PORN FREE?

Dick Pountain/ Idealog297/ 4th April 2019 10:42:59

Amid all the hoohah over our attempted Brexit you might be forgiven for not having noticed that, in addition to taking on the EU our valiant government has also decided to fight the internet. To be exact they’ve decided to regulate the consumption of pornography, which as everyone knows is what keeps that internet going. To be even more exact they’ve decided to announce a date for announcing a date for the introduction of a porn pass, without which porn sites nationwide will become inaccessible to you. This pass, which you’ll either buy online or else from your local newsagent for a fiver, proves that you’re over 18 years of age. It also presumably adds you to a database of dirty dogs who in some future post-Brexit theocracy may be summoned to a clinic for chemical castration.

Now I don’t intend to pursue here the obvious problems of implementing such a scheme - if the Chinese Communist Party can’t effectively censor the internet what chance does this clueless shower stand? Nor am I particularly worried for myself because the government’s definition of porn is far, far narrower than my own. They’re only attempting to ban sex porn, and I’m not much bothered with that as I get quite enough at home. The various porns that I do consume will not require such a pass: for example guitar porn (and its harder core variants guitar-pedal porn and guitar-build-and-repair porn), Japanese-street-food porn, chemical-engineering-animated-safety-video porn, restoring-rusty-old-tools porn, damascus-steel-blacksmithing porn, and a few like Czech-semi-automatic-weapon or dangerous-chemical porn of which I am slightly ashamed. You’ll gather that I’ve updated the definition of pornography for the age of consumerism, to mean any representation of some activity, in whatever medium, that makes a person want to perform that activity themselves. And of course the internet has revolutionised the production, distribution and consumption of this sort of porn.

All varieties of porn share certain aesthetic traits. Works are fairly short (5 to 20 minutes) to match attention spans. They have no plot beyond the preparation, beginning and completion of the activity they depict. Most lack dialogue and have irritating tinkly computer-generated music instead, but where there’s any talking it tends to be clipped, inane or purely functional. Mis-en-scene is often an interior, shot in a single continuous take on video with simple direct lighting. Occasionally there are ill-advised attempts to insert illustration or animation.

For me a perfect example of the form is ‘Japanese Street Food - RED BEAKFISH Sushi Fried Seafood Soup Okinawa Japan’ (1,704,738 views), one of a seemingly endless and hypnotically fascinating series. In all of them an unseen, anonymous fish-artist skillfully dissects an exotic and unfamiliar fish using a gorgeous-but-weatherbeaten Japanese chef knife. The various bits and pieces are then cooked (or not) in several different ways and presented to an equally anonymous and unseen diner who appears only as a hand and a pair of chopsticks, which grasp a piece and hold it close to the lens, slowly rotating it so the light catches its glistening fibres, and I’m unable to avoid some involuntary salivation. I won’t recommend them as I don’t want to corrupt you.

This is, of course, the freedom that the internet has always promised isn’t it? Freedom from the greasy clutches of the music business and Hollywood studios, in short from Big Entertainment, so that any weirdo can, for very little expense, share weird pleasures, unfettered and celebrated by fellow weirdos wherever we may be in the world.

Well, er, actually no. The hold of large monopolistic corporations on our entertainment has in fact increased, only the corporations are different. The various porns I consume are presented to me by YouTube, owned by Google, and just about everything else comes via Amazon, Facebook/Instagram or Netflix. In an important book called ‘The Internet Trap’, US media professor Martin Hindman explains how the internet doesn’t encourage competition but inexorably leads toward monopoly. Using experiments on data sets almost as huge as Cambridge Analytica’s, Hindman demonstrates how we crave variety but won’t search too long for it, which makes ‘stickiness’ the dominant factor driving internet traffic. And stickiness grants exponentially increasing advantages to size. All the advertising - which is what pays for all this free porn - will rapidly gravitate to the handful of huge corporations who host it. The always-charming Peter Thiel has summed it up pithily thus: ‘Competition Is For Losers’.

I do hope the government’s Porn Czar will read Hindman, and would venture to suggest a far more radical reform. Why not introduce an ID card that doubles as a Porn Pass and also confers entitlement to a Universal Basic Income? That covers all the bases and should render our streets empty and safe again in short order.

[Dick Pountain is working on a script where a young, bored housewife rings for a moustachioed Python programmer to help her with list comprehensions]

IT’S COMPLICATED

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 296/ 4th March 2019 13:41:22

I’ve often professed here my liking for simplicity, particularly in the design of software, but more generally in the design of objects. I’m just a Bauhaus sort of guy. That doesn’t mean that I hate, or fear, complexity. On the contrary, I know the universe is complex and I consider complexity theory an important area of mathematical philosophy, though one neither widely nor well understood.

It’s important for us in the IT business because, used properly, it can save us wasting effort trying to solve some problem with an algorithm that doesn’t stand a chance. But it’s also philosophically important because it places bounds on what it’s possible to know, and can rule out certain kinds of nonsense a priori. The thing is, complexity theory is quite hard both to grasp and to explain, involving as it does the concepts of true randomness and infinity. I know this because I’ve recently tried to explain it, and found it really hard work.

One of my simple pleasures is walking on Hampstead Heath, occasionally accompanied by an old friend, a semi-retired professor in a social science. We typically end up in deep analytical chats, over pints, about the state of the world, and recently he asked out of the blue for an explanation of complexity theory. His colleagues and students had begun using ‘complexity’ as a buzzword in their publications, in much the way chaos theory was thrown around a few decades ago, and he suspected this might be poorly-digested bullshit.

I recommended a couple of books, but back home I looked and found the first hopelessly out-of-date, while the other I barely understood myself, though I thought I did 30 years ago. So I set about trying afresh. One mathematical kind of complexity, studied as algorithmic information theory, is about the resources required for the execution of algorithms. This was pioneered in the 1960s in crucial papers by Andrey Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin, and at its heart is the definition of randomness. You can’t predict exactly the next character in a random string like “asdwebqwgastytinfdebfbwwvefwramk”, so there’s no description shorter than quoting the whole string. On the other hand a string like “okokokokokokokokokokokokokokok” has a shorter definition, namely “repeat ‘ok’ 15 times”. Such shorter definitions are algorithms, but this isn’t really what my friend was looking for.

A less abstract approach to complexity might be physical, via cause and effect. If I let go of this glass vase it will fall on the hard kitchen floor and shatter, thanks to gravity, a fairly simple cause. I like the vase though, so a second causal chain might start in the neural circuits that make up my brain, forming the intention “I’m going to repair it”. This sends messages to my limbs to sweep up the bits and deposit them on the kitchen table. Lots of them, small, more-or-less triangular shards. Can I in principle fit them all back together like a jigsaw and super-glue them? I don’t know the answer, and it might in fact be unknowable, because the number of comparisons that need to be made, and the time they would consume, grows exponentially with the number of shards.

Or here’s another stab. You’re given a string of bits and told to guess whether the next bit will be a 0 or a 1. Let’s distinguish three different scenarios:

a) The string might consist of all 0s, so that after a few hundred you suspect the next will be 0 too. This scenario might arise because some electronic device generating the bits is broken or turned offb) The string may be truly random, generated by repeated tosses of a fair coin, so however many bits you examine the chances of guessing the next correctly remain exactly 50:50.

c) The string might represent something, for example the letter “A” in this digital font. The distribution of 1s is no longer random: long stretches of all 1s correspond to the black parts, stretches of all 0s correspond to white space between adjacent characters.

One hundred bits of each string contain the same amount of Shannon information, but for everyday purposes a) and b) are less informative than c). String a) typifies nothingness, brokenness, non-existence. String b) typifies dissolution or decomposition. You could see both as different ways to represent formlessness or death. The most interesting things in the universe, living beings, can be represented and reproduced by type c) strings, stretches of repetition that convey form put there by the expenditure of energy to temporarily and locally lower their entropy. Complexity arises when a living creature, a bundle of proteins, nucleotides, carbohydrates, uses its sensory organs to sample the outside world and try to figure out what to do next.

[Dick Pountain actually refuses to super-glue broken crockery in more than four pieces]

DIGITAL WHIMPER

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 295/ 8th February 2019 12:08:45

‘This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper’

T.S.Eliot’s famous last line depends on an auditory metaphor, the opposite ends of a spectrum of disquieting sounds. He wrote The Hollow Men well before WWII and the atom bomb, and when interviewed in 1958 said he’d not use it now that ‘bang’ had new force. He didn’t live to see the internet, which might have done the same for ‘whimper’.

An equally well-known dichotomy is that between ‘cock-up’ and ‘conspiracy’. We’re supposed to consider them opposites too, though personally I believe that it’s possible to have both simultaneously, in the shape of an incompetently executed conspiracy, or a well-executed one that has unintended consequences. And it’s starting to look as if AI may turn out to be the latter.

What prompts this line of thought is a series of trivial online incidents I’ve witnessed in the last few weeks. Two of them were Facebook posts from friends. The first was an unretouched photo of a foggy night sky in the Ukraine, where a Windows 8 error message was clearly visible projected onto the fog by a malfunctioning digital billboard. (https://www.facebook.com/Dracothedeatheatingcupcake/photos/a.404155702971779/971136009607076/). Eliot might have liked that one. Another was a friend-of-a-friend who’s a photographer whose post got banned as hate speech because he mentioned that he’d just been out ‘shooting trannies’, by which he actually meant he’d been taking colour pictures on film transparencies. Ooops.

The third incident involved me directly. I started to receive Critical Security Alert emails from Google, claiming they’d just refused login to someone who was using my password, which I needed to change immediately. On checking up I soon determined that the malevolent agent was actually myself, in the form of my Windows laptop. I don’t use this PC nearly as often as I used to, but it remains connected to the internet and periodically backs itself up to Google Drive and OneDrive: some new super-smart AI security bulldog at Google had interpreted this behaviour pattern as that of a spotty teenage identity thief.

Problem was, Google then put a block on my Gmail account from that machine, and I immediately feared that this might spread to my Chromebook, phone and tablet and lock me out altogether. This proved far from irrational, because when I did as told and changed my password, I found that my Chromebook rejected the new password as wrong. After a shot of whisky, a few aspirins and a cold compress, I discovered that they at least had the decency to keep the old password active, so I could get back in and unchange it. There followed a pantomime where I tried to contact some human to explain what was happening but failed completely, until by fluke I was whimpering on my Gmail account page when a chat window opened. Eventually I got it all sorted with the help (several hours) of an obliging Google engineer based in - the Phillipines.