Back in June of last year, I wrote an exposé documenting millions of dollars of waste on government vehicles and related expenses. Accompanying that article were a series of photos of wrecks involving public vehicles.

The part that I didn’t talk about was what led to these crashes, and to more than a few metaphorical crashes in politics and government over the years.

I’m talking about booze.

Before I jump in, I need to make clear I’m not getting all accusatory here. I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict myself. I had the good fortune of celebrating 30 years without a drink in January. But I haven’t forgotten the damage that it did to my life, and the choices I made.

I’m one of the lucky ones. I drank to self-medicate, to survive in what felt like an otherwise unliveable world. But I didn’t have the genetic predisposition to alcoholism that afflicts so many. I watched the members in my fast-living circle of friends stunting and even ending their lives because of alcohol, but I was able to walk away on the first attempt.

I watched others try and try and try, and the best they could ever manage for themselves was a brief respite from the cycle of drunkenness, remorse and depression.

Politicians in Vanuatu face insane pressures. Many of them don’t choose the life for themselves, but have it foisted on them by their community leaders. No matter what leads them into public life, many of them arrive unprepared for the non-stop cycle of pushing and pulling inflicted on them by their supporters, detractors, allies and rivals.

For a minister, the demands are unrelenting. From one minute to the next, there’s always someone wanting something. It’s not unusual to see people leave office indebted, or with almost nothing left for themselves.

Many of these pressures are accessorised with bonhomie. Good food, friendly company and lashings of booze. Everybody has a good time, and it’s all free, just sign here. And there’s an ever-present chorus of supporters and hangers-on who want to eat from the Minister’s plate, egging him on through all of this, and ready to make consequences for him if he doesn’t get in there and smile and enjoy it, dammit.

This process reaches into the higher levels of the public service, too. Some Directors and DGs face similar demands, and not to put too fine a point on it, there’s a fair sized contingent in the upper layers of Vanuatu society who aspire to little more than having a good time.

Alcoholism is a workplace hazard for politicians and senior administrators in Vanuatu. There are mountains of evidence to attest to it. I’ll leave the images of fleets-worth of smashed vehicles to speak for all, because I don’t want to expose anyone to the malicious ridicule and gossip of our local keyboard cowboys.

Suffice to say that alcohol has been a significant contributor to reckless and sometimes downright violent behaviour. It’s shortened and sometimes ended promising careers, and it’s tragically shortened lives.

I haven’t said a thing about these people’s personal lives. Because it’s none of our business.

It would be a stretch to say that alcohol is the cause of countless questionable policies projects and decisions. It is not a stretch to say that it’s made many of them far worse than they had to be.

This isn’t a 1000-word subtweet. I am emphatically not targeting any individual. And I reject outright our hypocritical love of ridicule and public shaming where drunkenness is concerned.

Nor am I even anti-alcohol. It would be stupid of me to assume that the thing that almost ruined my life me will necessarily do the same to everyone else.

But it is ruining lives here. It’s shortening what should be promising careers. It’s costing us money. It’s putting policy-making at risk. It’s exacting a political cost that no one has ever stopped to tabulate.

My guess is that the damage done by this ritualised linking of drink to decision-making is easily commensurate to a moderate cyclone every odd year.

Moralising won’t get us anywhere. I’m not going to sit here in my digital pulpit and rail about the demon drink.

But if I were a politician today, I’d take note that people are trying to get me drunk, and to keep me that way. And I’d ask myself why.

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[I don’t propose to compose these things daily. Not by a long shot. It’s just that this particular topic has numerous facets, and the argument isn’t served unless we at least cursorily examine them all.]

The impact of social media on developing countries has received little attention in the popular press, with the exception of horrendous events such as the attempted extirpation of the Rohingya people in Myanmar.

These impacts are real and cannot be overstated.

Here in Melanesia, societies are at once more susceptible to gossip-driven scares and even mob behaviour, and more resilient in the face of it. It’s easier to set people off, and it’s easier to spread common sense.

The simple reason is that we are closer together. Your neighbour may drive you round the bend from time to time, but go far enough round the bend and you’ve done a circuit of the island. They’re not going anywhere, and neither are you. That’s the historical truth, anyway.

Social media has made the public sphere vastly larger and noisier, but the same rules apply, more or less.

Women are harassed, abused and faced with physical harm not just by their family and neighbours now, but by the entire online population.

Gadflies and conscientious objectors face opprobrium not just from the chiefs and other people of rank, but from masses of virulent and often anonymous attackers.

And anonymity/pseudonymity is a novelty that many struggle to come to terms with. While it’s freed the tongues of many who felt constrained from speaking before, a significant minority of them have used that liberty to behave horribly to others.

But in the midst of this chaos and rancour, a fascinating thing has happened: People are learning to moderate debate in real time. The pattern here in Vanuatu typically runs like this:

A person attacks another, making allegations that might or might not be true. One side piles on, either in concert with or in reaction to the original poster. Generally speaking, the conversational tide runs almost entirely in one direction, with few people showing the gumption (or the chutzpah) to gainsay the rest.

But then, slowly and sometimes softly at first, the first words of moderation appear. Before long, others find it in themselves to support this view or to supplement it with their own objections. Eventually, a trend begins to come clear, and comments with widely divergent views either peter out or are drowned out.

The process can sometimes be outright vituperative, sometimes not. Sometimes the right answer is found, sometimes the wrong one is reinforced. But even in the worst cases, where we see incitement to violence, to burn homes, expel people, exact vengeance or pour shame on a person or group, there are few if any instances of people actually acting on them.

In cases where people actually have done reprehensible things to one another, they were seldom discussed or organised over public social media channels. Slut shaming in cases of perceived infidelity are the one glaring exception.

The flow of discourse resembles nothing so much as a village meeting. I’ve attended more than a few, and they tend to follow the same pattern. If you walk in cold to the early stages of a contentious meeting, it can sometimes feel like the only possible outcome is open conflict. The tension is often palpable.

But as it unrolls, tempers begin to subside, and more nuanced and reasonable arguments begin to emerge. By the end of it, more often than not, the chief is able to find a ruling that will carry the room, and people part with handshakes and a sense of having accomplished something.

(I’m painting with a very broad brush here, so forgive the massive elisions in that description.)

We’ve been able to resist of the worst conspiracy mongering here. Even when Indonesian state actors conducted a Cambridge Analytica-style campaign to undermine confidence in the government of the day, the effect was minimal.

But it didn’t stop until high-level meetings were held with Facebook executives. Faced with a Prime Minister fully prepared to regulate them or see them leave the market immediately, they did the right thing.

That was only one victory among literally thousands of attempts. Dozens of user reports concerning this influence network received no response at all. Hundreds of reports of incitement and hateful comments went unheeded. In rare cases where a response was received, Facebook’s so-called community standards allowed imagery and language that were shocking to us—and to any thinking, feeling human. Images of dead and dismembered bodies, sexualised and clearly brutalised children… the list goes on.

Then, adding insult to injury, imagery of people in kastom dress were banned, because apparently a nambas or a nipple is beyond the pale, even though they scarcely raise an eyebrow here.

The push here became strong enough that Facebook’s head of Global Connectivity Policy met privately with the Prime Minister to dissuade him from moving ahead with a proposal to require them to register as a local company.

The Prime Minister’s rationale was that Over The Top services such as Facebook should be required to contribute to our Universal Access Policy, the same way all local telecommunication providers are.

But another, and I believe more compelling, argument is language. There is no business case for Facebook to provide support for Bislama, Solomons pidgin, Tok Pisin or any other of the thousand-plus languages in the Pacific islands. It’s just never going to happen.

The only way these languages—and our cultures and societies—get the respect and support they deserve is when social media networks become our networks. Without ownership of the content and of the management service, we are not masters in our own house.

Technology generally and social media in particular can accurately be described as a (re)colonising force. The imposition of standards, expectations and requirements that are not only foreign and new, but often beyond the capability of a great many people here doesn’t just bring development potential. More to the point, they’re largely impossible to alter to fit the local context.

Technology and social media are just as subversive as they are liberating.

And while our societies are generally better at self-regulation, we’re hardly perfect. The suffering and subjugation of women in the Pacific has always been a matter of concern. Social media adds slut-shaming, stalking, coercive talk and mobbing to their already tremendous burden.

The inexperienced have often been victimised by cons, scams and schemes, but they have only grown in proportion since the advent of the internet and social media.

Decentralisation and federation of social media services doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t provide any guarantees at all. Except one: if we screw it up, it’ll be our screw up, not someone else’s.

And that’s what decolonisation has always been about.

My last missive discussed the technical (and to a lesser degree, the social) arguments for a decentralised, federated approach to social media.

It didn’t entirely answer a kind of a big question: Why do we need it?

In a word: Jurisdiction.

There’s no end in sight to Facebook’s 14-year apology tour, and following the announcement that they’re going to take their ball and go home unless Australian news media stop asking for a share of the pyre—er, pie—it’s abundantly clear that something has to happen.

In a conveniently (but not deliberately) timed piece of news, Facebook has shown that it’s willing to take steps to control malicious activity, especially when it comes to state-to-state mis/disinformation operations. Their globe-bestriding status makes it possible for them to analyse and avoid these abuses.

But reach is exactly why their platform is being used for these ops. And lord knows they’ve been effective. Carole Cadwalladr’s exposé of Cambridge Analytica makes it abundantly clear that the platform is a near-ideal factory for weapons-grade propaganda.

I’m counting the hours before the folks at Facebook begin to leverage that power to dig themselves like a tick into our digital landscape. The only thing that keeps them from doing it right now is potential loss of trust among their audience, and the fear that acting in one nation’s favour might prejudice their relationship with another.

In short, they’re still trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Australia’s decision to foist regulation on the company upsets that delicate balance. Now, they have to decide. Publicly at least, Josh Frydenberg has stated that his government won’t respond to Facebook’s extortionate plan to simply turn off all Australian news.

But I expect that if there isn’t a strategic national interest conversation going on right now between the platform and the state, there will be. It’s also highly likely that Facebook will realise that Rupert Murdoch is their adversary, and the Australian Government is simply the hatchet man.

Once it does, all bets are off. Can, as Willie Nelson so coyly put it, old age and treachery beat youth and skill? Not forever. And, I suspect, not this time.

But if Facebook continues to take an antagonistic stance, there will be blood. And they will be subjected to regulation. And it will lead inexorably to more.

AT&T survived its breakup. Microsoft survived the legal sanctions it was burdened with, as well as the commodification of its operating system and software. Despite a balls to the wall rear-guard action against free software, open protocols and interoperability in the nineties and early oughties, it’s still ticking along just fine.

Google will survive as well, because it can argue much more convincingly for the good it does. With a lower evil index, it presents a smaller attack surface for its adversaries. And frankly, it could drop Google News tomorrow and remain the company everyone thinks it is.

But Facebook is a different kettle of fish. Along with its liberating and democratising influence, it brings the potential to quite literally overturn societies, inflict immense damage on personal lives, and oust regimes.

They’re doomed by their own dominance, and damned by their own tacit admission in their threats against Australian media that they actually have market dominance. The one defence a monopoly has is not to abuse that position, and that was the first card they threw away.

That’s why, no matter what play they choose, they’re going to find themselves coping with the perils of interacting with—and accepting liability in—all of the world’s jurisdictions.

It won’t all happen tomorrow, and it won’t all happen because of this stoush with Murdoch. But it will happen.

So if they’re smart, they’ll hive off the risky part, the one the plays an editorial role. They’ll either fragment themselves into a federation of national operations (more or less like every multinational that deals in physical goods), or if they’re really smart, they’ll open up their platform on a pay-for-play basis, and allow other companies to cling remora-like to their data corpus.

That makes for more modest profits, but it wins those profits with next to no accountability.

This is a terrible outcome for some people, of course. The moment you force an information service to work within the constraints of an authoritarian environment, you place people at risk.

The trade-off here is that people would only be at risk from their own authoritarians, and not their strategic rivals and adversaries.

People call this balkanisation. I get it. I don’t like it either, but commercialised and commoditised access to Facebook’s user base is really the only way we preserve anything of worth for a great many people. The stakes are high, and sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good.

And that’s why decentralisation and federation are a good idea for Facebook today.

Why decentralisation and federation are the future of online media

Over the last decade or so, I’ve been commenting in fits and starts around a theme:

Centralisation of internet infrastructure and services is anti-democratic.

Starting with Iran’s internet blackout following the 2009 presidential elections, I have been less-than-methodically reviewing the impact of centralised networks on the internet’s ability to ‘treat censorship as damage, and route around it’, as Internet pioneer John Gilmore famously said.

The idea of a neutral, borderless network of networks where any point could connect to any other was a brilliant design. We can legitimately call it revolutionary. In its best case, decentralisation is democratisation.

The protocols that distribute our cat pics and right swipes are indiscriminate and able to go literally everywhere there’s a pipe. But who owns the pipes? When it’s a government, a state-controlled entity or a large-scale corporate player—or some combination of that—then the tendency will inevitably be toward control, whether for profit or political reasons.

Back in 2009, we didn’t really have the means to cope with that, and in Iran’s case, it provided the government with the ability to control the entire nation’s communications through a mere five control points.

At the time, Farhad Manjoo used this bitter experience to argue that this meant that the revolution will not be digitised. I responded that he was conflating the physical networks and management tools with the protocols themselves, which are actually far more permissive. In the end, it seemed to me that the best—and worst—we could expect was a mixed bag.

So no surprise then, that back then I was strongly anti-regulation.

I wasn’t against it because I didn’t see any merit in the idea. I was against it because when large companies are regulated by governments, what usually ensues is either regulatory capture (as happened in the US telecoms market) or state cooption (as witnessed in China, Iran, Ethiopia and countless other autocratic nations).

And that’s why I’m against most regulation of social media companies.

Most, but not all.

I think we would all benefit from a little monopoly-busting. Well, commoditisation, at least. Facebook, Twitter, Google & Youtube all skate around their fundamental responsibility not to break society to bits because they claim to be as borderless as the network protocols that underpin their service.

Walled gardens are dangerous. They create a disparity of information, in which the platform knows everything about us, and we know next to nothing about the platform, or how it works.

Allow me to quote at length from the 3000-word screed that inaugurated this substack:

In 2013, Neil M Richards wrote about The Dangers of Surveillance. At the heart of his principled cry for what he described as ‘intellectual privacy’ is the contention that it’s not data per se that is dangerous to an individual, but the disparity of access to it. 

Our problem, the argument runs, is not that Facebook knows everything about us, but that we know next to nothing about Facebook. What exactly does it know? Who else is it telling? Why is this lie/ad/scam/rumour being shown to me right now? What information about me makes their algo think I’ll be particularly receptive to this so-called ‘sponsored content’? 

If we knew the answers to these questions, it would at least make the task of unraveling the untruth a trifle more possible. 

…

The contention that big data, the algorithms that shepherd it and the profits that derive are all private is bullshit. 

The contention that the resources required to acquire data, put some shape on it, and make sense of it all spring up sui generis like mushrooms in Mario World is equally bullshit. 

There is absolutely nothing in the world, bar a few private islands worth of wealth, that stops corporations from building their algos publicly, sharing exactly how they were built, down to the slightest minutiae, and still making a very large bundle of dosh. Better still, that bundle of dosh can be amicably and equitably shared among all the contributors to this wealth creation project in amounts commensurate to their contribution. 

Socialism! Yes. Just don’t say it like it’s a bad thing.

The ‘how’ of big data algorithms is devilishly hard to understand, and hella expensive. The ‘what’, however is not. And people have a right to know it. 

This is not the Secret Sauce. Or maybe it is, but who cares? It’s a secret sauce that can only be spread on a Very Large Dataset using Very Large Resources. 

And it’s a Secret Sauce made for use on Us. 

If algos and their impacts were public, companies would only have the size and composition of their dataset to compete with. And they would retain the allegiance of that data set (data is people!) by making it worth the data’s while. 

That’s how it works right now, only people’s data is kept secret from them. The public don’t have any way to choose who to trust it with, and for what purpose. Those secrets must be revealed. It’s not the end of the world. It won’t bring the data giants crashing down. 

It does mean they’d need to compete more, and compete on things we all can see, and measure.

That might be convenience. That might be services tailor-made to order, okay Google? That might be by demonstrably and consistently telling the truth (which would be pretty cool). That may mean straight up profit sharing. Who cares? We’re not prescribing, remember?

What I’m trying to say here is that the role of aggregator of data can be—and should be—separate from the role of content service provider. The aggregators need to be utterly transparent. The service providers need to be utterly responsible.

But you can’t be both. Because being both the one who gathers the data and the one who serves it up creates the situation we’ve got today, where straight-up ratfuckery and deadly collusion happen behind an utterly opaque and impenetrable barrier. Facebook has proven that it’s only willing to be as good as it has to be. And practically speaking, it profits more from being not good.

Right now, faced with the prospect of being forced to remunerate news agencies from which it derives immense revenues, Facebook’s best play is to pull a Murdoch. Sidle up to the Coalition government, remind them which side their bread could be buttered on, and leave those nasty Australian (and global) media to die on the vine.

The potential power that this represents is a fundamental threat to democracy and a rules-based order.

And there are few if any scenarios in which regulation doesn’t end up being coopted in one way or the other.

Unless…

Unless that regulation required them either to localise their businesses and operate as a media organisation, or to contract the provision of their data on a neutral basis.

In the best of all possible worlds, your social media data would be as commodified, and as private, as your email. In other words highly imperfectly. But owned by and controllable by the parties who contributed to it.

It’s not impossible to achieve this. It’s just really really hard, because you’d be militating against an entire generation of Tech Money, and returning the internet to its hippy roots* and make the services that run on the internet look more like the decentralised protocols that made it all possible in the first place.

* The truth is that its decentralised design was the US Defence Department’s plan to make communications networks that could survive a nuclear ‘beheading attack’. They didn’t envision cooption from within. Which is why centralised services like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter and the rest are actually antithetical to the internet that made them possible.

It’s already become clear that the White House explicitly overrode a DHS determination that contended the ban didn’t apply to Green Card holders and other valid, vetted residents. The ACLU is reporting that some officials are not abiding by a number of stay order issued at courts in at least three locations.

As a legal instrument, at least one scholar sees this particular Executive Order as so incredibly flawed that it won’t stand up to a sustained legal attack by the ACLU, CAIR and others.

Most worrying though are the reports circulating that the drafting process bypassed the normal interdepartmental and legal review stages, and that DHS was only briefed on the content of the Executive Orders as they were being signed. This doesn’t sound like an administration that’s particularly worried about adhering to the letter of the law, or bringing a lot of people into the conversation. Not sure how that will stand up over time. Politics is often petty and vengeful, and the White House is already leaking like a sieve. It might be that their incompetence is what does them in. It may be that their unwillingness to share power will do it.

My personal feeling is that neither one will stop them. I think people severely underestimate the lengths that this administration will go to to see this through. When Donald Trump promised the people of America that he would never back down, that he would do everything to advance the cause… I think he was speaking literally. When Steve Bannon says that we’re at war with Islam, I think he believes it fervently. When Flynn and others portray their work as an existential fight, I think they’re sincere in that.

Left-leaning people and other opponents have mobilised quickly, but they’re expecting the administration to react the way they would react. They think that public shaming, legal action and political activism will drive Donald Trump’s administration back. I fear they’re wrong. They will be seen as traitors and subversives, and they’ll be treated accordingly, through formal and informal means. They don’t realise that their resistance will ultimately have to be physical. They should be reading up on their Thoreau right about now….

People’s attitudes toward women are ruining lives, and it’s sickening

A few days ago, I heard news about someone whom I’ve known for almost as long as I’ve been in Vanuatu. She was tied by her hair to a post and beaten senseless by her partner.

Save your anger. I don’t want to hear it. Your outrage is meaningless to me.
You did this. Every single one of you.

Admit it: you loved it when they posted a false report that a local woman had been arrested for prostitution. She was framed and shamed simply because she’d had more than one partner. And you automatically believed she was guilty.

You loved it when a local man was wrongly accused of sexual assault and consorting with prostitutes. He was outed because he refused to lie about someone else. The threat could only work because you were willing to believe the woman was a whore.

You downloaded and shared copies of the intimate photos taken of a young professional who was tricked into sharing them with a man who swore that he was single. His wife takes him back, and the woman he lied to is the one who’s punished. Every time she walks into a meeting, she has to ask herself, ‘have they seen them?’

Yes, she was naïve. Do you think that justifies years of anguish?

You blamed her. You blamed her for being treated cruelly by others.

Blame yourself. You heard your neighbours fighting. You heard that woman cry out. You saw her tears.

You. Not someone else. Not someone down the road or in the next yard.

You’re reading this and thinking I’m talking about everyone else. I am talking about you.

For months, you did nothing after your neighbour buried his wife under a nakatambol tree. You didn’t even ask where she was.

You let a girl jump to her death from a moving bus. You let her death go unpunished. And then to add insult to injury, you warned young women not to travel at night.

You didn’t lift a finger when that faith healer groped and sexually assaulted your daughter. Just changed churches and warned your daughter to look after herself. You were the one who sent her to him.

You let a pastor—a pastor—beat a woman in broad daylight in the main street of town, and you did nothing but stand around gawping.

Stop shifting the blame. Stop pretending that it’s not all men. Because it is all men. It’s all of us. Every single one of us. Yes, me too.

And you.

Not the other readers: YOU

When is it going to dawn on you that the way we treat our women is our national shame? What is it going to take?

My shame is real. I’ve known this woman for over a decade, and when we were neighbours, I made sure nothing happened to her. But I moved on and she didn’t. And I said nothing last week when she showed up with a black eye. I didn’t want her to feel bad. Now this happens, and I’m ashamed of my cowardice. I did nothing to support her.

No longer.

But anything I do won’t make one bit of difference if the rest of you continue being the callous, uncaring people that you’ve been. Don’t deny it. There is not an adult in Vanuatu who hasn’t turned a blind eye toward abuse. If you think you’re not part of the problem, then you’re a bigger part of it than you know.

You read that clickbait smear. You read that post, and you believed it. Even now, you’re twisting around, trying to find a way to defend your prejudice. You can’t. It was a pack of lies.

But you believed it because that’s what you think women are like.

I can’t even bring myself to care whether I’ve changed your mind any more. All I have to say is shame. Shame on me for letting a friend hurt so much. For letting so many suffer. Shame on me for letting you get away with it.

I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight. But to my shame, I know I will.
And shame on you. It could all change tomorrow. But it won’t. Because of you.

If you really are sincere about wanting to make things better, read this again, and accept in your heart of hearts that I am talking about you. And for once in your life, feel a bit of shame for your role in this suffering.

Then do something about it. Every day. Until the job is done, and the shame is gone.