Build a Bridge and Get Under it - Community as Troll Fiction

Here's a premise for some speculative fiction:  Imagine a world in which the Internet was just another way for idle monkeys like us to sling shit at one another and tell entertaining stories about it.

I know that the Internet has other eminently valuable uses: sharing cat photos, running porn sites, facilitating the rapid distribution of cultural products (piracy,) astroturfing and corporate advertising.

Slinging shit and telling stories is something humans are going to do in any communication medium because those activities are fundamental to our formation of community.  Communities only form when monkeys like us can stake out a territory (by slinging shit) and they only persist by representing the community as having values (by telling stories.)  We all carry important messages, like Kilgore Trout's character Zog, and like Zog, we are all brained with a golf club by the head of the house.  So it goes.

Recently some really good shit-fights and stories have arisen.

There was the story of Gamer Gate, where the GamerGaterHaters and the Social Justice Warriors were only interested in truth in journalism, or only protecting the interests of the vulnerable and oppressed.

Then there's Award of the Rings, in which the peaceful and happy folk of Science Fiction Fandom are being invaded by evil troll spawn who are attempting to awaken the evil talisman which has long slumbered harmlessly in their bosom.  Fortunately the true and righteous bearers of the Award, who represent all the positive aspects of humanity, are able to spirit this avatar away before it can be reunited with its maker, the embodiment and source of evil in the world. SPOILER ALERT: in the end the good guys get a free ride on some giant eagles and get made into a 3-part mega-movie.

This story is compelling and rich: it stings the nostrils (in a good way.)

What's vexing to the reader is that the same narrative is being projected from both sides of the conflict!  I propose to consolidate and resolve the narrative conflict in the fictional character RequiresHate, the least fixed point in this DAG of he-said-she-said

RequiresHate was a fan and sometime reviewer who used to flame Science Fiction authors who were women of color for not being serious enough in their condemnations of heteronormative patriarchal oppression.  In doing so, she is alleged to have threatened one FWoC with dog-rape (truth be told, she didn't, she merely wished it upon her - you stay classy, SF Fandom.)

RequiresHate was identified ('outed', though not 'doxed' as far as I can tell) as a Science Fiction Author who was also a Woman of Color (so many capitals) called Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

RH/BS was simultaneously a SF Author, and a SF Fan.  She was at various times a candidate for a Hugo for SF fandom and for a Hugo for SF authorship.  She was simultaneously berating people for ignoring the plight of the oppressed while using the weapons of the patriarchy to make her point.  Perhaps in this she believed V.I. Lenin's "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."  Or perhaps she wanted to destroy competitors in the lucrative corner of SF she wished to dominate.

I don't know.  I don't even care.

• The truth is that RH/BS is a white male living in a basement.
• The truth is that RH/BS is a shrill firebrand feminazi seeking to take SF away from its owners.
• The truth is that RH/BS is a talking dog who sneaks onto its owners' laptop at night to post.
• The truth is that RH/BS is an AI derived from lobster neurons beaming its posts into the net via a pink "laser" from its orbiting platform.

No.  The truth is that the Internet is a medium, and the medium is a game, and the game is collaborative fiction.  The truth is that most people playing this game have no idea that the child they're talking to is an FBI agent and the FBI agent they're talking to is a child, the 20-something hottie they're making a play for on the internet dating site is a 40-something man in his undies, the wise old man they're talking to is a young woman who (rightly enough) would rather not have that known, 'cos it cramps her style.

The Hugo pugilists and the GamerGaters and the SJWs are all playing one game - its name is "The Internet: Serious Business."  There's another game, I'll call it "All for the LULZ."

The internet is the only story left and only the Trolls are writing it.  The internet is a game where the game is not to admit it's a game, because heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. "What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?"

The Trolls go to encounter for the millionth time the unreality of Internet and to forge in the smithy of their posts the uncreated conscience of their race.

The Trolls are the Aaron Spellings of the new millennium, writing the pointless but entertaining stories, dragging you happily down to their level, dancing outside themselves: Dionysian revellers whose intoxicant of choice is digital nihilism.

Your pretence, your privilege, your overarching delusion, is that anything we say or do here matters, while we're all Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

NSW to Privatise Topographic Mapping

My GIPA request for the topographic data covering NSW has failed, because GIPA says that if the government presents the data for sale, it doesn't have to provide any other access. Problem with that is that (a) the price is exorbitant and out of any relation to the marginal cost of production, (b) what data they have for sale is about to be sold wholesale to "a big international IT company," if the Minister has any say in it. This, I think, is why LPI and the Minister have been dragging the chain on replying to my proposals, trying to get as much done as possible done on the privatisation before the public has time to react.

I haven't heard a peep from the Minister in response to my proposal that LPI crowdsource their data for National Parks, so I guess it's time to go public about it, so I sent the following to the SMH:

NSW Land and Property Information [LPI] have map databases upon which we all rely, but they contain some dangerous errors. I detail (in this modest proposal) a couple of cases where the maps are quite significantly out of alignment with reality, there are many more such cases.

This matters. In one case, NSW Parks and Wildlife (NPWS) advise that the only safe path through a field of unexploded ordnance (a former Defence firing range, you could almost say a 'mine field') is the marked path, but the path marked on our State's maps bears only a passing relationship to the actual path.

It matters, too, because peoples' lives depend upon it. You will, no doubt, remember the sad death of David Iredale in 2006. Navigational confusion played a large part in his misadventure. The Coroner recommended that NPWS improve its signs, but Iredale was only carrying a sketch map! Improved mapping, better access to maps, would have served the boys better.

Per this SMH story the state intends to privatise its mapping functions because it is 'not in a financial position to continually upgrade the services provided by the agency as technology changed.'

LPI is certainly unable to maintain accurate and up-to-date data for some areas in NSW, but the most cost-effective and effective solution is not privatisation, one part of the solution is to be found in crowdsourcing, as I outline in my proposal above.

LPI struggle with effective electronic distribution of geographic information, I would say that's because it is not in their DNA. They see Google maps and believe that if they could only find a sugar daddy to take all that useless data for money, everything would be better ... clearly, an ability to deal with commercial reality is also not in their DNA.

What should happen, now, is that LPI should forget about trying to run as a profit centre, in some mad 1980s Thatcheresque throwback, and they should take note of the Bureau of Meteorology - which runs the most accessed website in Australia by simply providing a good service needed by all. LPI should and could achieve this kind of prominence and public utility by simply giving up its (completely illusory) belief that it holds Crown Copyright in the State's topographic data, distributing it freely, and welcoming the willing collaboration of the population by crowd sourcing ... it's not like they can do it without us.

The author of a track in bushland is whoever forms the track.

Skill and Judgement

A formed walking track made through the bush is an artistic work in Australia, and hence subject to copyright, because the creativity, skill and judgement exercised in selecting its route makes it a sculpture or engraving, and is a work of artistic craftsmanship.

In creating a walking track, one doesn't simply follow a bearing from start to end point, but rather actively chooses a route over terrain.  The choices made by a walker are conditioned by the topography, surface area, ground cover and a desire to arrive at certain points of interest.

The formation of a bush track satisfies all of the criteria enunciated by the Federal Court in the Sensis Case (Telstra Corporation Limited v Phone Directories Company Pty Ltd [2010] FCA 44 (8 February 2010)):  the expenditure of “independent intellectual effort” involving a “creative spark” and the exercise of a requisite “skill and judgment”.

Such works could be considered Land Art, and many famous examples of such works exist.

Case:  Folly Point.

We can consider a specific case, the formation of the Folly Point track in the Budawangs.  John Evans gives an excellent account of walking the track in 2010, and includes maps, kml tracks, photos and videos.

At the end-point of Folly Point track there's a pass named Watsons Pass leading from the cliff line into a deep gorge.  The pass was named for Colin Watson, who is held to have discovered it.  Colin Watson says, in his autobiography (pp 163):

I decided to explore farther below Folly Point and to start cutting a track to this point with machetes.  Glen Wilson, Bruce Ingram and Howard Dries left on Bank Holiday, 1962, weekend and took a day exploring the best way out to Folly Point, a distance of about five miles.

We are given the date of creation, the authors' names, and the statement that they had to explore to find the "best way" for the track to be cut.  This is a creative work requiring substantial skill and judgement, which is further proven by the fact that an entirely novel and original pass was found as part of the exploration.

State Copyright Claims

The Corang topographic map sheet contains a reproduction of the Folly Point track, over a claim of copyright by the State of NSW.

I think, in view of the Sensis case, any claim to owning the copyright of Watson's track would have to fail in view of the clearly demonstrable provenance of the work.  The mere compilation of the track does not confer on the publisher of the map any copyright recognised by the law of the Commonwealth.

Tracks of Ancient Provenance

Most of the tracks in the Budawangs can be traced back through the literature to Aboriginal walking tracks, bridal paths (many of which followed the Aboriginal tracks,) roads formed by timber getters in the early 1900s (and before.)

In none of these can any authorship be asserted by the map making authority on behalf of the state.

The Cartographer's Art

While there is, no doubt, an art of cartography, and while I believe that a great deal of skill and judgement may be exercised in the recognition and recording of geomorphological features such as cliff lines and swamps, and land cover, it is certain that a map maker cannot claim authorship of all features recorded on a map they draw - even more so when the systems used to produce the map are "designed to limit originality, not provide for it" (Federal Court Judgement, above.)

When we subtract (from a topo map) contours (derived from DEM models) water features (derived from DEM and hydrological models) tracks and trails (created by someone other than the map maker) there's not a whole lot left.

Cliffs, what cliffs?

I was looking in detail at the (poorly georeferenced) sketch map overlaying the topo map.  underneath is a pseudo-coloured altitude wash:

Here's roughly the same area with red polygons for the topo's cliffs ... *way* out:

Here's a GPS track (in blue)

 Same GPS track with pseudo-coloured slope wash, derived from 1sDEM

Note that the particular slope calculation (gdaldem slope) is really chunky ... not unexpected, really, as the scan is 3m vertical res but only something like 30m horizontal res (whatever 1 arc-second is at the surface of the earth.)  Part of it, too, is the colour quantization - I'm guessing the display is only doing 8 bits of colour.

The contours are much more informative, even though they're derived from the same scan ... this is, I think, because contours can extract information from more than one data point ... they presuppose continuity which permits that.

Just for completeness' sake, here's the GPS track, the topo track and the topo cliffs overlayed on google's imagery.

No bushwalking in fire season.

Closing tracks and whole areas of national parks is not about protecting bushwalkers from wildfire, it is only about protecting bush from bushwalkers' fires. As such, it is a short-sighted practice, based on false premises, doomed to fail in the medium- to long- term, but it does have the effect of putting off the inevitable. Short-term thinking at the political level will win every time.

The fact we haven't had a Blue Mountains bushfire this time around is mainly attributable to heavy surveillance of known arsonists, and luck. A bushwalker cooking dinner is indistinguishable from an arsonist, in the governmental model, since both have the effect of kicking off a chain reaction we are unable to control. Since arson surveillance has worked to prevent the blue mountains sparking up (and it has, make no mistake,) of course the government will extend the ban to anyone with the ability to make fire.

SITREP: NSW, all of it, is tinder-dry after an historically dry summer. The fuel load is very high as a consequence of the drought breaking a couple of years back. The National Parks and Wildlife Service [NPWS] has (for some reason I don't understand(*)) stopped preventative/mosaic burning to reduce fuel load. Canberra went up recently, Victoria went up recently. The fire service is completely focused on preventing damage to property (with consequent loss of life.) The Lib-NP coalition are only fairly recently in government - they don't want a disaster. They don't really care much about bushwalkers, they care a lot about adverse media coverage and property owners, hence any argument based on risk to bushwalkers will have no impact.

NPWS is consequently, and quite understandably, highly risk-averse. For example: NPWS fire policy for Royal NP was to 'prevent' wildfires for 15-20 years after the last major fire ... how they're going to achieve that is beyond my ken, but that was the policy last time I looked. The decision makers are operating under the delusion that they can stop the bush burning indefinitely if they can just keep flame away from it, and this is the fundamental reason they've closed the parks.

Seems to me quite likely that there's going to be a conflagration sometime soon (this summer, next summer) and that there's nothing anyone can do, now, to prevent it (or even, really, to ameliorate it.) The current light rain doesn't really put out the fires currently burning, it just means the RFS can't backburn.

It's pure luck that the weather happens to have been favourable. A pure fluke has delayed the inevitable. Sometime in the next little while we will have a week of extremely hot weather, and then an afternoon of strong winds, and there will be another series of wildfires. Property will be destroyed, people will die. The NPWS decision makers are keen that it not happen on their watch.

I could be completely wrong, but to the extent that I understand the issue: Australia's dominant flora has evolved to cause fire. For millenia aboriginal and (for centuries) historical pastoral practice was to selectively burn to keep the understories clear, and to generate feed for native and then introduced grazing animals. If I understand it correctly, it is necessary to burn selectively over cooler months to avoid conflagrations (although the art of doing this effectively has been lost.)

We, for some reason(*), have chosen not to maintain the country, and we will (as a direct consequence of this) suffer the consequences.

As far as National Parks go, I blame the Wilderness Act which militates against burning because it pretends that something called Wilderness can exist without any human interaction or intervention. It is apparent to me that this model of the bush is a damaging fantasy based on 19th century romantic notions.

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* Actually, it might have something to do with cuts to Rural Fire Service and NPWS funding.

Fun and Cartography

I've been playing around with maps.  Taking the current map vectors then georeferencing maps that are older than I am, and overlaying them.  I've got 5m contours from the DEM.  It's as close to state of the art as I can get it.

And I've been doing some musing.

Here's an extreme detail to show you what I mean:

The orange regions are cliff, the light blue sold and dashed lines are creeks, the grey lines are 5m contours.

There are three renderings of the same track:

• Dark blue is a modern recent GPS track.
• Pink is an (improperly georeferenced) track from the ancient map - you will have to make the obvious translation yourself.
•  Dashed black line is the state's topographic map's version.

The GPS and the historical trails are highly conformant to the contours - this is the trail on the ground, following ridges, moving from coll to coll along saddles, avoiding creek crossings.  These tracks and the contours are empirically derived, from walking on the ground and from satellite observation respectively, whereas the state topo trail bears no relation to the topography.

What strikes me is how conformant the actual tracks are to the contours.

Which gets me thinking:  crowd-sourcing maps is obviously a good thing, because the herd paths are a kind of least-energy path across the landscape, but also that it ought to be possible to generate analytically, for any two points, a least energy path across a given terrain.  One would avoid cliffs, creek crossings, and unnecessary crossing of contours.  One would presumably add some land-covering smarts (to avoid swamps and scrubby terrain.)

Here's Google Earth's most recent imagery

And here's some from 2006:

Secret Bushwalker Business

Sydney is remarkable in being surrounded by some beautiful bushland, some of it designated wilderness.  Sydney's sprawl is the result, it is said, of a conspiracy between hedonists and property developers.

Is a Sydney bushwalker making an expedition into a wilderness a hedonist or a property developer, or perhaps a little of each?  How are we to balance the two, and how are we to decide which places are public, and which private?

Wilderness - what is it?

Beautiful as some of it is, none of the wilderness is pristine, all of it is marked by European and Aboriginal occupation.  For example, we can measure the effects of rabbit control measures in the ages of trees everywhere - the rabbits ringbark young native trees, and so the forests have been scarred (albeit imperceptibly to us.)  Interestingly, there is evidence that having dingos range around decreases the population of ferals, but of course they shoot dingos, don't they?

Wilderness is a 19th Century romantic concept, you can read all about it in Thoreau, Nietzsche, and a hundred others.  Wilderness is held to have restorative and spiritual properties, and its existence is held even to be a measure of our civilisation, in that we exercise our considerable economic power in order to leave some natural places unexploited ('unspoiled'.)

By definition in the NSW Wilderness Act 1987, a wilderness is an area which is "together with its plant and animal communities, in a state that has not been substantially modified by humans and their works or is capable of being restored to such a state."

By that definition, there are perhaps no wildernesses in NSW, as both Aboriginal and Colonial land use, and the non-native fauna introduced by each have changed the state in ways we may not now be able to fully comprehend, let alone remediate.

However, and regardless of the vagueries of legislative definition: the hopelessly romantic, completely understandable desire to commune with 'Nature' (or at least those parts of it which don't involve blood, death, cruelty, mutilation, excreta, etc) is widespread in our population.  I endorse the sentiment and enjoy the 'wilderness' we have as yet not despoiled.

Cartography is Power.

I have been studying beautiful old maps first drawn before I was born, of an area I have come to know reasonably well in my old age.  The old maps have details lost to later generations because knowledge of the features might encourage bad behaviour and degradation of the sites.  Some camping caves (which may have been aboriginal occupation sites too) and some features designated 'abo sharpening grooves' (the abbreviation due to lack of space, I'm sure) have been lost to modern maps.

I have also pieced together, from published reports, guidebooks, conversations and memories, information about other exploitable features (tracks, routes, passes, campsites, caves, aboriginal sites) which are not in the modern maps.

I understand that the elision of features from later maps has been a considered act, intended to preserve the features from human degradation.  The approach has been "if people know these are here, they will be trashed."  But now I can make maps, high quality maps, and publish them to billions ... what am I to do?

I understand the keeping of secrets, and the necessity that people be initiated into knowledge of the land.  I understand how this totemic distribution of knowledge (through bushwalking clubs, affiliation groups) has the effect of reducing the impact of modern humans on the fragile land.

This is what the Aboriginals did.  They distributed land-use knowledge totemically, initiation was required to possess a right over the land in part, or its exploitable resources in a locale.

What I'm fascinated by is how this distribution mechanism is being replicated in modern society, where the totems are now bushwalking clubs.

Initiation, Knowledge, Ethics.

I recently found a 1930s monograph from the Australian Museum containing a trip report and detailed descriptions of a large number of Aboriginal rock carving sites, north-west of Sydney.  I plotted a course to them and organised an expedition.  I contacted the NPWS (government authority responsible for the maintenance of wilderness) and asked their advice.  Once I made it clear that I knew exactly where the carvings were, they were happy to talk to me about the expedition.  They explained that the sites were never publicised, but nor were they secret.  Once a person knew about them, NPWS was happy to discuss access with that person.

On reaching the first site, we found a visitor's book, much evidence of recent camping, and even a well-travelled trail off the public maps (and quite different from the dead reckoning and cairns we'd followed.)  The visitor's book revealed that this was a common destination for hikes from a number of privileged private schools.  This discovery has vexed me since - like the aboriginals, we have totemised knowledge of the land, made it esoteric.  Unlike the aboriginals, we have ceded the keys to people whose only qualification is wealth - an elite possessed not of knowledge, but of jet skis and urban assault vehicles.

I am concerned to enquire about the nature of our initiations, whether the rituals of initiation we now perform (club membership, organised hikes) really serve to protect the land, and preserve knowledge of the land, or whether they tend to reduce our ability to even act as custodians or preserve the sacred places.

If the modern initiations are without real value, it may be because we do not recognise them as such, and we have developed them without clear understanding of what we are doing.

The aboriginal initiations are long since lost, and with them a lot of knowledge of the land.  Some rituals required two generations of initiates to create a new generation, as new initiates weren't allowed to observe the construction of initiation spaces.

My question is:  what form of initiation is appropriate to what little knowledge remains?  We do not have the religious structure of real initiation, and for all the descriptions of 19th C Romantics of wilderness as "Nature's Cathedrals," the old gods are definitely dead - for we ourselves have killed them.

The Future is Augmented and Diminished.

Right now we're talking about maps, and about notes and reports shared through the conversation that never lulls but sometimes lulz (internet.)  Soon enough it'll be ubiquitous computing, high availability network connections and augmented reality.  How does one even keep a secret (even a benign one) in that kind of environment?  Should one?  By whom should it be kept?

It may be that most knowledge of places and things will disappear, but that what knowledge remains will be more public and more enduring than the places themselves.  If that is so, what is the ethical choice to be made, to disclose, to hide or to initiate?