Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities (15 page)

In fact, when initially asked, the attorney general of the United States, Eric Holder, said he couldn’t unequivocally confirm that a drone strike wouldn’t be used against an American citizen on U.S. soil. It was only after a thirteen-hour filibuster by Senator Rand Paul (who I don’t agree with on a lot of things, but who is absolutely right on this) that AG Holder penned a letter stating that the president does not have the authority to kill “an American not engaged in combat on American soil.”

Well, great! We’re safe!

Not so fast. “Engaged in combat” can be a very loose term, especially with prior precedents set by our government. Does writing propaganda make you “engaged in combat”? Does letting someone stay at your house make you “engaged in combat”? Does talking to a member of a terror group (again, as defined by the people in charge of pulling the trigger) for the purposes of research or journalism make you “engaged in combat”?

We don’t know. The reason we don’t know is that our government doesn’t want us to know. Why don’t they want us to know? (Insert known knowns and unknown unknowns speech here.)

I don’t know. But I can promise you that institutions that insist on obfuscation and denial of information are historically institutions that don’t fare well under future examination. Soviet Russia. North Korea. Egypt, Iran, Nixon, Mao. Religious institutions of all shapes and sizes. Financial gamblers and corporate boards—all concerned with hiding the truth of their actions.

And those are all within the last century!

Looking back further we have feudal Europe, Renaissance Italy, imperial Japan—hidden cults and secret handshakes taking place across the world, all to make sure the majority of people didn’t know what those in power were doing. Eventually, though, those people found out.

Reformations, revolutions, rebellions—the inevitable response to power and corruption lurking amid shadows (and, naturally, quickly co-opted by those very same shadows). Violent, bloody, disruptive change, ninety-nine times out of one hundred—anger finally boiling over at the lack of transparency.

Because that’s what this is all really about. As citizens, we grant our government the monopoly of legitimate violence, but in return that violence has to be legally employed. That’s the whole reason we have the Constitution, and why it spells out what the government can and cannot do. That’s why we have a legal system, with things like “due process,” “a speedy trial,” and “the right to face your accuser.” Above all, our government is supposed to be accountable to us, the people, not a shadowy cabal in a back room somewhere that no one ever sees.

That’s why transparency is so important. So we
can
hold the
government accountable for things like budgets and drone strikes and wars. So we
know
that violence is being employed within the constraints of our legal system and not to capriciously further personal agendas or desires for power. And, most importantly, transparency is so vitally important because it makes us face the choices
we
allow our government to make, especially those choices pertaining to violence.

Violence that historically never works. Violence that
we
allow to persist with our unwillingness to force transparency from those in charge of making decisions.

All the bombs we drop, all the countries we invade, all the terrorists we assassinate with a joystick and television screen—those aren’t the problem. The problem is instability, caused primarily through lack of food, infrastructure, and education. That’s what we should be fighting against (and not just overseas), but we buy into constant fear and think blowing up the symptoms will cure the disease. Another missile on the way, another insurgent killed, another five rising to take his place, angered and willing to do whatever it takes to destroy the threat they know is there, a threat they cannot see because it’s hidden by shadows and secrecy, a threat that won’t go away until it’s exposed to the light.

So the next time you see a report on body counts via drone, take a minute to wonder what those people did to deserve it.

If you don’t know, you might be next.

I
, and many others, grew up along with the Internet. As servers and protocols stretched their digital limbs, we stretched with them—learning, playing, falling down, and standing back up. The slow crawl of dial-up modems graduated into the frenetic sprint of broadband and fiber-optic lines, data shared among us at an ever-increasing pace.

Download this file. Don’t trust that link. Watch for phishing holes, and always look twice before crossing a firewall (for trolls lurk everywhere).

One vast, anarchic playground teeming with faceless participants. Behind the frozen glass of a monitor, everyone looks the same.

Anonymous.

Yet not.

Differences can always be teased out, extracted, thrust to the surface,
even in a text-based environment. Styles of communication—a smiley face here, an anachronistic phrase there. Nicknames that become permanent; deeds and trust built up over time. Hometowns referenced, schools attended, an IP address carelessly left unattended—chance bits of information dropped hither and yon, like bread crumbs. While the bread crumbs remain scattered, invisibility keeps its mantle spread, but gather them up, and the harsh light of reality shines on someone’s life.

What do we do while we have that specter’s cloak? While we hunt through the forest, all unaware of the trails we leave behind?

Some engage in mischief. Hacking, cracking, spyware, malware, shadownets, and botnets; dark ravens sent scouring the wilderness to steal bread crumbs someone foolishly left lying around. Credit card info. Social Security numbers. Usernames and passwords, addresses and dates of birth, tit pics or gtfo—secrets for extortion and embarrassment.

Some do it for money; some do it because they can—either way, a life is ruined. The anonymity of the thief, the murderer, hiding his face to deceive and to destroy, and avoiding the repercussions of his acts. One face of the coin. Anonymity as fear.

Others use invisibility as a shield. A way to speak truth to those in power who would react unfavorably, to those who would cover up their corruption with lies and treachery. Hacking, cracking, spyware, malware, shadownets, and botnets (and lions and tigers and bears, oh my)—the goal is an exposition of evil, a bringing to light of that which flourishes in darkness, because, make no mistake, there is plenty of darkness out there and precious few lights shining down. Collecting crumbs, not to find one’s way home but to find the witch, to reveal that saccharine house of lies. The other face of the coin.

Anonymity as justice.

Which aspect do we indulge in when we’re safe (for now) behind our comfortable cloaks of blurring haze? Do we create? Do we destroy? Or do we do both, mixing and matching as the whim takes us, today the villain, tomorrow the hero? When we hide, what are we hiding from? Fear? Or honesty? Which side of the coin do we value most?

(Bonus question: Why are large organizations so interested in making you transparent and themselves opaque?)

How do we interact with others when we can’t put a face to a name and know that the same can be said in return? Perhaps even more important, how do we interact with others when we have the advantage, when we
can
put a face to a name, when we
can
trace every last detail of someone’s identity or the contents of a database and know we’re safe from any counteraction (if we’ve been careful with our crumbs, of course)?

How do we treat those we have the power to treat poorly?

Because here’s the rub. No one is ever truly anonymous. Anyone can be found if enough resources are dedicated to the search, if enough people have been sufficiently upset to do something about it. Anyone can be revealed.

Anyone can be d0xed.

And all too frequently, we do it to ourselves. Inattention and ignorance are generally the culprits, but by far the most dangerous reason is arrogance. Everyone wants to have a name. Everyone wants to be recognized. Everyone wants to pass a legacy down, to be credited for the work he or she has done, and all too often, that leads to the veil of mist spun away in tatters, an individual forced to acknowledge reality and the consequences of his or her actions.

So as you set sail on the high seas, as you plunder and pillage, whether you be pirate leaders or corporate raiders or government lackeys, bear in mind that what you do will always see the light of day. Maybe not now, maybe not soon, but information wants to be free, so make sure that you can bear to put your name to your deeds.

Anonymity.

Such a powerful tool. Such a fearsome weapon.

So easily shattered.

What will you do while you still have it?

O
ne of my favorite things to contemplate is the Fermi paradox, which goes a little something like this: The universe is so unbelievably vast, and our sun so young, that other intelligent life in older systems should have evolved by now, and we should be able to see signs of their presence—yet we haven’t.

Where is everybody?

Unless we go with the “We’re all in a giant petting zoo and the aliens are watching us while wearing invisibility cloaks” theory, which I guess could be the case (though you think they’d toss some treats into the cages now and then), then logically there’s only one answer for the vast barrenness of a cosmos that should be teeming with life.

On a galactic time scale, all intelligent life self-implodes and kills itself.

Every form of evolution we’ve witnessed involves strife on some level. The fit survive, the slow get eaten; the victors are those with some sort of advantage. When intelligence is added to the mix, weapons develop, because it allows those who develop them to survive against those who don’t.

Take humans, for example. Against a lion, your average human doesn’t stand a chance. He’s basically ambulatory meat loaf. Once that human creates a spear, or a bow, or a gun? Now the ambulatory meat loaf has a pleasantly warm lion-fur cloak and plenty to eat for a couple days.

The problem with weapons, however, is that they are designed to be used, and as societies become more and more technologically advanced, the destructive power of weapons increases. Twenty thousand years ago, we had to club each other to death one at a time using animals’ jawbones. Two thousand years ago, Roman legions used swords and shields to cut their way across most of Europe and crucified those who resisted. Two hundred years ago, muskets and cannons boomed their presence across the entire earth—a deadly cacophony of missing limbs and torn flesh.

Then we got serious. Machine guns, nerve gas, high explosives. Napalm and cluster bombs blazing merrily away, meat popcorn crackling and roasting in the flames. Men and women weeping blood and coughing out spongy lung chunks until nothing remained. Battlefields literally carpeted with bodies, an unseen length of lead scything them down like young wheat until only the crows could feast.

Then we got REALLY serious. We figured out how to split the atom. Entire cities gone in an eyeblink, along with their populations, earth scorched and irradiated for centuries to come. Two countries, each with enough potential energy to permanently
change the planet’s entire atmosphere, on the brink of pushing that glowing red button. (
Press me,
it whispers.
Do it
.) More countries desperately trying to acquire Shiva’s fire, beautiful in its seductive promise of self-reliant power.

And we’re only getting started. Now we’re playing around with genetic tinkering, molecular nanomachines, biocomputing. What destructive potential resides in a custom virus that can destroy a woman’s ovaries? Kill a country’s future, and you’ve killed that country. Self-assembling and self-deconstructing nanomachines, a tiny invisible swarm capable of melting anything it touches into more fodder for the cloud, the ultimate commune. When your nervous system is synonymous with your operating system, hacking takes on a whole new meaning, and memory wipes can’t be reinstalled (or can they?).

That’s just on the micro scale. Zooming out, we’re making another push toward space, full of needed resources and habitats, much of which is found on rocks. Lots of rocks. Rocks that would store a very appreciable amount of potential energy if they were ever accelerated toward a planet. Perhaps a blue planet? Who knows. If we find a way to create large amounts of antimatter, something we already make in (very) small chunks now?
Boom, crack, splat
goes the egg. This is your brain on science.

As we are an intelligent society, we can’t
not
design weapons. Everything we do can be weaponized. Guns are used in a peaceful way to hunt and feed families (peaceful for the humans, at least, not so much for the animals). Biological tinkering has given us vaccines for polio, measles, and smallpox, as well as countless helpful drugs and crops. Nuclear power provides electricity for hundreds of thousands of families—light, heat, and shelter. We’ve invented multiple ways to kill each other, but we’ve also created countless
more to help. So far, we’ve managed to walk that fine line between creativity and craziness, advancement and annihilation.

However, the threat is still there, because ideas are weapons too. Without education, without respect, without tolerance, all it takes is one person who doesn’t realize why weapons
shouldn’t
be used to start that chain reaction that will mark us as just another failed experiment, another brief flash in the night sky on some alien world. As our society, as humanity, unlocks more and more knowledge, we must work just as hard (if not harder!) on stability and empathy and peace, because the risk of total destruction grows larger and larger the more power we amass. One madman with a meteor. One sociopath with smart matter. One ethically challenged despot with access to a doomsday device.

Where is everybody?

Exactly where their intelligence led them.

Y
ou! Yeah, hey, you! C’m’over here for a second.