ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  Flash forward six months: The documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (who was then finishing her movie trilogy about abuses of power in post-9/11 America) conscripts Greenwald to meet an NSA leaker in Hong Kong. Together, they follow the slapstick tradecraft instructions: Go to the Mira Hotel, locate a conference room festooned with a green plastic alligator, and ask a staff member the pass-question “Is there a restaurant open?”

  Et voilà—a gawky postadolescent materializes, fussing with a Rubik’s Cube, the identifying prop.

  Up in Snowden’s room—where noodle containers have mounted and pillows are pressed against the underdoor draft—Greenwald vets Snowden and goes through the exfiltrated files. He returns to his own room at the nearby W Hotel only to summarize the files in dispatches sent to The Guardian (the U.S. Guardian, as the British Guardian is constrained from publishing material deemed vital to U.K. security—later, in an attempt at intimidation, Government Communications Headquarters forced the British paper’s editors to destroy their own hard drives). While still in Hong Kong, Greenwald exposes a series of orders by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court compelling telecoms to turn over call logs; PRISM, a program for the bulk collection of all email, voice, text, and video-chat communications routed through the servers of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, et al.; and BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, a tool that generates “heatmaps” of the metadata captured by PRISM.

  Finally—Greenwald breathes:

  After the “BOUNDLESS INFORMANT” article was published, Laura and I planned to meet at Snowden’s hotel. But before leaving my room, out of nowhere, as I sat on my hotel bed, I remembered Cincinnatus, my anonymous email correspondent from six months earlier, who had bombarded me with requests to install PGP so that he could provide me with important information.

  Amid the excitement of everything that was happening, I thought that perhaps he, too, had an important story to give me. Unable to remember his email name, I finally located one of his old messages by searching for keywords.

  “Hey: good news,” I wrote to him. “I know it took me a while, but I’m finally using PGP email. So I’m ready to talk any time if you’re still interested.”

  I hit “send.”

  Soon after I arrived at his room, Snowden said, with more than a small trace of mockery, “By the way, that Cincinnatus you just emailed, that’s me.”

  This is a humorous and humanizing update of a James Bond bromance. And, like the best of those, it imparts a sense of the relationship’s cultural disparity—between the intelligence analyst and the civilian citizen, between the Fifth Estate of tech and the Fourth Estate of journalism. In every instance, the side with more intel can’t help but treat the other with “more than a small trace of mockery.”

  After describing Greenwald’s return to Brazil, and the online debut of the Poitras-filmed clip in which Snowden outed himself to the world—incriminating himself in a bid to explain and to obtain public support—the book turns to slides of the spying programs and protocols. Someone in Fort Meade has caps lock stuck. PROJECT BULLRUN, EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE, MUSCULAR, OAKSTAR, STEELKNIGHT, SILVERZEPHYR—they’re like the names of losing racehorses, or midlife-crisis yachts. The point is this: Everything we say on phones and write in emails is being monitored, stored, and parsed. Though that power was abused in approximately 3,000 cases in 2012 alone—often by NSA employees gathering LOVEINT on their exes—it’s not the capacity for abuse as much as it is the NSA’s exemption from reporting it and immunity from being prosecuted for it that constitute the greatest argument against bulk collection. The greatest argument, that is, after the Constitution.

  Snowden could easily have set up his own WikiLeaks-style site. Instead, he has chosen to hold our free-speech institutions to account. The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post—all have reported on Snowden’s cache and in consultation with the NSA redacted specifics that could endanger active agents. The highest task of the critic is not to condemn but to correct, and this is what Snowden has done. He has excoriated the surveillance state, and in doing so has elevated journalism.

  FROM THE DIARIES

  SALT AND PEPPER SHAKERS

  To survive as a couple you have to stand by each other, no matter what, inanimately.

  WHEN WE STOPPED SAYING WE WERE GOING TO MOVE OUT OF THE CITY

  When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we had: nothing to talk about at parties, nothing to talk about on the Q/N/R trains, nothing to talk about to my aunt, her mom, the pizza guy, over decent but insufferable sushi, in the movie line. When the bun place closed. The midnight-movie theater in Midtown. When the deli that did its own pastramitizing shut down too. I’d always liked that bun place. When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we became more bearable. We broke up and stayed the children we’d never have.

  DATASEXUAL

  ON MOROZOV, LANIER, JOHNSON, AND GOOGLE

  Datasexuals are to Silicon Valley what hipsters are to Brooklyn: both are ubiquitous and, after a certain point, annoying. These days, one has to search really hard to find daily activities that are not being tracked and recorded; now that everyone carries a smartphone, all walks of human existence are subject to measurement, analysis, and sharing. […] Alexandra Carmichael, a health entrepreneur and one keen devotee of the datasexual lifestyle, records forty things about her daily life, from sleep and morning weight to caloric intake and mood, not to mention sex, exercise, and day of menstrual cycle. […] The most impressive feat of self-measurement comes from Larry Smarr, a computer scientist recently profiled in The Atlantic. Smarr is in a different league from most self-trackers; he tracks everything they track—and more. For example, he collects and analyzes his poop. As The Atlantic puts it, “He is deep into the biochemistry of his feces, keeping detailed charts of their microbial content. Larry has even been known to haul carefully boxed samples out of his kitchen refrigerator to show incautious visitors.”

  —To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov

  # of books read for this review: 4.

  # of pages total: 1,424.

  List price of books, total: $104.

  List price of ebook versions, total: $51.96.

  Best book because of its thoughtful resistance to utopian technological dogma: To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov.

  Worst book because of its thoughtless embodiment of utopian technological dogma: Future Perfect, Steven Johnson.

  Other books: Who Owns the Future?, Jaron Lanier; The New Digital Age, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen.

  Most notable achievements of Evgeny Morozov: Editor at Foreign Policy; writer of Net Effect, a popular blog whose “aim is to help you navigate the dense world of technology news and understand the impact that technology has on foreign affairs”; author of The Net Delusion (2011).

  Most notable achievements of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen: Chairman of Google and director of Google Ideas, respectively.

  Jaron Lanier: Digital media designer, VR innovator, self-styled anarcho-consultant to the likes of “Walmart, Fannie Mae, major banks, and hedge funds.”

  Steven Johnson: Media theorist, TV guest, radio personality, college-circuit lecturer; “I’m a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of eight books, and co-founder of three websites.”

  Relationship between Jared Cohen and Joshua Cohen, the author of this review: None.

  Relationship between Joshua Cohen and Google: Use of Google search, Gmail account.

  # of books published about the internet/web since the start of 2013: 10,668, according to Amazon.

  Significance of 2013: Fortieth anniversary of the internet’s protocols being developed by the United States Department of Defense (1973, Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf presented their TCP/IP design at the University of Sussex in Brighton, U.K.); thirtieth anniversary of that protocol’s implementation (1983, the Defense Depar
tment required all computers that hosted its internal network, or intranet, to conform to TCP/IP).

  Date of last celebration of the birth of online connectivity: 2009, the fortieth anniversary of the Defense Department’s original network, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, 1969); and the twentieth anniversary of the web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee, working out of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN (originally the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, 1989).

  Chance of getting disparate governments, research institutions, multinational conglomerates, and authors just trying to sell their books to agree to a firm standard date on which to celebrate the birth of online connectivity: 0 percent.

  Subtitles of the books under review, with no attempt to link them to their titles proper: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist; The Case for Progress in a Networked Age; Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business.

  Reason why publishers and maybe now even authors are convinced that subtitles help sell books: Inconceivable.

  The only book under review without a subtitle: Who Owns the Future?

  That book’s answer to the question of its title: You.

  That book’s answer to the question of who owns the present: Global “Siren Servers” like Facebook and Google, which have managed to take control of the internet, concentrating in a few hyperdactylic hands vast reserves of material wealth derived directly from the information you provide them.

  What “your information” is, according to Lanier: Your identity on social media and networking sites, your purchasing profile and browsing history, that of others who are socially networked with you, emails, chats, etc.

  What else “your information” is, according to Lanier: An asset.

  What you get in return for giving this asset away, according to Lanier: “reputation,” “karma,” and “free services” like Facebook, Google search, and Gmail, which depend upon your data to better calibrate how to sell you goods and services (i.e., through ads based on your keywords).

  What Lanier proposes instead: “Two-way transactions,” which will finally turn you “the used” into you “the user,” the beneficiary of your own information.

  How many times this reviewer was reminded of drugs while reading Lanier’s perseverating, palilaliac evocations of “use”: 12.

  How many times this reviewer did drugs in the same period: 1.

  How this proposal to cut you in on the profits generated by the monetizing of your online identity is a betrayal of Lanier’s previous book, You Are Not a Gadget (2010): That previous book was more of a philosophical or spiritual manifesto—indeed, A Manifesto was its subtitle—whose wariness of technological promise was premised on the conviction that collaborative or interactive cultures deincentivized originality and were prone to commercialization; this new book, however, overturns that individualist caution by casting you the human—a term this reviewer prefers to “user”—as nothing more than the overworked sales rep of your own enumerated “self.”

  Representative passage: “Here’s a simple example of how you might make money from the cloud in a humanistic future of more complete accounting. It’s based on the kind of dubious calculation that’s typical of cloud entrepreneurship today. You meet a future spouse on an online dating service. The algorithms that implement that service take note of your marriage. As the years go by, and you’re still together, the algorithms increasingly apply what seemed to be the correlations between you and your spouse to matching other prospective couples. When some of them also get married, it is automatically calculated that the correlations from your case were particularly relevant to the recommendations. You get extra nanopayments as a result.”

  What Lanier calls this type of redistribution: “The humanistic information economy.”

  How disappointed is this reviewer in Lanier: Enough to end our relationship, despite forfeiture of any future “nanopayments.”

  What better suggestions this reviewer has to more equitably redistribute the profits generated by the monetizing of your online identity: A hypothecated federal tax on all social-media and search-engine advertising profits, the revenue from which would be spent directly on job creation (i.e., finding new work for people—book reviewers, for example—whose occupations have been technologically peripheralized or obsolesced); an online social movement calling for all “two-way transactions” to disburse a fixed percentage of profits to charity, including but in no way limited to nonprofit groups advocating “net neutrality.”

  Replacement of social norms by commodity exchange: Bad.

  Replacement of social activities by commodity exchange: Bad.

  Obfuscatory term for both: “Gamification.”

  Other examples of gamification: Quitting smoking or drinking by depositing money in an online escrow account that is lost to you if you lapse, but will accrue interest if you do not; keeping fit by walking or running a certain distance within a certain time, distance and time to be measured by your smartphone whose WiFi function cannot be activated until the quota has been met.

  Evgeny Morozov’s term for treating social norms and/or activities as unexploited opportunities for commodity exchange: “Solutionism.”

  Other vocab from Morozov’s book: “Bouncing” (“whenever information collected for one purpose [e.g., campaign contributions] is used for another purpose on another site”); “highlighting and shading” (“whereby some pieces of the disclosed information take on unintended, disproportionate roles in defining the person’s reputation”).

  Morozov’s problem with “solutionism”: “Recasting all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized—if only the right algorithms are in place!—this quest is likely to have unexpected consequences that could eventually cause more damage than the problems they seek to address.”

  Examples he details: Loss of sense of adventure by driving under the influence of GPS; loss of moral or ethical sense developed in the discharge of petty chores by contracting them to machines (automation).

  Place of Morozov’s birth: Belarus.

  Saliency to this review: Belarusians spend a lot of time washing dishes by hand and waiting in lines.

  More important issues addressed: “Algorithmic gatekeeping,” in which computers do their own censoring, flagging so-called “pornography” and “hatespeech”; how “closed” web policies restrict public speech in totalitarian regimes (Belarus, China, etc.) while “open” web policies erode privacy in democracies.

  Google’s politics of “open” and “closed,” according to Schmidt and Cohen: America will remain fairly stable insofar as it continues to remake online in its own image; i.e., as a space for developing and testing the products by which more-closed societies will open themselves to democratization and so to capital.

  Translation: Americans will use Twitter to get famous; Arabs and Iranians will use it to compete with, and counteract, theofascist governance.

  How life will be for Americans, according to Schmidt and Cohen: “Entertainment will become a more immersive and personalized experience in the future. Integrated tie-ins will make today’s product placements seem passive and even clumsy. If while watching a television show you spot a sweater you want or a dish you think you’d like to cook, information including recipes or purchasing details will be readily available, as will every other fact about the show, its story lines, actors, and locations. If you’re feeling bored and want to take an hour-long holiday, why not visit carnival in Rio? Stressed? Go spend some time on a beach in the Maldives. Worried your kids are becoming spoiled? Have them spend some time wandering around the Dharavi slum in Mumbai.”

  How this tourism will be accomplished, according to Schmidt and Cohen: By hologram, projected into your home.


  How life will be for everyone under less stable regimes, according to Schmidt and Cohen: “In the coming decades, we’ll see the world’s first ‘smart’ rebel movement. […] Before even announcing their campaign they could target the government’s communications network, knowing it constitutes the real (if not official) backbone of the state’s defense. They might covertly reach out to sympathetic governments to acquire the necessary technical components—worms, viruses, biometric information—to disable it, from within or without. A digital strike against the communications infrastructure would catch the government off guard, and as long as the rebels didn’t ‘sign’ their attack, the government would be left wondering where it came from and who was behind it. The rebels might leave false clues as to the origin, perhaps pointing to one of the state’s external enemies, to confuse things further.”

  How many of the tactics described above have already been used not just by Arab and Iranian dissidents but by the hacker collective Anonymous against American police departments, military and intelligence infrastructure, and, if you can believe it, NASA: roughly 50 percent.

  # of times this is acknowledged in this book: 0.

  How much Steven Johnson believes in collaboration: 100 percent.

  # of authors of this book by Steven Johnson: 1.

  # of times Johnson acknowledges that the type of decentered data-sharing he advocates might result in a massive uptick in data theft: 2.

  Terms coined by Johnson in his previous book, Where Good Ideas Come From (2010): “The adjacent possible” (inventors use old inventions to make new ones), “exaptation” (inventors developing technology for one application only for it to be used in another).