Thursday, August 05, 2021

PROJECT CYBERSYN


Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile - 
by E MEDINA - ‎Cited by 116 - ‎Related articles in Allende's Chile*. EDEN MEDINA. Abstract. This article presents a history of 'Project Cybersyn', an early computer network developed in Chile during the .... 9 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine .... by this new application of his work, invited Beer to visit him at MIT.


PROJECT CYBERSYN #SOCIALIST #SELFMANAGEMENT THROUGH #AI, #CYBERNETICS, #ROBOTICS,. WORKERS CONTROL OF PRODUCTION THROUGH #AUTOMATION IN THE #GRUNDRISSE #MARX POSTULATES THAT WITH THE ADVENT OF TECHNOLOGY FREEING PEOPLE'S TIME, AND HIS THEORY OF VALUE IS BASED ON TIME NOT SKILL, THAT IS SPENT IN PRODUCTION OF EXCHANGE VALUE.

 AS PEOPLE HAVE MORE TIME TO THEMSELVES WITH THE EIGHT HOUR DAY THE CONTRADICTION BECOMES NOT JUST THAT CAPITALISM IMPOVERSHIVES YOU ECONOMICALLY BUT IT STEALS YOUR TIME AS WELL AND USES IT AGAINST YOU INSTEAD OF UNEMPLOYMENT BY AI AND ROBOT WE SHOULD HAVE THE FOUR HOUR DAY, FOUR DAY WEEK, FORTY HOURS PAY IN FACT WE COULD ABOLISH MONEY WITH THE NEW FINTECH AND WE COULD FREE UP EVEN MORE TIME TO WORK ONLY TEN HOURS A WEEK FOR SOCIAL PRODUCTION FOR CREATING OUR COMMONWEALTH WHILE THE TECHNOLOGY CREATED COULD FREE US FROM TIME SPENT IN THE MACHINE, INSTEAD WE COULD WORK LESS AND PLAY MORE. BUT CAPITALISM PREVENTS THAT, IT SLOWS US DOWN AND INSTEAD OF FREEDOM WE GET UNEMPLOYMENT HERE IS THE SOCIALIST VIEW OF #TECHNOLOGY AS AN AID FOR SELF MANAGEMENT OF OUR WORKPLACES IT WAS AN EXPERIMENT CONDUCTED IN ALLENDE'S CHILE BY NORBERT WIENER AND STAFFORD BEER



 HERE IS THE PDF OF EDEN MEDINA'S BOOK 
Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile
However, the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, one of the originators of the field, offers one of the most-cited definitions. In 1948 he described cybernetics as the study of “control and communication in the animal and the machine.”14 Cybernetics often mixed metaphors from engineering and biology to describe the .

 HER PHD THESIS WHICH THE BOOK IS BASED ON ]The State Machine: Politics, Ideology, and Computation in Chile ... - Core
 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/4403874.pdf The MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society generously provided three years of tuition and ... to Allende's Chile and several years later allowed me to teach this history to his undergraduate ...... Allende period. 8 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. 

 The Cybersyn Revolution -
 Jacobin 
Apr 27, 2015 - Project Cybersyn was a bold technological project tied to a bold political project. It emerged in the context of Chile's peaceful road to socialism: Salvador Allende had won the Chilean presidency in 1970 with a promise to build a fundamentally different society. His political program would make Chile a ... 

 Cybernetic Revolutionaries | The MIT Press https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries 
Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina ... 

 Andy Beckett: The forgotten story of Chile's 'socialist internet ... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile Sep 8, 2003 - In the many histories of the endlessly debated, frequently mythologised Allende period, Project Cybersyn hardly gets a footnote. Yet the personalities involved, the amount they achieved, the scheme's optimism and ambition and perhaps, in the end, its impracticality, contain important truths about the most ... 

 Project Cybersyn - Stafford Beer's Cybernetic Science Fictions ... Video for project cybersyn
▶ 23:08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCO3vXyR-c4 Apr 20, 2012 - Uploaded by Malthus0

Free As In Beer: Cybernetic Science Fictions - A paper delivered at the 2009 Pacific Ancient and Modern ... Project Cybersyn: Chile & the Socialist Internet - YouTube Video for project cybersyn▶ 2:09:34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGTEoJI5-Y4 
Jan 31, 2015 - Uploaded by CybrSalon Cybersalon & Centre for the Study of Democracy 6th December - University of Westminster, London In Chile ... 

 Cybersyn: Control the economy from one central room - 
Video for project cybersyn▶ 22:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7_ylHj-AUA
Oct 31, 2015 - Uploaded by Max Zamora Under Salvador Allende's socialist government, a project was under way called Project CyberSyn or Proyecto ... 

 Project Cybersyn: Chile 2.0 in 1973 | iRevolutions https://irevolutions.org/2009/02/21/project-cybersyn-chile-20-in-1973/ 
Feb 21, 2009 - My colleague Lokman Tsui at the Berkman Center kindly added me to the Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholars working group and I attended the second roundtable of the year yesterday. These roundtables typically comprise three sets of presentations followed by discussions. Introducing Cybersyn 

 - Marginal REVOLUTION
Dec 7, 2009 - Cybersyn was a project of the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and British cybernetic visionary Stafford Beer; its goal was to control the Chilean economy in real-time using computers and "cybernetic principles." ... The two computers supposedly used to run the ... 

 Project Cybersyn – A failed experiment in Big Data and Socialism in ... https://www.peerlyst.com › Explore › Posts Feb 21, 2018 - private, systems, free - I read about this a few months back or maybe a year, I read way too much to remember all the details. It is a story about a new governm. 

 Before '73 Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism ... www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/world/americas/28cybersyn.html 
Mar 28, 2008 - 
Cybersyn, a project that included a clunky mainframe computer and a network of telex machines, was in the early 1970s a part of an experiment to help manage Chile's economy. What were the general motivations of Project Cybersyn? 



What were the general motivations of Project Cybersyn?
- Quora 
 https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-general-motivations-of-Project-Cybersyn Dec 10, 2016 - Cybersyn was an ambitious project in technology and design meant to help Chile's socialist economy succeed. It's objectives have an interesting backstory. President Salvador Allende had recently become president after a free election. Allende hope... 

 Good ideas that didn't pan out, part 2: Project Cybersyn
Sep 18, 2014 - Part 2: Project Cybersyn. Around the time the first email was sent, not long after ARPANET, the Internet's predecessor, was first connected, a group of high-minded computer scientists in Chile tried to run their country's economy by computer. In 1971, the Chilean government of Salvador Allende signed a ... 

 Project Cybersyn and the Origins of Algorithmic Life | Open Geography https://opengeography.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/cybersyn-and-algorithmic-life/ Mar 9, 2015 - One of the left's commonly accepted stories about neoliberalism is that it got some of its first real-world tests in Pinochet's Chile in the early 1970s. Following a coup and the violent end to socialist Salvador Allende's government (in which Allende took his own life in the Presidential Palace), probably with the ...

 Project Cybersyn | “At last, el pueblo” | dpr-barcelona https://dprbcn.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/project-cybersyn-2/ Aug 27, 2010 - According to the research project CYBERSYN, Cybernetic Synergy, internationally, the country was viewed with curiosity and mistrust, and in terms of internal affairs, different political groups wasted no time in planning a strategy to produce the debacle of the Socialist government, joining forces with the ... 

. Computers and the Internet: A global history. Chile — Project Cybersyn. Today. ▻ Review. ▻ Homeostasis: a fundamental cybernetic principle. ▻ Chile, Stafford Beer, and Project Cybersyn.

 CYBERSYN/Cybernetic Synergy
 “Dear friends, I should like to greet you personally to this place, in the development of which I have taken enormous personal interest, and for this reason I am asking you to take a special interest in it. What you see is the outcome of 18 months of hard work on the part of a group of extremely professional Chilean engineers ... 

Project Cybersyn, Beer, Stafford, Hand written in black fountain pen., March 1972, Image, application/pdf, Liverpool John Moores University, Special Collections and Archives: Stafford Beer Collection, Box 60 (Chile), English, JMU, 

 Santiago dreaming https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile When Pinochet's military overthrew the Chilean government 30 years ago, they discovered a revolutionary communication system, a 'socialist internet' connecting the whole country. Its creator? An eccentric scientist from Surrey. Andy Beckett on the forgotten story of Stafford Beer Project Cybersyn Project Cybersyn, Beer, Stafford, Hand written in black fountain pen., March 1972, Image, application/pdf, Liverpool John Moores University, Special Collections and Archives: Stafford Beer Collection, Box 60 (Chile), English, JMU, 

 The Socialist Origins of Big Data | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine 
Oct 13, 2014 - The consultant, Stafford Beer, had been brought in by Chile's top planners to help guide the country down what Salvador Allende, its democratically .... Norbert Wiener's classic “Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” (1948) discussed human behavior by drawing on his ... Writings on Norbert Wiener - Thinking Machines in the Physical World ... 21stcenturywiener.org/writings-on-norbert-wiener/ The writer's critical perspective regarding military technology leads to a co-biography supportive of Wiener but not of von Neumann. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and politics in Allende's Chile E. Medina (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2011). Wiener dubbed Stafford Beer the father of management cybernetics. 

Rethinking algorithmic regulation | Kybernetes | Vol 44, No 6/7 www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/K-02-2015-0052?fullSc=1 
A discussion of Project Cybersyn requires a discussion of Stafford Beer, whom Norbert Wiener described as “the father of management cybernetics.” Beer conducted ....

 M.I.T. Scholar's 1949 Essay on Machine Age Is Found - The New York  Times
May 20, 2013 - The Machine Age,” an essay written for The New York Times by Norbert Wiener, a visionary mathematician, languished for six decades in the M.I.T. ... 1948 he had published “Cybernetics,” a landmark theoretical work that both foreshadowed and influenced the arrival of computing, robotics and automation.

 The Lost 1949 Essay That Predicted The Computerized World We Live In http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-lost-1949-essay-that-predicted-the-computerized-wor-509540334? [PDF]

The Machine Age, version 3, 1949 - Monoskop https://monoskop.org/images/3/31/Wiener_Norbert_The_Machine_Age_v3_1949.pdfPage 1 of 8. The Machine Age, by Norbert Wiener, version 3, 1949. Copyright Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 Courtesy of MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, Norbert Wiener Papers, 

 Cybernetic Revolutionaries - 
P2P Foundation wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cybernetic_Revolutionaries May 1, 2015 - Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile. By Eden Medina. MIT Press, 2011. URL = http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries ... Computers that merely enabled factory automation were of little use; what Beer called the “cussedness of things” required human involvement. It's here that ... 



 Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the ... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cybernetics-Second-Control...Machine.../B002XUKWLC Rating: 5 - ‎4 reviews Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press) eBook: Norbert Wiener: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store. ... Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (MIT Press). Prodigy of probability | MIT News news.mit.edu/2011/timeline-wiener-0119 Jan 19, 2011 - Norbert Wiener gained fame as the father of cybernetics, but his earlier work on statistical descriptions of complex systems may prove more important. 

“Who believed in a second industrial revolution? 'the age of computers ... https://repub.eur.nl/pub/50302/Explaining-computers-v4-juli-13.pdf by D van Lente - ‎2013 for the second industrial revolution we could quote luminaries like Norbert Wiener, J.D. Bernal,. CP Snow and many others. ... computers and automation spread very quickly during the fifties and sixties, and one may expect that they raised ... Technology and politics in Allende's Chile (Cambridge, Mass: MIT. Press 2011). 

 Towards a Rhizomatic Technical History of Control By Goffey, Andrew | New Formations, Summer 2015 |https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-435637263/towards-a-rhizomatic-technical-history-of-control 

 On Socialist Cybernetics, Accelerationist Dreams, and Tiqqun’s Nightmares 

 Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas 
 Algorithms Dec 18, 2016 - “One day, it's going to no longer be arbitrary to reframe 20th century proposal and its clever machines as a quest for the confident definition of blunders, abnormality, trauma, and catastrophe—a set of ideas that must be understood of their cognitive, technological and political composition. it can be ...

  1. AUGMENTED INTELLIGENCE TRAUMAS

    https://library.oapen.org/.../978-3-95796-066-5-Alleys_of_Your_Mind.pdf · PDF file

    Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas. ... Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas


 Norbert Wiener’s Vision: The Impact of “the Automatic Age” on Our Moral Lives 
Terrell Ward Bynum Southern Connecticut State University http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/bynum.pdf 
Foreseeing the Information Age During the Second World War, while working to design a new kind of antiaircraft cannon, mathematician Norbert Wiener and several of his colleagues developed a new branch of applied science — the science of information feedback systems — which Wiener named “cybernetics”. With impressive foresight, Wiener realized that this new science, when combined with the electronic digital computers that were being developed to support the war effort, had enormous social and ethical implications. Soon after the Second World War, therefore, Wiener began to write and lecture about the social and ethical challenges of the coming “automatic age”, which he also called “the second industrial revolution”


Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic
 Front Cover Seb Franklin MIT Press, Sep. 4, 2015 - Philosophy - 211 pages 1 Review https://books.google.ca/books?id=j4OICgAAQBAJ&dq=MIT+CHILE+ALLENDE+AUTOMATION+NORBERT+WIENER&source=gbs_navlinks_s https://www.amazon.ca/Control-Digitality-as-Cultural-Logic/dp/0262029537/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1522280369&sr=1-1&keywords=9780262029537&dpID=41gMUHsF2KL&preST=_SY264_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch Is there a cultural logic of what we have come to call the information age? Have the technologies and techniques centered on the computer provided not only tools but also the metaphors through which we now understand the social and economic formation of our world? In Control, Seb Franklin addresses the conditions of knowledge that make the concept of the "information economy" possible while at the same time obscuring its deleterious effects on material social spaces. In so doing, Franklin traces three intertwined threads: the relationships among information, labor, and social management that emerged in the nineteenth century; the mid-twentieth-century diffusion of computational metaphors; and the appearance of informatic principles in certain contemporary socioeconomic and cultural practices. Drawing on critical theory, media theory, and the history of science, Franklin names control as the episteme grounding late capitalism. Beyond any specific device or set of technically mediated practices, digitality functions within this episteme as the logical basis for reshaped concepts of labor, subjectivity, and collectivity, as well as for the intensification of older modes of exclusion and dispossession. In tracking the pervasiveness of this logical mode into the present, Franklin locates the cultural traces of control across a diverse body of objects and practices, from cybernetics to economic theory and management styles, and from concepts of language and subjectivity to literary texts, films, and video games.


 How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
 Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation -- to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a "unified information network." Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS -- its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world. 

 Excerpts from How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the
 by B Peters - ‎2016 - ‎Related articles May 2, 2016 - MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-not-network-nation .... Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948, concluding line ..... Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).

Building the information society: A history of computing as a mass medium
 ProQuest


Folk Psychology as Mental Simulation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Introduction: The Mechanical Mind Philip Husbands, Michael Wheeler, and Owen Holland https://gpreview.kingborn.net/182000/98248e2a7b3a4326813d6ad7a7948ac5.pdf


Dreams in Cybernetic Fugue - Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences hsns.ucpress.edu/content/46/5/633.full-text.pdf 


 InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network
 Slava Gerovitch* Taylor and Francis GHAT_A_304641.sgm 10.1080/07341510802044736 History and Technology 0734-1512 (print)/1477-2620 (online) Original Article 2008 Taylor & Francis 
244000000December 2008 SlavaGerovitch slava@MIT.edu This article examines several Soviet initiatives to develop a national computer network as the technological basis for an automated information system for the management of the national economy in the 1960s–1970s. It explores the mechanism by which these proposals were circulated, debated, and revised in the maze of Party and government agencies. The article examines the role of different groups – cybernetics enthusiasts, mathematical economists, computer specialists, government bureaucrats, and liberal economists – in promoting, criticizing, and reshaping the concept of a national computer network. The author focuses on the political dimension of seemingly technical proposals, the relationship between information and power, and the transformative role of users of computer technology 


 Definition of Cybernetics | Blog | Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan bernardg.com/blog/definition-cybernetics by B Geoghegan - ‎Related articles Ever wonder what cybernetics was? Or maybe is? It's a baffling question and even the leading theorists of cybernetics in the 1940s and 1950s could hardly agree on the definition. In the last few years historians Eden Medina and Andrew Pickering, for example, have shown that the understanding, definition, and use of cybernetics varied tremendously from one context to another. Even Norbert Wiener, who is widely credited with founding cybernetics, offered varying and contradictory accounts of the field. Recently communications theorist BEN PETERS and I wrote up our own definition and introduction to the field for the forthcoming JOHNS HOPKINS GUIDE TO DIGITAL MEDIA AND TEXTUALITY, edited by Lori Emerson, Benjamin Robertson, and Marie-Laure Ryan. The editors have put together a stellar volume with entries by Simon Penny, Jay David Bolter, Matthew Fuller, Matthew Gold, Johanna Drucker, Jussi Parikka, Eduardo Kac and other notable theorists of digital media. Below is the rough draft of the entry Ben and I prepared. For the final, more polished draft, pick up a copy of the guide when it comes out. 

The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age 
by Ronald R. Kline. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015, 352 pp. http://issues.org/33-4/book-review-a-coming-of-information-age-story/ 
What was cybernetics? As Ronald Kline tells it in his new intellectual history, The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age, cybernetics suffered from being too many things at once: an interdisciplinary field of study, a philosophical worldview, a popular buzzword, an intellectual fad, and a theory of automation and control. That it could be all these things and not be wholly incoherent is a testament to the genius of its creator, the mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener. In charting the rise, fall, and legacy of cybernetics, Kline attempts to prove, mostly successfully, that it was cybernetics that gave rise to the coinage and conception of our “information age.” 


 The Cybernetics Society
Web site of The Cybernetics Society, the UK national learned society and professional body promoting pure and applied cybernetics information archive news events. 


 Here Lies Project Cybersyn aedhgsa.ca/docs/Strata/Volume_7/STRATA_vol7_ROSE_CLANCEY.pdf
 by R CLANCEY - ‎Related articles Interrompu par le coup d'État qui mit fin au gouvernement .... President Salvador Allende sought to bring great change to Chile, and. Project Cybersyn was a part of his program for a modern, independent, socialist Chile. .... 19 See: Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics; or, Control and communication in the animal and the machine.

 the strange loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener - WordPress.com
Apr 29, 2013 - sciences: the strange loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener, Russian Journal of Communication, 5:1,. 31-43. To link to this article: ...... Cybernetic revolutionaries: Technology and politics in Allende's Chile. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University ... [PDF]

Mechanical Mind in History - EPDF.TIPS
https://epdf.tips/download/the-mechanical-mind-in-history-bradford-books.html interest in the subject carried over into peacetime. In the early 1940s a circle of scientists intent on understanding general principles underlying behavior in animals and machines began to gather around the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964). Inspired by. Wiener's classified work on automatic gun aiming, ...

 EXPERIMENTAL FUTURES Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945
 By Orit Halpern Duke University Press
ISBN electronic: 978-0-8223-7632-3 
Publication date: 2015 
Beautiful Data is both a history of big data and interactivity, and a sophisticated meditation on ideas about vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century. Contending that our forms of attention, observation, and truth are contingent and contested, Orit Halpern historicizes the ways that we are trained, and train ourselves, to observe and analyze the world. Tracing the postwar impact of cybernetics and the communication sciences on the social and human sciences, design, arts, and urban planning, she finds a radical shift in attitudes toward recording and displaying information. These changed attitudes produced what she calls communicative objectivity: new forms of observation, rationality, and economy based on the management and analysis of data. Halpern complicates assumptions about the value of data and visualization, arguing that changes in how we manage and train perception, and define reason and intelligence, are also transformations in governmentality. She also challenges the paradoxical belief that we are experiencing a crisis of attention caused by digital media, a crisis that can be resolved only through intensified media consumption. 


 Human Control and Autonomy in Cybernetic Systems
 David Shen Georgetown University 
Abstract This paper is meant to question the idea that humans in cybernetic systems are autonomous in the traditional western liberal conception. Examination of the history of cybernetics reveals conflicts over the role of humans within human/machine systems over a larger period than is traditionally associated with the field of cybernetics. By comparing cybernetic systems from before the 20th century and through the Cold War, it becomes apparent how cybernetics served as an experimental testing ground for political ideologies to express themselves in the budding information age. Comparing cybernetics systems in this manner suggests that cybernetics as a discipline does not inherently support or contradict the ideals of freedom and agency, but rather, cybernetic systems become extensions of the organizations they serve and adopt their parent organizations beliefs. 


Towards Scalable Governance: Sensemaking and Cooperation in the Age of Social Media
November 24, 2016 Abstract Cybernetics, or self-governance of animal and machine, requires the ability to sense the world and to act on it in an appropriate manner. Likewise, self-governance of a human society requires groups of people to collectively sense and act on their environment. I argue that the evolution of political systems is characterized by a series of innovations that attempt to solve (among others) two ‘scalability’ problems: scaling up a group’s ability to make sense of an increasingly complex world, and to cooperate in increasingly larger groups. I then explore some recent efforts towards using the Internet and social media to provide alternative means for addressing these scalability challenges, under the banners of crowdsourcing and computer-supported argumentation. I present some lessons from those efforts about the limits of technology, and the research directions more likely to bear fruit merging the natural with the artificial: the nature of a ... 

 by AJ Malapi-Nelson - ‎2015 - ‎Related articles Abstract This thesis is concerned with the rise and fall of cybernetics, understood as an inquiry regarding the nature of a machine. The collapse of this scientific movement, usually explained by external factors such as lack of funding, will be addressed from a philosophical standpoint. Delving deeper into the theoretical core of cybernetics, one could find that the contributions of William Ross Ashby and John von Neumann shed light onto the particular ways in which cybernetics understood the nature and behavior of a machine. Ross Ashby offered an account of the nature of a machine and then extended the scope of “the mechanical”. This extension would encompass areas that will later be shown to be problematic for mechanization, such as learning and adaptation. The way in which a machine-ontology was applied would trigger effects seemingly contrary to cybernetics’ own distinctive features. Von Neumann, on the other hand, tinkered with a mechanical model of the brain, realizing grave limitations that prompted him to look for an alternative for cybernetics to work on. The proposal that came out of this resulted in a serious blow against the theoretical core of cybernetics. Why did cybernetics collapse? The contributions coming from both thinkers, in their own ways, spelled out the main tenets of the cybernetic proposal. But these very contributions led to cybernetics’ own demise. The whole story can be framed under the rubric of a serious inquiry into the metaphysical underpinnings of a machine. The rise and fall of cybernetics could thus help us better understand what a machine is from a philosophical standpoint. Although a historical component is present, my emphasis relies on a philosophical consideration of the cybernetic phenomenon. This metaphysical dissection will attempt to clarify how a machine-based ontology remained at the core of cybernetics. An emerging link will hopefully lead towards establishing a tri-partite correlation between cybernetics’ own evolution, its theoretical core, and its collapse. It will hopefully show how cybernetic inquiries into the nature of a machine might have proved fatal to the very enterprise at large, due to unsolvable theoretical tensions. 

 Claus Pias 
In Defense of Cybernetics. A Reminiscence
One cannot speak of defense without also speaking of cybernetics. From a historical point of view, it recommends itself as the science of defense par excellence, and in two respects. On the one hand, it owes its modern form essentially to the air defense systems of World War Two, i.e. automatic target prediction and enemy tracking. Peter Galison was right in particularly emphasizing this point and developing it into a broad contemporary-history diagnosis (Galison 1994). On the other hand, however, the question of system stabilization, the establishing of dynamic balances, can also be seen from the perspective of defense. After their being modeled, by which the relevant factors for their regulating activity is determined, cybernetic systems stabilize themselves through continuous defense against everything that might constitute a threat to their continuity. Cybernetic systems are constantly threatened with destabilization and constantly legitimized by defense. Hence, perturbation constitutes their right to exist, and defense appears as a positive force. Perturbation is what causes a permanent need for intervention, and defense is what permanently fulfills it. Therefore, cybernetics is to be characterized as a technical as well as a political science. And this brings back into focus that cybernetics – long before its neurologically and computer technologically inspired reinvention towards the end of WW II – has a double origin. In Greek antiquity, it means technology and politics at the same time: it designates both procedures of controlling missiles and procedures of controlling history; it names the control of material things and of historical events; it repels intruding enemies and adverse conditions, in both cases maintaining a paradoxical relationship with the future.


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Scientists Declare Climate Emergency: Earth’s Vital Signs Worsen Amid Business-As-Usual on Climate Change

TOPICS:

By WOODWELL CLIMATE RESEARCH CENTER AUGUST 3, 2021

Global Warming Climate Change Concept

Scientists reaffirm 2019 climate emergency declaration and again call for transformative change based on updated trends.

In 2019, a coalition of more than 11,000 scientists from across the globe declared a climate emergency and established a set of vital signs for the Earth in order to measure effective climate action. Now, twenty months later, a new study published on July 28, 2021, in BioScience finds that those vital signs reflect the consequences of unrelenting “business-as-usual” on climate change.

Specifically, authors of the study note an unprecedented surge in climate-related disasters since 2019, including devastating floods, record-shattering heat waves and extraordinary storms and wildfires. 2020 was the second hottest year in history, with the five hottest years on record all occurring since 2015. The study also notes that three key greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide — set records for atmospheric concentrations in 2020 and again in 2021. In April 2021, carbon dioxide concentration reached 416 parts per million, the highest monthly global average concentration ever recorded.

In response to these unprecedented findings and the ongoing climate crisis, the study calls for a phase-out of fossil fuels; strategic climate reserves for the storage of carbon and the protection of biodiversity; and a global price for carbon high enough to induce “decarbonization” across the industrial and consumption spectrum.

“The extreme climate events and patterns that we’ve witnessed over the last several years — not to mention the last several weeks — highlight the heightened urgency with which we must address the climate crisis,” said Dr. Philip Duffy, co-author of the study and Executive Director of the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “Without a plan for rapid decarbonization and large-scale investments in natural climate solutions, these climate change indicators will continue to worsen, pushing our essential ecosystems past the point of recovery.”

Other key vital signs the authors highlight:

  • The total burned area in the United States increased in 2020, reaching 4.1 million hectares — the second most ever recorded.
  • Brazilian Amazon annual forest loss rates increased in both 2019 and 2020, reaching a 12-year high of 1.11 million hectares deforested in 2020.
  • Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have continued their precipitous loss of mass, while Arctic sea ice extent continues to decline to near all-time lows each summer.
  • Ocean acidification is near an all-time record. Together with thermal stress, it threatens the coral reefs that more than half a billion people depend on for food, tourism dollars and storm surge protection.

“There is growing evidence we are getting close to or have already gone beyond tipping points associated with important parts of the Earth system, including warm-water coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets,” said Dr. William Ripple, a lead author of the study and distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University (OSU). “We need to quickly change how we’re doing things, and new climate policies should be part of COVID-19 recovery plans wherever possible. It’s time for us to join together as a global community with a shared sense of cooperation, urgency and equity.”

Reference: “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021” by William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M Newsome, Jillian W Gregg, Timothy M Lenton, Ignacio Palomo, Jasper A J Eikelboom, Beverly E Law, Saleemul Huq, Philip B Duffy and Johan Rockström, 28 July 2021, BioScience.
DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biab079

Christopher Wolf, of OSU, led on the study with Dr. Ripple. The study was also co-authored by Dr. Duffy; Jillian Gregg and Beverly Law of OSU; Thomas Newsome of the University of Sydney; Timothy Lenton of the University of Exeter; Ignacio Palomo of the University of Grenoble Alps; Jasper Eikelboom of Wageningen University and Research; Saleemul Huq of Independent University Bangladesh; and Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

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PETRONAS SCREWED BC OVER LNG
Petronas eyes $1.3B project in Alberta to export hydrogen to Asia

Petronas and Japanese conglomerate Itochu would jointly market the ammonia produced at the Alberta facility

Author of the article: Geoffrey Morgan
Publishing date: Aug 03, 2021 • 
Petronas signboard is lighted at night in Kuala Lumpur,Malaysia. 
PHOTO BY GOH SENG CHONG /BLOOMBERG

CALGARY — The Canadian division of Malaysia’s state-owned oil giant Petroliam Nasional Berhad, or Petronas, plans to study the feasibility of building a $1.3 billion petrochemical plant in central Alberta with the goal of exporting hydrogen to an Asian markets.

Petronas Energy Canada Ltd. announced Tuesday it has teamed up with Japan’s Itochu Corp. and an unnamed Calgary-based pipeline company on a feasibility study on a facility capable of producing 1 million tonnes of ammonia per year while capturing the carbon emitted in the process.

“Ammonia is a very efficient means for the transportation of hydrogen,” said Petronas Energy Canada president and CEO Mark Fitzgerald in an interview Tuesday.

The combination of nitrogen and hydrogen, which in this case would be sourced from Petronas’ natural gas operations in northeast British Columbia, produces ammonia.

“At the end point, the user, which in this case would be markets overseas, would split it into nitrogen and then hydrogen, which would be used as a fuel source,” Fitzgerald said, adding the project would be considered a “blue ammonia” or “blue hydrogen” because it would capture the associated carbon emissions.

Both Petronas and Itochu, a Japanese conglomerate, would jointly market the ammonia produced at the facility in Asian markets, “potentially for thermal power generation in Japan, replacing hydrocarbon-based fuels for power plants, steel, chemical production and other applications.”

Japan’s economy, trade and industry ministry has a goal of securing 30 million tonnes of ammonia by 2050 in an effort to reach a net-zero carbon emissions goal by 2050.

Fitgerald said Petronas, which operates in over 90 countries, believes Canada is an ideal place to develop the blue ammonia/blue hydrogen facility because of the country’s vast natural gas reserves, its hydrogen strategy and willingness to support carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) investments.

“Both the Alberta government and the government of Canada have committed to working with private sector companies such as ourselves to really drive that hydrogen strategy for Canada. We have an abundant supply of natural gas, which transitions to blue hydrogen,” he said.

Alberta’s Associate Minister of Natural Gas and Electricity Dale Nally said his government was pleased by Petronas’ and Itochu’s decision to pursue an ammonia production facility in Alberta.

“This is an incredible opportunity for Alberta’s natural resources to reach new markets and further display the innovation that powers our dynamic energy sector,” the minister said in an email.
If the companies decided to proceed with the project, they expect to start construction in 2023 and produce ammonia in 2027. The companies believe construction on the project will create 10,000 direct and indirect jobs and 3,300 permanent jobs once the facility is operational.

Fitzgerald declined to name the local pipeline company participating in the project’s feasibility study.

Both TC Energy Corp. and Enbridge Inc. have previously worked to develop westbound natural gas pipelines for proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects on the B.C. coastline including the Prince Rupert Natural Gas Transmission line, which is fully permitted by regulators, and the WestCoast Connector Gas Transmission line.

As the LNG facilities associated with those projects have been scrapped in recent years, officials in the Alberta government are hopeful the pipelines could be repurposed to transport hydrogen to the West Coast before ultimately being exported to Asia.
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Tunisia crisis: Democrats, despots and the fight for power

By Magdi Abdelhadi
North Africa analyst
Published1 day ago
Supporters of Tunisia's president have welcomed his dramatic decision

The eyes of many people are on the small country in North Africa that set the Middle East on fire when in 2011 it toppled a dictator that had ruled it for 27 years.

Tunisia - the birthplace of the so-called Arab Spring - shook the tectonic plates of power in a vast and strategic region, and no-one knows when and how they will settle back: in the same old despotic order or a new one that is yet to be born?

That question has become even more pressing after 25 July, when the secular President Kais Saied stunned the world by announcing the suspension of parliament, the sacking of the cabinet and assuming emergency powers citing an imminent threat to the Tunisian state.

These extraordinary measures are supposed to last for 30 days. No-one knows yet whether he will extend the emergency powers, or if he will embark on something else.

For Tunisia watchers the development came as no surprise. The poster child of the "Arab Spring" has long been moving inexorably towards the precipice.

Yearning for a strongman

A stagnant economy (it shrunk by 8% last year), growing unemployment (estimated at 17%), and a fractious political class have convinced a growing number of Tunisians that democracy is not delivering for them.

Tunisia's military has been deployed around parliament

Add to that the devastating impact of Covid-19. Tunisia has some of the highest infection rates in Africa.

All of this has created among a large number of Tunisians a sense of hopelessness and a loss of faith in parliament and the country's political parties.

That explains why Mr Saied's draconian measures were met with jubilation on the streets.

His supporters were simply fed up with parliament, and yearned for someone, a strongman perhaps, who could fix the country.

But can Mr Saied really fix it?

"A replacement strongman is not the answer to Tunisia's problems," The Economist publication warned in a recent editorial.

Autocrats rejoice

Of course, not everyone in Tunisia was happy. Foremost among them was Ennahda, the Islamist party that has the biggest block in parliament.

It denounced Mr Saied's move as a coup. Other parties as well as independent observers concur.
 Supporters of Ennahdha believe the president has staged a coup

Regionally, the autocrats - from Egypt to the Gulf - were rubbing their hands with glee, and rushed to express support for Mr Saied. The democrats feared the worst and sounded the alarm.

Article 80 of the constitution, which Mr Saied cited as the basis for his dramatic intervention, does give him the right to take extraordinary measures under exceptional circumstances.

But nowhere does it say he has the right to suspend parliament, revoke parliamentary immunity for all its members and sack the government.

That's why many have concluded that Mr Saied had carried out some kind of a "coup".

The judgement is qualified, because Mr Said is not a military general, and he was elected in a free and fair poll in 2019.

Opinion is divided between those who believe legitimacy comes only from the constitution, and those who believe the people are the ultimate arbiter.

However, in moments of profound crisis the boundaries between what is purely legal and what is political are blurred.

 President Kais Saied won elections by a landslide

For the moment, Mr Saied appears to have the power of the street, so to speak.

But no-one is denying that this is a slippery slope that could spell the end for Tunisia's precarious transition to inclusive government.

Many commentators have drawn parallels with what happened in Egypt in 2013, when Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, then minister of defence and now president, intervened to remove the elected Muslim Brotherhood president, to the jubilation of huge crowds on the streets, in scenes similar to Tunisia after Mr Saied's announcement.

But there are important differences.

Mr Saied was elected with some 70% of the vote, and the army has not played any major role in Tunisian politics, while in Egypt it has been the bedrock of the state for nearly 70 years.

Crucially, Tunisia, unlike Egypt, still has a strong trade union movement and civil society.

Ten governments in 10 years

So, the eyes will be not only on Mr Saied, but also on the four organisations - known as the Quartet for National Dialogue - which in 2013 succeeded in brokering a compromise between Islamists and their secular rivals and averted protracted civil strife.

Tunisia's tourism sector has been hit by the pandemic

The deal earned them the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015.

There are calls for national dialogue. But it is hard to imagine the country going back to what it was without changes to the system that landed Tunisia in this crisis.

Some believe the fault lies with the constitution that created multiple centres of power: the president, the prime minister and the parliament.

In an ideal world that should create a well-balanced political order, with checks and balances that prevent domination by the president.

But in an extremely polarised society it was a recipe for paralysis.

Even the electoral law contributed to the chaos, giving parliamentary seats to a plethora of small parties and making a fragmented political scene worse.

As a result, Tunisia has had 10 governments in 10 years.

As problems accumulated - especially with Covid spiralling out of control - the system broke down, with the president occasionally blocking parliament and vice versa, each side tweaking the text of the law to suit its own purpose.

What happens in Tunisia will not stay in Tunisia, as the experience of the past decade has demonstrated.

Autocrats in the region are hoping it will give them more ammunition to argue that "Arabs are not fit for democracy" and the democrats are clinging to the hope that Tunisia will remain a beacon.

Could the country that gave the Arab world its memorable slogan of revolution 10 years ago,"The People Want the Downfall of the Regime", be the one that writes its epitaph, "The people can't eat democracy"?, as an angry Tunisian woman once put it.
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Google May Have Created an Unruly New State of Matter: Time Crystals


Time crystals really don't like to play by the rules. 

That could be a good thing for quantum computing.

BY CAROLINE DELBERT
AUG 4, 2021

VICTOR DE SCHWANBERG/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYGETTY IMAGES

Scientists say they've placed an elusive time crystal inside a quantum computer.

Time crystals violate some laws of physics—notably, Isaac Newton's first law of motion—in much the same way that many quantum phenomena do.

Quantum computers are built in supercooled chambers called cryostats.

Scientists from around the world claim to have harnessed a time crystal inside a quantum computer. If true, their discovery—as outlined in a July 28 pre-print research paper—could change the world virtually overnight with a limitless, rule-breaking source of energy that would bring quantum computers into the now.

As The Next Web astutely points out, this could be "the most important scientific breakthrough in our lifetimes." But to understand why, let's first examine the complicated connection between time crystals and quantum computing.

What Is a Time Crystal?

A time crystal is a special phase of matter that changes constantly, but doesn't ever appear to use any energy. This, scientists say, means it violates Isaac Newton's first law of motion, which deals with inertia—the resistance an object has to a change while in motion. A rolling marble doesn't stop unless other forces act upon it, for instance. But from experience, you know that it will eventually stop due to forces like friction. If your marble were a time crystal, though, it would literally never stop.

🤯KEEP NERDING OUT

Scientists Catch Time Crystals Interacting

Time crystals, therefore, act more like superconducting materials (such as mercury or lead). Superconductivity is a quantum phenomenon in nature wherein certain materials conduct direct current electricity without any energy loss if they are cooled below a certain temperature. They also expel magnetic fields, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Once again, that means time crystals break the rules; this time, it's the second law of thermodynamics, which states that disorder, or entropy, will always increase. Put another way: the universe is always moving toward change. But time crystals are big-time rule-breakers that don't like change, meaning their disorder remains stable over time. In fact, that makes time crystals a wholly new phase of matter.

Why does that matter? It basically means that time crystals can oscillate between forms without ever using any energy. In a Schrödinger's Cat scenario, for instance, the radioactive atoms would decay and not decay, kill the cat and not kill the cat, back and forth one million times over without using any energy. This really could go on forever (apologies to the cat), hence the name "time crystal."
Time Crystals, Meet Quantum Computing

There's a reason we bring up Schrödinger's Cat: time crystals could be a game-changer for quantum computers, which physicists often seen as the natural next step in terms of computing power—they work at the most essential molecular and even particulate level, after all. They also capitalize on ideas like the passage of electrons around solid materials (literally what electricity is!), and represent a huge challenge for computer scientists to puzzle over. Think of quantum computing like the "going to Mars" of computing.

And on a more practical level, there are ways in which quantum computers offer special access to ideas that traditional electronic computers simply cannot manage. This is also where time crystals come into play, if peer review shows that Google's research is valid.
This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.


Electronic computers, like the one you may be reading this story on, use logical gates that switch on and off, so everything in your computer relies on just two states: on and off, light and dark, 1s and 0s, the whole binary system. Introducing qubits (quantum bits, which are often a single atom of an element with a carefully controlled electron) muddies the waters, both by adding more possible states than just on and off, and by adding an entire basis of uncertainty that complicates the picture.

Why would scientists want a complicated, less predictable form of computing? Well, a lot of questions scientists must ask themselves i​​nvolve more than two binary outcomes. This, in turn, translates into mathematical computing challenges for traditional computers.

Think about choosing a number between 1 and 100. A traditional computer would register that value in a binary format, of course, but also would register the number itself as a binary that's on or off. There are 99 other binaries representing the other numbers you didn't choose. It's a lot of variables to keep track of for something quite simple.

Now imagine the number between 1 and 100 is actually the outcome of something like animal breeding, or a plan for a warp drive. In reality, there are thousands, millions, or even more possibilities. Instead of trying to "force" a binary-based computer to do the work in an awkward way, a quantum computer might help scientists more naturally represent what happens.

This is where time crystals also offer even more promise than quantum qubit computing alone. Time crystals are stable, but pulsate at interesting intervals, meaning they might help scientists study things like repeating patterns or random numbers—with similar implications in the natural sciences and beyond.

How Did Scientists Create a Time Crystal?

For this research—which, notably, has not yet been peer-reviewed for publication in an academic journal—a group of over 100 scientists from around the world collaborated with Google Quantum AI, a joint initiative between Google, NASA, and the nonprofit Universities Space Research Association. Its goal is to expedite research on quantum computing and computer science.

In the paper, the scientists describe building a special microscopic rig where a time crystal is surrounded by superconducting qubits—special particles that are the bread and butter of quantum computing.

The quantum computer sits inside a cryostat, which is a temperature-controlled supercooling chamber that keeps all the materials at the right, extremely low temperature for advanced states like superconducting or time crystals (nuclear fusion also relies on cryostats as a way to keep equipment at the right temperature for containing fusion's extraordinary heat).

This would be, Quanta Magazine reports, the first fully successful demonstration of a time crystal. That's a pretty big deal, considering how difficult quantum computers are to build and maintain. In large part, that's because qubits are unstable, acting differently when they're under observation than when they're left alone. Time crystals, meanwhile, are stable.

It's not surprising that Google is leading the charge toward powerful quantum computing, themselves named after the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros: a googol. But what will come of one of the world's largest and most omnipresent companies having the most cutting-edge computing technology ever seen? It might take a time crystal-powered quantum computer to make that prediction.
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Toronto, Vancouver Island protests shine spotlight on media access


Elena De Luigi
The Canadian Press Staff
Wednesday, August 4, 2021 

Mounted Police reinforce the perimeter of a fence after it was breached by supporters during an eviction process at a homeless encampment in Toronto, on Tuesday, June 22, 2021.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

TORONTO -- Police and politicians' efforts to limit public access to recent events in Toronto and Vancouver Island have cast a spotlight on the role of journalists and spurred concerns over freedom of the press.

The decision by authorities in Toronto to fence off public parks last month as municipal staff and police cleared homeless encampments sparked backlash from media outlets and advocates, who have petitioned the city to allow reporters on site during the operations.

The push for media access in Toronto came on the heels of a court decision that ordered RCMP in British Columbia to allow reporters entry to blockades in Fairy Creek, where demonstrators have been protesting old-growth logging. The judge in that case, which was launched after journalists reported being blocked from the site, found police should only restrict access if there is an operational or safety concern.


In Toronto, the city has moved to dismantle several homeless encampments -- which emerged during the pandemic as many avoided shelters over fears of COVID-19 -- sparking protests and confrontations that have at times erupted into violence.

The Canadian Association of Journalists called the move to bar reporters from Toronto parks during the clearing of the camps "disappointing to witness and wholly unacceptable," and stressed media rights are enshrined in law.

"Stop arresting or threatening reporters for no good reason. That's a red line that cannot be crossed," Brent Jolly, the association's president, said in an email.

Tensions boiled over at Lamport Stadium Park two weeks ago after a large crowd refused to leave the site that authorities had fenced in. Multiple scuffles broke out and police were seen pushing those who didn't comply. By the end of the day, police said 26 people were arrested and charged with offences that included assault with a weapon, assaulting a peace officer and trespassing.



A day earlier, an encampment at Alexandra Park was cleared by city staff and police after a fence was put up. That operation also saw several people arrested, including a photojournalist with The Canadian Press who was escorted out of the closed-off area in handcuffs. He was issued a notice of trespass, which doesn't carry a charge but bars him from returning to the site for 90 days.

A spokesman for the city said staff closed off the parks during the clearings and prevented anyone from going in, "not just media," in order to speak to those living in the encampment, as well as remove tents and debris.

"We understand and appreciate the concerns raised by the media and the role they have in bearing witness and documenting city operations," Brad Ross said in a statement.

He said the city arranged pooled media coverage for the Lamport Stadium operation, which typically allows select members of the media access to an event so they can later share the material they gather with others.

"The pool arrangement was designed to allow media to see the city's actions, while ensuring the safety of all, as well as addressing the sensitivity around privacy," Ross said.



The CAJ's Jolly said, however, that the pool coverage the city set up for the encampment clearing was "inadequate" because it restricted the ability for journalists to "freely cover" evictions taking place in a public park.

"Attempting to control the work of journalists while they are doing their job is entirely inappropriate," he said, adding that a pool arrangement is generally used when there is limited space for press.

"The work journalists do is both professional and conducted in service to the public and any attempts to short-circuit that work is wholly incompatible with the long-standing tradition of a free press in Canada."

Carissima Mathen, a common law professor with the University of Ottawa, said mounting an effective legal challenge to get access to "relatively short-term" events is difficult because it likely won't be possible to get an injunction in time.

"It's possible that you could try and make the case right after the fact to get some kind of declaration, but it's usually not very practical," she said.

Mathen said it is important to consider questions like how far from a fence police and city staff are when they're carrying out their operations, whether reporters can speak with people as they come out, and how long barricades will stay up.

In the case of Fairy Creek, since it had been happening for weeks, those journalists were able to get an injunction to stop the RCMP from barring them from entering the blockades, Mathen said.

Five Toronto councillors who wrote to the city's mayor last month denouncing the "extreme show of force" during the clearing of encampments said any obstruction of media access to the operations is "undemocratic and unconstitutional."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 4, 2021.





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Ownership of Israeli NSO Group up in air amid latest Pegasus scandal

Oregon’s pension fund reconsiders its $233m investment in Novalpina Capital, which has majority ownership of Herzliya-based firm whose spyware is allegedly being misused worldwide


In this file photo taken on August 28, 2016, a woman uses her iPhone in front of the building housing the Israeli NSO group, in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv. (JACK GUEZ / AFP)

SALEM, Oregon (AP) — The future ownership of an Israeli spyware company whose product has been used to hack into the cellphones of journalists, human rights workers and possibly even heads of state is up in the air.

Major investors in a private equity firm that has majority ownership of NSO Group, the maker of the Pegasus spyware, are in discussions about what action to take. The Oregon state employee pension fund is one of the largest investors, if not the largest, having committed $233 million to Novalpina Capital, the private equity firm, in 2017.

Novalpina Capital has been saddled with both an internal dispute among its founding partners and an explosive report showing NSO Group’s spyware has been widely misused around the globe

Oregon State Treasury spokeswoman Rachel Wray told The Associated Press in an email Wednesday the department is getting involved. State officials previously said investors have limited say in private equity investments once they are completed.

“I can confirm that, consistent with our fiduciary duties to Oregon beneficiaries, and along with other limited partners, (Oregon State) Treasury is involved in discussions related to our investment in Novalpina,” Wray said Wednesday.

The development comes amid a serious disagreement among the three co-founders of London-based Novalpina Capital that, according to press reports from Britain, resulted in investors moving to strip control of the fund after concluding that relations between the three had deteriorated so much that they could no longer work together.

This Oct. 30, 2019, file photo show the Oregon State Treasury office in Tigard, Oregon. (AP/Andrew Selsky, File)

Sky News reported the dispute was about future deployment of Novalpina’s 1 billion euro ($1.18 million) fund.

On top of that internal strife, an investigation published in July by the global media consortium Forbidden Stories showed that at least 180 journalists around the world have been selected as targets by clients of NSO Group. In one case highlighted by the Guardian, Mexican reporter Cecilio Pineda Birto was assassinated in 2017 a few weeks after his cellphone number appeared on a leaked list of more than 50,000 cellphone numbers.

French President Emmanuel Macron is one of several world leaders who may have been targeted using the spyware that is capable of checking a cellphone’s emails and other data and turning on its microphone and cameras.

NSO Group denied that it has ever maintained “a list of potential, past or existing targets.” In a separate statement, it called the Forbidden Stories report “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories.”

The company insists it only sells to “vetted government agencies” for use against terrorists and major criminals and that it has no visibility into its customers’ data. Critics have provided evidence that NSO directly manages the high-tech spying.

This studio photographic illustration shows a smartphone with the website of Israel’s NSO Group which features ‘Pegasus’ spyware, on display in Paris on July 21, 2021. (Joel Saget/AFP)

Oregon State Treasurer Tobias Read, who serves as the state’s chief investment officer, “is following and (is) concerned about the reporting surrounding Novalpina and the NSO Group,” Wray said.

Wray said she cannot get into specifics about the discussions among Novalpina’s investors because of confidentiality restrictions and Oregon’s obligations as a limited partner. Read declined an interview request.

Oregon was Novalpina’s first major investor. Stephen Peel and Stefan Kowski, two founding Novalpina Capital partners, showed up at Oregon treasury offices in the Portland suburb of Tigard in November 2017 to make a pitch to the Oregon Investment Council, which oversees the state’s $90 billion pension fund.

“As investors, we assume we have to be contrarian,” Peel told the council. “We have to find deals that other people don’t see or don’t want to do for various reasons.”

The Oregon Investment Council unanimously approved a $233 million commitment. It has so far provided to the fund $65.7 million, according to the most recent statistics. The Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation and England’s South Yorkshire Pensions Authority invested $59 million and $33 million respectively.

In this Oct. 30, 2019, photo, the Oregon Investment Council conducts its monthly meeting in Tigard, Ore. (AP/Andrew Selsky)

In 2019, Novalpina Capital and the founders of NSO Group acquired a majority stake in NSO Group from another private equity firm, Francisco Partners, that the Oregon pension fund had previously invested in.

Novalpina’s largest investors are now considering picking Berkeley Research Group to replace Novalpina, the Financial Times reported. If appointed, the California-based global consulting firm would be given a mandate to return investors’ money by selling the three companies Novalpina owns, including NSO, for the highest possible price, the London newspaper said.

Berkeley Research Group did not respond to a request for comment. The group’s website says it “helps leading organizations advance in three key areas: disputes and investigations, corporate finance, and performance improvement.”
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