I certainly never imagined what it would be like to be 64 when I was 24 but the Beatles did.

Now that I am 64, I still have lots of questions.

Born in Bloomington, Indiana to Kuwaiti parents, Lubna Saif Abbas returned to Kuwait following the liberation of Kuwait by US Armed Forces.  Working for JAG in the Army, she along with a group of women set out to document war crimes committed by the Iraqi Army.  She decided to remain in Kuwait and with her partner Hamid runs Yawadi Glass, an art studio that is located in an Islamic museum.

I met Lubna at Maker Faire Kuwait in February 2019.

It was the Friday before Maker Faire Cairo opened.  At a restaurant on banks the Nile, I had dinner with Michael Shiloh, a tinkerer, engineer and maker whom I have known since before the first Maker Faire in the Bay Area. After working for many years in industry, Michael discovered he enjoyed teaching.  He taught at CCA in San Francisco, until two years ago when he began his current job as an associate professor of the practice of interactive media at NYU Abu Dhabi.  Michael also worked with the Arduino team and co-authored with Massimo Banzi the 2nd Edition of “Getting Started with Arduino.”

I had the pleasure of reconnecting with Michael and wanted to share some of our leisurely conversation.

A few tidbits

• It’s refreshing to come to Cairo where there is all this stuff going on, after living in Abu Dhabi for a couple of years where everything is so polished, pristine, and brand new.
• We are trying to encourage (students) to be creative, not to be so proscribed, not to think so much about products, on scalability, and how much they are going to sell their startup for. … But to think creatively about what looks interesting, whimsical, fascinating, what amazes people, attracts their attention and not so much how I can sell it.

I have yet to see a bumper sticker or poster advocating on behalf of Oleg Deripaska or other Russian oligarchs.  Where is the swelling of public support for removing sanctions from Russian oligarchs and Russian companies? Isn’t it just incredible why some things happen?

Isn’t it confounding that the US government would spend time thinking about how to remove sanctions from Deripaska or even define a process for removing them? Why do it? And why now?

It is hard not to see the lifting of sanctions as a favor based on the long-standing business relationship between Deripaska and Paul Manafort, who has worked as an advisor and investment manager for Deripaska and as a campaign manager for Trump.  US Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin was in charge of financing the Trump campaign, and he is the one authorizing the changes that benefit Deripaska and other Russians who have been Republican donors.

As I wrote previously about the Russian hacking during the election, the Russians seem to know us better than we know ourselves.  That is, they are under no illusion as to how our system works.

“Oleg Deripaska understands better than most Russian oligarchs how money buys influence in Washington,” said Michael R. Carpenter, a former National Security Council official during the Obama administration who is now senior director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. “It seems like he’s now using that knowledge to try to save his skin.”

From a November 4, 2018 New York Times article.

Deripaska has a British Lord in his employ and many others lobbying for him.  Apparently it is working.

If you want to learn more about Russians in power, read Red Notice, a terrific book by Bill Browder that tells Browder’s own tale as an investor in Russia in the 1990s who ended up on the wrong side of Putin and his cronies.  It explains how the oligarchs amassed wealth and power following the break-up of the Soviet Union.  When Putin came to power, he established the principle that the oligarchs worked for him and he got a healthy chunk of their wealth. Those were the only terms under which the oligarchs could keep a still sizable portion of their wealth and influence. Browder would not accept those terms and tried to make others in Russia aware of what was going on.

Browder was also a key figure in the passing of the Maginsky Act, named after an associate of Browder’s who was detained and killed in Moscow. The US law brought sanctions on the oligarchs restricting their ability to move money to the US and to enter the country. He believed it was the only way to bring some justice to the oligarchs.

Now, under Trump, the government is figuring out how to unwind the sanctions, at least for Deripaska and perhaps other Russians. The Democrats passed a bill in the House to stop the Treasury Department from ending the sanctions but it was defeated in the Senate. The Treasury Department lifted the sanctions on the Sunday a day before our own government shutdown was set to end.

Leonid Bershidsky writes for Bloomberg:

But two things are now clear: the terms on which a wealthy Russian can expect to have U.S. sanctions on their assets lifted, and how those assets can avoid being sanctioned, even if their owner is. 

Oleg’s business is more and more our business, which is a political system that big money can buy.

I was in Beijing about a week ago and a Chinese colleague prodded me: “Your government is shutdown.”

Half-embarrassed, I replied: “Yes, we always shut down the government for the New Year.” The Chinese New Year would start in a few weeks and already people were talking about how Beijing would shut down, as many people leave to go visit their family elsewhere in the country.

After laughing, he added that the Chinese could not imagine their government shutting down. He even wondered if it would be a good thing to happen in China, simply because it was so unimaginable.

Later with a group over lunch, the discussion was about how the Chinese judged the work of their government.  “There’s a billion people,” said a woman. “The government is responsible for so many people, which is hard, but they do their job.”  They agreed that the government was mostly competent and they expressed pride in the work it did.

***

Last week, I received an email message from a woman who works at NASA Ames and like other NASA employees who not working because of the government shutdown.   She wondered if anything could be done to help the NASA workers because morale was so low.  She said that many of them come to Maker Faire and wondered if some hands-on projects would help them.

In her email, she wrote: “I am afraid my colleagues will leave and go to better paying private sector jobs because they have to know that they can support their families. I guess I just thought maybe… just maybe if somebody like you could offer a little bit of what they really need… their work.   Then maybe they could hold on a little bit longer before thinking about going to The Private Sector.”

I didn’t realize that NASA was closed.  The blog for The Planetary Society published a story on December 22, 2018 titled “Happy Holidays. NASA is Shutdown” and described that “roughly 14,500 hardworking men and women of NASA will be sent home without pay.” About 3,000 who filled so-called essential jobs were required to work without pay.

I wasn’t sure what I could do but I wanted to talk to the woman who wrote me.  However, by the time we actually talked last Friday, the announcement had come that the shutdown was ending, for at least 3 weeks.  Nonetheless, she shared how hard it was for the NASA workers to not be working.  Scientists. Engineers.  They missed their work.  She described a social event that was held just to allow people to see each other, and it was very sad, she said. “These people work for NASA because of the mission, because they love science and they want to give something back to the world,” she told me. “They just want to do their work.”

Ronald Reagan famously said that “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; the government is the problem.” When you make government the problem, you really don’t really care about the problem and you don’t have a working solution.  The longest shutdown in US government history was not just pointless; it was careless.

 

Who you really are is what you say or do when no one is watching.  There are all kinds of variations on this idea.  C.S. Lewis says: “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”  Motivational guru Tony Robbins quotes UCLA basketball coaching legend, John Wooden:

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are…the true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.”

Robbins warns that creating an image of who you are, or cultivating an image through social media, can be at odds with who you really are, your core self.   Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says that social media is creating a “prestige economy” in which people seek recognition or prestige by what they say or do online, often reacting to what others have said.  It’s done with the idea that everyone is watching you, which at first seems compelling, like the 60’s TV-oriented protest slogan: “The Whole World is Watching.”

In a Recode Pivot podcast interview with Scott Galloway, Haidt says that:

social media and technology have put us all into a social space where whatever we say, various strangers with assumed names are going to say incredibly nasty things about us. Which makes us all reluctant to speak in public and which kind of decimates trust…

..,technology changes social dynamics so that when two people are talking, they’re not necessarily talking to each other. They’re talking to the, possibly a very large audience. That changes the nature of interaction, and generally, in bad ways.

Social media can be the equivalent of thinking out loud without giving much thought to what you say.  It is possible to share whatever comes to mind, without any intervening delay, without getting the feedback of a few before hearing from many.   The reaction might not be what you expected.

It is good to ask ourselves what we would do if all of that noise wasn’t happening all around us, online as well as offline.  Or what we’d be thinking if we weren’t always listening to what everyone else has to say.  Can we balance the chatter of social media by cultivating the life of our own minds, giving ourselves the time and space to think — or not think at all?  This would require developing a practice, a habit of balancing ourselves, a kind of mental training for when nobody is watching you.

Nancy, my wife, does Morning Pages, a practice which comes from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.   Nancy writes three pages longhand every morning in her journal, which she will show to no one.  (I have instructions that upon her passing to gather her notebooks and burn them — without anybody reading them.)  Morning Pages are not intended to be consumed by anyone. They help create a space in your own mind for you to listen to yourself and express yourself — without judgement, without analysis.

I must admit that when she first started writing her Morning Pages, I didn’t quite understand what and why she was doing them.  It was a kind of writing exercise, I thought, that seemed somewhat pointless to me.  Blogger Chris Winfield thought the same thing until he started doing Morning Pages himself.  He found that it helped develop a “clearer mind, better ideas and less anxiety.”  It can also help you discover your creativity.  He writes:

In order to retrieve your creativity, you need to find it. And it’s through this seemingly pointless process that you are able to find it. You discover things that have been hidden inside you and stuffed down in the business of life.

We need a way of discarding many of our thoughts and just letting them go. It’s like flushing pipes to clean them out before fresh water comes out.  Opening the flow itself is what’s important about creating Morning Pages.  Shutting off the flow altogether may also be its own practice.

Meditation, sometimes also called mindfulness, seems very different from Morning Pages, yet it is a way to gain some control over your thoughts.  Often meditation is described as teaching yourself to be present in the moment, creating greater awareness that you and your mind are in your body, here and now.  “Mindfulness is simply a state of open, nonjudgmental, and nondiscursive attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant,” Sam Harris, author of the book, “Waking Up”, writes on his site.  Harris adds:

The goal is to awaken from our trance of discursive thinking—and from the habit of ceaselessly grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant—so that we can enjoy a mind that is undisturbed by worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly aware of the flow of experience in the present.

For most of us, meditating for long stretches, sitting in silence, seems impossible.  Sometimes just for a minute, it is hard to stop the incessant talking in our own heads and not feel subject to the randomness of conscious thought. Meditating is a way of learning to pay closer attention to what Harris called the “flow of experience.”

This weekend, I attended a memorial service for artist and poet Wilder Bentley at a Buddhist temple (Emanji in Sebastopol).  (I hope to write about Wilder in a future post.)  In the pamphlet distributed at the memorial, a poem of Wilder’s mentioned “the silence behind all sounds” and the Buddhist priest emphasized it his remarks on Dharma, or Buddhist teaching.  I want to learn to think more deeply, and also think a lot less. The priest went on to say that the Dharma is a flow, which I took to mean was a way of thinking, rather than the thoughts themselves. The Way of Dharma. The Artist’s Way.  Seeking our own way.

 

Asked what changes surprised him after so many years in government, Governor Jerry Brown said in an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle brought up the complexity of modern California.

First of all, these things are enormously complex. Understanding the water system of California, I’d bet there aren’t 100 people in California that could really give a detailed accounting of what our water system is, its local, state and federal components. These things take an enormous amount of time. The environmental documents probably go 1 million pages. This is complex stuff.

Maybe that’s what’s changed. The complexity of the criminal law, the water law, the tax law, all these laws are very complex and the Legislature, as is the executive branch, is very dependent, as I am, on well-schooled and well-experienced staff. … [C]ertainly in the last eight years there is a centralization of decision-making into relatively few hands, just by the nature of the multitude of factors. And it’s not something you can lightly talk about.

Brown leaves office after serving four terms as Governor of California over a 44-year period.  The transcript of the interview by John Wildermuth is here.  Brown emphasized the complexity of modern California again, acknowledging

the need for highly trained staff and the dependence of the electeds, including myself, on staff that’s highly trained. For example, the Department of Water Resources, or even the high-speed rail or Caltrans, much less the Public Utilities Commission — let’s leave out the Public Utilities Commission, that body is pretty expert — I’m just saying the staff is having the conversations.

…So you asked me what surprised me. That’s something that people probably don’t quite get. But if you’ve been at it long enough, you realize things are shaped not only by events, but by the experts working within our modern complex society.

In other words, our society and our problems are complex. Government requires people who have deep expertise to understand these complex problems and work on them.  This complexity is what is driving government more than we think and there are few easy or simple solutions.  Complexity also makes it harder for more people to participate effectively in government.  It also gets harder at state and federal levels to know what is working and what is not.

Brown draws a distinction between what drives government and what drives politics:

So the politics tend to get off on sidebars: excitements, alarms, scandals, the hot topics or what we call the shiny new objects that can be handled at the relatively simple level at which politics is conducted. So I’m making a point about the democratic system itself. We’re not in Independence Hall with a relatively small number of people in a face-to-face debate. We’re spread over a massive state called California, dependent on a system of interaction between federal and state laws that go into the millions of words, and the people who come and go through our term-limited environment only have a relatively superficial view of what it is they do.

Brown’s point is that most of politics, especially what gets our attention on TV and social media, are the sidebars, the superficial things, not the substantial work of governing.  We should understand what happens in government, or at least appreciate the staffers or civil servants who manage this complexity.

This is also the point of Michael Lewis’s book, “The Fifth Risk”, which I read over the holidays.  It is a fascinating read, and a bit of a disappointment in that it was so short an examination of the inner workings of government.  Lewis follows the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration.  To put it bluntly, the incoming Trump administration is not at all interested in what government does — what agencies like the Commerce Department or the Department of Agriculture.   Administration officials in the Obama administration prepared extensive briefing books on what the agencies do and the processes they manage.

How to stop a virus, how to take a census, how to determine if some foreign country is seeking to obtain a nuclear weapon or if North Korean missiles can reach Kansas City: these are enduring technical problems. The people appointed by a newly elected president to solve these problems have roughly seventy-five days to learn from their predecessors.

President Trump and his team just didn’t want to know.   Or they wished to cling to what pre-conceptions they came with to avoid the complexity.  Lewis said that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, as “one of those people who thinks that, because he’s rich, he must also be smart.”  Lewis had little interest in Trump as a person, and as a personality.  He was instead pointing to early signs that running government wasn’t a priority for President Trump.

The “experts” in the federal government that Lewis portrayed in his book were mission-driven, not money-driven.  They do important work to make things better.  The government’s ability to predict weather and provide storm warnings earlier than in the past can save lives, and also spare communities from worse damage.

Imagine if we as a nation took great pride in our nation’s government, its many accomplishments and the many people who work there.   I admire people like Kathy Sullivan, the former astronaut and NOAA administrator that Lewis profiled.  I admire Jerry Brown.  In 1978, when he announced his candidacy in Boston for the 1980 presidential election, I went to see him in Faneuil Hall.  Brown started out idealistic, but became pragmatic, and he got things done.  Governor Brown said that he realized that “you can’t solve all problems.”  Yet he was surprised at all that he was able to get done in his years in government. That’s progress and it takes years to see it. The many young progressives coming to Washington this January may eventually learn that same lesson themselves.

 

 

On the recent Waking Up podcast by Sam Harris, Renée DiResta talks about “The Information War“.  She tells how she started researching the spread of disinformation on social media by looking into what “anti vaxxers” were doing to promote their point of view very successfully online.  Viewed from a social media perspective their view seemed dominant, which was quite the opposite of what most people thought outside of social media.  How did they do that?  She talks about the techniques they used to game the system and distort reality, by making their minority view seem popular.  Also, she found that once a person joins such a group they are targeted by other conspiracy groups.   In Fast Company, Renée wrote  “How Social Network Algorithms Are Distorting Reality By Boosting Conspiracy Theories ” where she describes how fairly simple algorithms intended to promote the most popular content have the unintended consequence of helping make crazy conspiracy theories go viral.

Once a user joins a single group on Facebook, the social network will suggest dozens of others on that topic, as well as groups focused on tangential topics that people with similar profiles also joined. That is smart business. However, with unchecked content, it means that once people join a single conspiracy-minded group, they are algorithmically routed to a plethora of others. Join an anti-vaccine group, and your suggestions will include anti-GMO, chemtrail watch, flat Earther (yes, really), and “curing cancer naturally” groups. Rather than pulling a user out of the rabbit hole, the recommendation engine pushes them further in.

She found activist groups on the left and right who were gaming social media platforms to spread their own narratives.   It’s a new kind of activism or pseudo-activism.  Maybe it’s fracking activism, which by going underground and cracking into people’s belief systems, you can manipulate them, change their minds without them seeing it happening and then get something you really want from them.  If activism is meant to encourage you to act on a belief, this new pseudo-activism is intended to create disbelief and division by hacking into own belief systems.  Like a fool, you no longer know what you actually believe and you do not act at all.

I first met Renée when she was working at O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures (OATV).  She was an associate, a VC in training, which is perhaps where her Twitter handle “@noupside” comes from.  She is remarkably smart and independent-minded.  At that time, she was interested in the early formation of the maker community and helped organize along with Nick Pinkston an early hardware unconference in OATV’s offices in SF.  She was co-author of a book called The Hardware Startup.

Renée started down a whole new path, as she describes in the podcast, once she became a mother.  While researching kindergartens for her child, she thought to look into how many unvaccinated children might be attending a given school.  This led to the discovery of “antivaxer” groups who were fighting legislation that required children to be vaccinated. Eventually, she was asked by the Obama administration to study the techniques that ISIS was using to gain recruits online because they saw the same set of techniques that the “anti vaxxers” were using.  In her report for Just Security, she writes that plain old truth doesn’t stand up well against lies.  She cited “a troubling statistic from a recent MIT study: on Twitter, lies are 70% more likely to be retweeted than facts.”

What’s more, a false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story. And while false stories outperform the truth on every subject—including business, terrorism and war, science and technology, and entertainment—fake news about politics regularly does best. This is why hyper-partisan, political propaganda is a popular tactic in information warfare. The goal is not to fool people into believing any one individual lie. It’s to overwhelm individuals’ ability to determine what’s true, to create chaos,

Eventually, she began researching what the Russians did in the 2016 elections. 

What she found the Russians doing was not exactly promoting Trump’s candidacy, which might have been a short-term goal, but rather they were playing a “long-game” of using simple narratives to create tribes and then mobilizing them.   The Russians created pages on something that an American might take pride in, such as being from Texas or from the South.   Or being Christian.  Or African-American.  Or LBGTQ.  Or driving trucks.  They’d create rather innocuous Facebook pages that seemed to align with people’s interests.  Much like a publisher, they’d create content that attracted people’s interest. If content was bait, they paid close attention to the people taking the bait and hook them.

In a New York Times Op-Ed, DiResta wrote:

Russia was able to masquerade successfully as a collection of American media entities, managing fake personas and developing communities of hundreds of thousands, building influence over a period of years and using it to manipulate and exploit existing political and societal divisions.

In the podcast, Sam Harris speculates that the Russians were having great fun coming up with stories, much like a writer’s room in Hollywood coming up with jokes for a sit-com.  Instead of jokes, they were coming up with exploits that would seem truer than true to Americans with certain beliefs.   It makes me think of “The National Lampoon” or “Mad Magazine” and how fun it must be to write parodies that exploit what others will take too seriously.

It’s a perverse kind of genius to see this other side of America so clearly.  You wouldn’t expect an outsider to be so effective and fool so many by infiltrating social media platforms that Americans think belong to them.  The Russians didn’t care about the usual subjects for political activism such as electing candidates or identifying with one side of an issue.  They didn’t care about what for most people is the content of politics.  Instead they used content to make Americans angry and turn on each other.  And somehow that made people feel good about themselves, that things were right.

What it proves to me is that the Russians understand people much better than those who run Facebook and Twitter.  The Russians see more deeply in darkness where Americans see only in light.  The Russians know Americans the way predators know prey.  Hunters, like comics and trolls, know what makes the target vulnerable, and the prey is unaware that they are being hunted.  That is also how the confidence man achieves what we wants without anyone even knowing.

Exploiting the endless varieties of vulnerability is the subject of Herman Melville’s “The Confidence Man: His Masquerade” (1857),  a story of a man who wears many masks, many disguises among all variety of people who are passengers on the journey of a Mississippi river boat, named Fidèle (faith in Latin).   A steamboat was filled with a swarm of people, just like on social media:

As among Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man.

And they are all vulnerable as prey to the confidence man who first appears in a cream-colored suit as a mute stranger who writes on his slate such innocuous sayings as “charity thinketh no evil” and “charity believeth in all things.”  People wonder who he is and what he is doing but he is also just ignored.   Later, this stranger approaches a well-dressed woman who is reading the New Testament.  He gets her attention and confides in her that “it is very solitary for a brother here.”  He continues:

“I prefer the company, however silent, of a brother or sister in good standing. By the way, madam, may I ask if you have confidence?”

“Really, sir—why, sir—really—I—”

“Could you put confidence in me for instance?”

She asks how she could possibly put confidence in an entire stranger, to which he takes offense that she should see him as such a stranger.   She says that she’d like to befriend him but he answers that he cannot be friends with someone who does not have confidence in him.   She admits begrudgingly that she has “some” confidence in him.

“Nay, nay, you have none—none at all. Pardon, I see it. No confidence. Fool, fond fool that I am to seek it!”

“You are unjust, sir,” rejoins the good lady with heightened interest; “but it may be that something untoward in your experiences has unduly biased you. Not that I would cast reflections. Believe me, I—yes, yes—I may say—that—that——”

“That you have confidence? Prove it. Let me have twenty dollars.”

“Twenty dollars!”

“There, I told you, madam, you had no confidence.”

She eventually asks what he wants twenty dollars for and he tells her that he wants it “for the widow and the fatherless. I am traveling agent of the Widow and Orphan Asylum, recently founded among the Seminoles.”   She not only gives it to him but regrets she cannot give him more.   She thinks that her faith in the goodness of other people was affirmed while he has proved her faith was foolish.

So how do we protect people from what the Russians can do, from what fracker-activists can do on social media, from what we do to ourselves?   I don’t think government regulations or artificial intelligence will keep social media platforms or us from being fooled again and again.

We think we see ourselves as others see us, clearly and in good light. The phrase “to see through a glass darkly” comes to mind — the distortion in a mirror should remind us that how we see ourselves is imperfect, just as how we are seen by others.  The quote comes from Paul in I Corinthians : “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”  Social media is more or less a distorting mirror, an attraction found at a funhouse or carnival, and we should know not to trust what we see reflected there.

Photo credit: Gaius Cornelius [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons