technology – David S. Moore: Insights & Innovations

I had read Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune many years ago, when I was in college. I even took a college class from Frank Herbert. But I had never read the second book in his series, Dune Messiah. Recently I had seen Part 2 of the new film version of Dune and had seen the director Villeneuve interviewed on TV. He said that they were considering making a Part 3 that would be based on Dune Messiah, so I decided I had better read it.

I’ll begin by saying that this is a book that sorely needs a glossary. There are a lot of words that Herbert invented for his books, and it would have been really helpful to me if it were possible to look some of them up.

By the time I was finished with the book I felt that there were a number of loose ends that I wished he had tied off. To avoid spoilers, I won’t mention them all here– but the very first character introduced in the book, Bronso of Ix, was one such dangling piece.

From a pure “writing as craft” point of view the book violates virtually everything that present day tastes dictate. For example, Herbert has many scenes in which multiple people are involved, and for which the personal perspectives of several characters are narrated in sequence. That’s called “head hopping” in contemporary parlance– and it’s considered a grave sin that proper writers should never employ. Personally, I thought it worked alright in most cases– but then I think that many contemporary standards about what constitutes proper writing today are highly contrived. I especially rebel at the rules regarding the use of numerals in written text– but that’s probably best left for another essay.

The first two thirds of the book is mostly head games. We encounter several of the adversaries of the Atreides family and we learn in great detail their motivations and impulses. To avoid spoilers, I won’t get into specifics. By about two thirds of the way in I thought I wasn’t going to like the outcome and that all of the angst and vitriol of the many personal narratives amounted to so much overblown hyperbole. But as it turned out I did like the ending. Or at least I found it a fitting ending for the story line as it was developed. It’s a very wordy book, and I personally felt that a great deal of its wordiness went off in unresolved directions. That was probably the greatest contributor to my sense of loose ends.

One curious detail: At one point in the narrative Paul Muad’Dib mentions the atrocities of several humans from Earth history. He specifically mentions Hitler and Genghis Khan, and he attributed 4 million deaths to Genghis Khan. Today’s research pegs that number at something closer to 40 million. I don’t doubt that Herbert was using what were probably regarded as the best known numbers at the time, and of course we’ll never know the true count. I just thought it odd that the number he used was one tenth the present day number. It shows, I think, just how little Genghis Khan’s impact on the medieval world was understood.

I have spoken elsewhere about faster-than-light travel. If you haven’t read that blog entry, here’s the summary: I don’t believe in it. And consequently I don’t believe in galactic empires. In Herbert’s universe traveling across a galaxy, or across the universe, is accomplished by “folding space.” That sounds very technologically cool, but there is no physical basis for such a thing. The premise of the Dune series is that there is a single emperor who presides over the entire universe. That’s possible because of human mastery of the folding of space. And since I don’t buy into the concept of folding space, I can’t really buy into the fundamental setting of the story.

Dune Messiah is about Paul’s role as emperor of the known universe– and as the figurehead of a religious cult. Regardless of whether you accept the notion of a universal empire, it’s a good premise. It’s the tension between Paul the emperor and Paul the religious figurehead that is the real driver of the narrative. Paul won the position of emperor by defeating his predecessor, but his role as a figurehead was thrust upon him by his adoring followers. Again, it’s a good tension, and one that made Paul’s character complex and engaging. But I also think this aspect of the story often got smothered by the wordiness of Herbert’s introspective narrations. It’s yet another dangling element.

In addition to the emperor/figurehead duality Paul struggles throughout the book with his prescience. Because he drank the Water of Life (in the first book) he can see into the future. But the visions he has of the future are often incomplete, or blurry. Sometimes it sounds like Paul sees absolutely every detail; and other times he misses major aspects of the course of the future. So is he truly prescient, or is he not? And if he’s truly prescient, and if he knows exactly what’s going to happen, what can he do about it? Can he avoid the pain that he envisions, or must he sublimate his feelings of revulsion and simply go with the flow? It’s a constant tension throughout the story, and in my opinion it was never adequately resolved.

I don’t believe in prescience. I don’t see how it will ever be possible for anyone– regardless of how many drugs they may consume– to see the future. In mathematics there is a concept known as “chaos.” It’s defined as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” That phrase has been rendered in everyday speech as “the Butterfly Effect.” The idea is that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Rio de Janeiro, six months later the weather in London will be different from what it would otherwise have been. Tiny changes in a complex system today can have a ripple effect that can drastically alter the course of future events. Nonetheless, the question of whether prescience is a good thing or a bad thing seems like it might be worth discussing. It’s a recurring theme throughout the book.

To me the most frustrating aspect of the book is that I still don’t think I know who the real players were in the narrative. I can’t add any detail around that statement without spoiling the entire story. But as I read it there were things that some of the leading characters did that they could not have done without a highly detailed prescience of their own. And it was never made clear as to just how they obtained that level of prescience.

The first book– Dune— was very engaging. There was much more action– and violence. And it arrived at a satisfying conclusion when Paul defeated the emperor of the known universe and assumed control if the empire’s most important resource– spice. This book is much more cerebral. There’s far less action, far less violence. But there’s also more introspection and deliberation. And more to think about.

Hyperbole has long been the political agitator’s weapon of choice. It costs nothing, and for those of the audience who are susceptible to fear it can be very effective. Now technology has given such antagonists an even greater reason to employ exaggeration. The tools of email, text messaging, and social media allow users to adopt aliases by which to disguise their true identities. This possibility means that the cost for employing hyperbole as a weapon is even lower. Whatever is said anonymously cannot be traced back to a person, so the author suffers no penalty for vile and deceitful rhetoric. The result to society has been a ratcheting up of exaggeration and lies. The shield of an alias makes it easier to use coarse language, to insult and demean those with whom one disagrees, and to cast even relatively small issues as evidence of our inexorable slide into the abyss.

There are certainly good reasons for social media platforms to support anonymity. Whistle blowers, for example, should be protected from retaliation, and the best way to allow them to present their evidence without fear is to give them a way to submit their testimonials anonymously. Witnesses to criminal behavior may need the shield of anonymity while those being charged are tried.

But anonymity is not necessary for most discourse. Anonymity is not likely to improve discussion of, say, public transportation policy. In fact, knowing the true identities of all parties to such a discussion is far more likely to result in respectful dialogue and an exchange of gainful ideas.

Spammers and scammers use fake identities to conceal their true purposes– fake names, fake email addresses, fake phone numbers from your own area code. Why do we allow this? What is the value to society to allowing people to use a fake phone number whose only purpose is to trick the person receiving the call into believing that the caller is someone nearby, someone he may know? I can think of no reason why a caller from Mumbai should be allowed to use a phone number that appears to have originated from your own neighborhood. But telecom companies no doubt make a lot of money by offering such “services.”

As for IP addresses, we could demand that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) disallow anonymous connections, that they ensure that every IP address points back to a real person at a real physical address, and that their directories of IP addresses and person names are available to the general public. That would enable any user of the ISP’s services to convert a user’s IP address to a real name, face, and physical address.

The problem with this option is that there are perfectly valid uses for anonymous connections. Users who work from home may need anonymous connections to defend against man-in-the-middle attacks. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) provides anonymous connections, and it ensures that the entire exchange of information between user and host is fully encrypted, end-to-end. VPN appliances are in common use by private citizens, corporations, and government for all of the reasons cited. So even though a VPN can enable the user to connect to servers in other countries to further disguise the true origin of the connection, it’s far too late to claw back those devices now.

Most ISPs provide some variation of a spam blocker, and a way to report spammers. That is certainly a good start, but each ISP has a different method for reporting spammers, and a different URL. Google, for example, has a special form for reporting spam. The Google form is available here: https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse. This form forces the user to parse the offending email into separate components: Source email address, Subject, Body, and Headers. But Comcast simply asks the user to forward suspect messages to abuse@comcast.net. These different methods are confusing to the user, and there is little evidence that they are coordinated. If you receive an email at your personal AOL email account that originated from a Hotmail user account, should you report it to AOL, or to Hotmail? In the present state of the market you should report it to Hotmail, since only Hotmail can remove that user from their subscriber database. But if the user forwards the message to AOL rather than Hotmail, will AOL in turn forward it to Hotmail? Answer: probably not.

It would be far easier for users of email clients if they could simply report all spam to one URL, and leave it up to the ISPs to monitor that URL, parse the suspect messages, and assign them to the correct responsible parties. Email clients should make it easy for users to block and report suspect messages, to flag specific email addresses as suspicious, and to whitelist addresses that the user knows are trustworthy. The email clients that are on the market today are by no means uniform in their handling of these use cases.

What about the problem of anonymity? As mentioned above there will always be a need for anonymous connections. But I would suggest that there is also a need for a system that allows users to consciously accept or block anonymous and fake users. When you log into such a system the default would be to block all anonymous and fake users, but you would have the ability to accept such users on a case by case basis. Such a system would put the user in control of the type of information he or she receives. And that is something that is sorely missing in the present market.

Category: technology

Book Review: Dune Messiah

Anonymity and social discord