Finite Optimism

Toward the end of his book “No Time Like the Future,” Michael J. Fox introduces the poem Antigonish, by William Hughes Mearns.

Said to be inspired by a ghost haunting a house in Antogonish, Nova Scotia, the poem goes like this:

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away . . . 

When I came home last night at three

The man was waiting there for me

But when I looked around the hall

I couldn’t see him there at all!

Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!

Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door . . . (slam!) 

Last night I saw upon the stair

A little man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

Fox uses the poem as a metaphor to explain the hallucinations produced by one of the drugs meant to counter other side effects of a different drug, taken to moderate his Parkinson’s disease.

From the previous chapter, though, an equally apt comparison, one likely Fox makes on purpose: Describing fear he felt while on a safari in Africa, he writes the following, after first seeing a leopard sunning in a tree, and then the paranoia brought on later by thinking another is nearby:

“The leopard from the previous day hadn’t scared me. It was the leopard in the tree at twilight – the one that I didn’t see, the one that probably wasn’t even there – that scared me stupid.”

Coming from a family where paranoia doesn’t just run, it gallops, that line, and the poem that followed it, spoke to me. As, oddly, does Fox’s optimism, even an optimism he admits is finite. Because with that paranoia comes an increasing pessimism, a pessimism that belies a life of faith or, as Tolkein put it, “hope without guarantees.”

So, like Fox, I have some mental work to do. And I’d best get to it quickly. After reading this memoir, that’s probably a sentiment Fox would agree with.

This book started slow for me. I got it for Christmas and started reading it then, but then finished it in a gulp this week. It’s one I’m going to have t re-read, and one worthy of that effort.

Seems an odd poem to put into a foxtrot . . . 

Ethical Dilemma Case Study: Cliff Stoll

“We’re the good guys, Marty.”

Who, we might ask, are the good guys?

Cliff Stoll, an astronomer and early computer adopter, asks that question in his book “The Cuckoo’s Egg,” where he tells his tale of meandering through the offices and mentalities of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and other civilian and military entities tied to the federal government as he tries to figure out why there’s a 75 cent accounting error related to computer use at the Livermore Berkeley Lab in California.

All I have to do is say the name “Berkeley” and we conjure up a vision of hippies, anarchists, free spirits and free thinkers who would just as soon blow up puppies and kittens for sport than help the spies and soldiers in the federal government track down a computer hacker.

But he does help them and catches flack for it from his free-spirited compatriots in California.
Clearly an ethical dilemma. But here’s how he states it:

All my buddying up with spooks in suits and playing computer cop came from my appreciation for creative anarchy. To have the networks as our playground, we have to preserve our sense of trust; to do that, we have to take it seriously when people break that trust.

I’m saddened to find talented programmers devoting their time to breaking into computers. Instead of developing new ways to help each other, vandals make viruses and logic bombs. The result? People blame every software quirk on viruses, public-domain software lies underused, and our networks become sources of paranoia.

Fears for security really do louse up the free flow of information. Science and social progress only take place in the open. The paranoia that hackers leave in their wake only stifles our work . . . forcing administrators to disconnect our links to networked communities.

Stoll tells his story in “The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking A Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage,” a book published in 1989, when the internet we know today didn’t exist and only universities, the government, and the military had networked computers. I’m old enough to remember the heady days of the early 1990s when as a student, I got my first email address and spent my first time perusing the internet. I even created a few websites, which, thanks to the Wayback Machine, can still be visited.

For what it’s worth, we have moved into a more secure and more paranoid internet, much as Stoll predicted. I work for a government contractor and am told our network undergoes thousands of break-in attempts a day. We’re regularly tested on our ability to recognize and ignore attempts to phish for personal information and for ways to break into that network, and we’re just involved in the cleanup of nuclear waste. We are the good guys.

But we see how far we’ve come, and sometimes wonder at what we’ve given up.

I built those foolish websites of my own by hand, learning HTML by looking at how other web pages built their stuff. I don’t do that anymore – I rely on others to do that work for me for free, at Facebook and at Google (owner of Blogger.com, where my personal blog resides). But what have I given up for the low-cost, little-work entry into the internet? Privacy. I’m a commodity. People other than me make money off the silly stuff I put on the web.

I’ve had my credit card information stolen three times (thanks, in all three cases, to iTunes, thank you very much Apple). I’ve been banned from Facebook for the space of 24 hours for using the term “white trash” in a joking manner. A fellow I know in Arizona, a former LDS bishop who writes an inspiring weekly blog, cannot post links to his blog on Facebook anymore because those hostile to the church ganged up and got Facebook to give him the boot, saying his stuff doesn’t meet Facebook’s “community standards.”

Maybe we’re more secure. But we’re giving up a lot. Associate with the wrong person, and you’re unpersonned, to borrow a word from George Orwell. Today, we call it “cancelled,” or “cancel culture.” Orwell predicted it. And it’s happening.