Year: 2025

Smells like 极 客精神

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, turbulence

One theme of mine is territorialization of the digital world, and the tight relationship between cyber criminals and their governments. Sometimes this is practical, as in the fact that Russian cybercriminals can operate freely as long as they do not target Russian /CIS citizens. Sometimes it is felt nationalism as with the patriotism of Chinese hackers. National hacking cultures are a combination of ways of organizing, expectations on participants and the wider digital and state structure in which they are held. Because everything digital is local,, they emerged from the historical evolution of skillbase, opportunity and political economy. It marks the particular division of labour, types of criminal activity and organisational practice that we see in national hacking forums.

极 客精神 is geek spirit (deSombre and Byrnes 2018), the ethos  and obligation of community among Chinese pro-government digital activists, hackers and crime entrepreneurs. For Chinese and Russian-speaking cybercriminals the 21st century viewed an evolving relationship between cybercrime, patriotism and nationalism. The authors of this highly informative report say there was a tight relationship between Chinese hackers and patriotic fervour early on. In contrast with the well-known links between the Kremlin and Russian-speaking cyber criminals, that relationship developed as Russian foreign policy evolved in a much more aggressive direction. Chinese hacker patriotism seems to be more organic in form and origin. Starting with first protests in the form of attacks and web defacements against the Indonesian and the U.S. governments. Later, Chinese hackers set up their own companies and contracted services to the Chinese government.

This review of hacker entrepreneurs shows each adheres to a different national culture. This is the case of both mode of practice and overall aims and targets. Something I and others noted with the different interactional ethics in Russian compared to English language hacking forums. English language ones were far more chatty. As the report also confirms, Russian forums emphasize business, not community. Professional in this setting means the cash nexus and the art of the deal, customer care and rewards for loyalty. Social punishments are meted out for weaker and less competent members. Chinese forums are more nurturing. Some hackers run paid apprenticeship programs. It seems there are both civilizational hacking cultures and national ones. Russian hacking sometimes includes the wider ruusky mir. This is not equal. Chinese, of course, participate in English and Russian forums.The reverse is not true. English and Russian speakers do not enter Chinese forums.

Russians and East Europeans saw a criminal market dominated by Americans. They wanted some of that. The report highlights how important Ukraine, especially its Russian-speaking areas pre-war was to the development of a Russian language cyber crime underground. CarderPlanet was formed from a meeting in Odesa in 2000. it was crazy and direct response to the English-speaking Carder group Counterfeit Library. the Russian language for was highly structured and deliberately professionalized in comparison to the anarchic English language one. The harm was significant, costing financial institutions hundreds of millions. As these organizations evolved so did the close links between Russian government and elite cyber criminals. The Russian-Georgian War showed close cooperation in military aims with cyber criminals. The Russian state has been adept at maintaining its cybercriminal capacity.It is hard to maintain the sociological concept of deviance as an explanation for criminal activity in situations where criminal activity is co-opted by the state, where criminals are highly skilled and well rewarded for crime is patriotic.

DeSombre, Winnona, and Dan Byrnes. 2018. Thieves and Geeks: Russian and Chinese Hacking Communities. Recorded Future.

Harm reduction is not the point, what is useful is what happens around it

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

Nothing is a silver bullet. Except when it is.

I was reminded reading Nicholls et al (2022) report on drug consumption rooms of the critique of them as ‘not a silver bullet’. This term means a dependable solution to a otherwise tricky problem . It put me in mind of a meeting with MPs where I and others had explained that they were useful, but not in themselves a solution to Scotland’s drug problem. I said that harm reduction services like DCRs are never an end in themselves. The ‘service’ you want to offer is not providing a safe environment for drug consumption. It is having a contact point for users who have particularly disrupted lives where you can talk about other services that they need – welfare, housing, psychological, health etc.  What matters is what happens when you provide that service. Later I heard, ‘they are not a silver bullet’. Does anybody think they are? As Nicholls et al outline, everyone involved thinks they have to defeat this strawman argument first of all.

We should make ourselves aware of why this argument exists in the first place. Nobody used it for Scotland’s needle exchange policy which was vital in fighting the HIV epidemic. Objections then were moral as it was seen as a moral and a technical project. It has come about because our harm reduction thinking has become increasingly technically focused in practice evidence and justification. This is just perfectly reasonable. We could work together with very different moral and political views  to agree on the technical benefits of needle exchange. It was quite remarkable that conservative, and liberal, politicians could agree on this approach.

The problem of relying on the technologically justified approach is that it can ossify over time and displace the wider moral claim you’re making. Everyone starts to expect naloxone to act in this way. We know it is its most effective when it is part of a toolkit owned by users – meaning not a magic bullet.

So we can perhaps work with some different means of understanding:

What kinds of conversations and communities are created and supported through it?

What kind of knowledge came from it?

Does it connect different elements of a wicked problem?

and so on

Nothing is a silver bullet. Except when it is. There are plenty of technological solutions. HIV is now a disease to live with, not die of. Obesity may be preventable. Semaglutide might treat addiction. Yet many campaigns reject silver bullets on principle because the real aim is different – usually to end capitalism in some form. Imagine a party campaigning against child poverty. They are offered a solution – eg here’s a ton of cash. They reject it. ‘No to solutions that do not change society’. We would think them disgraceful, immoral. Certainly we would assume they were not really opposed to child poverty. But that is exactly what happens.

In the social sciences, we have been sometimes reluctant to accept that there can be magic bullets, technological solutions, because we are a bit in love with our wicked problems. If some of these problems have simple technical solutions like the weight loss pill, then it reduces our role to technical administrators. Similarly we refuse the great man idea of history because it gets in the way of our ability to theorise. It is a bit hard to argue now that individuals do not influence history.

Nicholls, James, Wulf Livingston, Andy Perkins, Beth Cairns, Rebecca Foster, Kirsten M. A. Trayner, Harry R. Sumnall, Tracey Price, Paul Cairney, Josh Dumbrell, and Tessa Parkes. 2022. ‘Drug Consumption Rooms and Public Health Policy: Perspectives of Scottish Strategic Decision-Makers’. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19(11):6575. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19116575.

Trump is a turf warrior: crypto as a digital territory.

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, turbulence

Nobody talks much about capillary power these days. Probably because we have too many lessons in actual power. This was a predominant concept for many decades in social theory. Derived from Michel Foucault who held that power was not held by individuals or organizations, but spread through society. Every act of definition creates it. Every act of resistance renews it. It is hard to say as Foucault did, ‘Power is everywhere and nowhere’ when you can easily point to where power actually is. It is a pity as the persistent performance of power can bind us to its more subtle features. We can see is how much power is mythical, performative, rhetorical and psychological. Tone and texture matter. The  main problem I have with the idea of disciplinary power is that often what he is describing is not power. It is more like bureaucratic busywork. What we are seeing is power becoming more personal and ‘hot’, losing its bloodlessness and focus on the normal in favour of the pathological. The world is re-enchanted.

As with his origin story in Manhattan real estate, Trump thinks in terms of turf, as in controllable territory. Turf is a common concept in organized crime. In Mexico it is called plaza. The dense network of relationships that matter. Controlling the political power in a territory is more important than having formal ownership. Turf is the thicket of political, familial, clannish and neighbourhood relationships that make power happen. Organized crime is a frequent mediator of this relationship. Turf also needs some measure of consent.Just as the British police often say they’re policing by consent, so organised crime also often does crime with consent. Or at least acquiescence.

One area where turf wars had become less consequential is face-to-face drug dealing. The popularity of the mobile phone seriously reduced turf conflicts (Edlund and Machado 2019). However, this belongs to an older era of digital life. Increasingly, we see digital space and resources foreclosed. The digital is a much more territorial space and has become like a limited territorial resource. The growing interest of organized crime in crypto is part of that. They do not have a lot of interest in resources that are widely networked and easily accessed. Their interest lies in resources where they can control and limit access and charge significant rents.

This also explains Trump’s approach to politics, finance, and the digital sphere shows that his most recent embrace of crypto is significant here. Crypto is by design a digital turf. By that I mean it is deliberately a restricted resource that cannot be scaled and instead must be controlled.

 

 

A positive case for AI from the perspective of being disabled.

Angus Bancroft/ / A life with motor neuron disease., Research, turbulence

AI has become something of a bogeyman and it is not helpful to view the technology in this way. It is indeed often hyped up junk, as when Apple’s AI helpfully prioritizes spam email as ‘urgent’ for me. Yet as with any other technology it brings change and benefits and problems. I use AI-enabled tools every day. It concerns me that a negative narrative has emerged, which purely focuses on AI as a threat to individual human creativity and to the environment. This is a one-sided and rather  hoary and dated critique that rests largely on an assumption that we cannot possibly integrate these technologies into our lives.Techno fear is as bad as techno hype and just because it feels good doesn’t mean you should do it.

My existence would be much diminished without AI tools. I am unable to use a keyboard or other input device. Most of my voice has gone. The only dictation support that works is an AI driven one called MacWhisper, which uses the Whisper LLM. This is the only transcription software that can make sense of my much diminished voice. It is far superior to the solutions offered by others. And to be clear, it is actually the commercial software that is best.You know that horrible integration that Apple does and that the EU wants to end and loads of tech critics complain about. The one where everything works together. Well, it’s the best thing I can have. Using macOS and an iPhone, I can take advantage of my existing contacts and software and integrate accessible workarounds and solutions into my existing workflow. I can use iPhone mirroring to access my phone directly from the desktop.This means I can continue to work and communicate with friends in a more seamless way.

This is far better than the clunky, awkward and disheartening solutions offered as part of specialist support for the disabled. On the one hand you need to have reliable solutions which necessarily are not going to be as pretty. On the other these all kind of assume that you’ve already given up on life. As an example, there is a system that will allow me to make calls using a head mouse tracker. But, you have to type in each phone number manually, like it was 1998 or something. I literally cannot remember the last time I manually entered a phone number. There is no possibility of integration with my existing, well, existence, my existing way of working, communicating with friends and loved ones. It’s just one example. The other solutions being offered are much the same. I can laboriously type out an email in a Windows pad. Or I can use my existing computer, which I can use a head tracking mouse with, and use voice control and dictation to send an email that way, in a way that I need to because I’m a professional still. This means I can continue to work and communicate in a seamless way. I can also control my phone directly from the desktop. Despite my situation, I am still writing books and papers. I am still making plans with friends and family.

As a researcher and a teacher, I have a complex workflow built up over many years that uses customised tools and complex data sets. I need these kind of data, this kind of information, this kind of multiple tools at my fingertips in a way I can use for my work and in fact for my pleasure. It is absolutely infuriating to be told that I can switch on my TV with the system as if that’s all I should have as a disabled person. My lot in life is just to sit in front of the telly all day. Well I can already put my Apple TV on with my Apple computer or my Apple iPad and using that I can watch all kinds of TV from around the world which is what I do. Everything about these tools is focused on the lowest common denominator passive consumer. That’s not who I am, or anyone is. We are still in our lives.

If we do not highlight these positive use cases for AI, then they will be regulated out of existence or their development will be limited and I will be a lot worse off and my life will be much reduced. Likewise, a new era of domestic robotics cannot come soon enough.

More generally, I find the way that AI is used as this kind of scare figure quite frustrating. It blocks analysis and evaluation. For example, the University proposes for its ethical investment strategy it will not invest in companies that produce AI-enabled weaponry, As if this is somehow more nefarious than just plain old artillery shells and such. No explanation is given as to why AI weaponry is so much worse than just lobbing a RPG at someone.. If an ally like Ukraine is using AI to target incoming missiles to support its air defence and for its own targeting, why is that a bad thing? It might actually save lives if it improves their air defence capability and makes their targeting more effective. It might shorten the war and in any case allies should have access to the means to defend themselves against one of the greatest threats to civilization of our time. If Ukraine is able to use autonomous weaponry to make up for its manpower deficiencies, then I do not see that as being a problem.

The distinction between AI and non-AI is dissolving anyway. For example, artillery shells can be networked to work cooperatively.

That does not mean that AI is always the right solution or even a working solution. It still needs to be treated with critical reasoning. There are plenty of sins to recount. It continues to occupy the place that ‘data’ did about ten years ago in the minds of venture capitalists, as some magic dust to sprinkle upon a business plan. It will never understand irony, which makes parsing British communications very difficult. A lot of these sins, however, lie in the credulity of the beholder. For me, the bigger problem lies in the human willingness to give up our autonomy, to the group or to a convenient technology or to the state, an NGO or trade union. AI is just one insidious way in which this can happen, and people can farm out significant choices to a system that allows them to pretend they have no choice at all. But there are many other systems that do that, that we need to be alert to.