The Process of Perversion

Continuing with last week's theme of regulatory capture, I mused on the process itself. A robust institution may maintain several failsafes in case of abuse. In a free society, this often comes in the form of transparency from the public and press. The judicial and legal branches (in theory) act as ways to ensure the social contract. Security forces exist to enforce the laws of the land and protect citizens. These institutions essentially go mad, as catabolism wracks the system. We live in such a time where most of these had failed. The security system has become an end, rather than a means of defense. In an age of enforced frailty, the best defense is resilience, and opting out whenever one can. 

Future Shocked

Technology advances at a breakneck pace as corrupted institutions metastasize into Orwellian bureaucracies at a close rate. The signs of rule of law are generally thrown in front of a train as organizations prey on their former customers and clients.

To further add to the confusion is the effects of advancing technology. In military science, technology is not only a force multiplier for armed forces, but also enables new venues of attack previous generations would consider impossible. Imagine explaining cyberattacks to a World War II tank commander. Asymmetric warfare favors the small groups and even individuals, and their powers only increase over time. Today’s cutting edge research is tomorrow’s niche hobby.

With resource depletion, climate change, and economic collapse, the ruling elites are trying their hardest to hold onto power of vestigial structures. However, their desire and desperation to hold onto power are often the things that destroy the institutions they depend on. Corruption means that more disaffected individuals will arise, regardless of how many riots or uprisings are put down. Lots of broad bans on technologies and fields of research mean amateurs are less likely to hold things, but only a few professionals (who may or may not game the system for their own benefits). Surveillance and arrest of dissidents (including those practicing “legal” methods of dissent) means that change within institutions becomes much more unlikely. Expansive domains shrink as the costs of maintaining them exceed wealth extracted.

On the positive side, though, technologies exist for eliminating poverty and alleviating resource depletion (albeit treating symptoms rather than causes). From cheap desalinization to renewable energy to 3D printing to impressive medicaltechnology, we will need everything we can. Living under a dystopian police state out of a cyberpunk novel is bad enough, but as technologies get cheaper and more widespread, we may at least get a postcyberpunk future instead.

Iktomi: The Zeitgeist of the Third Wave

As the Third Wave crashes into a sickly and dying Second Wave system, a mythological entity may be worth revisiting. Iktomi was a spider-spirit of Lakota folklore. He was a bringer of technology, and also a trickster. An accomplice of Coyote, he would often give people new technology. Sometimes, the technology itself is a trick, a method of distracting an unwary victim from seeing the true purpose of it. Iktomi was believed to have a hold over European and American settlers, who inadvertently spread Iktomi’s web (telegraph lines and railroads) across the land.   
 

Iktomi is also correlated with communications, like Mercury. Like the Norse Loki or African Anansi, he is a trickster. The trickster archetype was correlated with hackers in recent decades, and some parallels with Iktomi are fairly logical. Both manipulate lines of communication to play tricks. Both bring novelty and new technologies. 

Hacking and cyberwar have been on the news recently. However, much about cyberwarfare is fear-mongering. Military and technological secrets tend to remain secrets for a very short time, especially in the present. Cyberwarfare favors the defender, and each cyberattack is often a single use weapon. After a cyberattack, security holes that led to it are typically the first things that get closed. Types of cyberattackers range from cyber-criminals (who merely seize something and run), cyber-spies (looking for intel or doing counterintelligence), cyber-terrorists (seeking a target of opportunity), and cyber-warriors (seeking to actively disable another network/system). Cyberweapons, such as Stuxnet and Flame, can easily be reverse engineered by their former targets. The political chiding to “improve cyber-security” may very well be a mandate to spend more on overpriced, under-efficient “security” software. Once again, the “security theater” replaces the rather boring reality. Many of the folks hawking “cybersecurity” products are the modern analogs of Basil Zaharoff.  

But to return to Iktomi, let us examine a cyber-attack as a form of combined arms. Even non-state actors could combine multiple vectors of an attack or plan to accomplish their goals. This process does not necessarily have to involve violence, destruction, or even illegality. An activist group could release leaked documents at the same moment a video goes viral. Iktomi may parallel the cypherpunk culture. As more things become networked, it becomes harder to completely shut down the internet, even if there is a “kill switch” (or more mundane power failures).

The technologies that thrive as Second Wave nation-states and corporations recede are decentralized ones. Permaculture and aquaponics may remove (or at least reduce) the need for food. Makerspaces allow for relocalized manufacturing. Solar panels and DIY renewables (such as homemade biofuels on a number of farms) could replace faulty power grids. Encrypted cybercurrencies like Bitcoin could act as a metric for a number of local currencies. There would be less need to rely on dying, stodgy bureaucracies. Iktomi would have the last laugh.

Mad Science at Home

There is a number of topics I could address this week, such as the food scandal in Europe, the spread of drones in the USA, or the rumblings of a genuine supervillain state in North Korea. However, the creation of mad science innovations at home is only beginning compared to what it may become despite (or perhaps because of) government laws. Death rays may join homemade firearms and explosives as weapons of mad scientists. Perhaps drones may be the new guns, in the sense of a disruptive technology everyone rushes to ban. Given the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure and possibilities of destructive drone swarms, protection will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Tomorrow's "terrorists" may lack ideology or cause, save destroying something and seeing what happens. The instability of the current world system becomes even more strained as a result. What could possibly go wrong?

Historical Supervillainy: The Borgia

When one thinks of the Borgia, the extreme decadence and wealth of Renaissance Italy’s most infamous family springs to mind. Whether they were any more ruthless than many of their peers is a matter for debate, but suffice to say, they fulfill many of the stereotypical criteria for supervillainy. Just consider some of the traditional accounts. 

Rodrigo Borgia (AKA Pope Alexander VI) was the Blofeld of Renaissance Italy. He had a son, Cesare, with more ambition than common sense. His daughter Lucrezia was synonymous with femme fatales for centuries. He employed an advisor renowned for schemes, Machiavelli himself. He employed a mad scientist, Leonardo da Vinci. He led a major religion, the Catholic Church, and had his own elite troops, the Swiss mercenaries (the forerunners of the Swiss Guard). He had his own personal hitman, Micheletto. 

However, there is some controversy over the extent of some of the Borgia deeds. Despite this, there it still influences media today. From novels to videogames to TV series, the legacy of the Borgia lives on. Even firearms have a bit of the Borgia legacy. An amusing bit of Borgia-related trivia is that "Buffalo Bill" Cody named a Springfield rifle after Lucrezia Borgia due to its deadliness. 

Neurohacking: A Brain Caper

As any neuroscientist or psychologist knows, calling the human brain “flawed” would be an understatement. Brains can be distracted easily, reject information they disagree with, and convinced to make rather stupid decisions not in their self-interest. Just Google the term “cognitive bias” for some clear examples. The brain is an impulsive, ad hoc massively parallel system, if we wish to view it as a computer system. 

Like other computers, the brain can be hacked. That is, its vulnerabilities can be exploited for someone else’s motives or curiosity. Eating sweetened foods or watching TV are common “hacks” for the pleasure centers of the brain. However, as neurotechnology advances, they may also be hacked. It is already possible to hack invasive implants (such as pacemakers, cochlear implants, etc.), so hacking a brain implant (especially a wireless one) is not outside the realm of possibility. Personal information could be placed at risk. 

More interestingly, brain-hacking is possible even by non-invasive venues. Even EEG, an older technology, can beused for neural hacking. EEG headsets are becoming commercialized and cheaper (about 200-300 USD). One use for these is brain computer interface (BCI). Brain computer interface (BCI) is a technology which allows an individual’s brain signals to control a computer or prosthetic device. There are applications for medicine (e.g. assisting disabled persons) and for entertainment (e.g. computer and video games). 

Interestingly, a simple EEG-based BCI system was used to unknowingly steal information from participants in a study. The types of information included house locations, bank account and credit card numbers, PINs, and the like. The study had a ~10-40% success rate on its 28 participants. None of them knew they were being hacked. Imagine if hackers disguised such an information-stealing program as a computer game, or embedded such a system with a popular computer game. 

Imagine if the personal data harvested by such an endeavor was encrypted, cached, and stored online for later retrieval. For instance, imagine if any a small amount of cash from compromised bank accounts was converted into an encrypted, online currency (e.g. BitCoin) and then vanishes into the underground economy. Such a process could easily be automated and be implemented at a low cost.

There are possible defenses and countermeasures that could be used. For example, tagging suspicious transactions with online banking could be one. Another could be allowing open access to code to check for any hacks or tweaks of the sort. Some people may have “natural defenses” in the form of forgetfulness and absent-mindedness. Still, the low success rate (<50%) means that in order to be profitable, such a hack would need to target large numbers of people or specifically target wealthy people. Social engineering may also be combined to prevent people from realizing anything is amiss, as well. 

Given that all the technologies for such an endeavor already exist, implementing a prototype system could be a rewarding task. Likewise, imagine if government and private spy agencies began investigating this technology. What could possibly go wrong?