by Chris Borgen
John Robb notes the following on his excellent Global Guerillas blog:
Coast Guard and BP’s private military contractors team up to enforce media and scientific blackout (part of BP’s information operations campaign) on the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. Here, they are caught on camera turning away a CBS film crew.
Coast Guard officials say they are looking into the incident. I look forward to hearing their explanation.
by Chris Borgen
There’s a post that’s been making the rounds in the science fiction blogosphere that warrants note by those interested in international law, especially in regards to issues of international trade, development, and regulation. The piece is by Ghanaian writer Jonathan Dotse and it concerns the rise of African cyberpunk.
Before getting to Dotse’s post, though, a couple of words on cyberpunk itself. Cyberpunk is a sci-fi style that arose primarily among U.S. and Canadian writersin the 1980’s. Setting aside the optimistic science fiction of earlier generations (think Star Trek) and the grand themes of “space operas” like Dune, cyberpunk instead focused on the street-level effects of technological change and imagined a gritty, dystopian, future. Good-bye Star Wars, hello Blade Runner!
This original iteration of cyberpunk reflected the concerns of the U.S. of the 1980’s: the development of computer networks (and especially of hacker culture), the rise of corporate power (and especially Japanese corporate power), the relative decline of the United States, the rise of crime and gang culture, and so on. Science fiction is not really a crystal ball for peering into the future; it’s more like a funhouse mirror reflecting the present. Nonetheless, science fiction writers, in extrapolating from the present, can sometimes spot important trends earlier than many other writers.
Fast forward from the 1980’s to today. Cyberpunk is no longer the hip new style; it is well-known and pretty well-worn. Some of its images of the future now seem as fanciful as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But, more importantly, many of its then-revolutionary themes (hacking, cyberwar, illicit genetic engineering, private military contractors run amok) are no longer revolutionary but rather common. And note– I don’t mean these topics are commonplace in sci-fi literature (though they are) but rather that they are (or are becoming) commonplace in serious policy discourse. We’ve got a drone war in Pakistan, debates over “cybersecurity,” and marketbots gone wild. Yesterday’s avant-garde is today’s daily brief. (But see this cautionary note.)
So now we get to Dotse’s post. Dotse is focused on how the literature of cyberpunk, which pre-figured some aspects of life today (but mis-analyzed others), may be especially relevant in Africa (and, I would add, in the developing world more broadly). Dotse writes:
The Internet counterculture of the West went mainstream faster than anyone could have predicted and the grim forecast of the cyberpunk movement became a self-defeating prophecy…. [snip] …
However, this power didn’t come without regulation. The surveillance capabilities of the West have been well orchestrated to secure a significant degree of control over its citizens’ virtual lives. Its law enforcement continually strives to gain jurisdiction over the ever-expanding boundaries of Net, making it a far stretch from the lawless frontier cyberpunk predicted.
But here in Africa, development has been dangerously asymmetrical. By the time any product hits our soil it’s already fully-developed and ready to be abused by the imagination. Technology designed for vastly different societies invariably trickles down to our streets, re-sprayed, re-labeled, and hacked to fit whatever market will take it. Regulation? You can forget about regulation.
Whatever rules the creators imagined fly out of the window as freighters are crammed to bursting with the second-hand remains of their creations, damn wherever they’re heading as long as they can be cleared from port.
What Dotse describes is familiar to anyone who’s read some William Gibson (the Neuromancer William Gibson, not the Miracle Worker one): tech innovation hits the street and then it is hacked and re-hacked. Or just re-purposed. Turntables become musical instruments. Text messaging gives rise to flash mobs. Street tech.
Consider a recent Wall Street Journal article on the rise of do-it-yourself genetic engineering. The WSJ article begins:
In Massachusetts, a young woman makes genetically modified E. coli in a closet she converted into a home lab. A part-time DJ in Berkeley, Calif., works in his attic to cultivate viruses extracted from sewage. In Seattle, a grad-school dropout wants to breed algae in a personal biology lab.
These hobbyists represent a growing strain of geekdom known as biohacking, in which do-it-yourselfers tinker with the building blocks of life in the comfort of their own homes. Some of them buy DNA online, then fiddle with it in hopes of curing diseases or finding new biofuels.
But are biohackers a threat to national security?
Exciting and frightening stuff, all at once. And, when we internationalize this phenomenon, we map the frayed edge of regulation. Twisted programs, ripped DVDs, knock-off pharmaceuticals, and biohacked DNA are the bane of corporations from the relatively rich countries. They are also thriving in the poor places of the world (well, maybe not the hacked DNA). Dotse writes:
It’s no surprise then that lawlessness is the rule on our end of the networks, ‘do what thou wilt’ the full extent of cyber-regulation. This will remain the case as long as Africa continues to wear hand-me-down systems; until she acquires her own truly tailor-made networks. With the huge logistical frameworks that need to be implemented, spanning vast swathes of geographical terrain, political regimes, and language barriers, a cyberpunk future for Africa seems all but inevitable.
Larry Lessig has written about the rise of remix culture and the challenge that it poses for copyright rules in the U.S. But what Dotse and others are pointing to goes beyond the remixing of culture in the U.S. to the reworking of technology on a global scale. It implicates not only copyright but patent, trade regulation, and a variety of regulatory schemes. While we as international lawyers focus (and generally laud) the rise of transnational regulatory networks, cyberpunk reminds us that innovation in areas of desperation will probably far outpace the work of bureaucrat. Necessity is the mother of invention. And necessity is especially sharp in lesser developed countries.
In thinking about the future of regulation, we need to keep in mind the interests, needs, and motivations of this new generation of innovators, hackers, and remixers in the global South. Science fiction writers are increasingly framing their stories in this landscape. Ian MacDonald has River of Gods in India and Brasyl in, well, Brazil. Paolo Bacigalupi’s award-winning The Windup Girlimagines Thailand in a world were the oil economy has collapsed and errant biotech has decimated populations. And there are others.
However, I am especially interested, as is Dotse, in what writers from the developing world imagine their futures may be like. What the the threas that they see? What gives hope? What should we try to regulate and where should we let things grow wild? It is a staple of cyberpunk (borrowing from William Burroughs) that every society needs its interzone, its night town where regulation isn’t quite so strict and innovation– to good and bad ends–flourishes. But, in our globalized economy, the new interzones may be the bloc flats of Lagos or the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
Whether or not the visions of the future of the African cyberpunks prove to be prescient or as inaccurate as a Hugo Gernsback pulp fiction remains to be seen. (Most likely by our children or grandchildren.) But, as an inspiration to break out of rote thinking about technology, trade, economics, and the role of law, you could do a lot worse.
Hat tip: Futurismic
by Chris Borgen
McGill University law students have started a new blog about international law, Legal Frontiers. Their official launch post states:
The goal of Legal Frontiers is to create a scholarly, social network where students interested in International law can identify key issues and challenges; test new theories; and draw attention to important causes, cases or alternative points of view. Having been inspired by a wide variety of legal blogs, we aspire to promote an emerging genre of writing, which we like to call “academic blogging”. We started this project because we believe that it is of the utmost importance to encourage students to actively engage with issues beyond the classroom, develop their own opinions, and learn how to clearly and effectively argue them.
Recent posts include a consideration of Canada’s diplomacy related to indigenous peoples, South Africa and climate change policy, and what the ICJ’s Kosovo decision could mean for the Palestine. It’s great to see law students as active participants in the blogosphere and also their being supported and encouraged by their faculty. Check this blog out.
Welcome to the international legal blogosphere!
by Chris Borgen
Over at Discover.com, Brian Lamb reports on a lecture by Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, an American Jesuit who is a research astronomer for the Vatican Observatory (and has archived blog posts here). On the issue of asteroid mining (which we tangentially touched upon in this discussion on legal issues related to mining the Moon), Lamb describes the opening of Brother Consolmagno’s argument:
Can you put a price tag on an asteroid? Sure you can. We know of roughly 750 S-class asteroids with a diameter of at least 1 kilometer. Many of these pass as near to the Earth as our own moon — close enough to reach via spacecraft. As a typical asteroid is 10 percent metal, Brother Consolmango estimates that such an asteroid would contain 1 billion metric tons of iron. That’s as much as we mine out of the globe every year, a supply worth trillions and trillions of dollars. Subtract the tens of billions it would cost to exploit such a rock, and you still have a serious profit on your hands.
Let me interject here on the economic incentives of asteroid mining. A 1997 review of a the book Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis (then-co-director of the NASA/University of Arizona Space Engineering Research Center ) noted that Lewis estimated that the main asteroid belt contains about:
825 quintillion (a billion times a billion) tons of iron – enough to build shells around planets, gigantic cities in space, and starships carrying entire civilizations. How much is this iron worth? Lewis performs a fanciful calculation: At present prices of around $50 a ton [that was in 1997], the asteroids yield $7 billion of the metal per person for everyone alive today, or an affluent standard of living for a population far larger. Moreover, iron is merely one element found in the Main Belt, which also contains gold, silver, copper, manganese, titanium, uranium, and much else.
So there may be substantial economic incentives to investing in asteroid mining. But, picking up now with Lamb’s precis of Brother Consolmagno’s lecture:
But is this ethical? Brother Consolmango asked us to ponder whether such an asteroid harvest would drastically disrupt the economies of resource-exporting nations. What would happen to most of Africa? What would it do to the cost of iron ore? And what about refining and manufacturing? If we spend the money to harvest iron in space, why not outsource the other related processes as well? Imagine a future in which solar-powered robots toil in lunar or orbital factories.
“On the one hand, it’s great,” Brother Consolmango said. “You’ve now taken all of this dirty industry off the surface of the Earth. On the other hand, you’ve put a whole lot of people out of work. If you’ve got a robot doing the mining, why not another robot doing the manufacturing? And now you’ve just put all of China out of work. What are the ethical implications of this kind of major shift?”
Brother Consolmango also stressed that we have the technology to begin such a shift today; we’d just need the economic and political will to do it. Will our priorities change as Earth-bound resources become more and more scarce?
Referring back to our discussion of mining the Moon, some commentors balked at the need (or utility) of a legal regime for mining on the Moon. I think these quotes from the review of Lewis’s book and the summary of Bother Consolmagno’s lecture show why law will have a very important role in any attempts at exploiting resources in space. In short: the significant economic incentives may not only spur private development but also lead to significant socio-economic effects (not all of them good) here on Earth. It is not a stretch to foresee that unbridled resource exploitation by certain companies may be viewed as a threat by some countries. This is a whole new gloss on the term “political risk.” It also shows why setting out some basic norms and “rules of the road” would be a prudent investment. Pun intended.
Hat tip: io9
by Chris Borgen
See it here. As usual, it’s full of great panels. Also, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of the Canadian Supreme Court and U.S. Department of State Legal Adviser Harold Koh will each give a keynote address. A list of program highlights is here. And, by the way, today is the last day for early-bird registration…
by Chris Borgen
The current issue of Foreign Affairs has an article called A Few Dollars at a Time: How to Tap Consumers for Development, which describes the “innovative financing” movement in which private companies find ways for their customers to contribute to international development. This morning, I came across an example that I guess you could call “innovative aid” as it isn’t so much development financing but rather disaster relief to Haiti.
Zynga is a software company that makes (wildly successful, as I understand) games playable via Facebook and MySpace. They have started a Haiti Relief Fund in which the Zynga gaming community can contribute to disaster relief by purchasing “virtual goods” within their games. They explain on their foundation’s website:
Three of our top games are participating in a special relief campaign to help earthquake survivors in Haiti. Zynga is donating 100 percent of the proceeds from non-withering white corn within FarmVille [one of their games], a Haitian drum on Mafia Wars, and a special chip package in Zynga Poker to support emergency aid in Haiti through the Zynga Haiti Relief Fund. Users can also support the fund by donating directly through Zynga.org…
All contributions will benefit the World Food Programme (WFP), which has set up an emergency response team to distribute food and other relief to thousands in Haiti affected by the devastating earthquake.
Elsewhere, they write:
“The devastation in Haiti is unimaginable, and anything we or our users can do is tiny compared to the utter loss for this nation,” said Mark Pincus, Zynga’s founder and CEO. “In our small way, I hope we can enable our users to help and touch Haiti in a meaningful way where every dollar raised can make a difference.”
Zynga and socially-conscious companies like it should be applauded for dreaming up new ways to respond to perennial problems. I should note that Zynga’s aid to Haiti began before the earthquake; they had already linked the sale of virtual seeds in their FarmVille game to development aid for school construction in Haiti. Sales of that one virtual item, in one game, before Haiti was making headlines, raised over a million dollars. A few dollars at a time can add up to a lot of money.
But, given the magnitude of the disaster that has befallen Haiti, the unfortunate truth is that even a million dollars is a drop in the bucket. So, I hope other companies follow Zynga’s lead and nudge more people (who might not have done so otherwise) into contributing to the relief effort.