This is my attempt to write down, in raw form, what I have been thinking about in the past year: ideas, events, epiphanies, and so on.

On Eating

One major idea on my mind has been the notion that food and eating are now political statements. More specifically, what you choose to eat, in terms of where the raw ingredients come from (and the associated environmental, social, and labor impacts) to who prepares the food, to how the leftovers are dealt with--- all these things are important factors in understanding the impact of food. As a result, I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is his travels down the road of discovering and understanding food. Saw the excellent BBC mini-documentary about food by Meades as well, where children are asked "Where does meat come from" and not a one has any idea. This detachment from sources of food production is one factor I believe that contributes to both the downward spiral of health as well as the depressingly terrible environmental/social/labor impacts of modern eating.

SciFi, Futures, and the Present

This year, I (re)discovered science fiction as an outlet to comment on the present. I read Spook Country by Gibson, who explains that science fiction, at least good science fiction, is always about the present: extrapolating from what is going on around to construct dystopian futures, or, alternatively, constructing utopias that themselves riff on the present world. Personally, I'm a a fan of dystopias. I also read Rainbow's End, another difficult-to-categorize scifi book that is really about the dystopia hidden behind an apparently ideal future.

Of course, the pioneer here is Philip K. Dick, whose work at the time must've read like paranoid delusions. He is the visionary who brought us Blade Runner, The Minority Report, and others that foretell futures that reflect terrible directions the present is going.

Torture Camps

For the first time, the reality of our nation's inhumanity was revealed when CIA torture camp survivors spoke out about their experiences. Unbelievably, this year the political question was whether so-called waterboarding is torture; one man even waterboarded himself to see: his conclusions are telling.

It is unquestionable that the US tortures. Prisons inside the US aside, there can now be no question. The US tortures.

Failure of Terrorism Trials

And at the same time, efforts by the government to win convictions against terrorist suspects to trial have been absolute failures. In almost every case, the US was dealt with defeat because of flimsy evidence and, in fact, it seemed most times that the people who were being tried were guilty of nothing at all (like those in Miami, who's alleged plot was 'aspirational' rather than operational, according to the FBI). Things got bizzarre in the HLF case when initially the verdicts were announced as not-guilty, but then for some reason three jury members disputed that that was the verdict; I can think of no rational explanation for this other than the government pressuring them to ensure a mistrial instead of a not-guilty verdict. The latter would prevent re-prosecution. In any case, there was little success in the government's efforts at prosecuting people it accused of terrorism, and the overarching reason seems that none of the people were actual terrorists.

The Hacker's Role

This current regime, the surveillance society of torture we live in, would be impossible without the support of several classes of people, people who find themselves caught in a difficult role to navigate. The doctor administering/overseeing lethal injections (is it better to not do this? Certainly if the absence prevents executions from occurring, but if the alternative is a botched, even more painful death, what should a doctor do?), psychiatrists monitoring tortured prisoners (again, are they using their knowledge to enhance the torture? or are they protecting the human who is being destroyed bit-by-bit? it seems from firsthand reports it is unfortunately the former), and people like me, computer scientists who enable such things like total surveillance (data mining at the network backbone level, for example)--- are we protecting lives or enabling the government to oppress?

I think it is a difficult question. 2008 finds me thinking about this more and more. I have no answers yet, reading A Hacker Manifesto, which gives a neo-Marxist reading of the issue. Will have to think about it some more.