Yearly Archives: 2014

After Snowden: Expressing Love in a World Without Privacy

Editor’s note: Jennifer Dales has written this piece as a follow up to her piece on facebook and privacy, Facebook privacy is a joke: How Edward Snowden changed my online habits.

It used to be that love letters were written on paper, sealed in an envelope and sent through the mail. These letters were private, and it was illegal to open them, unless you were the recipient. Otherwise you needed a warrant, signed by a judge.

Before the Internet, looking into private lives was a difficult thing to do. It took stealth and skill, or a police warrant.

Now spy agencies liken our private lives, our loves, to a haystack, in which, we are assured, criminals and terrorists lurk. Our expressions of love, our most intimate moments, are piled up like so many strands of hay, where they are picked through by security intelligence services, looking for disturbances in the patterns of our communications.

We live, more and more, online: placing photos of our children, friends and lovers, correspondence, essays, commentary, even financial and work-related documents on Google docsDropbox, blogs, tumblrFacebookTwitterYouTube — the list goes on and on.

Edward Snowden has spoken about love, moving strangely far from the abstract, technical and political discourse he usually engages in: “It may be that…by waiting and passing judgment over every association we make and every person we love, that we could uncover a terrorist plot… But is that the kind of society we want to live in?”

The online world is deeply penetrated by commercial and security interests, but also by images and stories of our loves, joys and sorrows — all the things we have done that will never come to pass again. These stories drift behind us, like mist in the electronic ether.

I have often heard the refrain that it doesn’t matter if everything we say and do online is collected. If we have done nothing “wrong,” we have nothing to fear. But would you willingly invite advertisers, data collectors and spies into your home to watch you take a shower or play with your children, because you’re “innocent” and have nothing to hide?

You may lock down your Facebook profile, but photos of your children can be collected by advertisers. You might turn off the GPS on your phone, but each time it communicates with a cell tower, your location is mapped, collected and used to find you in your past, present and future.

Knowing this, I tried withdrawing from Facebook. I closed down my profile, deleted all my connections and downloaded the hundreds of photos I had put online to a hard drive in my basement. But then I could no longer converse with friends in distant countries, or spontaneously meet up a friend in another city, because he knew I would be there when I said so on Facebook.

Once enough people join a social media platform, it exerts a gravitational pull that is hard to resist.

So, I created another Facebook account; an open profile with no “security” settings. Anything I reveal there can be seen by anyone.

It’s not as much fun this way. I miss posting photos of my holidays or capturing and sharing spontaneous acts using my camera phone. I have fewer online discussions that expose personal information.

To share photos and other files, I subscribe to SpiderOak, an encrypted, zero-knowledge online storage service, where you can upload information as you would with Dropbox, and share it selectively, whenever you want.

My email is now Hushmail — it costs actual money, but there is no advertising or data mining, and since it’s encrypted, it’s more difficult for spies to get into, should they wish.

The availability of these services suggests there is a hunger for something better. ello.co has tens of thousands of users clamoring for invitations to join this alternative to Facebook.

But even though I use services that support online security, my efforts to maintain a presence online while keeping some shred of a private life are probably futile.

But it’s the principal of the thing. I should be able maintain a creative, intimate personal life online.

Ed Snowden was reputed to keep a copy of his country’s constitution on his desk at work, but I think he risked everything for love. He knows that if expressions of love, creativity and friendship cannot flourish online, we aren’t free and secure.

We are paying a heavy price for giving away our privacy. It’s changing the tenor of our relationships. More and more, we look over our shoulders, wondering who is watching. We are constantly exposed.

It’s time to stop thinking our loss of privacy doesn’t matter. Without it, we have no democracy or individual freedom.

It’s time to stop paying with the geld of our personal information for free social media, email and storage. Reward responsible companies by paying to use their online services.

Kick the marketers and spies out of your living room. Do it for your friends and loves.

See the video of a related question I asked Glenn Greenwald.

Originally appeared in Rabble.ca

Honour the Treaties

Yesterday morning I watched Aaron Huey’s TED talk on the Pine Ridge Reservation and the Lakota Sioux. To me, the most important thing that he said was:

“Honour the treaties. Give back the Black Hills. It’s not your business what they do with them.”

In these few words, Aaron voices the transformation needed here in Turtle Island – a shift from the patronizing, controlling approach to First Nations politics, land and culture – to one of respect. Canada needs to get out of the business of Aboriginal nations. It’s not up to us how a Mohawk or Ojibway or Haida community decides to use its land or organize its community. It’s long past time for us to get out of their business and start listening instead of dictating. I believe our future depends on it, because resource extraction in the form of mining, drilling for oil, forestry, etc is destroying our ecosystems. Maybe Aboriginal people will treat the land the same way. But if past experience is any indication, I believe things would be different. I also think that our colonial relationship with Native peoples is stunting our growth as Canadians, and undermining our humanity.

I recognize that ending our colonial relationships with Indigenous nations does not mean that First Nations become closed societies that don’t need or require relationships with other societies. It’s just long past time for use to get out of the way.

Thank you, Aaron Huey for saying it so well.

Wayfinders

I recently read a Smithsonian article on Hawaiian voyaging canoe, the Hōkūleʻa, which circumnavigated the globe using traditional Polynesian navigation techniques.

These techniques include navigating by the stars, the rising and setting of the sun, as well as the ocean swells. This voyage is a culmination of many journeys using these techniques, dismissing once and for all the European skeptics who thought that it was impossible for Polynesians to travel so far without technologies like those of the European explorers.

What strikes me about this story is that is shows how a people use their own bodies – their eyes, ears, sense of balance, memory, ability to communicate among each other – to navigate the vast oceans of the earth. They do it independent of any navigation technologies. This independence and freedom that comes from relying on your own body and mind for orientation is very inspiring.

It is always an overstatement to say anything about all of western culture, but there is a tendency in westerners to privilege the intellect over the body, and thought over feeling. We are encouraged to ignore the signals that our bodies and feelings send us in order to work longer, or perform better in whatever it is we do. We push away signals of physical and emotional distress because we don’t think we are permitted to have distress. We must not be normal to feel such things.

There is a strong tendency to try and solve problems by thinking about them and by collecting and analyzing information. The internet makes this tendency very easy to follow, since it offers up vast reams of information on almost any subject, albeit without the context of experience, and very often with crucial elements missing.

Perhaps westerners actually create problems by trying to solve them; by perceiving something as a problem that must be solved when it is not; when it is actually a state of being: a message from the body or the emotions, signalling a need to change directions, or to attend to changes around us. It’s as if we don’t understand the language our bodies and feelings speak, and sometimes become very disturbed by the intensity of the signals we receive.

We think our bodies and feelings should behave and be orderly. We expect that by following a logical path we will reach the destination we predicted with our brain, even though we have ignored input from our body and our feelings.

These Hawaiian wayfinders are different. They find the path they need to take by feeling with all their senses – they feel in their bodies the swells of the ocean against the sides of the canoe, they see with their eyes the stars and sun in the sky above, feel with their skin and smell with their noses and hear with their ears the winds, the birds and the life of the seas. And they remember with their minds everything they have learned from their teachers and from their experiences. They apply full intelligence to wayfinding.

I am a wayfinder, and each day, in order to navigate successfully, I pay attention to the signals I receive: the weather – is it hot or cold, is there wind, rain, sun, snow? The light in the sky is fall coming closer? The mood of my family, the speed of the bus I take to work, the pace of activity at the office, how tired I feel, how alert, whether there is any anxiety, or sadness, if there is a feeling of joy that needs to take a walk outside under the green trees, if there is pain anywhere in my body, or a burst of energy needing release. I see a news article about a child who has been killed, or a mother who’s been run over by a dump truck during a bike race—then suddenly a feeling of intense fear! What if it happens to my child, or to me? And in the shopping centre  – bright pieces of jewellery, sweets, clothes, gadgets, noise, people everywhere. Each day I navigate the physical, the emotional and the intellectual. To succeed and not be blindsided, I need all my senses, and every emotion – a full intelligence that flows through the body and the heart.

We have the most in common with our enemies…

It has often been said that we have the most in common with our enemies. This is, in many ways, true of Israelis and Palestinians. They occupy the same part of the world, have similar desires for nationhood, identity, safety and freedIsraeli times articleom, and even follow religions that are very similar. With a few changes, this angry letter from an Israeli could have been written by a Palestinian:

“But I will not apologise for surviving. For surviving missiles intended to kill me. The fact they didn’t kill me doesn’t mean they weren’t sent with the intention to murder. I will not apologise for living and surviving thanks to being prepared because we have a culture that celebrates our lives and cherishes them…I will not apologise for having a business, a home, a family and friends here who want normal lives and to live in peace with our neighbors. I will not apologise for existing and I want nothing more than to co-exist quietly with neighbors who accept me here.”

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/shalom-motherfr/

Inside of mood

dark-soul-cloudsI recently read a book by Jonathan Rottenberg, who describes depression as part of the mammalian mood system. The human mood system is designed to drive and shape behaviour – it pushes us in positive directions and away from bad ones. For example, if a bear is fishing for salmon in a spot that is usually really good and no fish appear, that bear will experience frustration and unhappiness. This mood state will cause him to stop trying to fish in that spot and look for anther one. If he finds fish elsewhere, his mood system will reward him with positive emotions.

With humans, if you set yourself difficult-to-achieve goals, or undergo extreme stress, your mood system will shift downward. It’s trying to tell you something, but you may not be as in-tune with your moods as the bear is, and you may not listen. If not, the mood system will downshift your mood again and again, until eventually you either adjust your goals, or become totally incapacitated by your mood. If you don’t pay attention to low moods and learn from them, they will stop you in your tracks.

The mood system knows much more than we do. It has inside information on the health of our bodies, information that we don’t have access to. If, for example, we are deficient in an essential nutrient, or we are severely sleep-deprived, or we are being bombarded by too many demands, our mood system will take all of these elements into account. If we set crazy, unrealistic goals, our mood system will do everything it can to stop us, and turn us onto a better path.

We are sometimes like a frog in a pot of  water that has been set to boil – the water starts out cool, but over time, it gradually heats up until we are boiling. Our mood system knows that pot of water is going to boil eventually and, if necessary, it will scoop you out and toss you to safety, where you might lie for months, wondering why you feel so bad. But at least you’re alive! The mood system gives you signals meant to influence your choices so that you survive and even thrive.

While our mood system sees clearly, and sends us clear signals, our society often places greater value on other signals that override these vitally important ones. Many of these other signals come in the form of prescriptions – you should be successful; you should be happy; you should be rich; you should be thin; and so on.

To go back to the bear analogy – what if the bear could be convinced that if he just kept on fishing in the unproductive spot on the river, he would one day catch the biggest salmon ever? What if the bear believed that if he didn’t catch that salmon it is really his fault – that he wasn’t a good enough fisher? What if he thought he was weird for feeling depressed about his situation and then started worrying about not being happy?

If the bear listened to that kind of talk, he would probably persist in fishing at that unproductive bend in the river until eventually he became so depressed he had a nervous breakdown and crawled into a hole for a long time. When he came out later, he would hopefully find a better place to fish.

But here is the hard part: we don’t always know we are doing things that are dangerous to our well-being. As Rottenberg points out, we live in a time and place that is a perfect storm for low mood.

We hardly get any sunlight and spend all our time indoors. We get far too little sleep, on average. Our diet and exercise patterns are poor. And I would add that modern living forces us to synchronize our biological rhythms to a very fast-paced work world – we have to show up on time, every day, week after week, year after year. All of these factors, and many others, affect our mood.

For these reasons, Rottenberg says that we are now experiencing a depression epidemic. Depression may protect us from futile, often dangerous behaviours, but it is a very costly adaptation. Depression can be even more difficult to deal with than the situation that triggered it. To recover you need help from doctors, therapists, friends, family and often medications.

It is a very difficult, but productive process, where you learn about yourself and grow as a human being. By listening to depression, you discover yourself and the world anew. Ultimately, Rottenberg’s understanding of depression is a very optimistic one, because although he makes clear that there are many ways to become depressed, there are also a great many ways to recover from it, and all of them offer the potential for growth and renewal.