Back To The Motherland
I've just returned from a month of traveling. I try to get out of the US about twice a year, go on a walkabout, and talk to people outside my own country. I post to this blog infrequently when I'm on the road. But I learn a lot about the world when I pry myself out of my comfortable base camp here in San Francisco.
My travels this winter started in Berlin where I covered the Chaos Computer Congress run by the Berlin-based computer hacker group the Chaos Computer Club. I wrote a story about the Congress for Wired News called Hackers Rebel Against Spycams that just scratched the surface of the cool hacks and activism going on among the hacker community in Berlin. Needless to say, not many of these folks want to visit me in the US and be fingerprinted and photographed and I can't blame them. The most interesting discussion at the Congress took place between CCC member and security researcher Frank Rieger and Rop Gonggrip founder of the Dutch ISP XS4All. Entitled "We Lost the War" Rieger and Gonggrip suggested that we have lost the worldwide fight for privacy, lost the war against the surveillance industry and almost lost the fight for free access to the Internet. Have we lost these fights?
From Berlin I headed off to Florence to look at art and talk politics with some Italian friends. Life is beautiful in Italy, it seduces you like a narcotic. But activists complain that Italian PM Silvio Burlusconi still has a lock on the country's media outlets and very little real political dissent gets through. Internet charges are still high there preventing people from getting much news off the Net. Italy, say my friends there, tends to import the worst of American culture (TV sitcoms etc) without any democratic innovations, like, say the ability to file class action lawsuits. A judge in Milan has hauled a priest into court to challenge the existance of Jesus, however, so all is not lost in Italy. "What happened to America?" asked my Italian dinner companions. "We looked to it as a beacon of democracy and then they began locking people up without trial and torturing political prisoners."
What can one say to a comment like that? You put down your fork, appologize on behalf of your entire country, and then go find a beautiful place on the Palazzo Vecchio and have a cry.
The last leg of my journey took place in Switzerland. Even with my bad French, I could tell the Swiss really had a handle on current events. "Osama bin Laden is a creature of the US," said my Swiss friends in Laussane who were well-versed with the arguments in Michael Moore's movie Farenheit 911. "Bush has a lot of power, but the Swiss system does not allow the executive branch to concentrate power." Sensible Swiss. No wonder people want to bank there.
I moved on to Basel, Switzerland where I had a chance to hear my favorite Swiss researcher, Albert Hofmann, honored at symposium called LSD: Problem Child and Wonderdrug: International Symposium on the Occassion of he 100th Birthday of Albert Hofmann. I didn't get any sleep for the entire event, but I wrote a story about the symposium for Wired News.
I've only felt to be in the presence of a true mystic twice in my life. The first time was interviewing the Dali Lama and the second was hearing Dr. Hofmann describe his discovery of LSD. Hofmann, a very sober- minded former chemist for Sandoz, said that during the dark days of World War II, LSD called out to him to impart a message of reunification with the natural world. Hofmann is hoping that LSD can be decriminalized and find a useful place in society similar to role a similar ergot compound had in the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece. My story for Wired described the many scientists who found inspiration with this substance, including Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple.
