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The Entire Provenance of You - Signifiers of Identity | | | Royal Navy Impressment And The American Response | |
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< | In the 18th century, England's manpower shortage in comparison to its continental rivals and its constitutional hostility towards conscription created economic incentives for impressment, with a fascinating array of legal fictions attached. Criminals, drinkers, and those who could give no account of themselves were "volunteered" for naval service, sometimes by armed gangs. Merchant ships would be stopped at sea, and the Merchant sailors were taken into the navy and replaced with malcontents, or sometimes trusted Navy men who would desert the merchant ship in the next port and return to their home ship. In the second half of the 18th century, England's colonial ports were heavily targeted for impressment. In 1757, when the Seven Years War among the European great powers was in full swing, a full 800 men were rounded up in New York City, "all manner of tradesmen and negroes." Resistance to impressment was one of the many things souring colonial North America on membership in the Empire.
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> | In the 18th century, England's manpower shortage in comparison to its continental rivals and its constitutional hostility towards conscription created economic incentives for impressment, with a fascinating array of legal fictions attached. Criminals, drinkers, and those who could give no account of themselves were "volunteered" for naval service, sometimes by armed gangs. Merchant ships would be stopped at sea, and the merchant sailors were taken into the navy and replaced with malcontents, or sometimes trusted Navy men who would desert the merchant ship in the next port and return to their home ship. In the second half of the 18th century, England's colonial ports were heavily targeted for impressment. In 1757, when the Seven Years War among the European great powers was in full swing, a full 800 men were rounded up in New York City, "all manner of tradesmen and negroes." Resistance to impressment was one of the many things souring colonial North America on membership in the Empire. | | | After the Revolution ended and various protests in Great Britain and her colonies led to the gradual phasing out of impressment of people on land, a new legal fiction emerged: American sailors at sea were impressed on the feigned basis of their being British merchant sailors or pirates. In 1796, Congress passed a statute to address this problem by providing sailors with certificates: For twenty-five cents, any man with proof of citizenship could receive a certificate giving their name, height, age, and general appearance and stating they were a US citizen. It is difficult to say whether these certificates reduced impressment; They were not always respected, sometimes because the descriptions were too general. Early evolution of tattooing, scarification, and body modification involved making sure sailors were unique enough in appearance to be identifiable should they die at sea or be impressed - by making oneself more distinctive, the identifying document can work better. But still, it appears impressment declined after the Napoleonic Wars not because of identifying documents or international law concerns, but because Great Britain's naval hegemony was so assured there was no longer a need for a hundred-thousand man military navy.
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| | | Consider the following: Platform companies sit in the middle of all of your communications and control your access. Either your gmail or your Facebook could be used to send a communication that, stylistically, sounds like you and originates from where all your communications originate. And, if they control the logs, your ability to prove that it was not actually you sending that gmail, or making that Facebook post, or making that tweet is essentially zero. If tweets are now a critical method of political communication, it is trivial to imagine how this could be abused for the rise and fall of political fortunes. | |
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< | But it goes even deeper. Human beings are primates. Primates believe what they see and imagine what they hear, or read. Rapidly emerging deepfake technology showed in 2017 that it is possible, given enough video of a person, to seed a machine-learning algorithm with data and superimpose their features on a second video to the point where it is indistinguishable to the naked eye. Unsurprisingly, this started getting a lot of attention when it was used to make porn of celebrities, leading Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, and even Pornhub to ban it on the basis of being "involuntary pornography." But actually stopping the evolution of the software and increases in computing power is impossible. When these videos are indistinguishable to the naked eye, we will have to use software to identify bugs or oddities to determine their providence - a software checker for fake or real video. But, the fundamental philosophy of logic at the heart of computer science indicates if the software does a check for reality, that check can be accounted for, and the video can be made to pass the check. Our ability to believe what we see - and to prevent others from giving an incorrect account of us - will be in a level of danger that has never existed before. Eben himself, for all his privacy concerns, has given away enough video that someone could seed an algorithm and make a deepfake of him. With Google's work on analyzing writing styles and voice, in our lifetimes it will be possible for Google to create an Eben Moglen talk where a guy with his exact appearance walks around, talks using Eben Moglen language and voice, and says he was wrong about everything And, now, everyone in the 21st century produces and uploads enough video of themselves to make this possible by the time they are 15.
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> | But it goes even deeper. Human beings are primates. Primates believe what they see and imagine what they hear, or read. Rapidly emerging deepfake technology showed in 2017 that it is possible, given enough video of a person, to seed a machine-learning algorithm with data and superimpose their features on a second video to the point where it is indistinguishable to the naked eye. Unsurprisingly, this started getting a lot of attention when it was used to make porn of celebrities, leading Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, and even Pornhub to ban it on the basis of being "involuntary pornography." But actually stopping the evolution of the software and increases in computing power is impossible. When these videos are indistinguishable to the naked eye, we will have to use software to identify bugs or oddities to determine their provenance - a software checker for fake or real video. But, the fundamental philosophy of logic at the heart of computer science indicates if the software does a check for reality, that check can be accounted for, and the video can be made to pass the check. Our ability to believe what we see - and to prevent others from giving an incorrect account of us - will be in a level of danger that has never existed before. Eben himself, for all his privacy concerns, has given away enough video that someone could seed an algorithm and make a deepfake of him. With Google's work on analyzing writing styles and voice, in our lifetimes it will be possible for Google to create an Eben Moglen talk where a guy with his exact appearance walks around, talks using Eben Moglen language and voice, and says he was wrong about everything And, now, everyone in the 21st century produces and uploads enough video of themselves to make this possible by the time they are 15. | | | I do not know whether mass politics can survive such powerful faking technology. If we cannot know the provenance of political recordings and videos on the most profound level, will we have to reduce politics down to the web of people we can trust personally, and our second and third-order connections? It took too many years for people to understand and break the story of fake news and algorithms. We should not be so behind on this one. Control over our own provenance becomes doubly important when we may have to give accounts of ourselves and our behavior against the most convincing fakery that has ever existed. |
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