Documented in the 1872 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, Abram Colby was an elected member of Congress called to testify on domestic terrorism:

Colby: On the 29th of October 1869, [the Klansmen] broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the woods and whipped me three hours or more and left me for dead. They said to me, “Do you think you will ever vote another damned Radical ticket?” I said, “If there was an election tomorrow, I would vote the Radical ticket.” They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more, with sticks and straps that had buckles on the ends of them.

Question: What is the character of those men who were engaged in whipping you?

Colby: Some are first-class men in our town. One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers. They had their pistols and they took me in my night-clothes and carried me from home. They hit me five thousand blows. I told President Grant the same that I tell you now. They told me to take off my shirt. I said, “I never do that for any man.” My drawers fell down about my feet and they took hold of them and tripped me up. Then they pulled my shirt up over my head. They said I had voted for Grant and had carried the Negroes against them. About two days before they whipped me they offered me $5,000 to go with them and said they would pay me $2,500 in cash if I would let another man go to the legislature in my place. I told them that I would not do it if they would give me all the county was worth.

The worst thing was my mother, wife and daughter were in the room when they came. My little daughter begged them not to carry me away. They drew up a gun and actually frightened her to death. She never got over it until she died. That was the part that grieves me the most.

Question: How long before you recovered from the effects of this treatment?

Colby: I have never got over it yet. They broke something inside of me. I cannot do any work now, though I always made my living before in the barber-shop, hauling wood, etc.

Question: You spoke about being elected to the next legislature?

Colby: Yes, sir, but they run me off during the election. They swore they would kill me if I stayed. The Saturday night before the election I went to church. When I got home they just peppered the house with shot and bullets.

Question: Did you make a general canvas there last fall?

Colby: No, sir. I was not allowed to. No man can make a free speech in my county. I do not believe it can be done anywhere in Georgia.

Question: You say no man can do it?

Colby: I mean no Republican, either white or colored.

There you have it. And it has to be said that a “Republican” of that day was the exact opposite of one today. They literally are the inversion of what it meant in Colby’s time. Read that last line as no man can make a free speech in America if they support Civil Rights: death threats, terrorism, torture and beatings came from “First-Class men” against Americans who had voted for President Grant.

I’ve written before here about the attempted violent coup in America in 1868, when the KKK threatened they would murder anyone caught voting for Grant.

Alvin Toffler perhaps put it best in his famous 1970 book Futureshock

Toffler said the following, just before he admitted the idea was from Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization (Department of the U.S. Army).

Students must learn how to discard old ideas, how and when to replace them. They must, in short, learn how to learn. Early computers consisted of a “memory” or bank of data plus a “program” or set of instructions that told the machine how to manipulate the data. Large late-generation computer systems not only store greater masses of data, but multiple programs, so that the operator can apply a variety of programs to the same data base. Such systems also require a “master program” that, in effect, tells the machine which program to apply and when. The multiplication of programs and addition of a master program vastly increased the power of the computer. A similar strategy can be used to enhance human adaptability. By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education.

Learn how to discard old ideas, how and when to replace them to be literate.

Learn, unlearn and relearn to be literate.

“Cornerstones of Attachment Research” is a new book that phrases it like this:

…early findings and ideas; these enter into circulation, ricochet and rebound among domains of practice, and get repeated and repeated. Later developments, even important ones, become difficult to access and incorporate…

John Maynard Keynes famously wrote something similar into the introduction to his 1936 “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” (paraphrased here):

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

And from a military perspective, I think Daniel Hulter’s USAF essay is my favorite take on the problem yet:

I’ve seen too many times when either those pilots mistook their role for simply keeper of the machine–they just let it do what it was gonna do, not seeing or caring where we fell outside the margins… or they saw that our situation wasn’t protected in policy and felt helpless themselves. They weren’t piloting the machine. They were just operators.

To be literate enough to become a pilot you have to extend beyond “keeper of the machine” and into adaptation, an example I often used to put in my big data security presentations in terms of flying versus fighting.

This was well known in WWII by American pilots over the Pacific Ocean who would come from below and behind to pick off Japanese pilots stuck in “keeper” mode formations.

A new history book called “Hidden Gifts” dives into the complexity of Middle-East stability and comes up with this enticing premise:

…embroiled in a paradox—an ever-increasing demand for security despite the increasing supply…

Except, this isn’t a paradox.

Unregulated increases in security have an inversion effect, which is exactly why Facebook boasting about its massive spend has made it also the worst platform.

Compare Facebook to Equifax, for example. The latter had tightly constrained/managed spend and efficiencies that stabilized it and made it a leader in safety. The difference is the ethics of supply.

This is how the “imperial interests” mentioned by the new history book make its paradox thesis… not a paradox.

Here’s the full thesis of “Hidden Gifts”, where you can see the crucial link to “interests” guiding the supplies.

From Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the foreign interventions in the ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Libya today, global empires or the so-called Great Powers have long assumed the responsibility of bringing security to the Middle East. The past two centuries have witnessed their numerous military occupations to ‘liberate’, ‘secure’, and ‘educate’ local populations. Consulting fresh primary sources collected from some thirty archives in the Middle East, Russia, the United States, and Western Europe, Dangerous Gifts revisits the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins of these imperial security practices. It questions how it all began. Why did Great Power interventions in the Ottoman Levant tend to result in further turmoil and civil wars? Why has the region been embroiled in a paradox—an ever-increasing demand for security despite the increasing supply—ever since? It embeds this highly pertinent genealogical history into an innovative and captivating narrative around the Eastern Question, freeing the latter from the monopoly of Great Power politics, and also foregrounding the experience and agency of the Levantine actors: the gradual yet still forceful opening up of the latter’s economies to global free trade, the asymmetrical implementation of international law from their perspective, and the secondary importance attached to their threat perceptions in a world where political and economic decisions were ultimately made through the filter of global imperial interests.

Facebook’s security officer spent more on security because he wanted less safety, which would further balloon his own interests in self enrichment (and his friends). It’s no coincidence he purchased a $3 million home in the hills above Silicon Valley. Would anyone think of him as a descendant of Napoleon?

Before he was hired to drive Facebook’s infamous collapse of safety he was at Yahoo for only about a year, where he secretly pulled $2 million out of their budget to hand out to his friends and followers (under the line item: “bug bounty”), which did exactly nothing in terms of platform safety. Yahoo after he left had to report their biggest breaches of safety in their history.

It’s perhaps counter-intuitive, yet if you place an ethics filter over security spend you can see how sometimes massive investments proposed by immoral security leaders are in fact predictably going to reduce safety, giving them an excuse to demand more.

More investment therefore can lead to more safety, yet only if that investment has proper governance — adheres to principles of ethics like inherited rights and external accountability for harms.

I’m reminded of the days before “mutually assured destruction” had its total meltdown in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The unregulated hawks of America were trying to cook up another fictional “knockout punch” with a weapon (Project Pluto) that would demoralize the Soviets by being so egregiously awful to them.

This is a good reminder that the Japanese considered the nuclear bombs to be nothing more than a drop of rain in a hurricane that had lasted many months. In fact, the actual reason for rapid capitulation of the Japanese at the end of WWII was a fear of Soviet troops walking into their territory and seizing control.

In addition, the cost to American lives of the Manhattan Project is estimated to have been higher than what the Japanese suffered from it. And obviously it led to even further harms elsewhere, as well as destabilization of the world afterwards…

An expensive nuclear-ramjet-powered missile nonetheless following the fictional narrative of nuclear bombing, was conceived to fly around the world four times, dumping toxic radiation as it went, while lobbing hydrogen bombs with questionable accuracy.

Insanity? An excellent reminder of how “security investment” can be totally out of control without some basic morality as its guide.

Separating communication and contents is like saying the water utility shouldn’t be in the business of turning your taps into coke machines. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell.

Status (like money, ideology and ego) is power, which is a question of authorization and consent. Very different from generic content.

Nobody should want 1950s “Mad Men” of advertising agencies to own and run all the communications infrastructure in the United States. It’s like saying nobody should want tobacco companies peddling literally cancerous “social entry” messages to be in charge of actual social entry requirements (e.g. you must smoke to enter).

Likewise, nobody should want the 1930s “America First” of media empires to own and run all the communications infrastructure in the United States.

This is a very different model from the plain delivery of information, which may or may not carry status and power-changing content. I’ve written about this many, many times here. The Carterfone fight with AT&T is a perfect example of this fight in the 1960s, since it centered on harm with regard to delivering content only; nothing to do with the content itself (Carter wanted to wirelessly receive calls while he rode a horse on his ranch, simply by adding a radio extender to his phone).

It was at this point the government split service providers from the hardware devices being connected to them, which unleashed the entire Internet by allowing modem and fax markets to be born.

America has a long tortured history in this aspect of regulation of communication, such as during the Andrew Jackson administration when he pushed “gag rules” and aggressively sought to intercept mail to censor abolitionist speech, including arresting sailors at ports to confiscate their books, imprison and torture them into disclosing social contacts.

History thus should be helpful in charting the course ahead.

It warns us plainly how decoupling infrastructure ownership from the tangled power struggles over its content (e.g. measures of benefits and harms) is what delivered far safer and better technology-driven market for ideas, especially because it reduced threat of monopolization by private entities’ harm-based business model.

Woodrow Wilson nationalizing infrastructure set off alarm bells for good reason, given he had just restarted the KKK from inside the White House. Yet at least within government the evil gag rules and inspection of mail, or the U.S. nationalization of its wires, these orders could be repealed. What option is there in monopolization such that the private company runs the government?

Thus when people ask what is to be done about the long documented and discussed harms of Facebook, the answer has always been somewhat obviously government regulation to remove those profiting from pollution from owning the plumbing too. Break these two incompatible halves apart immediately (applying criminal charges where relevant).

Explicitly deny public infrastructure providers from running harm for profit schemes.

In related news, the Swiss government has split service providers from the software devices that are being connected to them:

…providers of chat, instant messaging, video conferencing, or Voice over IP (VoIP) services, such as WhatsApp, iMessage, Zoom, Teams, and Skype cannot be classified as telecom service providers, but rather “over-the-top” (OTT) service providers.

You should be able to dump a chat application (and its toxic contents) without having to lose connectivity entirely.

In also related news, American “Big Tech” is feverishly attempting to create monopolies where none should exist.

…the very tech companies pushing this idea stand to profit from it, because the national hub would likely be housed in the same companies’ commercial cloud computing services. …little more than a cash grab by what’s effectively the next generation of military contractors. The plan also could entrench the very same tech companies that President Joe Biden’s antitrust enforcers are working to rein in, these critics say.