Yorick Wilks

As the euro staggers, it may seem bad taste to examine the possibilities for yet another created or artificial currency. But the bitcoin* is worth a quick look because it makes us think again about the nature of currency and what value consists in. We all know the value of a currency is artificial and rests on nothing but confidence and mutual belief in its reality. There are those who still believe that gold represents real permanent value and should back the currency as it used to when English bank notes promised to be redeemable in gold. A small proportion of US notes are still “silver certificates” redeemable in principle at banks. But these believers know that even gold has only conventional value. True, it is hard to find and hard to imitate but, unlike currencies, its value also rests on non-monetary uses in jewelery, decoration and medicine.
The bitcoin could easily have come from the science and mystery fantasies of Haruki Murakami **: and it was indeed created in 2009 by the Japanese Satoshi Nakamoto, though that is almost certainly a pseudonym. The notion combines in a quite original way the elusive concepts of cryptography, computer games, internet hacking, money laundering and anti-government sentiment. Bitcoins are created (or “mined” in the jargon) by a complex set of algorithms close to what is called “public key cryptography”***, the most secure kind of coding generally available. When mined a bitcoin is just a number 33 characters long which you own and can pass to other people; all transactions with it are made public on the web but no one can see who you are nor who you are giving it to. You might feel this notion of having value by owning a secret number is absurd—after all you do not have any value if you know the number on a banknote. But think back to numbered Swiss bank account, now it seems in the dustbin of history: with them you had access to whatever riches the account contained simply by turning up and knowing the number. Nothing else, traditionally, was required, presumably because the number was long enough that you could not have made it up. A bit coin is like that except that its number shows it belongs to you alone because it embodies your “public”, but not private, key, and so changes when you pass it on.
There is a strong anti-government strand in the bit coin movement, one often present in the hacker and computer nerd communities from which the notion comes: the belief that governments are not fit to control currencies and their values. This point of view has traditionally been shared by US republicans and those who want us back on the gold standard, an odd alliance now being joined by the internet-driven “Occupy Wall Street” movement, an inchoate and leaderless movement that is spreading across western capitals and expressing disillusion not so much with capitalism as with corporate finance, a quite different matter. It is in part a protest about value, and not one a conservative should ignore: British conservatism has never wholly trusted finance, or capitalism, if it threatened social cohesion in its more unbridled forms.
The attraction of bitcoins is that they offer a way of avoiding government control of currency and value, just as did gold, and just as may the other growing movement to move all currency transactions to virtual phone transactions****. These are private, of course, at least until the government and its agencies seek our phone records, but they are not anonymous in the way use of bitcoins is. Dave Birch, one of Britain’s most acute observers of the internet and social networks, argues ****** that bit coins will not get a mass market because people on the whole want privacy not anonymity for their transactions. Inevitably, the anonymous aspects of bitcoin use have attracted tax evaders and money launderers leading to calls****** for government regulation of this pseudo-currency. In China********, game-based currencies have already been under attack by the government, a move sure to draw support from those who see any sign of anti-government activity in China as a good thing.
The real problem of course, is what government could control the bit coin? Like the internet from which it sprang, it has a sort of supra-national status, like gold again. Its nearest relative is the “Linden dollar”, the artificial currency created for transactions within the virtual world Second Life*******. It was at the point when properties valued in Linden dollars in that virtual world came up for sale on eBay that a link between Linden dollars and real ones was fixed; from that moment, Linden dollars took on real, not virtual, value. We can be sure international police and national governments are watching all this closely.
Bitcoins can now be bought and sold through a market called Mt.Gox which is what gives them value, and there are now over $100 million worth in circulation. In spite of the claims for the impenetrability of the cryptography, it seems the system was hacked and $9 million of Bitcoins was “stolen”last June; their value fell as a consequence but recovered. Bitcoins days may be numbered for many reasons, but currencies have survived massive frauds before and all modern currencies, especially US $100 bills, are widely counterfeited with no obvious effect on their value. Whether or not they have afuture, bitcoins do focus our minds on a cluster of issues to do with growing distrust of value created by finance industries and governments that print money, along with a growing paranoia about conventional cash itself, brought on by the spread of traceable electronic transfers: it is now thought highly suspicious to take a large sum of money into a bank and the US government must be told if any cash transaction exceeds $10,000. All this is throwing up strange and creative alternatives.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruki_Murakami
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography
**** http://www.rushkoff.com/articles-individual/2008/10/16/open-source-currency.html
***** http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/07/bitcoin-economist-new-york-times-currency-mining/
****** http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13857192
******* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Second_Life
******** http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8126386.stm

A new area in which the Internet may disrupt established social practices and rituals is the British jury system. Juries have always been sequestered to some degree, not normally in the US sense of isolation in hotels for long periods away from television and newspapers, but as the recipients of stern instructions from judges to avoid conversations about an ongoing case as well as all reports in the press and media. However, internet use though mobile phones is very difficult to control, and contacts through popular social networks like Facebook are now more important to many people than newspapers or TV as a source of news.

Last month (BBC News 19-11-10 “Top judge says Internet could kill jury system”) the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, raised the issue of jury members’ use of the Internet: he drew attention to a case where jurors were using the Internet to research a rape case—-in defiance of the rule that only information presented in court should be considered by a jury. A more interesting example is a Manchester case earlier this year where the judge dismissed the jury and restarted a trial after a juror had been to her Facebook page and asked her friends “Did he do it?” Lord Judge seems to have had Twitter more in his sights, arguing that a juror might see tweets sent out to bombard anyone getting them about the guilt or innocence of an defendant.

The LCJ said “We cannot stop people tweeting, but if jurors look at such material, the risks to the fairness of the trial will be very serious, and ultimately the openness of the trial process on which we all rely, would be damaged.” And he added “We cannot accept that the use of the internet, or rather its misuse, should be acknowledged and treated as an ineradicable fact of life, or that a Nelsonian blind eye should be turned to it or the possibility that it is happening.”

Technically, it would be hard to target such a campaign on Twitter, since the juror would need to have known about and subscribed to a specific defendant’s campaign. There are, of course, Facebook sites devoted long-term to proving the innocence of a particular, usually convicted and jailed, defendant, but these tend not to relate to current trials.

The LCJ’s argument is that a juror should not be exposed to any source of evidence that is not presented in court because there is then no possibility of the defendant denying it or presenting counter evidence. He went on the argue for stronger warnings to juries, notices in jury rooms and even the consideration of taking measures to ban all internet use and text messages from jury rooms, on pain of imprisonment for contempt..

One consideration here that might be the now much discussed (e.g. by the Economist) notion of the “the wisdom of crowds”: the idea that large-scale information input from huge numbers of people tends to be right. One sees that in the high accuracy of crowd-sourced Internet entities like Wikipedia; audience voting on questions in “Who wants to be a millionaire?” which is normally correct when individuals are not sure. The wisdom of crowds notion had its source in 19C fairground “guessing a cake’s weight” stalls where it was known even then that the average of a crowd’s guesses was normally closer to the truth than any individual guess.

All that being the case, one might ask in a subversive way whether the crowd sourcing of a verdict might not be a better judgment than that or 12 individuals, in which case the delinquent juror may simply have been ahead of her time? The obvious problem to democratizing jury decisions in this way would be how to ensure that the “wider internet jury” had all the relevant information before voting, along with responses from the defendant. But that is just a technical issue: some juries in Athens in classical times were 6000 strong and they did not tarnish the city’s reputation merely on grounds of their size. If there were ever to be very large internet juries to be polled (like political referenda) there are perfectly reasonable methods for getting the relevant “court presented” information to them, including the possibility of cross-examination of a defendant by large numbers of people on line.

The original article quoted the BBC’s Legal Affairs Analyst, Clive Coleman as saying: “This is the strongest and most detailed judicial consideration of the threat to the criminal justice system posed by jurors using modern technology. It raises major questions of how to police and stop internet use.” One expects no radical thoughts from the legal establishment in the near future, but one may legitimately wonder whether it will always be possible to hold back the use of technological aids like the Internet when their use has spread to the whole population?

The news that the new (compulsory) German ID card will be RFID equipped (International Business Times 21 August: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/44536/20100821/identity-cards-with-rfid-chip-on-track-in-germany.htm) is a step change towards John McCarthy of Stanford’s remark 40 years ago that the solution to the problem of crime was the Government knowing where each of us at any time. It is not compulsory to cary the ID card in Germany yet, but since a driving licence is not valid identification, most people do. Almost there…..!

The Prime Minister today announced (http://www.number10.gov.uk/) a new Web Science Institute with a commitment of £30m of Government money, and headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt of the OII Advisory Board. This presumably means TBL is beginning a pilgrimage home? The site was not mentioned but a large south coast city would presumably be an intelligent guess.

As a professional technophile, I have always dismissed outbursts of anti-technology feeling as agreeably retro but harmless, like the effusions of those who still write real letters on paper and tell us all so. I have begun to question my stance only recently when thinking a little about Jared Lanier’s new book “You are not a gadget”. He cannot be dismissed as a grumpy who has never known the inner joys of modern computing: he is a virtual reality man himself.

His fear is a very old one: the mob. In his words: “I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.” The mob is an old political player, especially in British politics where it traditionally functioned as a substitute for anything like a real revolution. In 1768, John Wilkes—to whom we owe many of our liberties—– was in the Kings Bench prison while the mob surrounded it for days, demanding his release. Wilkes was a great orchestrator of the mob, which would stone judges’ houses till he was released yet again to continue his campaigns. The mob is not only a negative phenomenon in politics therefore, but what it always does is to terrify authorities that it might “get out of hand”.

In the classic Marxist analysis of the Reformation, the hero is not Luther but Muenzer, who stirred up mobs against rulers to a point where Luther, terrified of what reform had unleashed, said that princes were right to massacre the rioters, thus exposing himself, so the analysis went, as no more than a tool of the ruling class. Lanier is suggesting that some aspects of the internet are bringing back a new form of the mob, not in the streets but in cyberspace, hounding and destroying not only authorities but helpless individuals against whom they arbitrarily gang up.

I saw something of what he meant in the recent UK case of the junior school headmistress who sent her school’s pet lamb to a butchers and had it brought back to serve as food, all so as to teach the children the realities behind their everyday meals. Her action was backed by the school governors, the parents, and even enough of the children, but a world-wide campaign of hate email and blogging was let loose on her, and she gave up her job to the school’s distress and loss. It all seems absurd and hateful but will be no surprise to anyone who has observed a chatroom and the way in which they routinely degenerate into obscentity and hatred, all anonymous of course. I have only anecdotal evidence but I am sure the percentage of postings removed by moderators from the major newspaper blogs following opinion articles is rising.

Lanier is pointing to a real phenomenon: not just our newly discovered “wisdom of crowds” —-itself a rediscovery of the marxist’s positive sponteneity of the masses —-but also their madness, a concept long known to Adorno, Le Bon (“The Crowd”) and Canetti (“Crowds and Power”). Lanier is thus in a great tradition when he writes: “It’s amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It’s time to think about that power on a moral basis”. Perhaps his originality is just that he is the first of the technorati to say it.

In many jurisdictions, such as the UK, you are free to kill yourself (without prosecution if you survive unexpectedly!) but not to help others commit suicide.
This may well be a wise position, and the distinction seems to be reemerging on the social web. You can, laboriously, defriend everyone you know on Facebook or you can poke around and find the Deactivate and Delete facilities so as to leave Facebook temporarily or permanently. But it seems you will get into trouble if you encourage others to do so, to commit “web suicde”.

Facebook is consulting their learned friends about new sites like suicidemachine.org which actively encourage users to leave all their social networks and to post on that very network how many friends they are cutting off by leaving the internet and giving their own last words on the web. Facebook’s spokesman said severely:

“Users rely on us to protect their data and enforce the privacy decisions they’ve made,” said Simon Axten, the company’s policy and security officer. “We take this trust seriously and work aggressively to protect it.”

There are many paradoxes and ironies here: former users of the social web advertising their own web suicide ON A WEB SITE; Facebook wanting to stop an organized but consenting deletion of data by claiming to be protecting that very data. Protecting the data for whom? Not presumably the would-be suicide? For the friends who cannot bear to lose you, for the Government, for advertisers who will be able to find you under Facebook’s new relaxation of privacy conventions?

In case you think this last is paranoia, check this blog from a tea-party-sort-of-person:

“shane farmer wrote:
All you little people sat at home typing to each other instead of meeting up for a night out, i know its not always possible but you type instead of. My wife thinks that the goverment loves the fact they know were most peopole are all the time, ie sat at home watching TV or typing bull to each other, while paying a mortgage on a hen hutch they can’t afford, its called house arrest in our new world communist country.”

This blog followed the Times article on the suicidemachine site: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6999245.ece
and has the authentic and widespread sentiments that are pulling down Obama’s ratings.

A much stranger competitor to suicide machine is Seppukoo.com, which not only cuts you off from the web but gives you scores depending on how many of your friends you have persuaded to commit suicide themselves; it explicitly lists those of your friends who have left and those who are still on the social web, see:

http://www.seppukoo.com/how-it-works

and
“Top 100 suicidal users
Open your mind to a new meaning of popularity: with Seppukoo it’s not important how many friends you have, but how much you may influence them. A friend who follows you in Seppukoo Experience is a friend you can absolutely trust!”

Seppukoo is more a suicide cult, where you get to design an elaborate memorial site for your self and, strangest of all, encourages you to add to memorial sites it has set up for famous real world suicides (i.e. not web suicides) from Virginia Woolf to Jim Morrisson. Here the circle is complete: you are encouraged to leave the social web and bring your friends with you, but then to set up an alternative “afterlife” website where you and your (old? new?) friends add shrine-like comments —of the kind even Facebook now allows for the really dead—–congratulating you and celebrating their new afterlife. Or is it Purgatory? Or is it a very subtle recruiting ploy to undermine existing social sites but start all over again? As Dr. Johnson said of second marriages: “A triumph of hope over experience”.

At the Web Science Trust meeting in Boston last week—a trust in which he OII is a partner site—the Chinese site (at ShenZen) described an interesting novel phenomenon on the Internet they are investigating that might call a Flash Posse (as opposed to a Flash Mob): where a good chunk of the citizenry collaborate on the Internet to hunt down a public malefactor.

This could cause hairs to stand up on the back of one’s neck, as images of the state’s enemies come to mind, but how different is it from what we do—with wanted posters and TV programs that feature suspects on the run and unsolved crimes—and how unpopular would such an Internet method be in our cosy countries if it were the search for a serial killer or rapist? And, to slip back a couple of generations in the US, would not Senator McCarthy have found this a perfectly acceptable form of mass action to root out communists in society and would not the majority of his compatriots have agreed with him? So perhaps no society can be smug about these new possibilities.

By coincidence the current issue of Wired Magazine carries a sort of Flash Posse
Experiment (http://www.wired.com/vanish/) In which a correspondent for the magazine tries to vanish and stay “on the run” leaving no Internet traces (except deceptive ones) while public compete (fro a prize) and collaborate on evidence so as to find him. It’s all good fun but gives some nice technical hints for public enemies at the same time.

Facebook has decided to treat the dead differently at last, so breaking through the old problem that, just as on the web you couldnt tell someone was a dog–as in the famous New Yorker cartoon–similarly you couldnt tell they were dead. Facebook now proposes to “freeze” and “memorialise” he sites of those who someone officially declares to be dead—though quite how you get a death certificate to Facebook isnt yet clear. Someone blogged somewhere recently that “if he didnt hear from his friends every hour he assumed they were dead”. Hopefully, it wont come to that!

The Facebook proposal is that only friends you have accepted before death will be able to find your “frozen” site, see it and add tributes to it. That seems a bit strong: after all, many others might care to jojn in a tribute after your death who didnt happen to have been your friend on Facebook in life–perhaps you relatives or children? Is there any more reason to fear malicious postings by those who know you already, as opposed to those who dont? In any case, it wouldnt be hard to have a truster “executor” or “Facebook filterer” who removed any malicious postings—such people could be appointed in wills in the future, as literary executors are now. The tricky bit will be using “defriend” to rid yourself of a growing list of dead friends—–but the huge mass of young users dont need to think about that just yet.

Bill Dutton talking to the Forum’s news unit is at

Today’s papers report a new method being trialed from the US to get news into countries with heavily censored Internet access such as China and Iran. (see:

http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/01/using-email-tricks-to-get-news-into-countries-that-censor-it/)

The method is called FOE (Feed Over Email) and is essentially a method for sending encrypted email as an RSS feed to any email address that requests it from an external mail provider such as hotmail or gmail. There are many such providers and it is hard for any state system to block all of them.

When decrypted the news appears in mail as HTML rather than text, rather like the adverts you get now from Amazon and British Airways. It all looks interesting and the wonder is why you need to request it at all: it could be sent as government-originated spam to any address they can find in a target country, just lie real spam! This would lower the likelihood of Government agencies at the target end later finding ways of locating those who had requested the feed. Companies in Western countries have not been slow to sell relevant software to the Iranian Government for Internet censorship, so why would they not take the next step and sell what is needed to find the FOE requestors? (see: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html)

As with all good ideas there are down sides: there are now HTML mailers available to anyone that send you not text but an image you cannot copy/paste or save; these give the sender the ability to delete email received by you from them, or alter it later as they wish; they own their own email, not you the receiver. Worse, it lets the sender know exactly when you read their email and where, and you can avoid it only by turning off the receipt of all HTML emails.

This tool, in the hands of the “target” Government’s, would be a powerful antidote to Western Government-backed “spam” emails. It’s all a question of who is moving quicker, the cat or the mouse. The hidden paradox is the use by Western Governments for virtuous purposes of all kinds of tools, from anonymizers to spam, that they deplore when used on them!