He listened.

The speaker started with a natural forest.

A gorgeous, maddening, complex, survived-of-the-fittest, multi-species, layered, organic feedback pathways, mycella-ridden delightful speckled sunlight happy, violent/eating/parasiting/singing insects/birds/people, robust kind of a forest.

They followed with a timber forest.

A straight-laced, single specied, splatted down, polygonally-bounded-tree-age-contoured, money spinning, automation hugging, zen simple, database-like, timber-producing, silent, vulnerable all-lined-up-in-rows kind of a forest.

The for loop iterated.

He wept for twenty minutes.

The campaign which won last year’s referendum for the UK to leave the European Union immediately dissolved, and in the process kindly open sourced some of its innovative canvassing software VICS – blog post, github repository.

This afternoon, prompted by a chat with Incubator of Change (a Liverpool based think tank working on new ideas for how to develop policies), I took a quick look at the code. Rather than lose what I learnt, I’m just throwing it up in this blog post.

This post is not meant to be a detailed or accurate account of the software, just an hour spent quickly scanning it. Pleases correct errors or add links to better analyses of it in the comments!

According to the blog post linked to above, the features Vote Leave needed that weren’t in existing software – and meant they had to make their own – were:

1. Live canvassing. I think this means it is a modern web based application, updating in real-time with new data and analytics. This requires a nice web interface and a permissions system for all the canvassers and local organisers to only have access to update or read data they need.
2. Sophisticated modelling – done by proper physicists who know what they’re doing, using machine learning. This was used to inform all sorts of things. e.g. content of leaflets sent to every household
3. Facebook adverts – targeted in detail in a sophisticated way. They bought over a billion digital adverts.

VICS isn’t a complete system. e.g. I’ve just checked, and it has nothing for generating Facebook adverts. I think VICS is just the core data entry and permissions system – i.e. the “Live canvassing part”.

The actual voting intention data is stored in another system (PAF) we don’t have the code to – as is the stuff that does machine learning and the stuff that does social media adverts. I could be wrong, this is just first pass looking at the code.

Nevertheless, this dump lets you learn a reasonable amount about their software and process. Below are some files to look at – even if you’re not technical, do click through. I’ve tried to choose ones you can learn something from anyway!

tools/db/create.sql – the schema for their database as to what is stored in VICS. It just has wards, constituencies and users (as in canvassers etc) with permissions for what they can access. No voter data.

paf-client/src/main/java/com/infinityworks/pafclient/PafClient.java – the functions for calling what they call “PAF”, their core API, which itself is not in this code dump. PAF is where the actual voter and intention data is stored. It’s a fairly basic API for getting lists of streets, voters in streets, and storing voting intention and other data about voters.

paf-stub/src/main/resources/json/paf-voter.json – this is a fake version of the upstream API for use in testing. This file is an example stub voter – it’s useful as it lets you see the data PAF contains about a voter. As you can see it is fairly straightforward, what you’d expect in this app. Note e.g. “wants_postal” (postal voting), “lift” (to the polling station), “intention” (how they intend to vote) etc. And “issues” being “cost”, “sovereignty”, “border” (key 3 issues for Vote Leave in the campaign). Plus “volunteer” – they used this to capture new volunteers. And, of course, contact by canvasser history. Oh yes, and this test voter has, amusingly, a French name – John Deaux.

web-client/app/views – HTML templates to let you see what each screen of the end user application contained. Maps of constituents, canvassing input forms, get out the vote (gotv) and so on.

web-server/src/main/resources/pdf/canvass_cover.pdf – hand made cover sheet for canvassers, telling them how to canvas.

web-server/src/main/java/com/infinityworks/webapp/clients/pdfserver/PdfClient.java – this code makes three PDFs for printing, by calling another API. They are for 1) canvassing, 2) get out the vote, 3) labels to get out the postal vote (links are to the forms for choosing the streets and so on).

web-server/src/main/java/com/infinityworks/webapp/rest/dto/LeaderboardStatsResponse.java – there’s a leaderboard of the best canvassers, wards and constituencies. I know from running various crowd sourcing efforts at mySociety that such league tables can be catnip for the best performing individuals.

Please do leave comments with other interesting things about this software you spot, or links to better blog posts or analyses of it.

In the late 1890s – the story goes – an ordinary boy in southern India heard an uncle mention the name of this holy mountain.

Arunchala!

Just this, just the name, started pulling him to it. The mountain is meant to be, literally, an incarnation of the deity Shiva.

Then, a while later, for no apparent reason, the boy had a sudden spiritual awakening on the nature of death. In final frustration during some pointless grammar exercises, he left home, headed for the mountain. He stayed there for the rest of his life.

Last month I arrived at the town next to the mountain. Tiruvannamalai!

I found, more than a century later, the flourishing ashram that the boy had started (full biography). Popular with Indians and Westerners. There are meditation halls and a cow farm.

I stopped for a while by this doorway, to listen with everyone else casually, peacefully, seriously to a tape recording of tracts by Sri Ramana Maharshi, the boy’s name when he became a guru.

The tracts were giving details of a Hindu mythos. Quite intelligent, fairly abstract and almost Buddhist in their nature. Some Hindu permanent soul details I didn’t take to. Well told, easy to absorb as they were the answers to questions Westerners had asked Ramana in person.

The next morning I woke well before dawn, too early for the main town temple that I had come for to be open. As if drawn by forces unknown to me, I started to climb the mountain. It rises 2617 feet above sea level. A guide appeared to help me.

We climbed all morning. I’d been ill. I was shattered.

We emerged to this view – the mountain stood proudly alone.

I helped this man rub milk into the rock here. I’d no idea why.

Bare foot, my guide and I made our way round to a tiny cave. Puja (prayer) paraphernalia had been left there – we left a few rupees to pay for refreshing it.

Yellow powder to daub on my head and rub into the lingam.

An oil lamp to ritually light.

A lingam of Shiva – the mountain/god – to ponder.

I sat a while cross legged, taking in the visceral, messy feel of these objects. My guide left me a while, he wanted to have a smoke. I fell asleep I think, or jumped some mental state, suddenly jolting awake.

Later I found that the ancient texts say…

All stones in that place Arunachala are lingams. It is indeed the abode of Lord Siva. … to fall asleep there is to be absorbed in samadhi, beyond the mind’s delusion.

Back outside, this man had finished making his puja of flowers where we’d put the milk. We paid him a few rupees.

In the only hut up there, we had tea cooked on a fire.

I bounced down the mountain, now beamish. I don’t know why.

I paid my guide (using a note a friend, during a conversation about meditation, had given me to help me out with demonetisation – thank you!). He turned out to be a sculptor. I left him, carving an image of Ganesh.

I believe nothing, Hinduism has no draw to me. And yet… I love these holy mountains.

Last night I watched Charlie Brooker’s news recap of the year. As I watched, the humour leavened things and left me entertained. But in my sleep, my mind has realised it had made me pretty angry. So a brief change in tone for this blog – a rant!

Charlie – both you personally, and you as a representative of the media – stop whining about the news bubble! You collectively all made the news bubble. Take some responsibility for it!

It’s cute and funny and post-modern to take the piss out of yourself for thinking the referendum on leaving the EU wasn’t a serious political event all year as remain was bound to win, and to take the micky out of yourself for going to bed on both Brexit and Trump’s election nights assuming they’d lost for sure when actually they won…

Yes it’s cute to be self-deprecating about that absolute failure of the main middle class intellectual UK media reporting. But it’s also pathetic.

Brexit

The news was absolutely useless at explaining Brexit to me as it happened. It didn’t help that the campaigns were useless too, and indeed many of the supporters of both campaigns who I knew. But they aren’t meant to be professionals reporting on the world for me and explaining how it works. The news industry that the BBC’s recap of the news year is representative of – that was their one job.

There seemed to be no understanding and no desire for analysis as to what was going on with the referendum. You’d think I might have read about it in the Guardian or at least in the Economist that I was paying for. But no, I had to rely on things like Simon Wardley’s blog or on my uncle sending actually good academic reports on the labour market effects of migration to have any idea why intelligent people were voting to leave the EU. I had to go off and read the Daily Express all by myself to gain any kind of understanding of the general mood amongst half the country.

So no Charlie, it’s pathetic apologia for your industry to just giggle at yourself for this disastrously bad failure of your industry’s reporting on the key UK political event of the year. It utterly failed in the worst possible way. Admit it explicitly, not just in jest, and do the work to not be so shit any more.

If you were surprised on the morning of the referendum result you just weren’t paying attention. Not only did some polls get the result right – all polls were so close and variable, you didn’t need to be looking hard to know there was a decent chance that leave would win.

You can’t just look at the average poll even if it wins by a tiny amount and assume that means that will be the result. It is probabilistic! If you don’t know this no you’re not funny or cute, you’re just being wilfully stupid in a destructive way. You’ve no basic idea how polls work, they’re just amusing numbers you sometimes share on social media.

Worse, you’ve no idea how to prepare your mind for multiple outcomes. You’re trying to use the news to reassure yourself, rather than understand reality. It’s pathetic. If you were surprised on the morning of Brexit, you need to completely alter your information diet and your approach to understanding the world.

All that applies to any politically aware citizen. It applies a hundred times more to someone like Charlie in his role representing the establishment media by doing the main news recap of the year.

Trump

This was even worse. The reporting on Trump all year was unbelievably bad. It consisted of finding tiny tiny moments when Trump said something that can be interpreted as bad, and only reporting on those in a one sided way, not realising why doing this increased his poll ratings. Watching him from a distance gave you no idea why tens of millions of people would vote for him.

I had to read Ian Welsh’s blog to find anyone to explain to me how Clinton was representative of neoliberalism, and both candidates were equally bad. And then, even though he’s a deeply problematic person in lots of ways, I had to resort to reading Scott Adams’ blog to understand the persuasion techniques Trump was using to win.

Why was this material not clearly explained in my Economist subscription, or the Guardian opinion pieces I was reading? Utter failure of professional media. I had to rely on a crowd funded social media consultant and an alt-right cartoonist for actually decent quality information. Seriously!

And no Charlie, it’s not funny you were surprised Trump won on election morning. It just means you were an idiot. No, polls have not been wrong recently, you just don’t know how to read them. For example, 538 (an obscure source to use in 2008, but hardly in 2016) were giving Clinton a 65% chance of winning. I’m going to put this in bold for people as it seems a common error:

When somebody has a 65% chance of winning it does not mean they have won!!!! It means there is a 2 in 3 chance that they will win. You roll one dice and have to get a 1, 2, 3, or 4 for Clinton to win. Actually pretty good odds for Trump when the prize is the presidency – pick up a dice, try to roll a 5 or 6! Feels possible, right?

So unless there’s, say, a 99.99% chance of victory going one way in an election, you shouldn’t be surprised whichever way it goes! Either could happen.

If you woke up after the election surprised Trump won, then you’re just an idiot who needs to understand basic probability. I’m sorry, it just isn’t an acceptable reaction to have been surprised. Learn not to have it again.

I expect better from our best people hired to work for our best public service broadcaster. It’s frankly embarrassing.

Summary

So, to summarise, on both of these supposed election upsets of 2016, which have made everyone in the UK college-educated bubble claim it was a terrible year, there were two failings in basic reporting by our media:

1. They didn’t investigate properly why so many people were voting the other way to the way they expected.
2. They didn’t understand basic probability, couldn’t read polls, so were surprised at the result.

The two are linked and reinforce each other. The reason I knew I had to go and do the research on why (1) myself was because the mysterious polling (2) was clear.

Failing in this way is excusable for a normal member of the public, we can hardly be expected to have the time do to this work. It is absolutely unacceptable for people working in the media. If you work in the UK media, and you were surprised by either Brexit or Trump on election morning, then you need to go back and retrain.

I’m a computer programmer, not a professional media worker, and I knew. Why didn’t you?

Disclaimer

For the record I voted Remain, but maybe there are potential opportunities from Leave in a ten year timeframe (it can’t be judged before at least ten years have passed, don’t even bother trying). I don’t endorse either Trump or Clinton, and I don’t need to as I’m not American. This blog post is in rant form deliberately, so do make me add nuance in the comments if you feel the need.

I went on a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation course in the Goenka school, at Bodhgaya in Bihar province in north India. 

It was a complex event – my emotions and thoughts about it have often changed dramatically in a day.

This blog post is more in note form than a cohesive, final account.

1. Silence

For 9 of the 12 days on site we were silent. Not just no spoken words – also no eye contact, no gestures, no communication with others. 

Just as Burning Man has exceptions to its no money rule – coffee, ice, illegal drugs – there are periods you can ask the teacher questions, and sometimes misunderstandings (problems with the audio equipment, an accidentally stolen shawl, a night terror) force communication. 

It was wonderous and unique. 

It takes away all the primate bullshit we usually wallow in. Who likes who, what does this person think, am I part of a useful group. I’m extrovert enough to love such stuff, yet to have a holiday from it was a relief. So much cognitive load released.

Strangely, this odd relationship makes me feel closer to my room mate because we both honoured it, than if we had talked. Solidarity is subtle, implicit. 

(The technical reason for the silence was interesting – it was the only way to stop us ever lieing so we were following monk rules.) 

I think it would be quite hard to experience this anywhere else. Communication with others is a large cognitive burden we take for granted and almost always have to do.

It was different, just to note, from loneliness. It was deliberate and complete, you couldn’t feel weak or self loathe for failing to initiate communication.

2. Monastic

No writing, no reading, no news, no cars (India! So of course there were l horns echoing occasionally in the distance), no money, no choice of food, no commute, no smartphones, no calendar, no radio, no negotiating, no cameras… 

The only labour cleaning yourself and your things and your rooms. And meditating. 

Butterflies, sunlight, trees, fog, simple food… Enough wonders buried in each moment to fill a life anyway.

I’ve avoided news before at Kentwell tudor recreations for two weeks. This was similar just more extreme and complete. Most news is so much junk.

I cried at the end of breakfast on the last day of noble science, knowing it was about to end.

Why can’t we live a little bit more like this? Maybe always cook one meal a day communally, maybe have some more communities you can live in a year or two with no commute.

3. Attention

Being forced to meditate ten hours a day with nothing else to do is a good boot camp. By far the most efficient way I think I could have learnt more about meditation. 

I’d done little before – used the Headspace app for 20 mins a day for a few months. Tried the hour a day technique in Vinay Gupta’s Cutting Machinery for a few days. 

The first few days were Anapana, a breathing attention meditation.

This done intensely gets you past the very basic distractions the mind creates – planning (I started thinking about what I’d do next time I had agency in 10 days time! Which was helpfully clearly absurd), remembering.

I feel more confident about how to watch them pass away, whatever kind of meditation I do in future.

This attention training isn’t the only purpose of the breathing. It focuses down to the upper lip only to enter the next phase,  see 4 below.

I felt nothing of sensations on/of my upper lip – eventually feeling weird insects walking on my nose and having a crazy hallucination like a red computer visualisation of my central face rotating and animated blue of my breathe flow. 

A bit nervous I asked the teacher about it and he said it was good as I was concentrating hard enough to make such thing happen. It was at least as dramatic an experience as the ones I was “meant” to have later. And there was no religious interpretation for it…

Everyone’s mind is different. 

4. Pain

I didn’t like Vipassana, the main technique, at all at first. It involves dwelling on each part of the body with utter attention and noticing the most tiny sensation – a puff of air or the weight of clothes if you can’t find anything else. Tedious in a hard way and feels meaningless – why the senses, rather than say thoughts?

Goenka has this “adhitthana” concept that three times a day at a big group meditation you must be determined not to move for the whole hour. The pain this inevitably creates then, I think, gives you a handle to take hold and form the equanimity you’re meant to be having about your feelings. 

Alas, at the end of the seventh day I did this too well (by being meta determined at a higher level) and hurt my knee. This combined with Goenka’s tapes going a bit crazy… Put me in a bad place for two days. See next section below. 

On the very very last day after talking to others, I had a couple of really good Vipassana meditations. Managed to not be distracted for more than a second or two or fidget and covered my whole body several times.

It felt useful – I would use it now, especially if in pain or if in need of a non verbal, secular prayer.

5. Sect

The marketing copy and course claim to be secular. They’re not. Goenka’s Vipassana centres are in my view an evangelical Buddhist sect. That’s cool, however I feel tricked because that isn’t made clear.

Constantly the materials say it is all about what you observe yourself. Which it to some extent is, and they have lots to teach on that. 

However in the training audio and daily chatty video of the founder Goenka, he is religious. As a basic example, he assumes reincarnation. A controversial supernatural belief, of which even his view seems naive to me (more like a Hindu soul than a recycled aggregate).

More worryingly, he imposes his beliefs about what we are experiencing on us, and in the case of laggard students like me, does so before I even had the experience. Umm, it’s dangerous to prime me to think an unusual new mental experience has a certain meaning! 

When you do Vipassana long enough – some people on day 7 of their first retreat, others it takes a while longer – you start to sense “subtle sensations” and then experience a “free flow” where your mind rapidly scans your body. This is reproduceable experience, although I got the barest hint of it. Most attendees felt it and describe it consistently.

Goenka interprets this experience as our “sankhara” being cleansed. He gets fervent, it sounds like he thinks that the meditation is removing sins from past lives. He says if you get gross sensations,  that is such sins coming back out and you must work harder, meditate more (with equanimity) to remove them.

The teaching materials got more and more desperate to drive us to work to cleanse ourselves. They claimed this is the only one way to do that. Not just Buddhism, not just Vipassana, but this very specific method preserved in Burma for a thousand years.

I was having technical problems myself at the same time (see “Pain” above) and the combination meant I stopped working on the eighth day. I had to stretch my sore knee all the time anyway. It was gruelling, I felt lonely. I nearly left.

The chanting Goenka does in his abrasive voice was like scratching my ears with nails. (Except for some reason at breakfast!) 

I spent two days doing just Anapana, then just thinking. Which by the end was lovely too. 

6. Community

I was surprised when we came out of silence that everyone else was really happy. Maybe half the people were Indian, half Western.

They enjoyed it, some are on their second or fifth course, others are new and don’t think it was too evangelical. 

Social conditioning kicks in, and I wonder if I’m mad. Did the isolation drive me crazy? 

Later I read up more online, and unsurprisingly find well written, interesting criticisms. This summary of three of them is the best starting point.

Yet… 

The Vipassana people turn out to be lovely and interesting. For various reasons, I spent a few more days than I intended with them in Bodhgaya after the course. 

There’s an instant bond and solidarity. They’re open and kind, from all over the world. People trying to improve themselves. Some with an energy of calm that can’t be faked.

I feel part of them. Even though I still think it’s a religious sect with a cleverly marketed meditation course that causes it to spread.

Not so different from things I’ve seen and done in Christianity?

I feel more deceived than I was there. The evangelism is less honest. I don’t claim to be objective about this, it may be cultural stuff that I misinterpreted.

7. Equanimity

So, the practice is to have detailed attention and to be equanimous about what you observe. Over and over again with no distractions. 

It is great. Especially if you’re prone to anger, or to dwelling on bad things. Useful just at a basic self help level.

Even if you know there is no point being riled by things you’re not going to change, how else do you bake that attitude deep into your soul? 

My big problem with it culturally is the way it devalues the senses and the wonder of the physical world. Isn’t our will to power also glorious? Where is the joy in dancing, in loving, in craving, in living? Can’t a meditation embrace this, not cut it out? 

Finally, maybe just maybe the meditation goes somewhere more. As well as self help, are there useful insights you get? Does the world as it really is unravel before you? Or is it just worship of odd mental phenomena?

And is it really not possible to study these mind phenomena scientifically, methodically, carefully? Why not?

Overall, I’d recommend the course just for the experience of noble silence.

Or just as an intense bootcamp to get you over some very early meditation hurdles. 

Or just as a very personal religion lesson on how spiritual beliefs can spread.

Or just as a way to meet a whole new interesting category of people you haven’t met before.

Or just as a more provocative, engaging philosophy prompt than reading another book. 

So five recommendations from me, probably worth going! Just be aware it may be tough, and Buddhism is a religion, not a philosophy.

Also, other similar traditions run similar courses, although they’ve less centres. Check them out too.
Equanimous.

He took my hand. “Follow me. Move fast. Don’t stop.”

I’d spent the early morning looking round the tranquil mosques of ancient Champaner at the bottom of the holy hill.

(This is a good guide to them, plus I left a comment on buses which might be useful. It’s in Gujarat, west India, a little north of Bombay.) 

Now it was time to get to the top. Pavagadh. During the Diwali national holiday.

My guardian angel appeared just as I was utterly lost and led me to a crazy place where jeepney hurtle up and down, passengers throwing themselves at them to get in.

Two lads would often lead, running and barging into a moving truck to claim it for the rest of their extended family. A dozen people rammed into each one at all angles.

He was shocked how long it took us. He was a businessman who lived at the top of the hill, running a shop there. He said he was helping me as others had helped him when travelling in Europe, the Middle East and South America, and I can help others in turn.

Somehow we rammed ourselves in and bounded up the hill in jolts like spears fishing. 

Half way up was just as crazy – an endless queue for the cable car. My guide turned out to have an uncle who worked there.

We were whisked VIP to the front and on board.

From the car the thick, snaking pilgrims up the mountain on foot are visible. 

So many people! My first guardian angel introduces me to brothers, cousins uncles in their shops selling food, staged photos, puja materials. 

I say goodbye at his shop, picking up trinkets of Kali, goddess of power and subject of the main temple chaotically perched at the top of the hill. Onwards!

A dressed up cow charges for prayers. 

Shoes everywhere. 

I track up the down path, accidentally skipping the wait, getting away with it as the only European for a hundred miles. A place to tie up my shoes, hop over a bar, and I’m in the temple. 

Oh Kali! 

No photographs – you’ll have to go yourself.

As in all Hindu temples the centre must be experienced in real reality. To have line of sight of the deity for just one short moment!

VIP treatment, the attendant in delight and surprise at my foreignness, pauses to give me extra time. The mark on my forehead of puja to Kali.

The design of the shrine, the materials are ugly. Yet, I am elated. Everyone is elated.

Oh yes and that’s my second guardian angel, a student with his younger brother. Magically Kali makes them appear to go down the hill with.

Although I have a return cable car ticket, the queue is already long, so we decide to go down on foot. It is slow, hours and gets crushed and scary.

At a pinch point of a narrow bridge and the merging of an up and down path with traffic control guards, I can feel why people die regularly at pilgrimage sites round the world.

My new angel gets a tattoo and then finds he can’t pay for it as his brother had 100 rupees stolen in the crush.

I lend it to him, and yes he does pay me back when he meets his cousin at the half way house. His cousin is distraught, crying hysterically as they have lost his father.

They come every year from Ahmedabad, a couple of hours drive away. 

I leave them in a rush to be sure to catch a bus later, and somehow I get into a 4WD back down, sat above the other front passenger at an impossible angle. 

You get no pause to reflect. The mountain – dirty, uncontrolled, raw – sucks me in and spits me out again.

Was it all a dream? 

A two year old draft blog post I just found, which is too good not to publish. Age leavens its earnest attempts to be ahead of trend.

New computer technology used to be my relaxation, my hope.

As the world has changed, that comfort has gone.

We grew up in a digital village. Now we’re in its seedy metropolis.

A decade or so ago, I used my energy for emotionally hard problems to try and help with international development or democracy or climate change.

All the while, my childhood hobby was getting exponentially more powerful. Wonders appeared each year – the mouse, 3D graphics, buying things online, Python, Kuro5hin, a pocket electronic diary/address book, rsync, Wikipedia…

I now realise that this gave me the strength, the hope to deal with the hard problems.

Yes, there were threats to this nascent information society.

However, by the time I knew about each threat, there were already contervailing forces – free software, TCP/IP, the web. I joined those as they were being taken up by early adopters, missing the long, lonely innovator phase.

So even when our information society was in parlous danger, I was in massive, growing, hopeful communities fixing the problem.

There are three reactions to this. Perhaps we can make them stages of reaction.

1. Just despair

Snowden revelation’s about the routine spying we are all under combine with a certain geek knowledge that even if you love GCHQ, the same backdoors are being used by the Chinese, the Russians, organised crime… Who knows who!

Safe havens such as the Linux operating system no longer feel safe. It’s an age when massive security holes in even open source software are evocatively branded – heartbleed, shellshock.

I can’t even feel safe in the privacy of my once obscure command line. The common command “less” has a severe hole. “less” is the geek word for merely glancing at something on my computer. That should be simple and safe, but now I know it is flawed so attackers could remotely run their own nasty programs on my computer.

What can I trust?

2. Leap to the new fun

Where are the wonders now? It’s much easier to just get excited about them!

Skip the Internet now its tricky… Let’s start learning about augmented reality! Now that Magic Leap has $400 million to commercialise light field displays, let’s read up on our OpenGL and fesnangle a job projecting virtual pets into the palm of our hands.

(My favourite early job was making virtual pets)

That doesn’t have enough roar for you? Space exploration is looking quite fun right now. Let’s brush up on our rocket chemistry, move to LA and help colonise Mars.

Electric cars, blockchain, solar power, DIY bio… So much to pick from!

This summer, I went to Britain’s newish hackerspace festival Electromagnetic Field. The programming of the talks, and the attitude of us attendees, was effectively:

Oh man online privacy is so fucked … Wow shiny! Look at that drone!

Yeah, look at that brilliant quadcopter. Under-regulated, about to crash into aircraft this month, probably used to assassinate someone next.

Jumping to the next good thing is a cute, a tempting attitude. Yet deeply immoral.

Math is hard, let’s go shopping!

3. Be professional

I suspect this swing happens to all professions.

Post-war European architects were on a mission to build housing for everyone in society. Monsterous tower blocks later, funded by South American right wing dictatorships… By the 1990s, they’re building funky sky scrapers for wealthy corporations. Destruction, guilt, complexity everywhere. (See introduction to Radical Cities for a summary.)

Nuclear physicists, it’s obvious why their tech went evil! Well no.

Last week, at an exhibition just across the road from work, I read about three excited Liverpool physicists. They were playing with their radiation in the 1930s, for medical purposes! Using X-rays for the first time to get an invasive object out of a child’s foot. Developing cancer treatments.

And yet, the war comes, they already have one of the world’s few cyclotrons. Before they know it, whisked to Los Alamos for cutting edge refresher courses on quantum mechanics, and leading roles in the Manhatten project.

One of them paid penance for the bomb, spending much of the rest of his life campaigning against it, including founding Pugwash. They’re the organisation which makes the nuclear doomsday clock.

(For a bit more on this, “Why the future doesn’t need us” by Bill Joy covers it, and in its own way much of the ground of this blog post)

So seriously, we’re just whiny. Finally noticing our shiny tool can be used for evil. We had a lovely grace period when computers were innocent. They’re not any more.

Just being sad it isn’t fun any more won’t fix it – professionalism will.

Partly, some of us are fighting a rearguard action – desperately trying to co-opt a few new pieces of information tech, to create new protocols, to boldly reinvent business models.

That’s kinda nice – and you should keep donating to Mozilla, and crowd funding Indiephone. Watch some of my videos over at Redecentralize. Send your first GPG email using Mailpile. Every tiny action adds up.

And it won’t be enough.

I think the missing piece is a code of honour. A hipocratic oath for software.

It has to be shameful, humiliating, career destroying to make insecure, anti-human software.

We can sign it with an elipitic curve cryptography pen on the vellum parchment of a block chain, for all I care.

And sign it we must.

First, do no harm.