I must be suffering from dementia. When I was young and impressionable, I had no trouble understanding the news. Nowadays, I’m totally lost when I see things like:
“The PA is non-political. It does not allow political activities on its premises but the guidance must be from somebody who is working on behalf of the government. The MP has a separate role to play – that of running the town council. The Government would bring him into the picture on issues such as bursary payouts and town council rebates.”
But that’s all right as things like these won’t affect politically apathetic people like me. However, I do get a bit worried when I read things like this, especially when spoken on a mid-autumn night which coincides with 9/11:
“We pre-empted, we detected, we arrested and detained people who would have done bad things to us and done us a lot of harm – not just hurt and kill Singaporeans but brought damage and torn apart our whole society and racial harmony.”
That sounds a lot more frightening. What is “we”? What is “us”? What is “them”? Can any one of us end up in a situation whereby we have have always thought as being part of the “we” suddenly becomes a suspected “them”? Why am I saying all this and what does it have to do with my book review?
Bursts is a science book that draws some parallels and analogies from history – namely the Crusades. The author brings forth an interesting theory that may explain and predict crowd behaviour.
The website wheresgeorge.com (probably blocked to your computer) tracks the path of dollar bills in the US. You can “george” a dollar bill in your hand by entering its serial number and the ZIP code of the area you’re in. You then write wheresgeorge.com on the bill and spend it. When people come across a “georged” note, they would enter the serial number and the ZIP code of their location. This allows “players” to track the movement of “georged” notes all over America. Going by commonsense, we would expect to see a random distribution. As it turned out, notes tend to stay within a locality and then “burst” out to a different part of the continent. They tend to lie dormant for long periods of time, then suddenly, you see a lot of movement. Barabasi postulates that such seemingly useless data can actually help us predict future activity.
Many supermarkets offer discount or loyalty cards. They are actually not offering you a discount but buying your private information. When you buy things at a supermarket anonymously, they know what you’ve bought, but they don’t know who you are. When you scan your loyalty, discount or membership card, they know exactly who bought what. The amount of information gathered can be very valuable in determining marketing strategies.
Research done on “young and wild” college students given smartphones which could track all their movements and activities revealed that by and large, even these young and wild individuals follow a pattern. In other words, they are predictable. Using data from their smartphones, you can predict with 80% accuracy where they would be and what they would be doing at a certain point in time in the future.
Barabasi also tells the story of US citizen, Associate Professor Hasan Elahi, who was detained at the airport twice for suspected terrorist activities. The reason for his detention? “Suspicious movement after 9/11″. Ownership of a storage facility which contained explosives.
Although Hasan had blond hair and spoke with a genuine American accent, he was born in Bangladesh and had a suspicious sounding name. But what really made him “suspicious” was his movements. He is an artist, a sculptor of sorts who deals with bulky creations the size of buildings. He owned a storage facility. He travels all over the world to lend his hand in the creation of these monumental pieces. One day, you may find him napping at an airport in the Middle East. The next day, he would be on a train in Europe. After that, Indonesia, Senegal, who knows? If Hasan had scanned some loyalty card at airports, the people who gathered the data would be annoyed that they can’t see any pattern. And US Homeland Security follows the same kind of information gathering and interpretation as the supermarkets. Hasan stood out as being unpredictable and therefore suspicious.
This resonates with my own personal experience. You see, my elder son was born in Chiangmai, Thailand. We got him a Thai passport and brought him back to Singapore when he was 3 months old. Then, I went to ICA to apply for his Singapore citizenship. It’s usually not a problem since I’m the biological father, his mother is a PR and Singapore is desperate for newborns. But in the interview room, the officer flipped through my passport again and again. She then asked me to photocopy almost every page of it. The application took many months to process. We were sick of renewing my son’s social visit pass on his Thai passport. Friends in similar situations had no trouble at all. Why me?
Well, those of you who remember me as an adventurer may have guessed that I had a Nepalese visa on one page, an Indian visa on another, a Thai visa, Chinese visa, Burmese visa …. Then an exit stamp from China at the 4700m Khunjerab Pass and an entry stamp at Pakistan on the same day. These movements simply don’t fit into the pattern of the average Singaporean dentist! I must be pretty dim to realise only after reading Barabasi’s book that I’ve been “Hasaned” at ICA. Luckily, my new passport only has entry stamps into Japan and Korea for dental conferences.
Back to my book review, Barabasi used the unexpected turns in the first Crusades to draw our attention to the uncanny prophecies of Hungarian Istvan Telegdi, who stood strongly against the Pope’s call to arms. Telegdi predicted that Crusaders would fight one another, resulting into a bloody civil war in Europe. He also predicted that the Crusaders would never get near to Constantinople and not a single Ottoman soldier would be engaged.
True enough, the Crusades descended into a war between peasants and nobles. There were no smartphones and loyalty cards back then, so how did Telegdi predict this outcome? More importantly, if there were smartphones and loyalty cards back then, would the data have convinced the Cardinal to retract his call to arms?
Some would argue that Hasan is fortunate to be living in the modern world. In Medieval times, he would certainly have been summarily executed, but then again, he would have been much harder to pick out when technology was primitive. Big Brother is now on the devices that we carry. Storage capacities for our “histories” is virtually infinite. For people who don’t follow the pattern, chances of being singled out and identified as “suspicious” will increase as technology advances.
No one here would dare to contemplate a wheresgeorge.com. No one would dare to fight fire with fire like what Hasan did. He exposed every movement he made to the public on the internet to show that he literally has nothing to hide. In Hasan’s case, it still didn’t work. He was still detained at the airport for suspicious movements. Hasan finally got out of his ordeal when he was invited to do a public art commission at San Jose International Airport. Homeland Security cleared him for work at the airport and he has not be harassed ever since.
The latest Mid Autumn Festival speech on 9/11 makes it amply clear. Alarms will sound (and Singaporean alarms are far more sensitive than American ones) if you break the pattern.
“We pre-empted, we detected, we arrested and detained people who would have done bad things to us and done us a lot of harm – not just hurt and kill Singaporeans but brought damage and torn apart our whole society and racial harmony.”
You may get a knock on the door if you suddenly buy large quantities of a brand of detergent you’ve never used before. Make sure you have your explanation ready. Enjoy your Mid Autumn Festival. In Hongkong if you can.
These mooncakes would be too “distasteful” for Singapore, I guess.
