by Ed Finn
“What can I do for you, Dad?”
Rob had thought about how he would handle this. Krishnamurti had some damning information—but not enough. His relationship with Terry hadn’t exactly been . . . comfortable, the past few years. If Krishnamurti was wrong, and Rob blew his stack at Terry . . . he made sure he smiled as he said, “The Haida don’t want to use the usual conference format. They’re insisting the negotiations happen in public and on the Net. I spent the afternoon having website addresses and acronyms thrown at me until my head spun. I don’t understand this stuff, and I need somebody who does.”
“Oh.” Terry smiled. He looked genuinely happy. “What tools are they using?”
Rob rummaged in his coat pocket for the paper he’d been writing on during this afternoon’s briefing. Of course CSIS and CSEC had people who could explain this better than Terry. “They’re picking delegates via sortition from a pool that’s developed using something called”—he squinted—“dynamically distributed democracy. What the hell?”
“Ah.” Terry waved a dismissive hand. “That’s just where people delegate other people to represent them. Rather than voting for some candidate, you might delegate me because you don’t have time to look at the issues but you trust me; other people might do the same, and then I might delegate my aggregate to somebody who I trust. It sounds cumbersome, but you can use a networking protocol called Promise Theory to implement it right down to the hardware level—”
“Whatever. And what about this website, Wegetit.com? They’re insisting that I register. Something about using it during the negotiations. Is this something they’re gonna use to manipulate the process?”
Terry shrugged. “No more than Robert’s Rules manipulates a meeting. Less so, actually. I can help you set it up.”
“I’m gonna end up with a profile,” grumbled Rob, “and then they’re gonna use it against me. This is like those damned Dorians you and Maggie were using this morning, isn’t it?”
“Nobody’s using the Dorians against us, Dad. Dorians are just little pictures of yourself, one for each major decision you’re thinking of making. Let’s say you’re thinking about quitting smoking. Your Dorian takes the data you give it—your age, health, and if you use a sports tracker it’ll take your fitness levels, if you buy through a grocery delivery site it’ll know your diet—and compares it to known outcomes for that demographic. Those little pictures of you—the Dorians—look happier or sadder, richer or poorer or sicker depending on the outcome. The Dorian for you in ten years if you smoke like a chimney is going to look different from the one where you quit cold turkey right now. And your Dorians get combined, so if you quit smoking but take up, I dunno, marathon running, then the good might counterbalance the bad. The game is to get your Dorian looking better and better—healthier, richer, and happier. If I want to do something like, say, buy a house, I tell my Dorians, and they look at outcomes for people like me and draw me a spectrum of faces based on usual choices.”
© 2013, Nina Miller / ASU
“That’s ridiculous,” said Rob. But Terry shook his head.
“People have a huge amount of neural wiring dedicated to reading faces, so if you want to map a complex set of data in such a way that people can recognize tiny but significant changes between versions, the best way is to chart it as two or more faces where the differences are in how close together your eyes are, or how many crow’s-feet you’ve got. A difference that’s so minuscule that you’d never see it on a chart will be instantly visible as a face.
“That’s just cognitive science. The analysis of your buying habits, social attitudes, health, and so on is the Big Data crunching that makes the data. How’s that a cult?”
Rob’s heart sank. He could hear it in Terry’s voice, see it in the enthusiasm in his face. Krishnamurti wasn’t wrong. The only question now was what to do.
“They’re holding the treaty negotiations on Haida Gwaii,” he said. “I’m flying out there in three days.
“Do you want to come along?”
THE RUNWAY WEST OF Queen Charlotte was drenched with rain as Rob and Terry stepped out of the little prop-driven commuter plane. Knowing what they were in for, they’d dressed in raincoats and brought umbrellas.
Climate change hadn’t yet had much impact on the Gwaii. South of the new airport lay Bearskin Bay, a stippled gray surface backed with fog. To the west were jagged, snow-capped mountains fronted by rough shoreline; north and east the land was carpeted with giant lodgepole pines, a rain forest unlike any other on Earth. The deep underbrush below the trees was lush, full of broad-leafed plants whose greens were not subdued by the gray skies. It smelled dizzyingly wet and cold and fresh.
Rob and Terry hadn’t spoken much on the flight out. Rob’s assistants had most of his attention as they briefed him on the whos and whats of the place. That was just an excuse, and Rob knew it; he was hiding behind his aides. But he just couldn’t talk to Terry, especially not at a time like this.
Rob paused at their hired car to look around. Beyond the dismal rain, towering trees scraped the vague underside of the low gray sky. Set back from the runway, but just in front of the trees, was a row of totem poles. Not those Disney imitations you saw everywhere else in the world, he noted with a small, grim hint of satisfaction. These were real, the animal shapes in them softened and gray with age. Once, there had been men named Skaay who carved them.
“Impressive, eh?” Terry was standing next to him, grinning at the poles. Rob shook his head.
“Impressive for the Stone Age. But that’s not where we are. And that’s the whole problem.”
As they reached the car the driver opened the door for Rob; no driverless cars on the Haida Gwaii, at least not yet. As he made to get in, the man said, “Oh, I’m sorry.”
Rob blinked at him. “What?”
“You’re angry. I’m sorry for whatever it is I did.” The man’s face was local; the rest of him was invisible under a yellow rain slicker and broad-brimmed hat. And, Rob noticed suddenly, he was wearing AR glasses.
“Why do you think I’m mad at you?”
The driver tapped his glasses. “I have Asperger’s. My glasses can recognize emotions on people’s faces and tell me what they are. They say you’re angry right now.”
“Not at you.” As he did up his seat belt he thought, And I’m not angry anyway, dammit! He scowled out at the monotonous trees as they headed into town and answered the aides’ questions and suggestions with terse yeses and nos.
Despite his attempts to focus on the business at hand, he couldn’t help but notice how Terry was avidly staring out at the landscape. Rob found his own attention reluctantly following.
The road curved and lowered, meandering south toward the bay and Skidegate Inlet. They passed a road sign that said they were on Oceanview Drive. It led toward a narrow strip of houses—just three or four streets deep—that hugged a shoreline bristling with the masts of fishing trawlers.
North of here, Graham Island fanned out, an inverted triangle nestled into the Dixon Entrance, where the Alaskan Panhandle met British Columbia’s shore. From the air he’d been able to see into Hecate Strait, which separated the Gwaii from B.C. If the pipeline negotiations worked out, soon a daisy chain of immense tankers from Kitimat would be heading up the strait—bound north and through the entrance, and then to Asia. They would be carrying ultraheavy crude from the oil sands in Alberta, and there was no way they would get through here without the cooperation of the local First Nations bands. The First Nations had fought for the power of that veto inch by inch, over several lifetimes. It wasn’t official, treaty-sanctioned power. They’d had to acquire real power, and in so doing had tangled themselves deeper and deeper into the world. This might look like a little island, but there was nothing local about politics on the Gwaii.
At one point the driver suddenly braked, reducing them to a crawl. Because he was watching the forest, Rob knew there was nothing to see—and yet, after a minute or so, a pair of deer cautiously s
tepped onto the road ahead of them. “How did you know they were there?” he asked the driver.
The man grinned. As the deer fell behind and he sped up again, he said, “Happy to be back?”
Rob started to retort that he’d never been to the Gwaii before, but the driver was Haida . . . “Yeah,” he answered.
This was the land of his ancestors, however much he might resent carrying that burden. He had to admit, the houses and stores they were passing looked . . . not exactly prosperous, maybe, but not as squalid as he’d expected. The Haida had been all but wiped out by disease at the start of the twentieth century. That was a story that repeated all across the Americas, but the apocalypse had taken four hundred years and had reached the Queen Charlottes last. Their culture was still intact when the smallpox hit; one result of this was that they didn’t see technology as the weapon of a conquering power.
His father had once told him that in the old days they’d used slaves to erect the more important totem poles; when the eyes were finally carved so the spirits could look out of them, and they were raised upright, the slaves would be killed and buried at their bases. It was the same nowadays, his father had said, except that they used power tools to do the carving and it was these they buried.
“Hey,” he said to the driver. “Are you on Wegetit.com?”
“Hate using the Internet. But they got a kiosk by the real estate place; when I’m going by, I answer a question or two sometimes. Why?”
“ ’Cause your side is demanding that I use it. Any idea why?”
“Oh, that’s ’cause it’s part of how we decide things now.”
“Really.”
When he got to the hotel and finally could put his feet up, Rob set aside his glasses, pulled out his tablet, and went to Wegetit.com. It wasn’t his first time on the site, but this time he bit back his impatience and set up an account. Terry had funded this, after all, and he couldn’t quite deny the curiosity of a father about what his son had been up to.
There was only one thing you could do on Wegetit.com: show that you understood someone’s framing of an idea. There were two text fields, one for a word or concept (very short) and a longer one, for about a tweet’s worth of definition. You could let fly your idea of what something meant and wait. After a while, people would respond with restatements of your definition. If you thought a restatement accurately represented your meaning, you could click the Wegetit button. There was no button for disagreement.
Ideas were usually presented in the context of some issue or problem area, such as, in this case, aboriginal land claims. That was the domain the Haida negotiators wanted him to stick to. He started with basic ideas like government and agreement and worked his way up to emancipation and good faith. He had no idea who the people he was agreeing with were—identities were anonymized—but somewhere out there were thousands of people who shared his understandings of many basic concepts, even if they might disagree with his politics. Wegetit was drawing lines connecting all those people, and every agreement strengthened the connections.
According to Terry, this made Wegetit.com the opposite of every other Internet site with a discussion forum, because however well intentioned they might be, by their very nature discussion forums manufactured misunderstanding. Divergence, not convergence, was the rule in a forum. But give a problem—especially a thorny political problem—to a constellation of connected people on Wegetit.com, and however diverse they might be in their perspectives and attitudes, they would at least understand one another when they talked about it.
It all seemed like bullshit to Rob; it became obvious the next morning that it was anything but bullshit to the Haida.
The negotiations would be taking place in the Haida Heritage Centre in Skidegate (or, as the locals called it, Sea Lion town). The place was along the shore, a collection of five large buildings reminiscent of lodges but built with modern materials. Six large totem poles stood at stately intervals fronting them. A bewildering amount of carving and block prints covered the walls of the meeting hall, all repeating the legends and tales of the culture. Tables had been set up in a giant U-shape, and there was the usual chaos of people running around making last-minute preparations.
The Haida insisted they needed a daylong scoping workshop to prepare for the real negotiations. Since they were the ones threatening to scuttle the pipeline project, Rob had decided to indulge them. He was as good at steering workshops in the direction he wanted as anybody in the country. He let his aides run interference on the preparations and running around; he wanted to make sure he greeted the right people ahead of the formal ceremonies. Before he could do any of that, though, his senior administrative assistant, Jeffrey, hurried over. “There’s a delay,” he said.
“Of course there is.” He would have been surprised if there wasn’t. Rob had been counting heads and seats; there were a lot more of the latter than the former. “Where is everybody?”
“Some of the delegates have been dismissed,” said Jeffrey. “They’re telling me it’s because of something you did last night.”
“Last night? All I did was go to sleep. Well, I browsed that website for a while . . .” Oh. Jeffrey was nodding.
“I guess you did enough agreeing that they were able to tell who would know what you meant when you used the word ‘the’—and who wouldn’t. The delegates who didn’t match up were either dismissed or they’re being briefed on the differences; and they’ve called up a boatload of professionally qualified people—”
“A literal boatload, I suppose?”
“—from across the islands and the mainland too, who’re within your agreements map. With an extra day or so of prep, they’ll be able to make sure that everybody sitting around the table speaks the same language at the level of basic ideas.”
“Fine. If they’re going to play shenanigans, so will we.” He brought out his glasses and put them on. Then he made a secure connection to Ottawa and spilled some copies of SimCanada into his sensorium. He wanted to see how the land-claims issue was tracking.
In between introductions to men and women with names like Ghaandl and Imkyanvaan and Gumssiwa—names and faces that triggered odd memories and recognitions in Rob—he was able to glance at the maps representing different policy outcomes. He could also see the status reports coming out of CSIS on the investigation, but he wasn’t really able to read them with all the glad-handing he was doing. It looked like the tanker hadn’t split yet, but it was on the rocks and they couldn’t get near it. A spill was inevitable; the only question was, how bad would it be?
Yes, let’s not forget this is a power play, he reminded himself as he pulled the glasses off for a photo op. Somehow the Haida had steered that ship onto the rocks. They were corrupting navigational data in the Inside Passage. If the damned spooks in CSEC could get their heads out of their asses and find out how, he wouldn’t have to be here. As it was, the threat was clear: negotiate now, or this happens again.
Either the Haida were confident that they could repeat this stunt, or they were desperate. He’d have to find out which.
“Attention!” It was Todd Swanton, a conference organizer Rob had worked with before. Todd had been flown out here on a day’s notice to facilitate. “Not all the delegates are physically here yet,” he said, “but I’m told they’re all connected and we can do a little teleconferencing while we get organized. I’m going to start by introducing the minister of aboriginal affairs, Robert Skaay . . .” He went on about Rob’s pedigree, but the way he’d emphasized the name, giving the correct Haida pronunciation, galled Rob. If the press started playing up his connection with the island, they might start to question his objectivity, hence his ability to represent the government properly.
Todd called him up to give a speech, and he talked for fifteen minutes without notes or any plan; he was good at that sort of thing. He started to relax in the familiar conference setting.
After all the preliminaries, it seemed the locals wanted to air their grievances, and Todd
didn’t discourage them; he actually started inviting people up to the mic to talk about issues. This too was a familiar exercise to Rob, who was prepared to tune out and ignore the whole process. It would be the usual festival of misery as various elders and parents talked about underfunding, poor education, drug problems, lack of good employment . . . He’d heard it all before. He would nod and look alert, but Bill had made Rob minister of aboriginal affairs because Rob knew the government couldn’t help these people. A hundred years of trying had yielded nothing. If you were going to pull yourself out of poverty, you had to do it yourself. Rob knew that in his bones, because he had done it.
Except that it didn’t quite play out that way. The people coming up to the podium weren’t just random petitioners; they were people who’d used Wegetit.com to define an issue. Some of them had access to sophisticated interfaces such as augmented reality glasses; some were old folks who’d been polled by volunteers in the grocery store. What they shared in common was that they had either identified some key issue in language that everybody else here—including Rob—seemed to understand, or they’d proven they understood one on the site, and had been chosen to be here through the sortition process of dynamic distributed democracy.
Even Rob had to admit that the problems they described over the next hour were real. Their descriptions were sharply focused, comprehensive, and almost immediately understood by everyone. The summaries were so clear, in fact, that he found it a bit creepy. Usually when he encountered such clarity, it was the result of a concerted propaganda effort. This, though—Wegetit didn’t filter or distort ideas, it simply connected those people who were capable of understanding one another. The people in this room represented the network with the broadest, most complete common understanding of the issues surrounding aboriginal land claims. A network that he was apparently part of.