Having never read a Ken MacLeod novel before, I found my introduction to him to be a bit rocky. The opening chapters of The Restoration Game were replete with irritants. After that it settled down and started to tell an interesting story, but never quite managed to completely convince. It had the right ingredients for a better tale, but it could not get the doses right and wound up feeling, for all its positive points, out of balance.

The story’s protagonist, Lucy Stone, spent most of her childhood in the fictional Soviet Republic of Krassnia, but now works for a computer game company in Edinburgh. Her company is hired to make a Krassnian version of a popular medieval computer game, and her heritage and lingual abilities, rare to be found in the West, are the reason her company was chosen. There is more to this request for a Krassnian video game than is initially apparent, however. Lucy’s mother is a former CIA operative, and another man who might be her father is mired in the same kind of political intrigue. Through them Lucy gets entangled in an international plot the details of which are murky but the danger in which becomes increasingly apparent. Finally, she finds herself on a mission with consequences so far reaching that “epic” does not seem to do them justice.

The novel opens with a prologue written in second person, which constitutes the first irritant. I do not see the point of second person, unless it is to make the author seem a little overbearing, informing a reader what he is doing instead of telling him about a story. To me, it seems like a cheap way to “be different.” It is fortunate that there are only three second person chapters in the book, all with a commonality that one supposes the shared difference in perspective is meant to highlight.

It is unfortunate that the second chapter is a flash forward to near the end of the book. In it, the narrator is clearly on the verge of a very traumatic experience, but its effect is attenuated by the fact that we do not know what the problem is, or The Other Thing that she refers to, and we cannot much care about her since we have not gotten to know her yet. Any effect of the mysteriousness of this Other Thing evaporates when we realize it is a flash forward, and must make another jarring jump before the story can get started.

Finally, three chapters in, we are introduced to a protagonist at the beginning of a story and start to get to know her. Her narration style reminds one of a fourteen-year-old girl on the phone with a fellow teenybopper. Soon after, she jumps into backstory. So the initial chapters of the book consist of odd bits of second person narrative, an annoying narrator with a less than propitious voice for this sort of story, and leaps from one time frame to another that are apt to give the reader whiplash. We get a perspective of someone, us apparently, outside our universe, then a future time frame, then a present time frame, then a past time frame.

This is the sort of thing that makes me regret opening a book in the first place, but there were two redeeming qualities about the beginning, qualities that gave me hope that the book would get better (the narrator’s voice also got less irritating, or perhaps I just accustomed myself to it). The first was a bit of cleverness after the prologue, the kind you do not get from writers of no talent.

I stopped dead. My rolling case, in accordance with Newton’s first law of motion, kept rolling and collided painfully with my calf muscles. It then rebounded (third law), toppled over (second law), and made me stumble (Murphy’s law).

The second was a small section in the prologue that hints at a profound and very arresting idea:

“… you have brought those poor creatures to the brink of disaster. Nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, and what else? Oh yes — cultural calamity, as they discover they are in a simulation. How long will it take for that to dawn on them?”

“Blame the SPs for that,” says Andrea Memmius. “They used an off-the-shelf navigational package as the basis for their extrasolar astronomy simulation. Naturally it is Ptolemaic. They were not to know—”

“That their virtual creations would one day send probes to the edge of the solar system? That they might just notice that the galaxies are spinning too fast? That the underlying physics of their world are inconsistent?”

“So far,” says Caro Odom, “the sim-people have shown remarkable creativity in rationalizing these… dark matters!”

We are given to understand, then, that our universe is a simulation. It is also what I interpret as a dig at modern conventional physics, and one that maybe they have coming (for those interested in these sorts of things, there is, on page 233, a clear reference to MOND). However, it comes as a disappointment to discover, by degrees, that the story is too small for a concept like that. It has too little time to apportion to it, given the other tasks it sets for itself.

MAJOR SPOILER MAJOR SPOILER

This conceit of a simulated universe is forgotten until the end of the novel. When Lucy finally, at the end of her mission, finds evidence of it, it feels tacked on, a foreign element in a story that is not intrinsically about it. The idea is not, insofar as I can tell, hinted at, talked about, or developed in any way after its introduction in the prologue. Then it resurfaces in the final act.

Perhaps The Restoration Game could be improved by omitting the prologue, by introducing a mystery whose elements baffle investigators through the course of the book until the final answer is hinted at in the end, when Lucy discovers a great secret. That way, it would have been a part of the story the whole time, but subtle enough not to give the game away, rather than an addition on the front and back of a story otherwise unconcerned about the topic. And better yet, it might have been left tantalizingly inconclusive rather than definite.

END OF SPOILER END OF SPOILER

Lucy’s family history is delved into several times, either by her telling us what she knows, or reading an old diary and relating it to us, or hearing stories from others who were there. The backstory itself is intriguing, but the time devoted to it is out of proportion to the other elements of the novel. By the time it is finally told, with the exception of an important reveal at the end, we are over halfway through the book. Meanwhile, very little is advanced or developed in the current timeline. Lucy meets a guy, they fall in love, she works on her video game project.

Ken MacLeod

The current timeline is mostly to put her in situations so that the reader can read more of the backstory. Then, with the majority of the book’s pages used up, the current timeline suddenly kicks into gear and Lucy goes on a very rushed mission that runs her smack dab into, as I have said, a gigantic idea that towers over the small novel like a colossus.

Complaints aside, I did enjoy the book. The backstory is too much, but it is interesting. Several generations of Lucy’s family are explored and they have some remarkable history. I also felt the author did a crafty job of mixing the events of his story with the turmoil in Ossetia and Georgia that happened in real life. Apparently, these unforeseen events, occurring while he was writing the book, forced him to make some last minute changes. This he pulls off marvelously.

The one thing I cannot figure — not about the book per se, but rather about reaction to it — is why this would get a Prometheus Award nomination. I do not see anything particularly libertarian about it. It explores some of the nastier aspects of communism, but even socialists are given to do that once in a while. Indeed, in seeing the sensitivity to nuance with which the author paints the different brands of communists, one might suspect him of being, if not in the fold, some sort of ideological cousin. Certainly he has gotten to know the movement.

It also does not paint the CIA in a wonderful light, but a book cannot be called libertarian simply because it opposes some of the same things a libertarian does. There are no libertarian characters; the sympathetic ones are just about uniformly social democrats. This might be realistic for a novel principally set, in one timeline at least, in modern-day Edinburgh, but it is hardly libertarian. Nor is there any attempt, so far as I can discern, to make an understated libertarian point about the things going on in the book.

I suppose that is not my concern. The Prometheus Awards may nominate whom they wish, and one imagines there is a paucity of truly libertarian material out there. What does concern me is whether or not I like the book, and I did. Sort of.

How gigantically humongous and intrusive is the federal government? A traditional measure is to look at the pages of regulations in the Federal Register, which is, by now, probably the world’s largest book collection. The problem with this approach is that it takes no account of how a single bad regulation can have monstrously deleterious effects.

Copyright regulation is a good example of this. There was no universal enforcement until the very late part of the 19th century, and terms were mostly short in the early days of this regulation. In the course of the 20th century, regulations became ever more tight and the copyright terms ever longer, so much so that today, the words you sign away to a conventional publisher are theirs to keep for your lifetime plus 70 years!

One standard argument for doing this is that noncopyrighted works will not be efficiently exploited. You have to assign ownership or else the resource will vanish into the ether. No one will care about it, and civilization will lose extremely valuable literary works. Our market for ideas will be impoverished.

Now, to me, this argument seems obviously false, but that’s probably because of my own experience in publishing. I’ve seen it happen — so many times that it is predictable — that once a work has fallen out of print but is still under some kind of protection, it is mostly neglected by the heirs. No one who “owns” the work has the incentive to bring it to light, while those who care about it fear the law or don’t want to pay some arbitrary price set by the owners.

Meanwhile, when a work is public domain, there are dozens of people bidding to get it into print. This was true all throughout history, actually. The reason American school kids in the 19th century read British literature is that it was not regulated in the United States, and therefore, it could be sold very cheaply and distributed very widely. It is true today: Whether music or books, the material in the commons is far more in demand than that which is regulated. And the demand leads to the supply.

In other words, the opposite of the conventional exploitation theory is correct. The copyrighted works drop from memory, while the public domain works last and last. But of course, this observation draws from my deep involvement in the industry, and we can’t expect academic scribblers to understand anything about how the world actually works in real life.

One academic, however, actually bothered to test the theory that protected works are more widely available than works in the commons. The research of Paul Heald of the University of Illinois College of Law shows that public domain works are far more widely distributed, while protected works have a habit of falling down the memory hole.

Lately, he worked with a research assistant who came up with a script that dug through the Amazon.com book inventory to look for books currently in print and their years of publication. With the invention of scanners and print-on-demand technology, there was an explosion of works — and, of course, works that are in public domain because they were published before 1922.

The point is thereby thoroughly proven, and the “market failure” argument against the free market is once again debunked:

But there is more significance to this chart than meets the eye. For years, I’ve suspected that there was a serious problem developing due to government regulations. There is a vast gap into which millions of books have fallen. They can be reprinted or republished only at high risk and expense. Many of these books have uncertain copyright status, the “owners” are asking too high a price or can’t be found, or are orphaned. The costs are too high. I’ve had experiences with probably a hundred or so titles in this class, and I’ve always assumed that thousands or millions more fall into this category.

There was a brief moment in the early days of Google when the company naively imagined that it could do the right thing and make all of this literature available for instant viewing and printing. They had the technology to rescue it all and bring it to the whole world. Publishers, backed by regulations that favor them, went bonkers. Google tried a profit-sharing agreement. Didn’t work. Finally, Google bailed and cooperated with the prevailing system.

The results you see in this graph. There is an 80-year black hole in which literature is being buried. In some ways, a whole century of ideas is being forced under a rock by government in league with large publishers. And it is getting worse by the day. Publishers are going through their back catalogs and threatening anyone who puts even a scrap online. Not that they plan new editions; they are just claiming what they think of as their assets.

This is a case of incredibly tragic loss. As you can see from the above chart, the literature of 1850 is more available than the literature of 1970. How preposterous is that? This is all a direct result of unprecedented, outrageous regulations that have effectively put a censorship veil over history’s most productive period of literary creation. This entire world is trapped in libraries that no one visits or is being put on remainder racks so that libraries can create more space for coffee bars.

There is a more general lesson that pertains to all government regulations. Even one line can be impossibly damaging to industry and to social advancement. It is extremely difficult to quantify the losses. This is just one case, but it is an important one because it deals with the most important thing any civilization possesses: its treasury of ideas. That treasury has been thrown to the bottom of the sea. Someday, explorers will discover it and wonder how any society could have let this happen even though it had the means to do otherwise.

[LFB]

Nominations are now closed for our June read. It’s time to vote on the book we’re going to read next month.

Here are the candidates:

Shadow and Claw is comprised of the first two books of Gene Wolfe’s four-volume The Book of the New Sun (1980–83), which is a critically acclaimed work of far-future science fantasy in the Dying Earth tradition of Jack Vance. The Shadow of the Torturer is the tale of young Severian, an apprentice in the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession — showing mercy toward his victim. The Claw of the Conciliator continues the saga of Severian, banished from his home, as he undertakes a mythic quest to discover the awesome power of an ancient relic, and learn the truth about his hidden destiny.

Farnham’s Freehold by Robert Heinlein — It’s a cross-time fight for freedom as a family retreats to a bomb shelter during a nuclear attack — only to emerge hundreds of years in the future, thrown forward in time by the blasts. There lifeboat ethics rule as they struggle to survive … until they’re discovered by up-time humans, the survivors of the apocalypse. These survivors are of African descent.  Down-time humans — in fact, all of the European-descended — are held guilty for the state into which the world has fallen and designated as automatic slaves.  The only escape is to find a way back down-time, to change events sufficiently to make absolute certain this nightmare future never get a chance to happen in the first place!

The Freedom Maze — Delia Sherman’s young-adult fantasy novel focuses on an adolescent girl of 1960 who is magically sent back in time to 1860 when her family owned slaves on a Louisiana plantation. With her summer tan, she’s mistaken for a slave herself, and she learns the hard way what life was like.  In the process, she comes to appreciate the values of honor, respect, courage, and personal responsibility.

Ready Player One — that has managed to evolve an order without a state and where entrepreneurial gamers must solve virtual puzzles and battle real-life enemies to save their virtual world from domination and corruption. The novel also stresses the importance of allowing open access to the Internet for everyone.

Snuff — A Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett (winner of a Prometheus Award for Night Watch, also set in Discworld), Snuff blends comedy, drama, satire, suspense and mystery as a police chief investigates the murder of a goblin and finds himself battling discrimination. The mystery broadens into a powerful drama to extend the world’s recognition of rights to include these long-oppressed and disdained people with a sophisticated culture of their own.

The last three are 2012 Prometheus Award finalists.

Deadline is Sunday, May 20th, but the sooner you vote the better.

As a reminder, this month we’re reading In the Shadow of Ares. It’s not too late to purchase and download a copy of the book, start reading, and join the discussion!

After a series of movies about individual superheroes, movies that gave us their origin stories, we have finally been treated to the culmination of the last few years and so many millions of man-hours: The Avengers. The films leading up to it were generally fair to middling, I thought, with the first Iron Man rising maybe half a skosh above that level. The latest comes heralded by uniformly positive reviews. It is, we are told, much better than one would expect. According to most reviews, there is a greater focus on character than one usually gets in an action movie, but there is no skimping on set pieces. The reality, for me, was more of the same: half a skosh above decent.

Loki, Thor’s brother and fellow god, wants to rule the Earth. He makes a deal with some aliens who agree to conquer the Earth for him in exchange for the Tessaract, an artifact of immense power, which will also play a role in transporting the invading army to New York to begin the takeover. Loki steals the Tessaract from Nick Fury, who then assembles the Avengers to find him, find it, find out what the plan is, and do anything else that needs a little superpower elbow grease. A lot of bickering between incompatible personalities and a whole lot of violence and destruction ensue.

The plot is unremarkable but perfectly adequate, and that is a good description for the movie as a whole. There are no scenes whose impact lingers in your memory after the credits have rolled, no wonderful development of character, no stunning visuals, no lines of great insight, no “aha!” moments. What it does have, to go with its serviceable story, is competent direction, a few genuinely amusing visual jokes, a bevy of one-liners that play well to an opening-weekend audience, and the action set pieces that many movie goers — mostly male — crave sometimes to the exclusion of all else.

There have always been movies like this, movies that never rise above ordinary. What concerns me is that there used to be summer blockbusters that left mediocrity far behind and below. They were full of adrenaline rushes, but they were also works of art. They never won many Academy Awards, but they were every bit as good, or better, than the ones that did. Has CGI banished the last of our restrictions and taken with it our restraint, or are we just making movies for audiences who want nothing more than a rollercoaster ride?

A movie is capable of so much more than a ride at an amusement park, but The Avengers, just like nearly every other action movie that comes out nowadays, avails itself of few of these possibilities. One of its two main problems is that everything is a huge explosion or a death defying stunt, always in fantastic locations on a grand scale. There is no foil to set any of this off. You step into smash bash crash, exaggerated with CGI, and that is about all you ever get. Once upon a time, without CGI, Lois Lane’s helicopter crashed and she hung from it, suspended over the streets of New York, to be saved by Superman. Those few minutes of her ordeal are more gripping than the entirety of The Avengers and all of its setup movies put together, and there is no hyperbole in that statement.

The second main problem, related to the first, is that no one in the movie feels like a human being. Precious little effort is spent showing us anything like a personal life. There are no small, quiet moments. Michael Keaton’s Batman, far and away the best of the caped crusaders for my money, was a fully fleshed out human being, and not just because he had a tragic backstory. He felt human, despite his wealth, because we saw him in his daily life, interacting with the people he knew. The script was good enough that the plot never stalled while we saw these things, and the result was that we actually gave a damn about him as Batman because we knew him as Wayne. The Avengers has no time for this, because it has too many skyscrapers to pulverize.

No real people in this image.

There are other little quibbles, such as a few curious moments when one is inclined to ask questions that start like, “Wouldn’t it make more sense to…” or “How could he have known…” or “Shouldn’t he really have…” But these are small lapses of logic. We also get too little mystery because we are shown too many things from too many perspectives, but this too is no great sin. The main issue is that there is no restraint and no human being in the movie, just costumes and destruction.

When a fine movie like Ang Lee’s The Hulk is panned by critics and audiences, I must recognize that I am far from the mainstream. I am not what moviemakers have in mind when they think of their audience. But I cannot help thinking that these visceral delights that CGI brings us will quickly fade, and future film buffs will look back at our period and wonder why so few good action movies were made, why CGI was not used to enhance good movies, rather than be made to form the core of mediocre ones.

The first Lightmonthly Read hosted by Prometheus Unbound has begun!

For the month of May we will be reading and discussing,

In the Shadow of Ares (Kindle, Nook) — This young-adult first novel by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson focuses on a Mars-born female teenager in a near-future, small civilization on Mars, where hardworking citizens are constantly and unjustly constrained by a growing, centralized authority whose excessive power has led to corruption and conflict.

It appears to be available only as an ebook, so there’s no need to worry about delivery times. You can download your copy today and start reading right away. If you don’t own a Kindle or a Nook, there are free Kindle and Nook reading apps available for almost all major platforms.¹

Join us as we read and discuss In the Shadow of Ares.

You need not have voted on this month’s selection to join in the discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.

Nominations are now open for the book we will read next month (June). Head on over to the June 2012 Nominations thread in the book selection forum to put your choice in the running.

Deadline for nominations is Thursday, June 10th. Then voting will be open on the nominees until Sunday, June 20th, when the winner will be determined.

One last thing: We now have a special page dedicated to the Lightmonthly Read, where you’ll always find a reminder of the book we are currently reading, the book we will be reading next month or a link to the nomination/voting thread, links to the Lightmonthly Read forums, and an archive of past reads.

Notes

1. Except desktop Linux, but the Windows Kindle app runs just fine in WINE. Or use the Kindle Cloud Reader.

David Brin is the author of science fiction novels The Postman, the Uplift series beginning with Sundiver, and others as well as the ever-popular nonfiction work, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?. He recently sat down with Reason.tv’s Tim Cavanaugh to discuss his recent criticisms of “dogmatic libertarians,” his hobbyhorse of government transparency, and the subject of uplifting dolphins.

I have much to say about Brin’s attacks on “dogmatic libertarians,” by which he means followers of Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand who worship property too much, but watch the video first and then continue on below for my commentary.¹

I’ll state right up front that I do not think of Brin as a libertarian, much less as a heretical one (as he describes himself). To the extent that he is right on anything, he’s not telling libertarians anything new. As for the rest, I’ve seen enough on his blog and various social networks to come to the conclusion that he doesn’t understand the actual positions held by principled libertarians (as opposed to the bizarre straw men he’s concocted and attributed to us) and that it’s impossible to carry on a civil, constructive conversation over the internet with him about libertarianism if you disagree with him on the subject. Although he says in the video that he doesn’t want to insult, after he’s already insulted, if you dare to challenge his views about “dogmatic libertarianism,” prepare to be mocked and insulted and misinterpreted and talked past.

Brin says, “The issue should not be government. It should not be unalloyed and unlimited idolatry of personal property,²  which is the path that the libertarian movement has gone down.”

I have no idea what he means by “unalloyed and unlimited idolatry of personal property”³ and I’ve yet to see him give a clear explanation of this magic-talisman phrase he bandies about like a Hammer of Refutation. I can’t imagine what problem he sees in upholding private property rights. He seems to think our “unalloyed and unlimited idolatry” somehow leads to oligarchy, but I’m at a loss as to how it is supposed to do so. I can only assume he thinks it means we must uphold “rights” to even unjustly acquired property, but this is simply not so.

The phrase is also code for “Hey, man, let’s be practical; sometimes one has to make compromises, break a few eggs to make an omelette.” Those who want government solutions to perceived problems hate it when libertarians stand on principle and refuse to budge. It drives them into uncivilized fits of apoplectic, frothing rage.

Brin also seems to think that so-called “dogmatic libertarians” have lost sight of the importance of competition and transparency and whatnot. Uh… No. No, we haven’t. I don’t know where he gets this stuff from. We see private property rights as making fair and creative competition possible in the first place; and we value fair and creative competition greatly, especially those of us who see intellectual property as illegitimate government grants of monopoly privilege that can only be enforced by infringing on the pre-existing rights of others to their physical property.

“Libertarians need to be reminded that, across 6,000 years, the greatest enemy of free enterprise, of market enterprise, innovation, creative competition… have always been oligarchs,” says Brin.

No… No, we don’t. But mayhaps you need to be reminded that all forms of government, not just the one labeled oligarchy, are ultimately ruled by oligarchs. It’s in the nature of the state. You know… that organization you said we shouldn’t concern ourselves with. Theory and history show us that it is through the state that oligarchs acquire and exercise their power. Without it, they are impotent. It is the state, always ruled by oligarchs, that has been the greatest enemy of free markets, free enterprise, innovation, and fair and creative competition.

The Pyramid of Oligarchy

In the video, Brin lays out a plan to rein in government growth, corruption, and “abuse.” Here’s a summary: Let’s draft 10,000 average Americans into a pool every year. Excuse Brin’s poor choice of words; this “draft” is one that can be refused without penalty (although an opt-out system is an unnecessary hassle for people and is frowned upon by savvy Netizens). We’ll then do background checks on this pool of candidates to winnow it down to a list 1,000 trustworthy, loyal citizens who can keep their mouths shut. Give them security clearances and arm them with a badge that let’s them get in any door in the United States of America — you read that right, any door. They are tasked with watching the watchmen. There will be penalties for revealing “anything about anything the’ve seen.” Brin suggests a mere month in jail. The idea being that spending a month in jail will be a price worth paying to patriots in order to bring truly heinous acts of government out into the light so that they can be stopped.

What was interviewer Tim Cavanaugh’s response to all this? “Huh. Okay.”

That’s it?

This didn’t immediately strike him as a terrible idea? He didn’t think or, better yet, say: “Gee, this can’t possibly go wrong.” Not a single problem with the proposed system immediately sprang to mind that he could ask Brin to address? Or did Cavanaugh just not want to ask the celebrity any tough questions?

I’ll just toss a few ideas off the top of my head into the ring for consideration:

1. Who is going to administer this new system of citizen-watchmen — the lottery for the draft, the background checks, security clearance decisions, and so on? Oh, that’s right — the government. Despite Brin’s talk about non-governmental, or market, solutions to problems, his proposal is a government solution to a government problem (government failure).  What? You need me to flesh the implications out for you? Okay…
2. It means the creation of a new bureaucracy or ratcheting up an exsiting one. Either way, a WIN for big government and more spending! That’s what we libertarians are fighting for!
3. Who’s to say the penalty won’t be ratcheted up over time like the income tax? Thus decreasing the risk to government officials that their secrets will get out?
4. The selection process couldn’t possibly be rigged or gamed, could it?
5. No citizen-watchman would ever take a bribe to keep quiet,  surely.
6. Or stay mum in the face of threats to himself or his family… right?
7. Brin’s proposed system entails acclimating Americans to increased government surveillance of and deep-probing into their public and private lives. Oh, and revisit #4-6 in light of this. Worse, it might come to be seen as a patriotic duty to accept such scrutiny from the government.
8. Brin says there will be penalties for revealing “anything about anything the’ve seen.” I hope he’s only referring to classified or top secret, not unclassified, information here. Let’s take him charitably and assume he is; how much do you want to bet that this will lead to more and more aspects of government becoming classified so as to have the threat of the penalty for revealing what is seen hanging over the citizen-watchmen’s heads for matters of less and less importance to the “national interest”?
9. The system Brin proposes is likely to make people more complacent about government in the same way and for the same reasons that democracy fools them into believing they’re ultimately in charge and that regulations encourage them to abdicate responsibility for the quality of the goods and services they buy, for their own safety and security and that of their families, and so on. “Hey, man, there’s a system in place to make sure our representives and public servants do what they’re tasked with doing and to weed out corruption and bad secret policies and stuff. They have enough volunteers. I don’t need to waste my valuable Celebrity Apprentice–watching time⁴ worrying about it. Did you see what happened last night? Aubrey O’Day is soooo right. She’s the only one with any talent on her team. Nobody else every has a creative.”⁵
10. Brin doesn’t  mention monetary compensation for being a citizen-watchman. Is it likely that as many as 1 in 10 draftees will not only accept being drafted but pass the background checks to qualify for a security clearance? A much larger pool than 10,000 might be needed. And might there not be a selection bias in who chooses to accept the responsibility after being drafted? No potential for abuse there?
11. What if the citizen-watchmen are generally okay with things libertarians would deem heinous? In light of the direction this country has been headed lo the past couple centuries, this isn’t much of a stretch, is it?
12. Brin says that citizen-watchmen will be able to get into any door in the United States. Any door. I hope he means any government door, not really any door.
13. Let’s face it, Brin’s proposal is a pipe dream. The Powers That Be will never let it happen and the American people are not really interested in that level of transparency in their government — not enough to make Brin’s plan a reality, at least. And Brin has the gall to mock and blame “dogmatic libertarians,” the lapel-grabbing (lolwut?) Rothbardian and Randian wing of the movement, for the Libertarian Party failing to make headway (more than 1%) at the polls in presidential elections.
14. Brin’s citizen-watchman program will be funded by taxes, and taxation is theft. Oh, sorry, did I grab your lapels too hard?⁶

I could go on, but what’s the point of continuing to kick a dead horse?

[TLS]

Notes

1. It’s heartening to see that the video on YouTube has more dislikes than likes at the moment.
2. The Reason.com transcript has the words “unalloyed” and “unlimited” in the wrong order.
3. What do “unalloyed” and “unlimited” even mean in this context? Can there be alloyed and limited idolatry of personal property?
4. Bread and circuses! Bread and circuses!
5. My wife subjects me to Trump’s insipid Celebrity Apprentice show on Sundays. We both can’t stand that obnoxious, narcissistic, conniving, overhyped “reality”-pop-star twit. Fire her already! And WTF is “a creative.” The word is an adjective, not a noun!
6. I would have placed this item in the #2 position but wanted to make a joke about the lapel thing and it needed context. Again, lolwut?

In the interest of full disclosure, here are the books we received in April.

The Restoration Game Ken MacLeod Pyr	The Night Sessions Ken MacLeod Pyr	Cowboy Angels Paul McAuley Pyr
	Living Proof Kira Peikoff Tor Books

Yes, that’s prominent Objectivist Leonard Peikoff’s daughter.

The Cabin in the Woods is a supernatural genre-bender penned by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard. It is a bizarre story that grows odder as it goes, but there is a focus on character, a decent atmosphere, success in keeping a young and handsome cast from becoming mere plastic eye candy, some intelligent dialogue and a few inspired approaches to scenes. There was enough skill involved in its creation to make a fine work. It had me at the opening; it kept me as events unfolded; it lost me at the end.

To summarize the plot past a certain point is to risk ruining a first viewing. At the beginning, five college students go to a cabin in a woods to spend a weekend drinking, playing games, and committing acts that many religions proscribe outside of matrimony. It is safe to share that the students are being monitored and manipulated, because this aspect is revealed from the outset. From the conversations of the monitors we piece together that the students are going to be put through some sort of gruesome trial, and that these students will, unwittingly, determine the nature of that trial. Beyond that I prefer to say only that beneath this bizarre surface is a whole lot more story to be uncovered.

There are a number of things the movie gets right. Despite the fact that the nature of the cabin is explained early on, there is still a mood of enigma about everything. The monitors become the mystery, rather than the cabin. The dialogue, despite Whedon’s continuing penchant for corny one-liners at the wrong moment, is streamlined, full of character, and delivers just enough information without talking directly to the audience. Tantalizing phrases suggest a deeper plot, hints of which are continuously doled out to us. Even one aspect that seemed initially disappointing, regarding the trite order in which characters must die in a horror movie, is given a surprising yet sufficient explanation later on.

The script demonstrates thoughtfulness in the way it approaches things. There is a basement that figures large in the story, but the way Whedon and Goddard get the kids in the basement is imaginative. They are playing a game of truth or dare, and when it is the turn of the less sexually adventurous of the two girls, another character ventures her answer for her: truth. She gets irritated when he explains that whenever she chooses dare she always goes back and says she would rather do truth. To show him up, she reluctantly picks dare, but the game is interrupted by the discovery of the basement. After staring into the dark depths for a while, the other players decide that the girl’s dare will be to explore the basement.

Not just handsome eye candy.

I had a handful of minor issues, many of which might be cleared up on a later viewing. However, at this point they seem illogical and contrived. By way of example, there is a one-way window between two bedrooms. On one side, it is a mirror, on the other side translucent glass, but it is covered by a painting. One of the boys removes the painting due to its macabre subject matter and gets a view into the room of one of the girls. She starts to undress and after a quick debate, he tells her to stop and shows her the mirror.

As far as I can tell, there is no logical reason for the one-way mirror to be there. Because the nature of the trial awaiting the lodgers is to be determined, one might argue that the mirror is there in case a particular trial is chosen, but I feel like that gives a free excuse card to the screenwriters for any implausibility they stick in the movie. Either the students should have encountered something in the cabin that would have to do with the particular trial they end up with, or they should have discovered all sorts of architectural and decorative oddities that would at first baffle the characters but whose use the audience could guess at (they do find in the basement many items, each relating to a different scenario, but this is not what I am referring to). As it is, the mirror, chilling though it is when first discovered, ultimately feels like a convenience to help show the chivalrousness of one of the male roles, who will soon become an amorous interest of the girl on the other side of the mirror.

Notwithstanding the few minor issues, I was sold from the beginning until near the end, whose nature I prefer not to describe here. Suffice it to say that it goes from bizarre to outlandish, and does it in a very short period of time. Where before mystery had been heightened and questions answered at a judicious pace, now everything started spilling out all at once, while I felt there was still more mystery and revelation to tease us with and plenty of time to do it. Restraint is cast aside in favor of slapping the viewer over and over with excess, and the final effect is a silliness that does not sit well with the established tone.

A moviemaker should, to my way of thinking, treat the viewer like a woman. He must court her, slowly, never pushing too far but neither missing an opportunity to advance his cause. Whether the courting takes place over a month or single evening, there is a pace she will accept and a pace that will lose her favor. It is different with every woman, but there are certain approaches that work with none of them. If you find the pace and approach that makes her eager, she very well may, to borrow a phrase from Dangerous Liaisons, perform quite eagerly acts that one would hesitate to ask from a professional. But you cannot whip out your manhood in the restaurant over dessert. That would be revealing too much too soon, and that is precisely how the last act of the movie felt.

The Cabin in the Woods is worth seeing for its uniqueness, and it certainly is not a bad movie. I was considering adding it to my collection until the last part made my decision easier. A $10 movie ticket might be too much for some, but a Netflix rental does not seem like a bad idea, especially for one who likes supernatural horror and a little genre-bending.

It’s been a news-heavy month. Here are a few more tidbits:

• Yesterday, Tor/Forge announced that it will make all of its ebooks completely free of DRM by early July 2012. This is a momentous and welcome change. Tor/Forge is a genre imprint of Macmillan, one of the Big Six publishers. It’s the first of these publishers to cave to author and cusotmer pressure on DRM. It may have helped that Macmillan is not a publicly traded company. Cory Doctorow believes more Big Six publishers are sure to follow; he’s “had contact with very highly placed execs at two more of the big six publishers.”
• Last month, James Cameron promoted private deep-sea exploration. He’s also partnered with Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and Ross Perot Jr., to back private space company Planetary Resources. Immediate plans are to design and build low-cost robotic spacecraft for survey missions. The firm, founded and chaired by Peter Diamondis (creator of the X-Prize Foundation) and Eric Anderson, hopes to then build on this technology and begin mining Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) within the next ten years. For an extended explanation of how and why Planetary Resources can succeed, read Phil Plait’s post on the Bad Astronomy blog. We live in exciting times for the exploration and exploitation of space.

• Mike Masnick of techdirt has the story of some obscure author suing the developers of the game Assassin’s Creed for allegedly stealing his idea. What idea, you ask? Why, genetic memory, of course! This is such an old trope, it’s like those clueless people accusing Disney’s John Carter (of Mars) of ripping off Avatar and Dances with Wolves. Genre tropes are not covered by copyright, and even if they were — screw copyright. (Not that the illegitimacy of copyright somehow greenlights plagiarism.)

While Prince and the rest of the world anxiously counted down the final seconds of the millennium — when Y2K Godzilla would destroy Cobol and Fortran systems — Dallasite Mitch Maddox was about to take part in a bold experiment.  Beginning January 1, 2000 he would legally be known as DotComGuy.

This project — to the delight of geeks, nerds, and voyeurs alike — involved living and working exclusively from home.  No more traffic jam drudgery or cubicle farm shenanigans for Mitch.  No more TPS reports or water cooler gossip. And while telecommuting was hardly a new phenomenon, corporate sponsorship from the likes of 3Com, Travelocity, and UPS made him the envy of all those who had just read Cryptonomicon or LARPed as Neo.

After all, who would not want free money to goof around on the computer all day?  It was like taking candy from a baby.

This was also at the height of the dotcom bubble.  When ordering fresh food from Webvan was considered the New Normal and the DJIA was supposedly on its way up to 36,000.

However less than two years later, Mitch would legally be known as Mitch again and product placement gurus would have to find a new Ed Pekurny and Truman Burbank to spy on.

Small Steps Towards Cybernetic Fusion

A quadriplegic named S3 in medical literature (Simeral et al, 2011) was recently noted for having successfully been part of a medical project to test brain-computer interfaces (BCI).  For over 1,000 days, her brain has played host to a tiny set of electrodes that have enabled her to perform “point-and-click” tasks on the computer.

Granted, there is literally a world of difference and several orders of magnitude between moving a mouse as S3 has done and navigating and raiding in World of Warcraft but the precedent has been empirically shown.

And while it appears we are decades away from thawing and repairing cryonically suspended brains, let alone curing paralysis, S3’s seemingly marginal freedoms could quite possibly be a tour du force for a new spin on a Neuromancer-style world.

Peas in a Sci-Fi Pod

Lee Majors and Herb Wallerstein have more in common than the cult following of their respective television shows.  In the early-to-mid ’70s, Majors portrayed Steve Austin, a government pilot who is critically injured in a plane crash.  In a risky experiment, medical doctors implant six million dollars worth of bionic gadgetry that revive and enhance his life and various brain functions in particular.  His transformative operation also served as the inspiration for the show’s title, The Six Million Dollar Man.  Adjusted for inflation, this is equivalent to roughly $30 million today.

BCI

Several years earlier, Wallerstein served as a director for the original Star Trek series.  In the sixth episode of the final season, Commander Spock is kidnapped by a group of aliens.  Spock’s brain is removed and fused with a computing machine where it is used — among other things — to control the alien’s planetary life-support system.

The term Wallerstein brain is just one of many neologisms for the same idea of an isolated brain, ex body.  For instance, while Spock’s brain is placed inside the alien’s Eymorg Controller, Richard Nixon’s head is placed inside glass covered vat in Futurama.

Even the late Robert Nozick (1974) contributed to this corpus with his philosophical-cum-physical experience machine that used simulated artificial reality to study hedonism.

Synthesis

During the heyday of the space race, Werner von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke, and even former US vice-president Spiro Agnew thought that humans would begin colonizing Mars by the 1980s. Yet it has been nearly forty years since the last time any Terran-based complex life has touched down on the moon and in the prevailing decades only a couple hundred or so people have flown to an altitude beyond 100 kilometers.¹

Nearly two years ago astrophysicist Paul Davies (2010) proposed that despite its dangers, a one-way trip to Mars could solve the problem of human deep space exploration.  He along with other commentators noted that for a fraction of a return trip, it was technologically possible to undertake and economically viable given the in situ materials of the planet.  And given the continued enthusiasm for sci-fi related entertainment, that there could plausibly be numerous, qualified volunteers.

Similarly, given the enthusiasm towards mind-uploading, brain-computer interfaces, intelligence amplification, and the technological singularity, would there be volunteers for a Wallerstein brain?²

Legalized Decapitation

Assuming that there would be volunteers for an irreversible brain-transplant, what would the financial costs be for developing the necessary machines to keep a healthy brain alive outside of the body? What would the legal ramifications and procedures be for what amounts to decapitation?

To answer these questions, there are several potential development paths that may unfold in the future.

The first of these involves seasteading.  Seasteading is a term independently created by Ken Neumeyer (1981) and Wayne Gramlich (1998).  It is a portmanteau of homesteading and “the sea,” and in most cases “the sea” is defined as the High Seas or international waters.  The specific reason for such distinction is that pursuant to most international law and international treaties, all activities that take place more than 200 nautical miles (nm) from a sovereign shore are considered immune to a sovereign’s jurisdiction.³  Or rather, there is no entity that currently holds de jure jurisdiction over territory outside the 200 nm.

In theory, if you anchor in the High Seas, you axiomatically begin to homestead the area as yours. In practice (de facto), many sea lanes and territorial waters are patrolled by friend and foe alike, irrespective of state affiliation.⁴  Current non-state entities include Blueseed, an IT startup anchored off the coast of San Francisco; Women on Waves, a non-profit organization that enables abortions near countries that prohibit them; and private radio stations such as those portrayed in The Boat That Rocked.⁵

Another potential disruptive development could be location arbitrage via charter cities.  Economist Paul Romer (1990) has spent the last decade developing their legal and theoretical framework and is close to implementing them in the real-world.⁶

In essence, Romer’s model is grafting the successful free-trade zone paradigm (e.g., Shenzhen, Incheon, East (Pudong) Shanghai) within a nation-state that is seeking to jump back into world trade — with a slight twist.  The twist is, although the zone would nominally be within an existing state, the rules, laws, and governance within the city would be developed by a third-party country (e.g., Canada, Switzerland).  It is within these zones that Romer and other developmental economists are hoping to attract world-class talents and skills to relatively stagnant states.  The first of these is already germinating in Honduras.⁷

A look at the field of cryonics could also be instructive in both legal and practical considerations.  Despite 35 years of existence, the industry is still relatively small in part because none of the companies have a real marketing department.  In fact, all told less than 300 patients are under managed care by the three leading providers combined.  The legal framework is one of the impediments, due to the fact that cryonic suspension is only legal after a patient is declared dead.  Attempts to bypass the law by use of voluntary suicide or physician-assisted suicide amounts to murder and, thus, are declared illegal by the courts.

As a consequence, the medical team involved in suspension is fighting a potential losing battle against brain decay and that is something that does not look good on marketing brochures.  And even if a cryonics operation is considered legal in one jurisdiction, permanent storage and maintenance of such cryonic chambers has been a political hot potato.  For instance, in 1993 Alcor moved their offices from one jurisdiction (California to Arizona) due to earthquake risks; however, upon transferring their patients, they had to receive legal approval under the revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act.  And following a high-profile celebrity case in 2003, the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, received a cease-&-desist order prohibiting it to conduct medical operations for six months.⁸ The order was subsequently rescinded and the Institute was then regulated as a licensed cemetery.⁹

Richard Nixon

If brains could be successfully transplanted into computer systems via the Wallerstein method, the physical jurisdiction question is paramount for future survival — after all, you no longer have legs to move yourself and are thus dependent on third-parties.

Thus, in the event that an entrepreneur creates a company offering brain-in-a-jar services, where could such a company legally operate?  The answer, at least at this time, seems to be the aforementioned seasteads.

Bootstrapping to the Singularity

Why would anyone volunteer to undergo this risky operation?

The motivations could be numerous and while the nature of the physical isolation within a computer system may appear emotionally daunting, the selection pool of individuals could be broad. For example, anyone who uses a computer for both their work and leisure activity would conceivably have less difficulty adjusting to living in a rudimentary digitally synthesized world compared to a fireman, forest ranger, welder, plumber, or someone who manipulates and interacts with the physical environment on a continual basis.

Thus, potential candidates includes but are not limited to: programmers, engineers, scientists, mathematicians, computer-aided designers, digital artists, writers, lawyers, accountants, actuaries, architects, librarians, philosophers, psychologists, financial analysts, and economists.

How many of these individuals would be willing and able to volunteer for such an operation?

Perhaps a small subset of accountants and lawyers might find it attractive to start a round-the-clock billing firm as they would have non-stop access to digital libraries. Similarly, many scientists who conduct meta-research may find solace in their ability to focus without any circadian distractions.  Maybe a subculture of programmers and engineers wanting to permanently forgo trips to the bathroom. Or maybe even retirees, unwilling to try cryonics, but still wanting to bootstrap themselves to a pre-singularity event.

In fact, as both critics and proponents are quick to point out, a technological singularity is not necessarily a given.¹⁰ Something may prevent it from taking place, so what other viable options are capable of prolonging your life better than a Wallerstein brain?¹¹

On the Seven Seas

At this time, the start-up capital necessary to build a vessel (e.g., a large barge) capable of safely storing and running electronic machinery at sea is prohibitive and in the reach of but an affluent few.¹² However, given the incentives for profit (e.g., $100,000 one-time transplant fee), an entrepreneur could put together a business plan for potential venture capital.

In terms of geographical considerations, the equator may be an ideal location for a few reasons.  First, both storms and waves are relatively regular and predictable throughout the year.  Second, it is statistically one of the least cloudy regions on earth, thus creating ideal conditions for powering photovoltaic solar panels indefinitely.  While the added cost of paying for an underwater sea cable to an equatorial location may be relatively costly, the added savings of not having to continually transport and ship fossil fuels and maintain combustion engines may make up the difference.¹³

The final piece is the digital synthesizing machine itself.  At this time, there are no publicly known cases of brain transplants.  In the event that they do occur and that it is possible to fuse the brain stem into a computer system, this would raise a number of questions.  How would an operator handle biological maintenance? What about potential intelligence amplification (e.g., increasing brain storage capacity or instant recall)?¹⁴

As there are both mechanical and digital prosthetics for nearly every human sense, are there any inherent technical limitations for permanently tapping into the five senses and artificially synthesizing a digitized real-world experience?¹⁵ Could it be done for $30 million — the current inflation adjusted cost for Lee Majors — or would it require Apollo-sized budgets?

Or will all of this remain relegated to campy science-fiction television shows and Hollywood green screens?  If Source Code is any indication of the near-future, perhaps we may already know some unwitting volunteers trapped in a Vingean Cookie Monster.¹⁶

Synthesis

Each year, millions of people throughout the world already vote with their feet and their pocket books by moving across jurisdictions.  And due to continued financial and political uncertainties at the macro level, skilled workers may soon have the option of living in a variety of micro-states, including seasteads and charter cities.

Similarly, over the past decade, numerous physically handicapped volunteers have rediscovered human sensations, including sight and sound.  Quadriplegics are now able to communicate to the rest of the world vis-à-vis brain-computer interfaces (BCI).  Through continued medical and technological progress, volunteers might also have the option of fixing or even improving upon physical limitations, including the permanent removal of sleeping, bodily functions, and even caloric intake.  Thus, given the continued development of BCI and other digital prosthetics, skilled workers, driven by financial and political uncertainty, may volunteer and become Wallerstein brains; and perhaps brainstead the Seven Seas.

[An earlier version of this article was originally presented on August 17, 2011 at the Shanghai Rationalist Society.]

Bibliography

Davies, Paul. 2010. “One way ticket to Mars.” Cosmos Vol 31.

De Grey, Aubrey. 2007. Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs that Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime. St. Martin’s Press.

Ettinger, Robert. 1962. “The Prospect of Immortality.” Retrieved July 2, 2011.

Gramlich, Wayne. 1998. “Seasteading — Homesteading on the High Seas.” Retrieved July 2, 2011.

Kurzweil, Raymond. 2005. The Singularity is Near. Viking Publishing.

Neumeyer, Ken. 1981. Sailing the Farm: A Survival Guide to Homesteading.

Nozick, R. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books, New York, 1974, pp. 42–45.

Romer, Paul. 1990. “Endogenous Technological Change.” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 98, No. 5, Part 2: The Problem of Development: A Conference on the Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Systems. (Oct. 1990), pp. S71–102.

Simeral, J.D., Kim, S.P., Black, M.J., Donoghue, J.P., Hochberg, L.R. 2011. “Neural control of cursor trajectory and click by a human with tetraplegia 1000 days after implant of an intracortical microelectrode array.” Journal of Neural Engineering. 8 025027 doi:10.1088/1741-2560/8/2/025027

Vinge, Vernor. 1993.  The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. VISION-21 Symposium.

Notes

1. According to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), only 514 people have reached orbit; the sole requirement being the flight must have reached over 100 kilometers in altitude.
2. Mathematician and scince fiction author Vernor Vinge (1993) and inventor Ray Kurzweil (2005), among many others, have suggested that ceteris paribus, at some point in our own technological advancement we will reach a wall, a point, a technological singularity in which development continues to accelerate in a positive feedback loop much akin to a logarithmic curve.
3. More specifically this includes a sovereign’s Exclusive Economic Zone.
4. The South China Sea is a contentious region as several nation-states have competing claims on numerous islands.  These include: Vietnam, mainland China (PRC), Taiwan (ROC), and the Philippines.  In addition, over the past five years the east coast of Africa, specifically the regions adjacent Yemen, Somalia, and Kenya have had substantial increases in piracy and ransom activity.
5. The Seasteading Institute was founded in 2008 to develop the legal and engineering concept at a theoretical level. Blueseed is a commercial spin-off founded by several members of the Institute.
6. For a detailed look at what this entails see “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty” from The Atlantic.  See also the Charter Cities FAQ.
7. See also “Honduras’s Experiment with Free-Market Cities” from the Wall Street Journal.  Note: Patri Friedman, who founded the Seasteading Institute, is now also working on the Honduras Charter Cities project.
8. The case involved hall-of-fame baseball player Ted Williams.  For more information, see “Williams Children Agree to Keep Their Father Frozen” from The New York Times.  The outcome of the Michigan cease-&-desist is discussed in a public statement from the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs.
9. For more details surrounding its new status as a cemetery, see the official press release.  This topic was also handled in the season 1  episode of Boston Legal entitled “Let Sales Ring.”
10. While the technological singularity plays a central role in many of his books and essays, Vernor Vinge, and others like Charles Stross, has also talked about what the alternatives are if the singularity does not happen.
11. Negligible senescence, or anti-aging, is a nascent field of biomedical science considered to be a theoretical alternative to cryonics or a Wallerstein brain.  Among others, it has been spearheaded by Aubrey de Grey (2007) of the Methuselah Foundation.  See also: “John Sperling Wants You to Live Forever” from Wired.
12. Based on past histories, potential angel investors could include Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com; Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal; Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors; and John Sperling, co-founder of the University of Phoenix system.
13. An alternative possibility includes a satellite link-up, depending on which part of the ocean the equator is on. Other sustainable, relatively inexpensive resources are wind generators or tidal wave generators which could be used as potential backups placed on nearby barges.
14. For more on intelligence amplification see the discussion notes “Species of Mind” from Vernor Vinge.
15. Examples include the cochlear implant for the ear. There are more than a dozen different types of bionic eyes developed by various medical companies.  Over the past year Dean Kamen has been working on a software-based, digital hand prosthetic called the Luke Arm.
16. “The Cookie Monster” is the name of a 2004 novella written by Vernor Vinge; it can be found in the The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois.