Ah, I see I already commented at length on this Jared Cohen character and Google Ideas back in June of 2011... Can't believe how I write all this stuff and then completely forget about it...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... ePage.htmlGoogle Ideas think tank gathering former extremists to battle radicalization By Allen McDuffee, Published: June 24
Technology giant Google, having conquered the Internet and the world around it, is taking on a new challenge: violent extremism.
The company, through its eight-month-old think tank, Google Ideas, is paying for 80 former Muslim extremists, neo-Nazis, U.S. gang members and other former radicals to gather in Dublin this weekend to explore how technology can play a role in de-radicalization efforts around the globe.
Think Tanked blog: Follow Allen McDuffee's daily reporting from the Google Ideas conference
The “formers,” as they have been dubbed by Google, will be surrounded by 120 thinkers, activists, philanthropists and business leaders. The goal is to dissect the question of what draws some people, especially young people, to extremist movements and why some of them leave.
Stop! Triggers ahead:
Brace yourself to hear what a
pre-former, still-radicalized young man says. It's pretty stunning and highlights why it's so important to learn ways to help such cases leave their extremisms behind before they do too much damage.
“We are trying to reframe issues like radicalization and see how we can apply technology to it,” said Jared Cohen, the 29-year-old former State Department official who agreed to head Google Ideas with the understanding he would host such a conference. “Technology is part of every challenge in the world and a part of every solution.”
Ha, did I get ya?
!O TECH GOD REMAKE OUR NEMESES!
The thing about that sentence is, it doesn't have to be a manifesto. You could always read it as an embarrasing generality, like, say: "Everything's atoms, man. The problem and the solution!"
In forming Google Ideas, company officials said, they were eager to move beyond the traditional think tank model of conducting studies and publishing books, saying their “think/do tank” would make action a central part of its mission.
But in its first venture, the decision to enter the space between thinking and doing is also drawing some criticism as Google steps enthusiastically into what many view as an intractable, enduring problem — and one that has traditionally been left to governments.
Google Ideas may be setting its sights too high, said Christopher Boucek of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and getting terrorists to give up violence may be a more attainable goal than getting them to change their sympathies.
“You’ll never make a hard-core jihadi into a Jeffersonian democrat — it’s just not going to happen,” he said. He also noted that while there may be common threads to why individuals join extremists groups, the remedies to that problem are more likely to be “culturally, and even country, specific.”
Pah! Analogue piker! We shall find the Frequency of Mind-Change and tune The Algorithm to Actuate It!
Harvard University professor Joseph S. Nye Jr., who specializes in theories and application of power, agreed that the endeavor “could be problematic — especially if it is perceived to be in conflict with the foreign policy of the United States.” He added that the ambition could “complicate things further since profit is ostensibly involved.”
Uh, hello? This is attempting to develop the next generation foreign policy of the United States. In which profit is always involved: who could suggest otherwise, my god are we not still gentlemen? But I see where there can be your usual bureaucratic struggles over it. Vulcans vs. Mind-Googlers vs. Killemall-Drone-Obliterators, and whatnot.
Heh, it's also easy to see where this is likely going, which will be nowhere, but a lot of fat data sets and checks produced in the meantime. But since radicalization and its reverse process are conceived as a matter of individual mental frameworks to alter, rather than questions of politics and economics and justice and ideology as well as one's particular biography... these guys are going to be like materialists, but without probing most of the material plane.
Officials at Google express little concern that their efforts are overly ambitious or will tread in others’ territory.
Well duh, gotta hype for buyers, man.
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said the company decided to get in the think tank business with the goal of tackling “some of the most intractable problems facing mankind by combining a new generation of leaders with technology. . . . We’re not looking for silver bullets but new approaches.”
Radicals!
Up to now, efforts to reform extremists have largely been government-run and focused on distinct groups. Many of the programs have operated in Muslim countries, and their sponsors have struggled with whether it was enough to get radicals to disengage from extremist movements or whether they must reject extremism and embrace mainstream values.
Cohen said the approach at the conference will be to treat extremism as a universal problem that cuts across cultural, ideological, political, religious and geographic boundaries.
In other words, as I've implied, to fail. Filtrate out any trace of history, and see if the universal radical virus can be isolated in your test tube!
Bringing together former extremists from a variety of backgrounds, he theorizes, could point to common factors that pull people into violence.
“If we compartmentalize different radicalization challenges, that also means we compartmentalize the de-radicalization solutions,” and that could be a lost opportunity, he said.
By leaching out the differences, you're actually left with a pretty small compartment that may not speak to anything except your pre-planted paradigm that radicalization is a kind of a universal psychological bug, and not (at least also) the product of circumstances.
But wait. Now, we shall learn that the superpowered Orwellian promises were just a set up for hellacious disappointment:
Although he didn’t want to prescribe an answer, he said a campaign in the coming months could harness the power of YouTube, employ advanced mapping techniques or create alternative Web spaces to compete with radicalizing voices.
That's it? More material for overstocked Google subsidiary YouTube, and a new social network realm for repenitent radicals?
http://www.FormersMeetup.net?
Plop!
Cohen, a former aide to Secretaries of State Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Rodham Clinton who had focused at the State Department on counterterrorism and radicalism, said he joined Google to escape some of the limitations on what can be done within a government agency to address extremism.
Is it ambition? Striking out on his own? Maybe!
“You can’t build things,” said Cohen, noting that government often lacks the resources to create technologies aimed at complex social and political problems.
Or is this exactly what government is doing -- dispatching him to this new assignment at a joint ideas incubator with Google?
In his new job, heading a think tank supported by a company that earned $30 billion in sales last year, the limitations are quite different.
“There’s no sense in bothering with some of these challenges at a place like Google if we can’t take risks,” he said.
In the future, Cohen predicted, the think tank will take on the challenges of fragile states, democracy building, and questions about the Internet and society.
Google Ideas, with six full-time employees working out of the company’s New York offices, is somewhat removed from the Washington environs where Cohen had operated for the past several years. He had become known at the State Department for bringing together unlikely participants, often in gatherings with a strong technology component.
In 2009, Cohen drew attention when he asked his friend, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, to delay a scheduled maintenance shutdown so protesters in Iran could coordinate during an uprising and reach international media.
!THAT GUY! That's Cohen then.
The White House had wanted to fire Cohen after the incident, out of concern the U.S. would be seen as meddling in Iranian affairs, according to a report in the New Yorker, but he stayed in his job.
** cough kabuki cough **
This weekend’s conference, formally known as the Summit Against Violent Extremism, or SAVE, will run Sunday through Tuesday.
The name alone demands abolition. But at least we're not all Jesus-y about our salvation narrative. It's about finding and expressing your inner American.
Among the speakers will be T.J. Leyden, a former skinhead leader from California and now executive director of Hate2Hope. Leyden has said he began to turn away from the white supremacist movement as he watched his young children take on his anger and bigotry.
Another participant, Maajid Nawaz, is a British citizen of Pakistani descent who resigned from Hizb ut-Tahrir, a pan-Islamist group whose goal is to establish a global Islamic state, and now leads an organization that counters Islamic extremism.
The conference will also include Carie Lemack, whose mother was killed in one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. Lemack co-founded Global Survivors Network, an organization for victims of terrorism and produced the documentary “Killing in the Name.”
Anyone know this movie? Sounds harrowing to say the least.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Killing-I ... 6082693879“The hope from the conference is that we will figure out some of the ‘best practices’ of how you can break youth radicalization,” said James M. Lindsay, a senior vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations, which is helping organize the summit.
Simplistic ideas, like not bombing them and helping them put their national/regional development ahead of global capital's needs, may not appear on the agenda.
Cohen also turned to the Tribeca Film Festival, which was founded to help bring people back to the lower Manhattan neighborhood after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the festival, is making a film about de-radicalization that will draw on the work coming out of the conference. “You have to create deeper opportunities for involvement,” she said.
Follow Allen McDuffee’s reporting from the Google Ideas conference at
Think Tanked and live updates on
Twitter.
I see nothing more at those links.
Keyword: Involvement! Which I can't help reading as the individualized inverse to CHANGE.
Another tangential thought that occurred to me is how much applied radicality must have gone into finding the solutions for making Google, whatever else you say about it, into such a powerful search algorithm.
But onwards and upwards.
.
