the world we want rather than the world we fear.” The present moment, Zuckerman asserts in his book's concluding sentence, offers “an opportunity to start the process of rewiring the world.”
In his own new book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, cyber-utopianism's severest and most eloquent critic, Evgeny Morozov, has dubbed such grand assertions about the mastery that we, with or without the help of intelligent machines, can exert over the future of the species the “Superhuman Condition.” (Full disclosure: I blurbed Morozov's book.)
