It is the year 2014.

An unknown organization or group in the US assembles a fairly sophisticated drone from toy and radio shack parts. It’s basicly a smart “semi-controlled” RC helicopter with robot parts latched on. Nobody ever claims responsibility for this first act of weaponizing a private drone and even in 2020 nobody knows who started this ANON-ization of private drone vigilantism.

The first such device has a battery life of several hours and might easily mount a single high calibre rifle, a tampering proof directional communications beam, a smart programming (that gives it simple self-preservation ‘behaviour’ in case contact with base station is lost) and a HD camera.

This device takes to the air at an altitude that is largely inconspicuous to law enforcement and official authorities. The total construct is available online and costs less than 5000$, and is relatively easy with a mix of mail ordered and 3D printed parts.

Early models of this devices in 2014 are used to monitor and record law enforcement activities. Of course authorities are in a state of severe alarm about this sousveillance! Very soon after most law enforcement, security and intelligence officials in the US become indexed on non-US (and completely unaccountable) web sites outside the US. US law enforcement and intelligence communities (as well as organized crime, corporate security, mercenary forces who become likewise exposed and scrutinized) are in a state of disarray as their faces and biometric data because subject to constant public scrutiny.

The US state tries to crackdown against these “acts of domestic terrorism”, to no avail. Attempts are made to extradite those responsible for the non-US publications, to no avail. Those in charge can’t even find out who the hell is doing this documentation. As early of 2015 hundreds of thousands of police officers, IAD officers, FBI, NSA, CIA, immigration, narcotics, government, shills, politicians, military, seals, secret service, army intelligence, ATF etc etc agents are charted. The lest then expands to foreigners, chinese, russian, mossad, and so forth. In mere months the listing expands exponentially.

In 2015 the first confirmed vigilante kill occurs – a NY police officer found violently raping a teenage girl is shot through the head by one of these devices during the act. The device itself or those responsible is never retrieved, despite a national and international man hunt that burns through tens of millions of US dollars.

The act itself is recorded in HD format and publicized real time, causing massive riots and protest throughout the western world. The video of the rape and summary execution is called “collareral vigilantism” and watched by billions world-wide. Police officers (et.al) are held to close scrutiny by common people and met with outright hostility for months as a result, and vigilante killings of ‘feral cops’ become commonplace. In 2016 a full 300 “feral cops” are shot or wounded, many while committing these crimes and in the years following this incident a virtual ecology of garage drones take to the skies, or crawl on top of buildings.

By 2018 the number of private (rogue, vigilante, occupy, anon, terrorist, protest, copwatch, private blogger, journalist, etc) drones outnumber official drones about 20 to 1. By 2018 these drones become as small as a matchbox, can crawl in to homes with miniature appendages, are smart, camera equipped and many are deadly. These devices are then used to steal, burglarize, assassinate, spy, record video, hack home computers, read credit cards, blackmail, poison, spread diseases, troll, stalk, sexually predate on and far far worse.

By 2018 the authorities wish they never started this horrendous drone arms race. But nobody gives a flying hoot about what they think any more.

1. Teevee Light

We live in a post-panopticon culture, and everybody’s watching.  Occupiers watch bankers, bankers watch farmers.  Farmers watch their crops in infrared.

We all watch: that’s the active media myth we see played out daily.  The same basketball game, the same GigaOM Post, the same Funny or Die short, the same #hashtag:  we are all watching it together, even if in separate rooms.

But this is a gross oversimplification, and in it we must look at an important nuance: even if we were looking at the same stuff, would we be watching?  To watch requires attention.  But attention is lacking: we’re all surfing, tweeting, bitching, and twitching inattentively.  Spastically.  Our minds are crashing on media moments like Aquafina bottles from the Pacific Trash Vortex rolling up onto the sunbathed Southern tip of Papa‘apoho.  Our attention bifurcates on shoals of Kardashian.

We don’t watch anything.  We just look at shit.

2. The Transhuman Toehold in the Present = The Advent of Sousveillance.

In my former town (DFW, NoTx), cameras are everywhere.  Many or most traffic intersections have surveillance cameras, even those without photo-enforcement.  Of course they’re all over private properties, government buildings, and official vehicles.  It seemed to happen suddenly.  Sometime over the last five years, while I was zipping along on the Interstate switching the radio from left to right to NPR, the cameras blossomed.  We’d been warned that it was coming.  But who pulled that trigger?  I wondered whether to call the mayor, the sheriff, my state representative… Then I got busy moving to the Middle East.

You want to do surveillance right?  The UAE gets it on properly.  Few cops on the road here — it’s all done with auto-cameras and radar boxes every klick or so.  If you are in the public square (or in the cracks between), you’re probably being recorded.  Your antagonists, your allies: all record it all on phones.

Even now, it seems that the surest way to mitigate state/corporate surveillance is sousveillance. The Arab Spring (and it’s descendant Occupy Wall Street actions) taught us a lot about “state gaze.”  And we do know that when we stare back and do not blink, we can (when winds are are with us) muscle into formerly denied cognitive space.  We can occupy the panopticon.

3. Flash Mob Head Space Eats Time

Grant Morrison made a comment (at Disinfo Con back in 2000)  to the effect that the more cameras the government puts up, the more weirdly we all act — because we have more opportunities to perform more and more wildly in more and more unexpected places.  How weird can we act before we really, truly, become the strangeness we perform?  And how strange can we become, in this odd dance with media and technology, before we flit into Singularity with a joke, a faux pas, a cliche, a gesture of wrist or skirt or riding boot?

If the Singularity eats the state, the corporation, the ego, and all economies (as some suppose it may be able to — or must necessarily do), we find the continual pressure of state/corporate gaze pushing us into revealing ourselves as Dancers at the End of Time. When we become posthuman, such state structures are obviated entirely.

So… they watch and we watch, We act out and we get weird, and weird gets us.  We merge with the watchers and the media by which the watching gets done.

We become the sci-fi fictions we create for their cameras.

Then it all floats away like a dandelion seed on a stiff breeze, just as we thought the denoument was gonna bring us down.  It comes like a thief in the night.

We blow “the past” a kiss, our last blush of artifice as performers before this Future we’re flirting with becomes terribly and totally Real.

And we then begin to occupy reality.

Woody Evans writes books and stories and essays. He’s from Mississippi.

I’m sure most of you followed the story about the revolution in Egypt, and the uses which the protestors were putting Twitter, Facebook, etc, and the effort the government made to “shut down the internet”. It should illustrate very effectively how the internet is a tool that is inherently hostile to “information control.”

Sure, the government shut it down. But they did so far too late, and the populace simply built a makeshift new internet out of mesh networks, dial-up lines, and basically has kept right on. It’s a story that you should really pay attention to because you are going to see it repeated more and more frequently. Why? Because the internet has taken over the role that cities once had.

No civilization in history has been created without cities, because cities were “hubs of information.” Traders could get knowledge of the best areas to trade goods; politicians could get knowledge about other cities’ the common people could hear about ideas from far and wide. Cities have driven the advancement of human civilization precisely because they allowed knowledge to be shared among far more people than was possible without cities. But we’ve been growing beyond cities, first with radio, TV, and cars, which allowed ideas to be distributed between cities and from cities into the rural areas, and now with the internet, which not only allows distribution, but exchange.

As a medium of knowledge exchange, there is nothing humans have ever created before that comes close to the scope and spread of the internet. You no longer have to be able to go to a far away library to have access to knowledge, or even to your local one. From scientific papers, to news, to opinion, to knock down drag out information exchange brawls, the internet has created a “nervous system” for the human metaorganism. It’s primitive, but it’s allowing people all over the world to communicate, and making us all aware of the larger world outside the walls of our homes.

And, as Egypt’s former president learned, when people can share knowledge, they grow ever less willing to be controlled.

Tyranny relies on isolation. It relies on control of information and making those tyrannized have a worldview that makes them feel isolated and alone. A tyrant wants everyone to be suspicious of everyone else, and to believe that rebelling is pointless because they would be one lone voice that would be quickly silenced. They want people to feel terrified of the “world outside” of the tyranny so that people will tolerate the “lesser of two evils.” But that’s impossible to do with the internet. When people can connect without borders and can talk to people all over the world, isolation is impossible.

But just by itself, the internet is not enough, because, as Egypt again shows, just being connected is not sufficient. There’s a second element that is needed to eradicate tyranny, and that is accountability.

If you are unsure what I mean by “accountability” let me refer you to my blog because a full explanation would greatly exceed my word limit, but in short, let me give you my usual example. If you look at a small tribe, everyone knows everyone else, and if any member is “up to no good” i.e. acting in a manner that jeopardizes the well-being of the tribe for self serving gain, then they are easy to spot, and easy to penalize. They steal food from others, then they don’t get to share in the hunt, or get thrown out of the tribe if it’s bad enough. The internet is allowing us to gradually return to this state of “knowing everyone” again, in the sense that it allows us to create and access records of even the most trivial events, like twits, or, as Jon Stewart often does, pull up video records of political figures saying the exact opposite of what they currently say.

So how can the internet be used to make humanity “accountable” again now that we lost that small tribe intimacy? That answer lies in the fact that now that we’ve made a basic nervous system, we’re in the process of giving the net “eyes” and “ears.” How? Certainly not deliberately, but I’d be willing to bet that if you don’t own a smart phone now, you are planning to get one, no? Even if you are not, I recommend getting used to the idea of owning one eventually, because having one will be your key to entering the world of mobile VR. Within the next ten years, we are going to not only increase the abilities of smartphones far beyond what your current desktop can do, but we will integrate them with either wraparound “virtual lenses” made of lightweight plastic that have cameras, lidars, and displays built in (via printed electronics) or we will be wearing contacts or have implants that do the same thing. In essence, we will give the internet OUR EYES and OUR EARS, so that it sees what we see, all so that we can create and interact with augmented reality and virtual worlds.

For a bit more in depth look at that, I recommend reading some of my articles on H+ magazine, particularly the 3 part essay “Virtualization” (links at the end of the article) but understand this, we will shift to living a life “on camera” not because of “Big Brother” but because we have no other choice but to do so to make VR work, and with the advantages VR and AR will give us, we’ll be no more likely to reject them than we have smartphones.

So what does “life on camera” mean? It means that we will be recorded, our actions outside of our homes available to anyone who wishes to look. And, it will indeed be used for “surveillance” and attempts by tyrants to control the masses. But the more cameras that exist, and the greater the ability to become aware of the actions of others, the less ability that “Big Brother” has to escape being “On Camera” himself. The “Spy” can only spy in secret. If the spy is himself being spied upon, it pretty much negates the purpose.

Sure, tyrants will seek to use universal surveillance to tyrannize. But with the improved ability to spy comes the improved ability to be spied upon. Governments and “elites” will love the opportunity to spy on everyone, including each other. We’re about to enter the age of the “Surveillance Arms Race” as new and better ways to spy on one another are created, defended against, and then innovated. The elites will be spying on the governments, the governments will be spying on the elites and each other, and as each and every spy technology becomes “obsolete”, it will filter down into the hands of the masses who will be using it to spy on the governments, the elites, and of course, each other.

Get over your notions of privacy. There is nothing you can do to prevent this. By the time the Surveillance wars are over, there will be no-one and no-place on earth that is not observed, recorded, and available for access at any time. I’m sure we will pass laws to protect personal lifeblogs or “private” information, for all the good it will do, but in the end we’ll just accept it.

Why? Because when everyone, and I do mean everyone, is on camera, it will be impossible to escape accountability. If you break a law, it will be known. If you steal, it will be found out. And after a very short period of time, in a world in which crime is no longer possible, and in which no CEO can inflict misery on large masses of humanity without penalty and no politician can lie his country into a war on false pretenses, we’ll come to wonder how we ever managed to survive in a world in which people could not be held to account.

You don’t have to like this reality, and I’m quite well aware that it will terrify many of you, but that’s because you’re not thinking past the “horror of Big Brother” to the inevitable result that will follow those attempts to tyrannize, when tyranny is finally and forever laid to rest.

For recommended reading:

Virtualization, The Rise of the Avatar & the Open Sim Project | H+ Magazine

Virtualization: From Avatar to the Mirrorworlds (Part Two) | H+ Magazine

Virtualization: From Virtual to Reality Part 3 | H+ Magazine

Fly Your POV Around with Your Own Personal Quadcopter | H+ Magazine

The Truth Machine by James Halperin

http://www.davidbrin.com/transparent.htm

If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, I’m sure you’ve heard about the “Declaration of War” by Lulzsec and Anonymous. Regardless of what you think about their actions, it should be obvious that there has been a growing effort by large corporations and governments to recreate the internet in an image completely alien to its original intentions – that of a robust decentralized network which no amount of damage could bring down. DARPA’s original designs have been sidetracked by various groups trying desperately to eliminate a “free and open” network model in favor of centrally controlled, corporate owned, authoritarian “walled gardens” in which your every move is tracked, your every file is subject to the central authorities approval, and your every action with your own possessions is monitored to ensure you’re not doing something a company disapproves of. The corporations have no desire to allow the masses a future in which information is not monitored, metered, charged for, and always in the control of the corporations.

In order to do this, they need the networks to be centralized, run entirely through systems in which every bit of data transmitted back and forth from the end user to the internet is subject to their scrutiny and approval. Due to the manner in which the net has developed using existing infrastructure, there are many bottlenecks which have made this effort possible, from cell phone towers that ensure that smartphones are routed through bandwidth limiting servers that meter per second access and looks for ways to charge customers for “overuse” to broadband services who inspect every packet of information to prevent you from downloading movies and songs. Even the FBI wants the ability to search your computer remotely.

So while I am uncertain of the utility of “cyberterrorism,” I can certainly see the need for methods to prevent the “digital frontier” from becoming a “virtual prison” and to encourage a return to that robust decentralized vision created by DARPA.

That’s pretty much what these guys at MondoNet are about and I think their words say it pretty clearly:

“Although the Internet is highly decentralized in its communication and social patterns, its technical and regulatory foundations are extremely hierarchical, due to centralized control by organizations like ICANN and the oligopolistic ownership of the access business by a handful of broadband ISPs and wireless carriers (Wu, 2010). As a result of this centralization, digital communications are compromised by a degree of surveillance and censorship that would be unthinkable in traditional social arenas, threatening our cyberliberties and “e-speech” rights (Sinnreich & Zager, 2008).

“Seemingly disparate issues like network neutrality, intellectual property treaties and national security measures, taken in combination, threaten to produce a communications environment in which innovation is stifled and normative cultural behaviors are criminalized and punished by censorship, fines and/or imprisonment. One potential solution to this problem would be to create a new communications platform based on existing Internet protocols, but with a decentralized infrastructure free of the bottlenecks and chokepoints that plague the current system. Specifically, this new infrastructure would use mesh networking technologies to produce a stable, ad hoc global wireless network in which each peer is a router, server and client combined, and in which no single state or organization can effectively censor or surveil the population on a massive scale.”

If you’ve never heard of a mesh network, or don’t understand the technical jargon, it basically means that every “device” — be it a smartphone, computer, or other internet connected device — “talks” to every other device, instead of to a “tower” or to a “server.” In other words, instead of talking to an “ISP” or “Carrier” who stands between you and the internet, your device will simply be part of the internet.

In the current infrastructure, if you want to call your friend, your device can’t just call up your friend. First it has to call up to a centralized, corporate controlled network. Then it has to confirm that it is allowed on that network and receive approval to use that network. Then it has to ask permission to create a connection to your friend, and verify that your friend is allowed access to the network, has not been banned from the network, and is connected to the network instead of a different network. Then, it will finally be allowed to create a connection, subject to monitoring from the central network. In a mesh network, your device would simply go to the next nearest device and then on to the next, and so on until it made a connection to your friend, over hundreds of different paths that it would turn into a “virtual private network” in which everything you and your friend say is inaccessible to anyone but the two of you because your data would be being sent along too many different paths to intercept.

Mondo.net again does a fantastic job of summarizing the principles of such a network:
1. Decentralized
The network should not be operated, maintained, or in any way reliant upon a single or minimally differentiated set of entities or technologies. No individual, entity or group should be central to the network to the extent that their absence would measurably impact its functionality or scope. Network participation should not require access to fixed, physical infrastructure of any sort.
2. Universally Accessible
The requisite technology and expertise required to participate in the network should be available at minimal cost and effort to every human being on the planet. Furthermore, all users should be able to extend the network’s content and functionality to suit their own needs, or those of others. No aspect of the network’s functioning should be reliant upon proprietary technologies, information or capital.
3. Censor-proof
The network should be resistant to both regulatory and technical attempts to limit the nature of the information shared, restrict usage by given individuals or communities, or render the network, or any portion of it, inoperable or inaccessible.
4. Surveillance-proof
The network should enable users to choose exactly what information they share with whom, and to participate anonymously if they so desire. Users should only have access to information if they are the designated recipients, or if it has been published openly.
5. Secure
The network should be organized in a way that minimizes the risk of malicious attacks or engineering failure. Information exchanged on the network should meet or exceed the delivery rate and reliability of information exchanged via the Internet.
6. Scalable
The network should be organized with the expectation that its scale could reach or even exceed that of today’s Internet. Special care should be taken to address to the challenge of maintaining efficiency without the presence of a centralized backbone.
7. Permanent
The network’s density and redundancy should be great enough that, despite its ad hoc nature, it will persistently operate on a broad scale, and be available in full to any user within range of another peer.
8. Fast (enough)
The network should always achieve whatever speed is required for a “bottom line” level of social and cultural participation. At present, we assert that the network’s data transfer rate should, at a minimum, be enough for voice-over-IP (VoIP) communications, and low-bitrate streaming video.
9. Independent
While the network will have the capacity to exchange information with Internet users and nodes, it should be able to operate independently, as well. A large-scale failure or closure of Internet infrastructure and content should have minimal effect on the network’s operations.
10. Evolvable
The network should be built with future development in mind. The platform should be flexible enough to support technologies, protocols and modes of usage that have not yet been developed.

The question then is this: Why should you care?

And I’ll be honest here. I see mesh networks naturally evolving to become the dominant form of network over the next few decades, because it’s the most practical solution to a number of problems that will have to be solved in order to build the VR web as well as to connect the entire world to the internet. Centralized networks are only possible in highly developed countries with existing infrastructures like power and telephone grids, as well as roads. You can’t build a tower where you don’t have either power or access. For vast areas of the world, mesh networks will be the only feasible solution. As handheld devices get cheaper, smaller and use less power, and batteries become able to store weeks or month’s worth of power for them, they will become the world’s primary means to access the internet. As billions of devices begin attaching to the net, they will overwhelm any centralized system. At that point, it will be much simpler to use them in a mesh than it will be to try and build sufficient infrastructure to meet demand. A mesh network can grow as fast as you add a new device to it. And unlike traditional networks, it auto-updates itself as users discontinue using older devices and switch to new ones. It also will eliminate bandwidth issues as thousands of paths will allow data streaming at the limits of the devices own hardware. As we move past the multimedia age and into the VR age, the need for vast amounts of data to be transferred will force the abandonment of centralized systems that simply cannot handle the load for robust multispectrum wireless networks that are more akin to P2P torrents than today’s cellular networks. Technology advancement itself is going to ensure we will move to mesh architectures in the very near future. So why, really, should you care?

Because the sooner we begin working towards developing these peaceful, innovative, and practical solutions to the threats of authoritarian control of the worlds developing nervous system, the less need we will have for “Cyberterrorists” like Lulzsec and Anonymous to cause disruptive attacks that hurt the innocent and the guilty alike in a fight to preserve our freedom to access information. And that is a goal I think every side can agree on

Valkyrie Ice

RU SIRIUS:  John GIlmore famously said, “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it? True or not? And what’s missing from the Internet as it is, structurally, that requires an alternative creation for mass p2p activity?

ARAM SINNREICH: Gilmore was really talking about TCP/IP, and node-level routing. While it’s true that these protocols are inherently decentralized and therefore very resistant to censorship, the problem comes at the infrastructural level, which is far more centralized. The Internet may have a billion nodes now, but only a handful of companies control the Internet’s “backbone,” the broadband ISP market, and the wireless data services market (and two companies, AT&T and Verizon, are the dominant players in each of these sectors in the US). That means that no two Internet users in the US can communicate with one another without their data passing through the hands of one of these companies.

Unless the data is encrypted (in which case, it can be dumped if the companies choose), it is vulnerable to packet-sniffing or other forms of inspection. This is not a hypothetical situation; these companies have long histories of inspecting packets for the purposes of (a) commercially preferred treatment, e.g. non-neutral network operations; (b) commercial exploitation, e.g. consumer profiling; and (c) political censorship and surveillance, either at the behest of the federal government (think NSA wiretaps) or for reasons of corporate ideology (e.g. AT&T censoring an Eddie Vedder webcast critical of President Bush; Verizon blocking text messages between pro-choice groups and their members).

Thus, only a network that replicates the decentralization of nodes at an infrastructural level — or, to put it another way, one in which the nodes themselves are the backbones — can eschew the Internet’s vulnerability to censorship.

RU: There seems to be a lot of activity going on in a similar direction to MondoNet. Are you aware of other efforts and how does your plan differ?

AS: MondoNet was a germ of an idea in my mind from about 2004, when I first read Tim Wu’s work on Net Neutrality, and the idea of mesh networking as a democratizing force was something I discussed with my USC doctoral professor Francois Bar at the time. In fact, a video about mesh networking that Bar produced with my contributions in 2005-6 is available here (see the automata video). So this has been percolating for a while. However, it wasn’t until I started my tenure-track position at Rutgers in 2010 that I had the support to begin doing something with the idea. I taught a doctoral course in the fall called “Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace,” and two of my students in that class, Nathan Graham and Aaron Trammell, shared my enthusiasm for addressing the social and political dimension of network technologies. So at the end of the fall semester, we applied for a small grant to start MondoNet, and have been working on it ever since.

It’s been a gratifying surprise to see how much the concept of mesh networking has taken hold across disciplines and even in the mainstream press in the seven or eight months since we started our work. In January, 2011, OpenMesh launched their initiative, and we started sharing our work on MondoNet.org. In February, Hillary Clinton gave her “Internet freedom” speech, and a few days later, the Freedom Box initiative announced itself in the pages of the New York Times. In April, I announced MondoNet at my TEDxUSC talk.

Now, it seems every day we read a new article or hear about a new initiative along these lines. And what’s really cool is that all of these networking initiatives have started to network as well. We’ve gotten code-sharing offers from other projects, been invited to Google Groups uniting researchers in this field, and are even planning our own Rutgers mini-conference on the subject later this year.

Where I think we differ, and can offer some vital perspective, is in our theoretical orientation. Unlike most of the other initiatives out there, we’re not engineers or policy wonks. We’re critical information scholars, bringing perspectives from social science, political economy and even cultural studies into the mix. This is why my TEDx talk and our soon-to-be-published article in The Information Society begin with what we call “social specifications,” emphasizing the qualities that free society requires from a network, rather than the capacities that given technologies can offer us. Before we even start thinking about protocols and feature sets, we want to be perfectly clear about what we’re trying to accomplish. So today, wireless ad hoc networks might be the best solution to address these social specifications, but ten years from now, there may be other options. Either way, we’re wedded to the principles, not to the tech.

Of course, we’re just as interested in making free and open networked communications a reality as anyone else out there. Our immediate plan is to test a “virtual” version of MondoNet in three different types of community, and to operationalize our social specifications through a variety of different data measurements. Once we are confident that MondoNet will actually move the needle on these target goals (e.g. accessibility or resistance to censorship), we’ll start building actual MondoNet software to spec. And the more we can make use of other projects’ openly-licensed code in the process, the happier we’ll be.

RU: I wonder if this thing scales, or if you want it to.  For example, for all the horrors of Facebook, the charm is in the fact that there are like a billion people there.  I can go find my old high school buddy or my great aunt. And while smaller decentralized alternative networks might be an advantage to, say, revolutionaries in Egypt or wherever, in that the government would find it harder to shut it down, there’s the chance that it won’t reach a lot of the people.

AS:  We definitely want it to scale — not just in terms of growth, but in terms of applicability within social milieus of any size. As you point out, it needs to work for small groups of dissenters within oppressive environments, but it also needs to provide a large-scale platform for an uncorruptible public sphere. In my ideal future, the entire globe will be covered with a stable, decentralized, peer-to-peer communications mesh, which can be used as a platform for public, closed-group, and person-to-person information exchanges.

As to Facebook’s “charm,” you’re certainly right that size matters when it comes to networks. I’m sure you’re familiar with Metcalfe’s law, which states that the value or power of a communications platform grows exponentially as the number of peers grows incrementally. And with MondoNet, this applies to an even greater extent, because users will rely on one another not only as senders and recipients of information, but as components of the network itself. All that being said, we’re not trying to replace or rival Facebook. In fact, we’d be delighted if Facebook chose to mirror its servers on MondoNet peers one day. We’re aiming to be pure infrastructure, simply a reliably secure and open alternative to the increasingly draconian and expensive broadband and wireless commercial networks.

RU:  I’m amazed that Rutgers is supporting this (so far.)  Certainly the government takes very seriously their abilities to surveil communications (going all the way back to the fight over the Clipper Chip in the mid-90s).  Do you expect a visit from some friendly folks at Homeland Security if this becomes viable?

AS: Yes, I’m sure that once we move from the talking phase to the doing phase, someone with national security concerns will come a-knocking. They’ll probably ask us to build in a “back door” to allow wiretaps and other forms of surveillance, just like they have for all the other network service operators. But the beauty of the technology we’re building is, such a back door would be impossible from an engineering standpoint. There’s no central backbone or other point of presence through which the majority of bits will flow. Furthermore, the platform will enable native peer-to-peer encryption (like PGP), which means that each individual node will have the ability to determine the visibility or obscurity of the information it sends. And, because the code is all open-source, even if we did create some kind of workaround back door, other developers could simply engineer it back out, and release an improved, higher-security version.

I’m not surprised that Rutgers is being supportive, though I am gratified — after all, free speech, social equality and technological innovation are key aims of our school, so we’re pretty much in line with the mission statement. However, it is a state university, so I suppose if federal regulators got a bee in their bonnet about the project, they could probably exert some political force to get the university to kibosh us. Hopefully, by the time that happens, we’ll have enough research, code, and project inertia to continue independently.

RU:  What sort of time frame do you think you’re looking at before this starts testing and how long after that do you think it might become viable for lots of people?

AS: As social scientists, we ask questions first and act second. So our first order of business will be to test the premises of MondoNet by creating a “virtual” version for field research. Will a peer-to-peer mobile mesh network actually address the social and political flaws of the existing Internet? Will it increase accessibility? Decentralize communications? Prove resistant to censorship and surveillance? We’re currently in talks with a mobile software developer to create this virtual MondoNet, and hopefully we will test it over the next year.

Once we determine whether our strategy actually does what we hope it does, then we can begin to develop the software itself. The good news is, many of the components (e.g. mesh networking protocols) are already developed or in development under open license elsewhere, so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We see our role more as integrating these back-end technologies, creating an easy-to-use and widely accessible user interface, and then shepherding the project development within the open source/free software community. Given that we will probably need to rely on grant money to do this, a realistic timeframe would be about 3 years till public release.

Coming from the business world, I realize that this might seem like a long development cycle, but we want to get it right the first time, and build a strong foundation for future development by ourselves and other coders and communities. If we do it right, the project should take on a life of its own, and the code will be adapted for uses and sociopolitical contexts we can’t predict at this point.

RU: Broadly speaking, there has been a lot of controversy over the years about the liberatory or revolutionary potential of the internet, ranging from technotopian imaginings to scathing indictments.  What’s your view?

AS: Great question. I actually teach a doctoral course on this topic (Nathan and Aaron — both project participants — took it last year). The short answer is, all technologies are inherently neutral. They can be used toward both emancipatory and totalitarian ends, and usually both apply. Through laws, regulations, architecture and social norms, different interests work to redefine the role of technology to achieve the social outcomes they seek. Right now, many regulatory and architectural developments are pushing the platform towards informatic totalitarianism, though emerging social norms continue to explore its emancipatory potential. We see MondoNet as an architectural intervention, reversing the “cable-ization” of the network and undermining the power of regulators to centralize control over information flow.

As a final word, I would also like to mention that this process of social reorganization through evolving communication technologies will never end. It will never reach a happy medium, a comfortable resting place, or a peaceable stasis. As the pace of technological innovation continues to accelerate relative to more organic human processes, communications networks will continue to play an increasingly central role in our politics, and the stakes will grow ever greater. Even if MondoNet is wildly successful, and we achieve our dream of a decentralized, universally distributed global mesh in 20 years, we can’t expect the story to end there.

Nanotechnology, quantum computing, and genetic science are just a few of the emerging fields that have far-reaching political and communication implications, and thus far these implications have been primarily addressed within the discourse of science fiction rather than research and advocacy. That’s why each of us needs to be aware of the power dynamics surrounding technological innovation, and to continually ask ourselves how we can intervene to help shape a future we’d want to live in.