internet explorers (not exploiters)

I was reading this post from 2013, about addictive games and game-like websites (such as Facebook), and the possibilities for “addictive” educational resources that could compete with them.  It was interesting, but something felt off about it.

I found myself fixating on this passage [emphasis mine]:

Somebody who is tackling a truly novel problem often feels at a complete loss, having no idea of whether they are even on the right track. Someone who is facing a tough problem that is known to be solvable, but which nobody has yet turned into an addictive one, might feel similarly. If we motivate people to work by giving them frequent external rewards, does that train them to become even more impatient and eager to quit in cases where no such rewards are forthcoming?

Apparently, Western cultures are already doing badly with this. According to this NPR piece, American first-graders who were given an impossible math problem to work on tended to give up within less than 30 seconds. Japanese students, on the other hand, spent a whole hour trying to solve it, stopping only when the researchers told them to. We Westerners have already been trained to desire instant gratification, and it might not be a good idea to turn society even more in that direction.

I am not at all sure that we have a choice, however. It is all well and good to say that we should stop being so focused on instant gratification and train ourselves to work on problems for longer before giving up. But how are we going to do it in a society that keeps becoming ever more addictive? Most people have big projects and noble goals that they say they intend to accomplish, one day – and then they never do, because there are easier rewards available. “We should train ourselves to have a longer tolerance for uncertainty and delayed rewards” is exactly the kind of goal that provides an uncertain reward sometime late in the future… and is thus likely to be put aside in favor of easier goals.

I’m not sure the blogger is saying that the behavior of the Japanese students was strictly better than that of the American students.  I think the argument is just that “Western cultures” have swung too far in one direction, that in the short term it would be helpful to take local steps toward the mindset of the Japanese students.  It’s not a Goofus vs. Gallant thing.

Still, I think “delay gratification more” is difficult advice to act on, in a way the blogger is not accounting for.  This is because “how much should I tolerate delayed gratification?” is an enduring, intrinsically difficult question, one that will always trouble us as long as we are still alive and making decisions.  It’s a question that has been academically formalized as the “explore/exploit tradeoff,” which comes up for instance in the design of computer programs, which have no will of their own.  (That is, we can make the programs delay gratification as much as we like without them “complaining,” but this doesn’t actually lead to the best results.)  And I think the explore/exploit tradeoff is a very important concept if we want to understand why the internet is so addictive.

If you aren’t familiar with it, here’s the basic gist.  (There are probably better explainers somewhere if you feel like Googling for them.)

Say you are designing a machine that makes choices.  (I’m using a machine example here, rather than a person, so it’s clear that the tradeoff arises even when you don’t have a desire for instant gratification built in at the start.)

Your machine doesn’t know everything about the world.  So there are two reasons it might choose an action:

(1) it knows what will happen as a result, and likes it

(2) it doesn’t know what will happen as a result, so it will get new information from taking the action, even if the result is bad

Type 1 is called “exploitation” and type 2 is called “exploration.”

As a concrete example, imagine that the machine gets “points” every time it enters a room.  There are ten million rooms.  It knows that it will get 2 points for entering Room One, 1 point for entering Room Two, and 3 points for entering Room Three, but it doesn’t know how many points the other rooms deliver.

The best room it knows about is Room Three.  The “pure exploitation” strategy would just be to enter Room Three over and over again, forever.  But clearly this is a pretty silly strategy.  It only knows about 3 out of 1,000,000 rooms, and what if one of the others give more than 3 points?  Hence it may want to do some “exploration,” not just “exploitation.”

To learn the answer, though, it will have to take the risk of entering some rooms that might give less than 3 points, so it might lose out in the short term.  And there are so many rooms that it would make sense to settle down and exploit at some point, even if there are still rooms it doesn’t know about.

(The classic formal version of this problem is called the “multi-armed bandit,” BTW.  If you like math/CS there’s a lot of interesting stuff out there on it.)

This framework makes sense for thinking about instant vs. delayed gratification, although the connection can go in two opposing directions.  On the one hand, we need a tolerance for delayed gratification in order to explore, because exploration involves trying many things that aren’t as good as the best thing we already know about.  (Are you going to try a new recipe that might suck, or just make that easy dish you know you like?)  On the other hand, if we always stick with the same thing in the hopes that it’ll pay us delayed rewards sometimes, we are exploiting when we should be exploring.  (If you’ve been “working on” that unsatisfying job/relationship/whatever for 10 years, hoping that maybe next year it’ll finally improve, you might be too tolerant of delayed gratification.)*

When I read the anecdote about the American and Japanese students, I immediately thought back to my time in grad school.  Every day of work in grad school was a vivid explore/exploit dilemma: I was working on a project, and I had various ideas I was pursuing, many of which would probably not work out in the end.  Each day, I could plug away at my latest idea (exploitation), or I could spend time exploring – thinking about other possibilities, trying to critique my existing ideas, trawling Google Scholar to see if someone’s done it already.

This was never a Goofus vs. Gallant, good responsibility vs. bad hedonism sort of decision.  Exploration was scary: I could spend a whole day thinking or reading without anything to show for it, except even stronger misgivings about everything I’d done.  But exploitation was also scary: what if I was wasting time on something clearly misguided?  (I’ll never forget the time I spent weeks working on a beloved idea while my adviser was out of town, wrote up 10+ pages of TeXed notes on it, presented it proudly on the whiteboard to my adviser and a colleague, and watched them sit in impressed silence for about 30 seconds, after which my adviser walked up to the board and wrote a two-line proof that my idea could never possibly work.)

Indeed, one of the biggest psychological pitfalls was that exploitation felt so responsible.  If I was writing equations and doing math, I was “getting things done,” not just screwing around.  I was delaying gratification, putting a big project together step by step, carefully and dutifully.  This responsible feeling, though, got me into plenty of situations like the one I just described.  Delayed gratification can be dangerous!

*(Boring technicality paragraph: this is all a bit circular.  If we really didn’t care whether a reward happens now or in a million years, there wouldn’t be as much of a reason to prefer exploitation over exploration.  There still may be a reason if there’s an infinite choice set, but that’s a mathematical curiosity; more relevantly, any machine or human project has a finite time horizon, and besides, time is money.  If you spend 10 years agonizing over finding the perfect job posting to apply to, you are losing money by exploring too much.  No messy value judgments there, just concrete $$.)

Back to addictive games and the internet.

It’s tempting to lump together addictive video games and addictive internet behavior, since they’re both recent phenomena involving digital technology.  But I think they’re really very different.

Addictive games are all about exploitation.  They may have internal explore-exploit dilemmas: maybe you are trying to get the most points, and you have choices like the “rooms” above.  But when you’re entranced by the game, it makes you forget that you value things other than its points.  You end up spending three straight hours trying to get more Tacky Phonegame Points, not thinking “do I really have nothing better to do with the next three hours than mining Tacky Phonegame Points”?  This is why they’re draining and ultimately un-fun, like chemical addictions: you end up pursuing the game’s internal objectives even beyond the point where you stop truly wanting them.

Addictive internet behavior, though, is all about exploration.  That blog post mentions checking Facebook notifications, which do have a certain resemblance to Tacky Phonegame Points.  But the vast majority of the time I spend on sites like Facebook and tumblr isn’t spent following up on notification, it’s spent scrolling and refreshing the feed.  I am not pursuing any explicit score here; the website presumably records how much time I spend reading the feed, but it doesn’t give me any kind of feedback about it.  You have Follower counts and Friend counts, but you don’t have “Number of Posts Read” counts.  Yet I read a whole lot of posts.

Another distinctive feature of these sites, which is totally different from addictive games, is their heterogenous content.  When I scroll down my feed, I have no idea what I’ll see next – a joke? a serious political statement? a personal lament or celebration?  There is an “instant gratification” element here: I’m curious what the next post will be.  But there is also a strong exploration appeal.

The internet is better than anything else in the world at making you aware, at all times, there there may be better Rooms out there.  You tend to end up reading one tab of 20, acutely aware that there are 19 other possibly-better reading choices a mere click away.  Everyone knows those social media posts that make the plaintive appeal, “why isn’t anyone talking about this?”  But even when this is not explicitly said, it’s always the subtext of the internet.  There are always so many things you aren’t (yet) talking about, thinking about, reading about.

A typical breeze through my feeds in the morning might expose me to 2 important-sounding political issues I’ve never heard of, and 2 noteworthy developments in the lives of friends or acquaintances, and 2 things that trigger thoughts I want to write down in my own posts, and 5 or 6 articles or blog posts that I will open in new tabs because they give me an “I ought to know about this” feeling.  Which of these opportunities should I spend my day pursuing?  I’ve only just woken up, and already I have so many responsibilities – and that’s if I want to “waste the day on the internet,” instead of “getting real work done”!

The internet connects us to many people on ambiguous terms, in relations that are somewhere between friendship, acquaintance-ship, fan-ship, etc.  Unless we spend all day reading the feeds, we are constantly – by the standards of real-world friendships – “falling out of touch” with people.  So many personal situations I could pay more attention to, but at the cost of not reading up on the latest political thing I ought to know about, or reading that oh-god-so-interesting blog post.

And on the internet, we no longer have any excuses for not “educating ourselves.”  That important issue that more people should be talking about?  You can’t say you don’t have time to go to the library.  You probably haven’t even read the Wikipedia page, or all 10 of the must-read long-form journalism pieces, much less all the acerbic must-read blog critiques of those pieces (what kind of sucker are you, not being up on the acerbic critiques?).  Meanwhile, of course, you’ve been neglecting that tab about the different local variants of Polynesian mythology, which maybe isn’t as “important,” but which is super interesting, and which was giving you ideas for your fiction project earlier on, and wouldn’t it be a shame if you forgot about it and your fiction suffered as a result?

So much exploration to do.

Why isn’t anyone talking about Room #130,327?

BRYCE
What about the massacres in Sri Lanka, honey? Doesn’t that affect us, too? I mean don’t you know anything about Sri Lanka? About how the Sikhs are killing like tons of Israelis there? Doesn’t that affect us?

BATEMAN
Oh come on, Bryce. There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about. Sure our foreign policy is important, but there are more pressing problems at hand.

BRYCE
Like what?

BATEMAN
Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. But we can’t ignore our social needs, either. We have to stop people from abusing the welfare system. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women but change the abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women’s freedom of choice.

I think the internet has made it a lot harder for me to read books.  Really, it’s made it harder to focus on a lot of things, but reading books stands out, since it’s such a close substitute for what I do on the internet (mostly reading text of some sort), and because it’s something I want to do more of.  I don’t mean that in an aspirational, self-improvement way; the books are actually more interesting, in an immediate-fun way, than the internet.  Yet I choose the internet.

The problem here is not weak-willed hedonism.  Weak-willed hedonism is when, instead of reading a book or browsing the internet, I choose to play Starcraft.  When I make that choice, I am plunged into an almost non-conscious exploitation void, I get a lot of Points, and I come out on the other end 30 minutes later as though nothing had happened, without no learning or thinking in between.

No, this is something else.  You know what’s weird?  The reason I have so much trouble reading a book – any book – is that it feels complacent.  It feels like writing equations all day that my adviser is going to demolish on the board at our next meeting.  It feels like exploitation in a world full of visibly under-explored possibilities.  Even “important” reading, reading on “things I should know about,” feels palpably excessive, frivolous, an overblown luxury.

350 pages about Sri Lanka alone?  Come on, Bryce.  There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about.

The internet connects us to many many people, which makes us aware of all the possibilities for exploration.  To compound the problem, it also makes us aware of the worst pitfalls of exploitation.  It routes us directly to all the world’s crackpots and single-issue obsessives, who we all put in tabs so we can guiltily skim their work and think about how much more worldly we are than them, how much more aware.

The most superficially charismatic people on the internet (to me) are the people who are the opposite of these obsessives, who seem to know (a little) about everything, who always have the latest must-read links, who expose you to new things every day.  The Batemans, not the Bryces.  These people presumably have relatively shallow knowledge of any one thing, but since we’re all hyper-explorers on the internet, we don’t have enough time to exhaust their knowledge of any one thing.  The internet doesn’t show me “professor spends 10 years working on topic, contributes steadily to human knowledge”; it shows me “professor fields ignorant opinion on twitter; should have known better.”  Good thing I know better, I think, clutching my 20 tabs to myself like armor.

I don’t think traditional notions of addictiveness are sufficient to describe this particular problem.  It isn’t a matter of just choosing the responsible thing.  The problem is that Bateman is (figuratively) right.  There are a lot of things to worry about, and now we’re hyper-aware of this fact in a historically unusual (unique?) way.

And our traditional notions of responsibility, of instant and deferred gratification, were shaped in a world where there were much stronger barriers to exploration.  Where you could still say, truthfully, that you hadn’t educated yourself on an issue because you just didn’t have time to go to the library.

Now there really are millions of Rooms a few clicks away, and any one of them might be a very important Room.  And the question is what we should do in that situation.  And there is no good, traditional answer.  This is a new problem and we need new answers.

What the “Alt-Left” Trump Despises Was Actually Doing in Charlottesville Last Weekend →

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There were some fifteen types of teen.  Nothing in my experience as a teen, nothing in the academic literature, had prepared me for this.

funereal-disease:

I believe in rehabilitative justice first and foremost because I was in a cult.

Yeah, I talk a lot about my liberal pacifist upbringing and my community’s condemnation of Middle East invasion shaping my relationship to the Evil Other. All of that is true and salient. But the most formative element by far was the experience of being seduced by incorrect beliefs and finding my way out the other side.

(very long effortpost below cut)

Keep reading

In a television drama broadcast in 2001, an aging bachelor in Pyongyang shows little interest in the young beauty he encounters in a hardware store until he finds out that she has volunteered to work in the same collective potato farm. (Since the launch of the “potato revolution” in the late 1990s, the regime has glorified citizens who relocate to the remote northeastern region where most potatoes are farmed.) He proposes marriage to her that very day, she accepts, and they go off to celebrate with his mother and her aunt.

Baker’s digressive novel, partly composed of extensive footnotes of up to several pages, follows Howie’s contemplations of a variety of everyday concepts, such as how paper milk cartons replaced glass milk bottles, the miracle of perforation, and the buoyant nature of plastic straws; and everyday objects such as vending machines, paper towel dispensers and popcorn poppers.

antialiasis:

earnest-peer:

fnord888:

nostalgebraist:

How much do we really know about how profitable online advertising is?

I’ve heard that advertising in general is not a very scientific field.  One reason I’ve heard is that the whole industry will pick up a fad at once, so it’s hard to do anything like a scientific study of whether it helps competitively.  There seems to be a lot of debate on whether “sex sells” is even true, but advertisers decided it was true en masse at some point, and now we have a lot more sexy ads than we used to.  That sort of thing.

The internet as we know it could not exist without advertising.  Hosting costs money, and most (?) of the time, ads are used to pay for it.  Given how ineffective online advertising intuitively seems – if you aren’t blocking it, it’s usually in your peripheral vision and not even consciously perceived! – there is something weird about the staggering ecosystem of companies and services involved in bringing it to you.

I used to be one of those people who didn’t use an ad blocker on principle, just because there was something magical about the way I could get all of this free content because a bunch of suckers were willing to bet on influencing me subliminally via my peripheral vision.  Sure, you can always whitelist sites you specifically want to support, but I kinda wanted to support the system as a whole.  It was only as ads got worse – as they made websites slow and unusable, as they did more and more creepy tracking of your identity – that I started blocking them.  Which only makes them even less effective.

I can’t think of a single time I’ve bought something because I saw an ad for it online, not counting “in-house” ads like webcomics advertising their own merchandise.  Literally.  I can’t think of one single time.  It’s conceivable that I’m the sucker here because I don’t think I’m being influenced by all these little pictures in my peripheral vision, when really they’re inculcating subconscious brand recognition and stuff.  But … really?  Really?  How much would you be willing to bet on that almost crackpot-sounding theory of subliminal influence?

A lot of companies seem to bet a lot on it.  Should they?  Is is likely that they’ll all collectively come to their senses, the way the all collectively decided that sex sells, and thereby destroy the internet?

1) Beware of typical-minding.

2) While it’s probably true that advertising in general is not a particularly scientific field, it’s not completely devoid of data (Especially in the web advertising space! All those creepy trackers are there for a reason!). There’s a difference between “nobody knows if a sexy ad will actually create more clicks/sales than a boring control ad, but everyone does sexy ads” and “nobody knows whether or not anyone clicks ads and buys products”.

A buddy of mine is working at a startup that is building a system to find out which ads actually get people not only to customers’ sites, but even to buy stuff. The thing is: It’s 2017, and that’s not exactly an obscure mission statement. Why doesn’t that sostware already exist?

That definitely already exists. Google Analytics, for example, has features specifically for tracking which ad visitors came in through and subsequently whether that person goes on to buy stuff - the industry jargon is “conversions”, as in visitors being “converted” to paying customers. Yes, that sounds like some incredibly creepy Cybermen shit, and yes, that is actually what they call it. I get spam about “improving your website’s conversions!!” weekly.

Online advertising is actually pretty scientific as industries go, since the ease of precise programmatic tracking means collecting and aggregating hard numerical data on what works and what doesn’t is just a matter of having a couple of moderately competent programmers involved at some point in the pipeline (the site itself has to tell Google Analytics when the visitor “converts”, but Google pretty much handles the rest). Within the industry, articles abound analyzing and picking apart click-through rates and conversion rates for different types and placements of ads on different networks. You may never ever be tempted to click on an ad, but showing an online banner ad to thousands of people is very cheap, so it can all be worth it if just five people in 10,000 (say) actually click on it. It’s the same principle as spam e-mails - odds are there is no chance you or anyone you know would ever buy the male enhancement kit in the sketchy spam e-mail, but sending mass e-mail is very cheap, so they only need one sucker among the hundreds of thousands who get the e-mail to fall for it in order for it to pay.

Advertising preys on the naïve - to somewhat varying degrees, depending on the legitimacy of the product, but always partly. Most people don’t click ads, but they’re there for the fraction of a percentage that actually do, and that fraction of a percentage is enough to keep it profitable.

Ah, yeah, conversion tracking seems important.  It doesn’t let you estimate revenue directly, since not everyone who buys something they saw in an ad will do it via a click-through (otherwise how would ads have worked before the internet?), but it does put a lower bound on it, at least if you trust the data.

A lot of people mentioned A/B testing as an example of how online advertising is more scientific than offline advertising.  On the face of it, my OP seems incoherent: I say that ads track your identity, but I don’t mention the main reason for doing this, which is precisely making advertising more scientific.

What I was thinking was more like, “advertising is prone to fads that may not provably do much for the bottom line, and online advertising as a whole may be one of those fads.”  For very small “all else being equal” changes, we can (insofar as we trust our measurements!) test whether the change helps or hurts.  But they have to be small changes: an A/B test is supposed to be a controlled experiment, and you have to keep every other aspect of your business practices constant while varying one little thing.

(That said, I imagine you can do A/B tests to simulate “what if we didn’t advertise on this platform,” by assigning some group of tracked user IDs to receive blank spaces, or pleasant but irrelevant pictures, instead of ads.  Do people do this?  I wonder how it would work for Youtube ads, say; I’ve never seen a “dummy” ad on Youtube that wasn’t for a product, and would be confused if I did.)

What’s probably much more important than the above is the issue of untrustworthy measurements.  We have big, monolithic major players (Google, Facebook), and some huge conflicts on interest.  Google Analytics seems great, but it’s made by, uh, Google, who want you to buy ad space from them, and who have a worrying lack of competition.  I keep seeing articles about how advertisers are mad at Google or Facebook for mistakes or shady practices related to their metrics.  Here’s one about Facebook (and this about the resulting loss of trust).  I can’t find it since it’s been swamped by articles about “brand safety” concerns, but I remember something about advertisers who thought their ads were being shown in full on Youtube when they weren’t?  Etc.

@captain-penguin pointed out in a reblog that Procter and Gamble recently made a large cut to their online ads and didn’t see a perceptible drop in sales.  There are many articles on this – here’s a decent one, but see also this about a speech by P&G’s chief brand officer.  He talks about unreliable measurements, and also about the long supply chain with many middlemen:

First up was the increasingly dodgy world of programmatic, and specifically the long list of ad tech vendors who each “punch their ticket” and take a significant slice of the client’s media investment long before it ever reaches a publisher or platform.

“We serve ads to consumers through a non-transparent media supply chain with spotty compliance to common standards, unreliable measurement, hidden rebates and new inventions like bot and methbot fraud,” Pritchard announced.

His claim that this supply chain is “murky at best, and fraudulent at worst” is the clearest signal yet that client companies are finally starting to question the gleaming technological promises that were made about programmatic and digital media in general. […]

Pritchard was not done yet. In the biggest move of the speech, he decried the closed measurement systems of Google and Facebook. He offered up a “confession” that when P&G first embarked upon digital advertising it had traded its usual rigour for the first-mover advantage that these “latest shiny objects” might confer.

Well, Pritchard continued, “we have come to our senses” and will no longer accept publisher self-reporting without external verification.

By the end of the year P&G expects all its partners to adopt third-party, accredited verification of audience numbers. The “gig is up” he told his by now spellbound audience. The P&G shears are coming out and the “walled gardens” are about to be pruned back.

The following quote from Josiah Stamp (apparently sometimes known as “Stamp’s Law”) seems apropos:

The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

(via antialiasis)

I started reading a book called “The Angel of the Revolution” (free on Project Gutenberg), and it is so bad in the most fascinating way

It was written in 1893 by this guy named George Griffith, who was a lot like H. G. Wells, writing near-future science fiction that combined technological speculation, adventure, and a socialist message.  But Griffith is, more, uh … look, just let me summarize.

We’re ten years in the future – it’s 1903.  The central character is a nerdy 26-year-old dreamer who’s devoted his entire life to building a heavier-than-air flying machine.  His prospects are drying up, everyone’s making fun of him, but at last he succeeds in building a little scale-model airship that flies (he’s discovered a chemical reaction allowing for very light fuel).

By chance, he runs into an agent of a massively powerful worldwide conspiracy called “the Terrorists.”  They seem to be left-wing anarchists of some sort, and are said to have been behind the real-life Russian nihilist movement.  But their ideology itself is rarely talked about and only then in platitudes, while on nearly every page there is a loving authorial focus on their methods.

Their main form of activity seems to be arranging the killing of people they don’t like.  They have agents high up in all majors institutions, allowing them to routinely kill public figures and successfully cover up their deaths.  (They love pointing out that these are not “murders” so much as “executions,” because they are bringing bad people to justice.)  They have a centralized power structure organized in circles around a single leader.  Their members obey orders from their superiors without question, up to and including sacrificing their lives.  Snitches and other betrayers are promptly and efficiently killed:

“Every one of the cabs is fitted with a telephonic arrangement communicating with the roof. The driver has only to button the wire of the transmitter up inside his coat so that the transmitter itself lies near to his ear, and he can hear even a whisper inside the cab. […]”

“It’s a splendid system, I should think, for discovering the movements of your enemies,” said Arnold, not without an uncomfortable reflection on the fact that he was himself now completely in the power of this terrible organisation, which had keen eyes and ready hands in every capital of the civilised world. “But how do you guard against treachery? It is well known that all the Governments of Europe are spending money like water to unearth this mystery of the Terror. Surely all your men cannot be incorruptible.”

“Practically they are so. The very mystery which enshrouds all our actions makes them so. We have had a few traitors, of course; but as none of them has ever survived his treachery by twenty-four hours, a bribe has lost its attraction for the rest.”

In fact, they sound exactly like a one world government, and despite being a bunch of anarchists who want all governments to be destroyed, they revel in the control they’ve achieved.  Yet their chosen method of destroying all governments is this targeted murder campaign which is carefully made to look like the work of many diffuse and weak activist groups.  Rather than, you know, saying “hey we actually control you all, the jig’s up now,” or just undermining the works from the inside.

The important Terrorists all seem to be super-rich and lead opulent lifestyles.  Partially this is because they need to pretend to be normal powerful people, and super-rich leaders are used as an explanation for how the Terrorists got so much power, but it’s still treated in the narration as awesome sexy coolness rather than a necessary evil.

Everyone talks in bombastic, Romantic speeches, and the Terrorists – who supposedly hide themselves from the world with unbroken success – are constantly tripping over themselves to reveal their true identities and explain key facets of their grand plans.  This is to a kid they’ve only just met, whom they have no reason to trust, and whom they only care about because he’s built a tiny flying machine that they believe will scale up to military use (because he says so).

There is a lot of talk about “the coming war.”  Everyone has the (correct) sense that the Great Powers are gonna have a big dust-up one of these days.  Since a bloody conflagration is going to happen one way or the other, might as well have it in the Good way, the one that fully destroys “Society,” so it can be followed by, um, something:

After that, if the course to be determined on by the Terrorist Council failed to arrive at the results which it was designed to reach, the armies of Europe would fight their way through the greatest war that the world had ever seen, the Fates would once more decide in favour of the strongest battalions, the fittest would triumph, and a new era of military despotism would begin – perhaps neither much better nor much worse than the one it would succeed.

If, on the other hand, the plans of the Terrorists were successfully worked out to their logical conclusion, it would not be war only, but utter destruction that Society would have to face. And then with dissolution would come anarchy. The thrones of the world would be overthrown, the fabric of Society would be dissolved, commerce would come to an end, the structure that it had taken twenty centuries of the discipline of war and the patient toil of peace to build up, would crumble into ruins in a few short months, and then – well, after that no man could tell what would befall the remains of the human race that had survived the deluge. The means of destruction were at hand, and they would be used without mercy, but for the rest no man could speak.

Our protagonist worries for a sec about brutal extrajudicial murder, but handily remembers that violent people aren’t actually human, so it’s OK to kill them:

Colston spoke in a cold, passionless, merciless tone, just as a lawyer might speak of a criminal condemned to die by the ordinary process of the law, and as Arnold heard him he shuddered. But at the same time the picture in the Council-chamber came up before his mental vision, and he was forced to confess that men who could so far forget their manhood as to lash a helpless woman up to a triangle and flog her till her flesh was cut to ribbons, were no longer men but wild beasts, whose very existence was a crime.

In what I’ve read so far, not much has been said about the leader, except that his name is Natas, which you’ll note is “Satan” backwards.  Internet summaries tell me he has a mysterious power to control people’s minds, as if this all weren’t Code Geass enough already

There’s been more focus on his daughter, Natasha, the titular “Angel of the Revolution,” who is beautiful and enchanting and yeah I’m sure you can fill this part in even if I stop typing

Apparently the rest of the book is about the Terrorists building flying war machines and fighting a big war against everyone, which they eventually win, which somehow means that War Has Ended Forever