Tag: Surveillance

Names and Nyms

Caius draws down his copy of True Names, a work sometimes said to have “invented” cyberspace. He reflects, too, on Kevin Kelly’s call for “True Names Only” here in the age of AI.

Published in 1981, Vinge’s novella precedes Gibson’s Neuromancer by three years. It refers to cyberspace not as “cyberspace” but as “The Other Plane.”

“The story took place just on the near side of a network-mediated Technological Singularity,” notes Vinge, “but superhuman automation was still mostly offstage” (True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, p. 18).

Can blockchains and kill chains bind the Modern Prometheus?

The terminus of this vision: computers that aspire to become gods.

“For several years (ever since reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea), I’d had the idea that the ‘true names’ of fantasy were like object ID numbers in a large database,” writes Vinge (16). Alongside Le Guin’s work, he lists Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945), Poul Anderson’s “Kings Who Die” (1962), Ted Nelson’s Xanadu system (1965), and John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider (1975) as several of the novella’s other antecedents.

Intellectual property, blockchain, Tim May.

Former Intel employee and author of “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” May is widely recognized as the progenitor of modern cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

“Our problem is that, literally, we cannot imagine the future,” writes Danny Hillis in his contribution to the True Names anthology. “The pace of technological change is so great that we cannot know what type of world we are leaving for our children. If we plant acorns, we cannot reasonably expect that our children will sit under the oak trees. Or that they will even want to. The world is changing too fast for that” (30).

May’s contribution is an essay titled, “True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy.”

Like the characters in the Vinge novella, May sought defense against government surveillance. Reputation-backed anonymous interactions. Data havens. Untraceable electronic cash.

Mr. Slippery, the Mailman, guardians, sprites, and the Feds.

The bust at the start of the novella reminds Caius of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.

Vinge’s protagonist Roger Pollack has achieved fame as an author of “participation novels.” This success in the “real world,” however, is what brings him to the attention of the Feds. “It was what he had always worried about,” writes Vinge. “A successful warlock cannot afford to be successful in the real world. He had been greedy; he loved both realms too much” (244).

True Names as portal fantasy.

“He sat down before his equipment and prepared to ascend to the Other Plane,” writes Vinge. “He powered up his processors, settled back in his favorite chair, and carefully attached the Portal’s five sucker electrodes to his scalp. For long minutes nothing happened: a certain amount of self-denial — or at least self-hypnosis — was necessary to make the ascent. Some experts recommended drugs or sensory isolation to heighten the user’s sensitivity to the faint, ambiguous signals that could be read from the Portal. Pollack…had found that he could make it simply by staring out into the trees and listening to the wind-surf that swept through their upper branches. And just as a daydreamer forgets his actual surroundings and sees other realities, so Pollack drifted, detached, his subconscious interpreting the status of the West Coast communication and data services as a vague thicket for his conscious mind to inspect” (250).

The Other Plane is innovative in terms of both what one does there and with whom one does it. Not only may two persons “exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other,” as Vinge and May foresaw. With language models that can pass the Turing Test, these others may be machines.

As is “Alan,” an elemental that Slippery encounters early in the novella — named, appropriately enough, after Alan Turing.

“Alan was a personality simulator, of course,” writes Vinge. “Mr. Slippery was sure that there had never been a living operator behind that toothless, glowing smile. But he was certainly one of the best, probably the product of many hundreds of blocks of psylisp programming, and certainly superior to the little ‘companionship’ programs you can buy nowadays, which generally become repetitive after a few hours of conversation, which don’t grow, and which are unable to counter weird responses” (255).

The novella’s anticipation of the future is intriguing in other ways as well.

The Other Plane “hangs together,” in the words of Vinge’s narrator, “with a weird sort of logic” (268). Avatars transform into creatures, their speech undergoing “encipherment” into the “beast languages” that accompany these chosen forms (270). As in Neuromancer, government databases appear as pools of light.

As he rereads Vinge’s novella, Caius can’t help but think of a creepy bit of early-90s chaos magic known as “The Rites of Cyberspace.” Media studies scholar Shira Chess references the rite in her 2026 book The Unseen Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse. Designed by Don Webb, self-described “high priest of the Temple of Set,” the piece aims to invoke a noncorporeal entity known as “XaTuring, Lord of Computing.”

Like the entity known as “Alan,” the villains in True Names turn out to be personality simulators. One of these simulators is the Mailman. Another goes by the name DON.MAC.

Troubleman Unlimited

The founders of Palantir Technologies met at Stanford Law around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The two bonded over their shared love of political debate. “[Karp] was more the socialist, I was more the capitalist,” recalls Thiel. After law school, Karp earns a PhD in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. (See Moira Weigel’s “Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School.”)

Karp and coauthor Nicholas Zamiska publish The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West in February 2025. American journalist Michael Steinberger publishes The Philosopher in the Valley: Alexander Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State later that year.

Karp and Zamiska begin their book with an epigraph from Part I of Goethe’s Faust: “You will never touch the hearts of others, / if it does not emerge from your own.”

The Technological Republic punches out in many directions, yet the book struggles to articulate the grand strategy that would connect the attacks waged across its various chapters.

Karp’s doctoral thesis, Aggression in the Life-World, engages with Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity and regards aggression by way of Freud’s theory of the death drive.

How does one deter the aggression of one’s adversaries? This is the question Karp and Thiel answer through their work with Palantir.

People at Caius’s church love Palantir, even as Scripture exhorts them to pray that the God of Peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, perfect them.

Must there be adversaries?

A friend from church reminds Caius of passages from Ecclesiastes. Days later, what should Caius happen upon among a table of free books at church but one about Ecclesiastes. The maze on the cover is what first draws Caius’s attention to the book. That, and its title: The Art of Staying Off Dead-End Streets.

The book’s author, Richard W. De Haan, contends that Deism alone is not enough.

“A sensitive observation of the natural world can point a thinking man to a great Designer and Maker, a Supreme Being. But it cannot tell him that God is love, that He cares for us, and that an eternal destiny awaits every one of us,” writes De Haan. “True, sometimes nature does seem to say that God is good, loving and kind. […]. But that is only one side of ‘mother nature.’ Sometimes she can be brutal. She can kill with the bitter cold of a merciless, swirling blizzard, the fury of a hurricane, or the awesome terror of a devastating earthquake. Thinking about ferocious beasts, poisonous serpents, injurious insects, and disease-producing germs will never lead a person to believe in a loving God. A person who studies the natural world without the aid of divine revelation…will never understand the contradictions he encounters. But if he is willing to acknowledge his inability to resolve these conflicts, he will be goaded into a further quest for light in an attitude of humility. He will then realize that if he is to find stability in life, he must be willing to accept the well-driven nails of God’s truth outlined in the Bible” (19-20).

Caius becomes intimate with the idea while handling blooming branches of quince, his fingers plucked by the plant’s thorns as he ties it with twine.

Opening his copy of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Caius finds placed between those pages of the book featuring the philosopher’s critique of “private language” a folded slip of looseleaf covered in handwritten references to Bible verses.

1 Peter 1:18-19. Like the Holy One, be holy in all your behavior, writes Peter, “knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.”

Acts 20:28. Paul says to the disciples gathered at Ephesus, “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.”

“In so far as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his, it is also possible for us both to have the same pain,” writes Wittgenstein. For him, pain is shared.

“I have seen a person in a discussion on this subject strike himself on the breast and say: ‘But surely another person can’t have THIS pain!’,” adds the philosopher. “The answer to this is that one does not define a criterion of identity by emphatic stressing of the word ‘this.’ Rather, what the emphasis does is to suggest the case in which we are conversant with such a criterion of identity, but have to be reminded of it” (Philosophical Investigations, p. 91).

It is by Scripture that each is reminded.

Time-Space Compression

“I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming away,” sings Poly Styrene. “Didn’t you see the thin ice sign?” she asks. What I hear instead, though, is “the thing I signed.” How is one to beware if the message is always misheard?

A Raincoat follow with their spooky funky glam jam, “It Came in the Night.” What is one to do with this energy? Should I unplug myself from Spotify, as Neil Young has done? That would deprive me of much of my library. The problem is, my apartment lacks space for objects that store sound. Hence my dilemma this morning: I woke up wanting to listen to Sonic Youth’s Sister, an album I own on CD. It and the CD player on which I would play it, however, are elsewhere. Should that prevent me from being able to listen to it here and now?

Spotify replies to this dilemma by compressing space-time.

“Time-space compression”: that’s what communications technologies do. Marxist geographer David Harvey writes about it in his book The Condition of Postmodernity. Paul Virilio calls it an essential facet of capitalist life.

Spotify achieves this effect of time-space compression through an act of remediation. The consequences of this act are only just now entering consciousness. Initially, it seems rather simple: an algorithm selecting and streaming recorded bits of sound based on past listens. But not just your listens, by which I mean your listens to it. That’s where it goes strange. For Spotify forms a cybernetic system with its users, each element revising itself into subsequent iterations or becomings based on the other’s feedback — meaning listens occur both ways. Users of course listen, both actively and passively, to Spotify. But Spotify also listens to its users.

A friend plays me a tune — Fassbinder collaborator Monique Zetterlund’s “Ellinor Rydholm” — and the next day it shows up in my “Discover Weekly” playlist. Spooky, eh? What can I say? I love it. Without it, I might not have heard Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Yoko’s voice might not have whispered in my ear, “Remember love.” Buddy Holly might not have entranced me with his version of “Love is Strange.” Thurston Moore wouldn’t have told me, “Angels are dreaming of you,” as he does on “Cotton Crown.”

Bricoleurs can’t be choosers: but here I am imagining in the faces of those angels glimpses of you. I picture us eyeing each other on a dancefloor, approaching as in a circling manner ‘round an invisible pole. Pouts give way to smiles; fingers trace forearms; lips graze lips. By these means, distance is eradicated and contact reestablished, hope reborn.

Thursday February 15, 2018

I imagine myself away in a psychic hideaway, garlanded with wreath beside Bay of Biscayne, spying unseen, like the reason-mad royal society scientists of Bacon’s New Atlantis, antennae out, receiving signals, telescopes trained on the world. I gather around me work that suits me. Using wireframe models draped in polygons, I build new objects. Mechanical Turks. And I do this not by exploiting teams of artists made to sell themselves piecemeal in an unwinnable race to the bottom. I do it, rather, by way of consciousness modification. Reverse behavioral economics. Hypnoses, trances, collective lucid dreams. What constitutes crime in the absence of democracy? Criminality is a response to the wrongs of a society. Mindhunter makes me nostalgic for when universities were universities. Spaces of critical dialogue, where students and professors began from an agreement that established narratives were lies.