Harvard University Press Blog

Publishing (and Promoting) a Book during a Pandemic

This year challenged the way people do many things. For Justin Reich that meant rethinking how to promote his new book, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, published in September. With bookstore tours and readings out of the question, Reich came up with an idea to get the word out about his book.

On March 24, I submitted the final copyedits for my new book, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education. Schools across the country had begun to shut down, and many parts of the country would follow into lockdown soon after. The book release was planned for September, right in the midst of back-to-school season, and over the course of the spring it became very clear that I wouldn’t be doing any kind of traditional academic book tour.

While planes were grounded, I came up with the alternative of conducting an online book club. We would meet for one hour every Monday afternoon for ten weeks of discussion, one session for every chapter in the book. The goal was to create a format where interested readers could have some structure for reading the book with a community, get some expert commentary, and have a place for discussion and reflection. Each session had a one hour live conversation that we edited down and then released as a podcast episode.

I hired my dear colleague Audrey Watters to serve as a co-host for the series, alternatively joining as subject matter expert or co-host for the discussions. Each session had one or two guests, sometimes joining as experts on the topics and sometimes joining as subjects from the chapter of the book. I encouraged guests to bring a sense of “friendly pugilism” to the discussion; I was worried that folks might be too friendly as guests, so I actively encouraged them to find points of disagreement that could make for lively discussion.

Each episode had a basic run of show, at least to give us something to deviate from. We did introductions by asking guests to tell their “edtech story,” a memorable experience from their teacher or student days encounter with education technology. Then either a guest or Audrey would give a short rundown of the main idea of the chapter, both to help orient people who didn’t read the book in time and to provoke some thinking among listeners. The next section was “Stump the Chump,” borrowed from the great Car Talk segment, where I asked guests to reflect on what I missed or got wrong in the book. Usually by this point, some good questions or lively dialogue would have gotten underway in the chat, and so at some point we could often continue the conversation using questions from the audience. Typically, that plan was enough to fill an hour of conversation.

I was grateful for the terrific group of participants that came together. We had about 600 people sign up for the book club, and the early chapters got 100+ live attendees, dwindling to about 50 or so by the end (there is a MOOC attrition joke in here somewhere). The participants were educators, education researchers, and technology designers; I was particularly pleased that we recruited several folks with titles like “Director of Learning Science and Research” from some prominent edtech companies. The group included many of the kinds of people from industry who I hoped the book would be in dialogue with. I suspect that I would have spoken with more people on a ten city/university book tour, but I had a much deeper engagement in this format.

Most of the mechanics of hosting and recording the book club were handled through Zoom. I used the Zoom webinar feature to create a recurring 10-session series, and then participants could just sign up once for every session.

Other than Zoom, we had two websites for the project. A book website (failuretodisrupt.com) advertised the book club, and we set up a simple Discourse discussion forum site where people could discuss the book in advance of the sessions.

In my lab at MIT, the Teaching Systems Lab, we conduct design research on online learning, so we have a talented production team on call, who remixed all of the episodes and are in the process of publishing the refined versions on our podcast, TeachLab.

Throughout the fall, I settled into a familiar routine for communicating with all of the stakeholders. On Friday, I emailed a run of show to the following weeks guests and added them as panelists to the Zoom webinar. On Sunday, Zoom sent an automated reminder to registrants. On Monday, myself, guests, and Audrey showed up about 30 minutes early for some chitchat and a soundcheck, and then we chatted with everyone for an hour. On Tuesday, I sent an email to registrants with a Zoom link to the recorded webinar and a preview of the next week’s discussion.

When everyone gets vaccinated, I still hope I have a chance to travel around and discuss ideas from the book with colleagues in person. But in the future, if you have to release a book in the midst of a global pandemic, I can recommend online book clubs as an enjoyable way to generate interest, connect with readers, and build community.

New and Noteworthy Science Books for Our Times

Beginning this October 8th, the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of Technology will convene virtually for the first time. This annual meeting, appropriately enough, focuses on science within the context of history and society. In a similar spirit, we at Harvard University Press are highlighting five recent and forthcoming books that offer a valuable perspective on the history of science, but also the current moment. We are offering a discount on these and other books related to the conference.

History will remember 2020 as a year of war. A technoscientific battle against a previously unknown threat. A year when an invisible virus challenged the world. And despite the uniqueness of the current battlefield, it presents familiar uncertainties, rationalities, and emotions, inescapably similar to what Carl von Clausewitz termed the ‘fog of war.’ As M. Susan Lindee writes in Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War, Clausewitz viewed wartime actions as both measurable and shadowy, cost-benefit calculations made during a twilight haze. Choices are often made with gaps in information, with the hope that the unknown consequences will skew favorably toward survival. The similarities to our struggle against COVID-19 are painfully clear. Lindee continues, “scientific ideas and technological innovations can help us understand cultures and systems of power.” Awareness of how science and technology has been applied to past military struggles provides invaluable insight into how it can, and should, be applied to our current fight. The choices leaders make on what to do with the power of human innovation and industry can lead to a future of lifesaving vaccinations just as easily as it has to historical violence.

The current pandemic highlights how arguments over science underlie most of our divisive and consequential policy debates, such as genetic modification, climate change, and immigration. Andrew Jewett’s Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America recounts a century of battles over the cultural implications of science in the United States. He traces the history of the widespread indictment that science has been too often compromised by political ideology, with dire consequences for the country. By piecing together its development, varied expressions, and ultimate consequences, Jewett reveals how suspicion of science has been a major force in American politics and culture.

But, as we know, tension between politics and science is not unique to 20th-century America. As Henry Cowles states, “science as a way of thinking had a politics of its own.” The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey explores the intertwined politics and histories of evolution and experiment in an unexpected history of how modern science took shape. Evolution, once viewed as a natural adaptation, itself evolved into the scientific method and soon became a controversial symbol of science’s power over nature. Instead of being a kind of knowledge deduced from observations and principles, “the method” became a way of thinking.

The 19th century soon saw the rise of yet another kind of thinking: visual problem solving. The forthcoming (Spring 2021) A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication by Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer tells the story of the 400-year evolution of an intellectual framework that has become essential to both science and society at large. From its origins in statistical data during the 17th century to the 19th century “golden age” of data display, visual and graphic communication was used for everything from tracking disease outbreaks to understanding social phenomena. Across countless disciplines, people realized that information could be more effectively conveyed through visual display than solely through use of words or tables. This trend continues to accelerate into the 21st century and has become integral to how we understand, retain, and use information.

The increase in utilization of graphics and illustration have also contributed to the evolution of scientific research. In The Black Box of Biology: A History of the Molecular Revolution, Michel Morange writes, “Open a book on molecular biology or glance at an online article, and you will be struck by the quantity and quality of the graphical representations…the pages will teem with illustrations of macromolecules, intracellular pathways, and networks.” Morange further maintains that few areas of science that have seen such an incredible transformation in such a short span of time as molecular biology. From new advancements like CRISPR and genetic engineering to the development of new scientific programs such as synthetic biology and systems biology, the past few decades of biological progress can only be understood within the context of the larger molecular paradigm. As this paradigm fosters new disciplines, the fundamental importance of molecular biology only becomes more pronounced.

Remembering Hiroshima

On this day 75 years ago, the United States dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. James L. Nolan, Jr.’s grandfather was a doctor who participated in the Manhattan Project, and he writes about him in Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, an unflinching examination of the moral and professional dilemmas faced by physicians who took part in the project. Here is the introduction to Nolan’s book.

On the morning of June 17, 1945, Captain James F. Nolan, MD, boarded a plane in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In his briefcase was a highly sensitive report prepared by Nolan, along with other Manhattan Project physicians and two physicists, that expressed concerns about potential radioactive fallout from what would be the first nuclear bomb ever exploded. The plutonium bomb, or Gadget, as it was called, was scheduled for detonation in the Alamogordo bombing range of New Mexico in less than a month. Nolan and his colleagues hoped to persuade General Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, to approve safety and evacuation procedures for the so-called Trinity test. After a flight delay, a missed connection, and a long train ride from Cincinnati to Knoxville, Nolan finally arrived at the Oak Ridge Site of the Manhattan District at six thirty the next morning. At Oak Ridge, about twenty-five miles outside Knoxville, Nolan eventually met with the large and imposing Groves, who was not at all pleased to receive the report.

Groves made Nolan sit outside his office while he read the document and discussed it with his aides. When he finished, Groves called Nolan in and addressed him dismissively: “What are you, some kind of Hearst propagandist?” The comment—with its reference to William Randolph Hearst, known for his sensationalist journalism—was indicative of Groves’s overriding concerns with security and secrecy. He feared that if the proposed plan were implemented, information about the top-secret Manhattan Project might leak out to people living near the Alamogordo bombing range. Such a response from Groves was not unexpected. In Nolan’s view, the military was concerned only with making a bomb for the purposes of warfare; worries about radiation hazards “were entirely secondary.” Groves, in Nolan’s words, “had rifle-barrel vision,” which “made him a great soldier” but limited him to “thinking only of the security aspect.” As it turned out, the Manhattan Project physicians were right to be worried about fallout from the Trinity test. Groves eventually approved some of the safety measures, but concerns about the long-term effects of radiation on the region around the test site persist to this day.

Although the Manhattan Project doctors warned the military about dangerous fallout from the Trinity test, they also participated in downplaying the harmful effects of radiation following the test. The doctors’ complicated role in this instance is emblematic of what happened a number of times at the dawn of the nuclear age. Manhattan Project doctors would offer warnings, particularly with respect to the dangers of radiation exposure. Military leaders would not take the warnings seriously, giving greater weight to military and scientific concerns. Doctors would then be put in a position of helping the military to hide or minimize the negative consequences of radiation exposure, often out of fear of litigation.

 Atomic Doctors focuses on the physicians who were involved in the Manhattan Project, paying particular attention to Nolan, as well as his colleagues Louis Hempelmann and Stafford Warren—all of whom were part of the project from its earliest days and then played important roles in the unfolding drama of the atomic age. All three doctors had training in radiology and thus knew more than most about radiation—the critical and defining, yet mysterious, feature of the new weapon. How they gained and managed their knowledge about radiation, and how they treated (or didn’t treat) those who were affected by it, is a central theme of this book. It’s a theme that intersects with the continuing debate about the necessity and morality of detonating, and then continuing to develop and stockpile, atomic weapons. We will see how the doctors were used, with or without their cooperation, either to support or to refute competing historical narratives about the atom bomb.

James F. Nolan was my grandfather. I first became aware of the nature and scope of his contribution to the Manhattan Project when my mother visited me several months after my dad had passed away. She brought with her a box of materials that no one else in the family even knew existed. When I opened the box and began sorting through its contents, I was astonished by what I found. The box contained a treasure trove of data about my grandfather and his role in the Manhattan Project. I discovered photographs of the Trinity test, the USS Indianapolis, Tinian Island, Bikini Island, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki (taken just weeks after the bombs were dropped on the two cities). Also inside were my grandfather’s military papers, travel itineraries, artifacts, souvenirs, weather maps, newspaper clippings, written accounts of his experience, and correspondence, including with Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of the Manhattan Project.

Discovery of this material marked the beginning of my own journey through the early nuclear age, with my grandfather acting as my guide. In a sense, Nolan served as my Virgil, taking me through a divine comedy of sorts. He introduced me to fascinating people, including those who had visions of a technophilic new paradise. He also showed me a horrifying inferno—the image conveyed by the Japanese doctors with whom Nolan interacted in Hiroshima and Nagasaki immediately after the war. The contents of my grandfather’s secret box of materials led me on exploratory trips to a number of archives across the United States, to Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, to the San Ildefonso Pueblo, to a reunion in Indiana with the still-living survivors of the USS Indianapolis, and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The more I explored, the more interesting and troubling the story became. The Virgil image also works in the sense that the story is not so much about Nolan—though he is clearly a central figure—as it is about the dramatic and utterly transformative historical period he lived through.

My grandfather participated in many of the crucial events of this period.

He was involved in some way with the first eight nuclear bombs ever detonated. He was there at Los Alamos—indeed, he was one of the first recruits. He helped plan the safety and evacuation measures for the Trinity test. He was one of two men tasked with escorting Little Boy, the bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima, from Los Alamos to the Pacific Islands. He was one of the first Americans to visit Japan and investigate the bomb sites after the war. He was present for the subsequent atomic tests on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls in the Marshall Islands. And, at the very end of his life, he joined about one hundred others to attend the fortieth reunion of the start of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, an event that provided the scientists who built the bomb an opportunity for tortured reflection on all that had become of their invention. This book follows Nolan through these episodes and considers the ethical and medical issues faced by the doctors working on the project.

My interest in my grandfather’s journey is more than personal and more than historical. As a sociologist with a long-standing interest in the role of technology in modern society, I find that Nolan’s story provides insights into our fraught relations with technology. Discovery of the bomb generated a host of nuclear technologies—in the military, in energy, and in medicine—along with a variety of related technologies that continue to shape our lives. Lessons from the early atomic age help us deepen our understanding of how humans engage not only with nuclear and nuclear-engendered technologies but also with such emerging technologies as genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology. The forceful impact of technology, nuclear and otherwise, on human life is one of the multiple meanings of “delivering little boy” that will be explored as we follow Nolan’s passage through the early atomic age.

Technology, Biology, Chronology

Fears and anxieties about the latest technologies are nothing new, say Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt, authors of Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter. But neither is the fact that they often provide new ways for us to connect and socialize.

Mark Twain is rumored to have said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Of late, much press has been spent on uncovering those rhymes, focusing on the similarities between the current epidemic and past ones. These stories underscore the lesson that progress hasn't allowed us to escape the suffering of earlier generations, for the persistence of plagues roots us more to the past than we initially thought. While technology promised to let us escape history, our biology—our bodies and their pestilences—has kept us shackled to it. 

These accounts are to some degree true. But they are by no means the whole story. If history rhymes as a result of biology, it also rhymes as a result of (rather than in spite of) technology. 

Consider the conspiracy theorists who believe 5G Networks transmit the COVID-19 virus. Acting on their suspicions, they've burned and vandalized cell phone towers across Europe. In England alone, there have been 30 attacks on towers. As Amy Davidson Sorkin observes in the New Yorker, they suspect the towers of harming humans’ immune systems, emitting dangerous radiation, or perhaps even transmitting coronavirus. One might ask what quirk of our present culture would lead to such outlandish theories about COVID-19 and communications. Yet dismaying as the rumors and vandalism are, they closely resemble past fears about disease and communications technology. 

In 1849, a cholera epidemic swept the globe, and as many people struggled to understand its causes, some pointed the finger at the telegraph (created 5 years before), believing there was a connection between electricity and the deadly illness. According to Alvin Harlow, an early historian of the telegraph, East Coast newspapers “began whispering the rumor that the telegraph might be responsible for the spread of the great cholera epidemic of 1849.” In its early years, Southern preachers suspected the telegraph also brought other ailments—like bad weather. After listening to their minister blame the telegraph for drought conditions, Kentucky Baptists rushed out of their church and “collectively cut down several miles of poles and [carried]… off the wires.”

If current anxieties about COVID-19 and communication technologies rhyme with past worries, so does the gratitude that so many feel about being connected in the midst of the pandemic. For example, around the world, people are marveling at the fact that while COVID-19 has quarantined us in our houses, social media allows us to be alone together. The recent penchant for Zoom rendezvous and virtual partying seems like a new development; some observers contend it will remake our social habits long after we develop herd immunity. But before prophesizing overmuch, we should remember that in the telephone’s early days, “party lines” (instead of private, one-on-one calls) were the norm, and literally were what they were called. H.E. Wilkinson, who lived on an isolated Iowa farm in the early 1900s, recalled, “We often made good use of that party line for an evening’s entertainment. With no radio, no television, no record player, no car to dash to town in, and no movies,” a traveling peddler who played the “Jew’s harp was the sensation of the neighborhood.” When he was ready to play, the family hosting him would ring up the neighborhood; whole families would gather around a small receiver. “[R]eception was somewhat difficult to say the least…But we thought the music was wonderful, we who were so hungry for diversion of any kind…It was entertainment, and it was coming mysteriously over that slender thread of wire strung on poles along our fence lines.”

Out on windswept, wintry farms, party lines made sociability possible. Phone lines bound people together in cities and towns too. While today, Yo-Yo Ma plays “Songs of Comfort” via Twitter, nineteenth century orchestras played concerts over the telephone to accompany partiers at distant dances. In 1877, the New York Tribune reported: “At the telegraphers’ reception in Chicago on Feb. 12, the dancers waltzed to music played in Milwaukee, 85 miles away.” And like today, preachers found use for the phone as well, offering “sermons by telephone.”

In times of sickness, radio has also had connective effects, just as Zoom does today. In its early days, listeners isolated because of illness marveled at being connected to others from afar. As E. E. Ricker of Lynn, Massachusetts, wrote in a 1923 fan letter to a pioneering radio station: “I am a shut-in and have to sit all day ‘day in and day out’ away from the busy activities of life which I used so much to enjoy. But I find in my Radio my constant companion, affording me an almost constant source of entertainment, and instruction….”

And reminiscent of current speculations about whether students may end up gaining their education from their living rooms as they wait for COVID-19 to pass, in radio’s early days, some suggested physical college campuses might disappear, for university degrees could be earned by tuning into “colleges of the air.” By the 1930s, dozens of universities from Harvard to Kansas State offered on-air courses. A 1924 observer wondered if radio spelled the end of brick-and-mortar universities, asking, “Will the classroom be abolished, and the child of the future stuffed with facts as he sits at home…with his portable receiving-set in his pocket?”

Historians often lament that we suffer from historical amnesia. Worse yet, some say that we are chronocentric—convinced we live in times so singular and unique, so sundered from the past, that it would be fruitless to look to yesteryear for anything that might add meaning to our present lives. Not so. In our current pandemic, we’ve already been disabused of the notion that progress has allowed us to escape the plagues and miseries of the past. In that same spirit, we shouldn’t imagine that the vandals burning down 5G cell towers have no precursors. Or that being alone together, or Zoom parties are entirely new things. If our biology links us to our past, so too does our technology.

Jonathan Lusthaus and His Obsession with Cybercrime

Jonathan Lusthaus has just published Industry of Anonymity: Inside the Business of Cybercrime, a fascinating account of the lives of cybercriminals and the vast international industry they have subversively created. We asked Jonathan about how he got interested in this unusual, yet important field.

While Industry of Anonymity is a labor of love, it is also a product of luck. In a different reality, it might never have been written. When I moved to Oxford to begin a Masters program in the sociology department many years ago, I was set on researching religious violence. Unfortunately, the work I wanted to do didn’t match the research strands among the faculty. In a classic student conundrum, I was quickly forced to come up with a new dissertation topic at short notice.

As it happened, just before the deadline for announcing topics, the former Guardian and BBC journalist Misha Glenny came to Oxford to give a talk. A well-known author on organized crime, Glenny was writing a new book on cybercrime at the time. That project would become Darkmarket, and the sneak preview we were treated to opened my eyes to a world I had never considered before.

Cybercrime – something I had figured as a purely technical phenomenon – involved people. These people communicated with each other, worked together and traded products on large online marketplaces. There was a secret world here, an undiscovered economy. I sensed immediately that I wanted to explore and map this new underground economy that seemed to be hidden from sight.

Luckily, I was in the perfect department to do this. Following scholars like Diego Gambetta and Federico Varese (who would become an inspirational doctoral supervisor), one of the strengths of Oxford sociology is the study of extra-legal governance. This examines how groups outside the control of the state, such as criminals and insurgents, regulate their own dealings. They can't rely on the courts or the police, so they have to develop their own institutions of governance.

Cybercrime presented a fascinating sociological puzzle: how do cybercriminals manage to cooperate together on a wide scale? It would seem that criminals, and anonymous ones at that, don’t make great business partners. You ostensibly can’t beat them up if a deal goes wrong. Yet we were seeing increasing levels of collaboration taking place, and later I would come to the realisation that a fully-fledged cybercrime industry had formed. How was this happening? Answering this question became the heart of my research. 

One of the first people I interviewed for this project asked me whether I would continue working in the cybercrime space after my masters. At the time, I was starting out and hadn’t really thought about it. But he told me that this was a fascinating and hugely important area, with tremendous opportunities and one that I should stick with.

After I finished my masters and the pilot research on which this book would be built, I realized that this interviewee was right. I had become obsessed with the topic of cybercrime. I had begun researching this topic with no knowledge of cybercrime and no contacts at all. I wanted to change this and interview the most knowledgeable people I could find – whether from law enforcement, private sector or cybercriminal backgrounds. If I travelled to a country, I wanted to do research on cybercrime while I was there. I knew this was an enormous topic, and an enormously important topic. And I knew that one day it would become a book.

After seven years of fieldwork, this passion had taken me to Russia, Ukraine, Romania, China, Nigeria, Brazil and more. I have interviewed 238 people, including some leading former cybercriminals. I have visited the sites where key historical events took place, such as a conference held in Odessa by some of the pioneers of the cybercrime industry. I have moved from the periphery of the topic towards its heart, and had an amazing adventure along the way.

This journey confirmed my view that the human dimension of cybercrime is vital to understanding the challenge and seeking solutions to fix it. Cybercrime is not just a technical phenomenon but one that is driven by people. Its victims are also people. By focussing on the technical, many can simply turn away and chose not to address the problem. It is complex and ultimately mystifying. But when we have a better understanding of how cybercrime affects us in personal terms and how the attacks stem from people in different parts of the world, we are in a much better position to engage people and make progress in addressing the threat.

Facebook Interruptus

In Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt assays the deeply troubling implications of pervasive surveillance in our age of lives lived online, and the degree to which we willingly trade our privacy for the fleeting rewards of digital affirmation. To Harcourt, a professor of law and political science at Columbia University and the author most recently of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress last week was a pageant that will do nothing to address the perilous dynamic of our society of exposure. Meaningful reform will come only when we recognize the libidinal allure of today’s digital platforms, as Harcourt explains below.

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The Facebook hearings last week were quite the spectacle. Mark Zuckerberg deftly deflected his inquisitors and misled them, while share price rose 4.5% in a single day. Senators and representatives postured for their constituents and got free prime-time media exposure. Privacy experts crowed and gloated that they had always been right, but unfairly ignored. The media and the Internet harvested abundant costless content. And social media lit up, abuzz. Between the schadenfreude and the glee, and the plain-old gawking and goggling, everybody seemed to pleasure themselves. It was win-win—except, perhaps, for the ordinary digital subjects who were left high and dry: pleasantly entertained, but totally exposed.

In the end, the Facebook hearings were nothing more than another tantalizing but anxious digital distraction. The greatest paradox, perhaps, is how much personal data and digital exhaust we all emitted and how many digital traces we shed watching Zuckerberg and simultaneously fretting over our privacy.

If anything, the Facebook hearings confirm the dreadful bind in which we find ourselves: social media and the Internet companies have us all in the palms of their hands because the digital experience itself is so seductive, consuming, and self-gratifying. Their Faustian business model works because their platforms tap directly into our pleasure centers and trigger deep reward circuits. Seeing our selfies online, tracking our likes and shares, counting our followers and retweets—these stimuli are almost more reinforcing than food or sex. We find ourselves going from one digital platform or device to another, swiping and clicking, pressing the levers like a rat in Skinner’s box, desperately seeking more stimulus and gratification.

And unless and until we come to grips with the place of desire and of our libidinal and at times narcissistic urges in relation to these new digital technologies, we won’t make any progress, we won’t get anywhere. Yes, the #DropFacebook campaign just gained Susan Sarandon and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. But the vast majority of the users of Facebook—as well as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.—will stay put because these platforms satisfy their desires, provide the gratification, and remain the easiest way to enjoy social relations today, even when they do make us anxious about our privacy.

The fact is, power circulates differently in the digital age, and the social media powerhouses have tapped deep into our pleasure centers and egos. The dark analogies to George Orwell’s 1984 or to Foucault’s “panopticon” just do not capture the present moment, nor will they alone stop us from sharing and liking.   

Today, we are no longer being coerced to give up our privacy, as Winston and Julia were by Big Brother. We are no longer confined to a panoptic cell, naked before the all-seeing guard tower. There is no telescreen forcibly anchored into our apartment walls. Instead, today we share our personal information jubilantly, out of love and desire, and for self-affirmation. We post selfies on Instagram, status updates on Facebook, screeds on Twitter. We invite Echo into our homes. We build personal websites open to all. And it feels so good, it’s so pleasurable, that even when we are warned about how much of our private information the social media and Internet companies have, we cringe but go on.  

The Rule of Code vs. The Rule of Law

Many compare the emergence of the blockchain to the arrival of the internet, and anticipate a corresponding transformation in communications, business, and individual freedoms. In Blockchain and the Law, new this month, Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright examine both the profound opportunities the technology presents and the legal and even ethical challenges it poses. In the brief excerpt below, they consider possible paths away from our current crossroads between the rule of code and the rule of law.

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When Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin to the world, he had a clear idea in mind, which was reflected in the message he included in Bitcoin’s genesis block:

The Times 03 / Jan / 2009
Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Nakamoto released the Bitcoin network in the middle of a financial crisis, as a reaction to an unstable international banking system. In doing so, he gave birth to a new currency—one controlled not by any government or central bank but only by cryptography and code.

As a global and decentralized payment system that operates without centralized control, Bitcoin held out the hope of newfound economic freedom for those dubious of governmental authority. Early Bitcoin adopters subscribed to the notion of vires in numeris (strength in numbers), a motto emphasizing the fact that, when it comes to money, only math can be trusted.

But Bitcoin was only the first step in a much grander vision. Shortly after Bitcoin’s release, technologists began to realize that the true potential of Bitcoin—the real innovation—was its underlying data structure: a blockchain. While Bitcoin offered the ability to replace the role of central banks and eliminate the need for financial institutions, blockchain technology could be applied more generally to reduce the need for middlemen in many sectors of the economy. Whenever a trusted authority is necessary to coordinate social or economic activity, blockchain technology could provide the necessary infrastructure to replace this activity. The roles of banks, financial institutions, stock exchanges, clearinghouses, content providers, online operators, and even governmental systems could all be modeled by a set of protocols and code-based rules deployed on top of a blockchain-based network.

Blockchain technology presents some risks, however. The technology supports technological systems and decentralized applications that operate independently of any centralized institution or trusted authority. They implement their own internal systems of rules, which often ignore or attempt to circumvent traditional systems of control. Unlike other technological constructs currently deployed on the Internet, these decentralized systems and applications can be governed almost exclusively by the rules of code.

The Internet had already raised a fundamental tension between the rule of law, based on geographical boundaries, and the rule of code, based on topological constructs. The regulation of “cyberspace” lies at the intersection between these two normative systems—which can either cooperate or compete with one another, depending on the circumstances at hand.

At the outset, legal scholars thought that the rule of code would ultimately prevail on the Internet. With code, people could implement their own systems of rules, enforced by a technological construct that operates outside of any legal jurisdiction. This is what inspired a number of technology activists to believe that cyberspace was an unregulatable space that governments did not have the right or ability to control—as opposed to the “meat space,” which is mostly governed by the rule of law.

Eager to bypass the politics of enclosure and control enacted by governments and corporations, these groups believed that the Internet would foster new normative systems, which would facilitate the free flow of information and promote political and cultural autonomy. The Internet marked the beginning of a new paradigm for regulation—one where regulation would be applied through the rule of code, with power dynamics that differed significantly from those of the physical world. Over time, however, governments recognized and embraced the potential for the rule of code to maintain the rule of law on the Internet. Governments have extended their control by requiring that intermediaries change their code to maintain and respect jurisdictional laws.

With the advent of Bitcoin and blockchain technology more generally, we are poised to witness a new wave of decentralization and new calls that the world will—once again—be governed by the rule of code. Echoes of the first Internet wave permeate the discourse around blockchains, with claims that blockchain technology will lead to greater individual freedom and emancipation, as these early technology advocates initially aspired to. Blockchain technology is viewed as a new opportunity by many cypherpunks and decentralization advocates, who see it as a new means for people to liberate themselves from the tyranny of governments and corporations—in ways that are quite reminiscent of the Internet’s early days.

The Future of Russia as an Energy Superpower

Russia’s energy wealth has long been the main pillar of the country’s economy, but what’s the long-term future of that financial security in a world that is gradually moving toward decarbonization? Thane Gustafson, whose Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia we recently released in a paperback edition, addressed that question earlier this fall when he delivered the Chatham House’s Annual Russia Lecture. The text of his address is below.

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The last time I had the honor of giving a speech here at Chatham House was thirteen years ago, in 2004. The talk was entitled “The Russian Oil Miracle.” Five years before, after sinking to a low point equal to about half of the Soviet-era record of 1988, Russian oil production had abruptly turned around, and between 1999 and 2004, it had regained much of the lost ground. During those years, Russia accounted for all of the net addition of crude to world oil supply.

What we could not see at the time, however, was that 2004 was the last of the miracle years, which were essentially based on capturing the “Soviet dividend.” By 2004 much of the Soviet dividend had been extracted, and while Russian oil production has continued to grow steadily since then, progress has been very gradual, and every year the net increase in production is far outstripped by the volume of drilling required to produce it, as each year’s production must overcome the built-in decline rate of existing fields as well as the diminishing returns from new ones. The Russian oil industry is very much in the position of an athlete that is running uphill against a slope that is steadily growing steeper.

But it is not my purpose today to deliver an update of the Russian Oil Miracle, but rather, to ask a very different sort of question, reflecting the revolutionary changes that have taken place in the world of energy, and especially in our perceptions of it, in just a decade-and-a-half, and to reflect with you on the implications of these changes for Russia as an energy producer and as—I think we can fairly use the term—a “petro-state.” Namely—what happens to Russia as an energy superpower as global demand for oil approaches a peak?

Cycles within Cycles: How to Think about the Energy Future of Russia

Trying to predict the future of Russian energy, and indeed of Russia itself, is like predicting climate change. And here I’m not talking about Mark Twain’s famous wisecrack that “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Rather, what I mean is the classic difficulty in any conversation about climate change—namely, that of distinguishing between long-term cycles and near-term ones, or, to put it another way, between signal and noise. Rising ocean levels are signal, whereas last year’s winter temperatures in Washington are noise.

Let me take as one example the cycles of global crude oil prices and their impact on the Russian economy. Russia has gone through four economic crashes since the mid-1980s, all four of them connected to the rise and fall of commodity prices and specifically oil. The precise causes and course of each of these cycles has been different from case to case. Yet the following would have seemed like a safe prediction just a few years ago:

• The cycle of peak and trough in global commodity prices will continue—that is what commodities do—and since oil markets are increasingly globalized and commoditized, the same cyclical pattern will govern oil prices as well—and gas too, by the way, as liquefied natural gas (LNG) increasingly turns gas into a globally traded commodity.
• And with each downturn—possibly at more frequent intervals in the future than in the past, but roughly once every decade—Russia will be thrown into recession, although with improved macroeconomic management (as in the last downturn) the extent of the decline may be cushioned. Conversely, as Alexei Kudrin has been warning for a decade, the stimulative effect of each upswing in oil prices will also be smaller each time, as the dependence of the Russian state budget on oil revenues increases.

The Hello Girls

In The Hello Girls, historian and novelist Elizabeth Cobbs tells the story of America’s first women soldiers, more than two hundred women inducted into the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War I to operate the newest communications technology–the telephone switchboard–at the front and behind the lines in France. These women served alongside male soldiers, handling vital communications and placing their lives in danger, at the same time as feminist activists at home were demanding a federal suffrage Amendment. As Cobbs shows, the military service of these women pioneered a new engagement of women with the military and with the state. Altogether, the story told in the book explores how Americans mobilized for World War I, telephones transformed the United States, females joined the armed forces, suffragists won the vote, and women and men fought together for justice. It illuminates the battles that defined the twentieth century and still shape our own. 

In the video below, Cobbs introduces the Hello Girls and all they meant to the war and the nation.

The Space Race and the Grassroots

Celebrated as an American triumph and immortalized as “one giant leap for mankind,” the Apollo 11 moon landing has always had a certain buzzcut cast. But July 1969 was of course a shaggy time in America—the moon landing took place just three weeks before Woodstock—and the space program had a surprisingly intimate relationship with the social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. As historian Neil Maher documents in Apollo in the Age of Aquarius, the space race both provoked and responded to the struggles for civil rights and for peace in Vietnam, the environmental and feminist movements, and even the counterculture.

Here’s Maher in the book’s Introduction:

Apollo in the Age of Aquarius tells the story of the shared history of the space race and the social and political movements of the 1960s era. It argues not only that these two historical phenomena were mutually dependent on one another for popular and political support, but also that they represented two factions in a national debate regarding the present and future course of the United States. Was America the sort of nation that would spend $24 billion to land men on the lunar surface, or a country more interested in using such resources to solve political problems such as racism, war, pollution, and sexism right in its own backyard? This controversy over national purpose, moreover, ultimately transformed, albeit unevenly, both the space race and these grassroots movements. While shared opposition to space exploration nurtured these movements during the 1960s, making NASA a somewhat reluctant driver of broader social change, in the 1970s civil rights leaders, peace activists, environmentalists, feminists, and those in the counterculture successfully pressured the space agency to reorient some of its technology away from outer space toward our bright blue planet. As a result, Apollo, in partnership with what the cast of Hair was calling the “Age of Aquarius,” brought both the space race and American politics back down to Earth.

President Lyndon Johnson himself remarked on that interplay, writing in his memoirs that “If we could send a man to the moon, we knew we should be able to send a poor boy to school and provide decent medical care for the aged.”

As Maher shows, though, it took a lot of agitation and activism to make such things plain. Civil rights organizers and the black press, for example, worked hard to popularize the notion that the space race was diverting federal funds and national attention from a decaying city environment and unhealthy urban housing. Mainstream African American magazines and newspapers ran pieces with such titles as “Moon Probe Laudable—But Blacks Need Help,” “Moonshot Missed Most Blacks,” and “‘Only Way I Could Get on the Moon Is to Be the First Janitor There.’” Artists followed suit, as in Gil Scott-Heron’s indelible “Whitey on the Moon,” recorded in a Harlem nightclub in 1970:

In a surprising but ultimately ineffectual show of institutional accountability, NASA responded to such uproar by establishing an Urban Systems Project Office that “spun off” space technologies to track city sprawl, monitor urban air pollution, and, in a cooperative venture with HUD, to lower urban energy consumption by retooling the Apollo space capsule’s extremely efficient heating and cooling systems for use in low-income housing projects.