Calgary from the air. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Oli-Oviyan.

Calgary is not a place to stay. A cultural wasteland with a boom-bust oil economy where hard workers can make their money before moving to a “real” city with “real” arts and culture—but not a place to stay. This is an all-too-common belief about Calgary. But skeptics should take a closer look at the Heart of the New West, because things are changing fast.

Many Calgarians, including newly elected mayor Naheed Nenshi, are committed to making this a livable city and creating a place where people will want to stay, set down roots, and build a life. What outsiders often miss, however, is that the foundation for that livable city has existed for many years, thanks to a vibrant grassroots arts community that hasn’t had much exposure outside the province, but has been churning out great work all the same. With the election of an exciting new mayor, local artists sense that the time has come to demolish Calgary’s “cultural wasteland” image.

“People have this story about Calgary that there’s nothing going on,” says Dr. Terry Rock, president and CEO of the Calgary Arts Development Authority. While the city has historically lagged on factors such as per capita funding and arts space, Rock says the slow and steady approach to building an arts community means that the city does things better—not faster. “There’s a convenience of being last to really get this going,” he says.

Calgary created CADA in March 2005 and says it’s the only organization of its kind in Canada, bundling together space, promotion, and funding for non-profit arts groups in one unified organization. CADA provides funding for both new and well-established arts organizations. In 2010, it funded 161 arts organizations with more than $3.8 million.

CADA has also been involved in the creation of six new arts spaces, including the highly anticipated National Music Centre, a project that received $75 million in government funding and will help revitalize Calgary’s East Village; and Seafood Market Studios, a temporary, and affordable rehearsal and studio space that artists can rent from the city. “At first glance, Calgary seems like a conservative place, where the focus is on the Stampede and the more traditional arts like the ballet and opera,” says Kerry Clarke, artistic director of the Calgary Folk Music Festival. “But scratch the surface and you find a very creative scene, where a breadth of mainstream and cutting-edge, underthe-radar events draw audiences that would make other cities envious.”

Now in its 32nd year, the Calgary Folk Music Festival has grown into one of Canada’s major music festivals. It started as a two-day event on three stages and is now a four-day event on seven stages, with other concerts and programming happening throughout the year.

In a place where public funding for the arts has traditionally been scarce or unpredictable, hardier species of arts organizations have grown and built wider, more sustainable audiences. Though public funding is still lower in Calgary on a per capita basis than many other cities in the country, attendance is comparatively high: in a population of one million, public attendance across arts organizations in 2009 was 2.5 million, meaning lots of people were making it out to events.

“The theatre is full of real people who want to see a play,” says Vanessa Porteous, artistic director of Alberta Theatre Projects, “not to be seen or to get a job.” It’s this approach, says Porteous, which drives the theatre itself. Calgarians have been particularly supportive of Alberta Theatre Projects’ Enbridge playRites Festival, a five-week celebration of Canadian playwriting. Going into its 25th season, playRites will premiere its 100th production in 2011.

With a new regime installed at city hall, arts advocates throughout Calgary repeat the same refrain: more money, more space, more arts-friendly. The most difficult period in an artist’s career is the first 10 years, and CADA’s Terry Rock would like to see money available for individual artists, not just organizations.

Zak Pashak, a Calgary entrepreneur who opened Broken City, a live-music venue, and founded Sled Island, a music festival that features local and international artists, firmly believes that the city has to be affordable and walkable to keep young artists around. If Calgary wants to foster arts and culture, he says, the city needs to be affordable for artists—which not only means a roof overhead and enough to eat, but also a supply of reasonably priced studio space and quality public transportation.

That’s not to say the cowboy ethos is totally gone from Calgary; the arts community remains independent-minded, and while public arts funding has increased, it’s still low compared to similarly sized cities in Canada. The arts in Calgary remain a labour of love by a group of people who can’t imagine doing anything else.

Vanessa Porteous, who came to Calgary 12 years ago, says, “I stayed because I had the best job in Canadian theatre and the next thing I knew, I had a community.”

The Dalai Lama is charged with watching over Buddhist tradition, but on March 29, 2009 The New York Times revealed a shadowy presence was secretly watching him, invisibly sending information about the religious leader to his anonymous attackers. When the story broke, the office of the Dalai Lama believed it was dealing with an ordinary computer virus. It turned out to be something more widespread, organized, and ominous.

Long before The New York Times, Canada’s Citizen Lab was on the case. Based at the University of Toronto, Citizen Lab is a global leader in documenting and analyzing the exercise of political power in cyberspace. The Lab’s 10-month investigation into the virus that had lodged in the Dalai Lama’s desktop revealed it was in fact just one of 1,295 compromised computers in 103 countries, many found in embassies, government agencies, and significantly, Tibetan expatriate organizations. The researchers at Citizen Lab dubbed the network GhostNet, which spread through a malicious software program—“malware,” in technical circles—called Gh0st RAT. Gh0st RAT spread via email to high value targets: diplomats, politicians, the Dalai Lama. Once installed on a target’s computer it provides barrier-free access to an intruder, giving them full control of the system as if it were their own. This allowed the thieves to bring sensitive documents back to four control servers in China. Worse, Gh0st RAT allows its operators to take control of an entire computer in real-time, giving them the unfettered ability to see and hear their targets through the computer’s webcam and microphone.

It’s virtually impossible to determine whether GhostNet was a work of cyber-espionage by the Chinese government or a single hacker who wanted to make it look that way. In January 2010, search giant Google admitted they were one of 30 companies attacked by the latest version of Gh0st RAT and threatened to shut down the Chinese version of its site. Computer security firm Verisign reported it had traced the attacks back to “a single foreign entity consisting either of agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof.” Beyond China, countries around the world are increasingly using the internet for espionage and intelligence-gathering. Observers report more viruses, more trojan horses, more botnets, more surveillance, more censorship and more denial-of-service attacks. The tactics are being used by governments and independent groups alike for intelligence gathering, terrorism, national security and religious or political propaganda. Most of it happens secretly, obscured by layers of technical complexity. In the early 2000s, China was a leader in cyber-espionage, but it has lately been joined by more players: Saudi Arabia, Russia, North Korea, Iran, the U.S., and Canada.

We are witnessing, the Citizen Lab researchers believe, the weaponization of cyberspace.

“I realized there was a major geopolitical contest going on in the domain of telecommunications,” says Professor Ron Deibert, Citizen Lab’s founder and head researcher. “The information environment today is mediated through telecommunications. So being able to control, access and retain information through those networks are vital sources of intelligence. This was happening, but it wasn’t being talked about.”

Deibert isn’t new to the intelligence game. He worked as policy analyst for satellite reconnaissance in the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but it wasn’t until he wrote a book about major technological shifts in history, and started researching his PhD—documenting how rapid technological changes of the information age affected global politics—that he began investigating the war that would set him on the path to being the “M” behind the Citizen Lab.

“Our technological advantage is key to America’s military dominance,” said U.S. President Barack Obama in a May 2009 speech on his administration’s plans for the militarization of the internet. “From now on, our digital infrastructure—the networks and computers we depend on every day—will be treated as they should be: a strategic national asset. Protecting this infrastructure will be a national security priority…. We will deter, prevent, detect and defend against attacks, and recover quickly from any disruptions or damage.” In the same speech he assured the world his security plan would not infringe on internet freedom or personal privacy. The U.S. Department of Justice, however, argues (though far less publically) it can’t be sued for illegally intercepting phone calls or emails—unless they admit what they’re doing is illegal, which they won’t.

It’s this kind of secrecy (in the name of national security or not) that Citizen Lab exposes. The small team of researchers and benevolent hackers, who work in the basement of the Munk Centre for International Studies at Devonshire Place in Toronto, watch the watchers and document the shadow war most are too busy updating their Facebook pages to notice. But more than that, Deibert wants to see Canada put its peacemaking reputation to work to lead the way in drafting a constitution for cyberspace among the nations of the G8. He believes Canada can be a leading guardian of the free and open internet, a valuable global commons worth preserving, on par in importance with land, sea, air and space.

Average internet users—the ones doing their banking, their shopping, or their FarmVille cultivating on the brightly lit thoroughfares of the web—are relatively safe from the cyber-spooks of the world. But if you challenge your government, expose injustice, or work for humanitarian ends in hostile places like China, Iran, Syria, Sudan, and Pakistan, it can become a dark, threatening place pretty quickly.

Deibert wanted to expose these injustices on behalf of citizens everywhere, but quickly discovered there were places he couldn’t go as a political scientist. So, with a research grant from the Ford Foundation, he launched the Citizen Lab in 2001 and began assembling a team dedicated to his two-pronged mission: monitoring and analyzing information warfare, and documenting patterns of internet censorship and surveillance.

The first major partner for the Citizen Lab was the SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based think tank that engages in evidence-based research targeting countries at risk from violence and insecurity. Its CEO, Rafal Rohozinski, was the man originally responsible for connecting all the countries in the former Soviet Union to the internet.

That meant he knew everyone who was anyone when it came to cyber-espionage in a region known for its deep ranks of hackers. This was the beginning of a vast network of agents who would later prove invaluable to all Citizen Lab operations. In those first days together with Rohozinski, Deibert also developed the methodology from which all Citizen Lab missions stem: A combination of technical reconnaissance, interrogation, field investigation, data mining, and analysis. In other words, the very same techniques used by government intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency in the U.S. and its Canadian equivalent, Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC). But this time, the expertise would be in the hands of the people.

“We wanted to take that combination of technical and human intelligence to turn it on its head,” Deibert said. “These organizations are using these techniques for national security purposes. They are watching everybody else, no one is watching them, and we wanted to watch them.”

Next, Deibert needed a powerhouse legal team. “We don’t break Canadian laws, but we do break the law in just about every other country,” he says. That’s why he partnered with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Based at Harvard Law School, this gives Deibert and his team access to a network of some of the best legal scholars in the country.

None was more vital than the final piece of the puzzle. All wars need soldiers and Citizen Lab needed the very best computer scientists, programmers, software developers and data analysts. All of whom were handpicked by Deibert from an unlikely recruitment pool: his own political science course.

The Munk Centre has all the architectural hallmarks of an English boarding school, left over from its days as a men’s university residence at the turn of the century. Few visitors have any idea what goes on beneath their feet in Citizen Lab’s dimly lit basement headquarters, but two of Deibert’s lieutenants have agreed to let me ride along on one of their online patrols.

Born and raised in Singapore, research associate James Tay has a personal stake in Citizen Lab’s mission. “I came from a country where those in power were willfully blocking access to the net. I just thought it wasn’t right, so when I heard about the lab tracking censorship and finally holding these governments accountable, I was like, ‘Okay, yeah, this is something I want to do.’”

That’s why, when riots broke out in Iran following its corrupted June 12, 2009, election, Tay was at Citizen Lab, keeping Iran’s lines of communication open. The Iranian government was blocking opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khamenei’s website, along with Western-run sites such as YouTube and Twitter. Opposition supporters needed a way to stay connected online, to share information and coordinate their response to the crackdown.

The battering ram that broke through Iran’s online barriers is called Psiphon. Developed first by Citizen Lab, the software is now its own commercial entity, helping to fund the lab’s academic research. Through small chinks in the Iranian government’s armour, Tay was able to send a short, crucial message to people inside Iran who needed unrestricted access to the web: the snippet of text he was charged with sneaking over the border through TweetDeck—software that communicates through Twitter without requiring an actual visit to its website— was an encrypted link to the Psiphon web server, a tunnel through the blockaded border that allowed users to see the web unhindered by Iran’s online filters. Once connected, Psiphon is simple to use: It appears as a second address bar in the web browser and delivers internet traffic through proxy sites that haven’t been blocked yet. Block one, and the data simply changes its route to the user. During the crisis, Tay was trusted with making sure Psiphon ran without Iranian governmental interference, allowing thousands of people to liberate their internet connections.

“Psiphon is open-source and free to the user, but the BBC and big media pay us money for the right to spread our proxy to their readers and viewers,” says Tay.

Psiphon isn’t for everyone, though. It doesn’t provide anonymity, for one, something that Psiphon users are made aware of before using it. Even so, many Iranians still used the service, often at great personal risk.

“Some of them were trying to organize rallies,” says Tay. “I saw that on Twitter a lot.”

But even more dangerous research is directed by the lab, just collecting the data risks the threat of imprisonment or torture if discovered by the offending country’s oppressive government. The project is known as The OpenNet Initiative.

If you stumble upon a site a sitting government doesn’t agree with, it may simply look like a problem with your internet connection. But that error page could be a fake. “These governments may publicly claim to block sites to protect the morals of their citizens, then use the same technique to block the site of a politician they don’t agree with,” says Jonathan Doda, Citizen Lab’s software developer for OpenNet. “They set up the error page because they don’t want people to know. The good news is they’re pretty easy to spot.”

“What’s most popular these days is proxy based blocking,” Doda says—in which a country’s internet connection is shunted through a single gateway that allows a regime to filter all the web traffic in and out— “or some American filtering software—the same thing you find in libraries and schools or some private businesses.” In every case, the country’s internet service provider intercepts your connection and substitutes an error page.

Sometimes, the error is legitimate. After all, internet connectivity in many parts of the world can be slow and unreliable. That’s why Doda must gather evidence of governments’ intent through extensive testing. His team accesses sites multiple times and compares what happens from within Canada to what happens from inside the suspected country.

Doda’s been programming since he was a kid, making software in BASIC on his PC Jr. It was fairly easy for him to create “rTurtle,” the software that collects the data, looking for anomalies like dummy IP addresses, weird-looking address headers and missing keywords in the returned page. The lab needed a way to test within the offending countries, but the lists of blocked sites are determined by religious or political elites and implemented by centralized internet providers in target countries—closed systems that are virtually impossible to penetrate as an outsider.

But Rafal Rohozinski’s international reach gave Citizen Lab the ability to recruit agents within those ISPs and other high-value positions in repressive countries’ internet hierarchies. “In Central Asia alone, we have a network of about 40 individuals working for us,” says Deibert. Some of them are literally putting their life on the line—guilty of treason for working with Citizen Lab.

“Going to Burma and running the software that Jonathan developed in an internet café—that’s life-threatening research,” says Deibert. “The person doing that would have to be aware of the risks.” Those risks range from arrest, imprisonment, and interrogation, to torture and death. Deibert knows people have been arrested under similar circumstances, so OpenNet’s work requires a delicate protocol.

“Jonathan might not know the names of testers in certain countries. I might not even know their names,” says Deibert. “They’ll have a key and it’ll be used to unlock that data they need to run the software. We don’t know who they are. There will be a person who mediates their communication with us. If Jonathan were sent to Syria and got captured, he wouldn’t be able to give out a tester’s name.” For everything at stake, you’d never know the risks by stepping into the lab. Among the islands of computer terminals and the big red vinyl couch off to one side, the only thing remotely James Bond-ish is a hollow world globe stocked with contraband cigars and bottles of alcohol from the countries they’ve visited. But for all they do for others, the Citizen Lab largely ignores internet censorship and surveillance at home.

“I’m not worried as much about Canada. We have a government that’s largely accountable. Despite all the problems, we still live in a democracy that includes the benefits of humanitarian law and respect for human rights. If I did this research in Uzbekistan, I’d be jailed and tortured within the hour,” says Deibert.

Canada has cyber secrets of its own that often escape public notice. There are two bills before parliament collectively called “lawful access” meant to aid law enforcement in obtaining information needed to make an arrest. (Both bills were put on hold when parliament prorogued in December, but they appear to be Conservative government priorities and are likely to be reintroduced.)

“The approach we’ve taken is to respect civil liberties to the fullest extent possible by recreating in the cyber world the exact same principles that have been applied in the analog world. In order for police to obtain the content of emails, or intercept phone calls over the net, they will require a warrant,” says Peter Van Loan, Canadian Minister of Public Safety.

That isn’t the whole story, says David Fewer, director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, based at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law.

At the moment, police can’t force ISPs to hand over a customer’s name and address without a warrant, but the lawful access legislation will allow them to do just that.

“It’s bad enough that ISPs can give over that information if they want,” says Fewer. “Obviously our view is it shouldn’t be made available.” For now, there’s an unofficial compromise: for child pornography allegations, most ISPs give up the information, but for other crime such as fraud, police still need a warrant. Fewer says the informal understanding isn’t good enough.

“The system should be formalized, so there’s a formal response across the board,” Fewer says. “Police should be obliged to get a warrant except in cases of imminent harm, akin to a search warrant.” But police forces are currently demanding search warrant standards be relaxed. “There are sliding scales they’re demanding on certain search warrants. Ordinarily, police have to give ‘probable cause’ and they want that standard to be replaced with ‘reasonable suspicion.’”

Canada’s democratic laws don’t keep you immune from the government’s roving eye in cyberspace, either. “We have to start with the assumption that everything we do on the internet is public,” says Deibert, “and then work backwards and say, ‘What of my communication is private?’ Since potentially, at every step along the way, you can be monitored.”

In your terms of service agreement with Rogers or Bell they have the right to retain, store or turnover any information they provide you as a service including web history, web addresses, emails, and chat logs to the Canadian government for intelligence gathering and law enforcement purposes. CIPPIC is fighting various court battles around the disclosure of user identity to thirdparties online.

“We need courts to carve out some mechanism for preserving respect for privacy online,” says Fewer, “because privacy is a human right.”

Deibert wants the nations of the world to establish their own formalized treaty for the internet, one that treats cyberspace as a public commons and halts the aggressive arms race that threatens to further erode our basic rights. But drafting such an agreement will prove difficult, as security concerns continue to override basic rights.

Incidents like GhostNet demonstrate that even when all signs point to a massive national espionage plot, online attacks are difficult to trace, and governments nearly always enjoy plausible deniability.

“Even when we have lots of evidence that indicates a country may be behind it, the government denies any association,” says Van Loan. “Attacks are extremely hard to trace. What would likely happen is wholesome, good players would follow it, but the bad operators would continue to operate outside of it.”

And such a treaty could abuse as much as protect. “Anonymity is viewed [by governments] as a tool of terrorists and hate-mongers and—in the negative sense— whistle-blowers,” says Fewer. He fears any such treaty would inevitably morph into a cyberspace trade agreement, further tightening abusive intellectual property laws and scaling back civil liberties at an accelerated pace. “You need a tragedy for anything good to come out of a treaty like that. The International Declaration of Human Rights was the result of the First World War.”

With six billion people on the planet facing global problems, Deibert says the real tragedy is losing the open and unfettered ability to communicate globally, but Van Loan sees no other choice. “It is really the new arms race. Every time we erect new barriers and protections some smart, tech-savvy individual comes along and finds ways around those defenses.”

For the moment, it will have to be enough to know that Citizen Lab will be watching the watchers. James Tay admits he takes his work a little too seriously. “I don’t sleep,” he says. “This isn’t your typical 9-5 job. I regularly find myself responding to emails in the middle of the night. Ron wants us to sleep, but this isn’t a job for me. It’s something I live and breathe.”

[This article originally appeared in the May-June 2004 issue of This.]

Why are so many progressives rejecting science as a vast right-wing conspiracy? Illustration by Dominic Bugatto.

If you’ve spent any time in activist circles recently, you’ve probably noticed the rise of the anti-vaccination movement. In a growing number of “alternative” and progressive communities, parents are refusing to immunize their children. Vaccines, critics claim, aren’t necessary for good health—they’re merely another set of drugs foisted on the public by profit-hungry pharmaceutical companies. Not only that, they’re dangerous; they’re the cause of rising autism rates in children.

This anti­-vaccine argument has been cropping up more and more in protest movements. A while ago, I dropped by a leftwing bookstore in my neighbourhood, and found—nestled among the handbills for anti-Bush protests and yoga pamphlets—an invitation to a lecture on “the vaccine myth.” While checking out the discussions on an alternative parenting website at the University of Western Ontario, I read a call-to­ arms claiming that “refusing to vaccinate” your kids is a cool way to […] the evil right-wing health-care empire. This is no longer a fringe view; plenty of parents across Canada are heeding the call, as was evidenced last year when whooping cough broke out in nine kids in London, Ontario. At least one of the kids’ parents had refused vaccination, apparently on the advice of a chiropractor, another popular source of alternative medical advice.

It is a really weird shift. Just a few decades ago, vaccination seemed like the quintessential public good, something that all people—especially progressives—ought to support. Vaccines have been proven to save millions of children, particularly those in poor communities, from death or disability. But now the anti-vaccine argument is becoming gospel even among alternative healers, as Kumanan Wilson, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, recently discovered. He polled 312. students at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine—which emphasizes holistic treatment and natural remedies—to ask how they felt about vaccines. Only 12.8 percent of the students said they would recommend their patients’ children get a full set of vaccinations; 67 percent believed that vaccines are “highly or moderately risky.”

The problem is, this anti-vaccine argument has zero basis in science. It is driven purely by the hunches and superstitions of spooked-out parents and not-terribly-well-informed activists. It’s true that vaccines have side effects; they cause sore arms and allergic reactions in a small percentage of cases. But no one has ever proven a link between vaccination and autism in a peer-reviewed study—the widely accepted standard for scientific proof. With peer review, the idea is that an experiment must be performed rigorously enough to convince other experts in the field—the only people qualified to know. Before that’s happened, you’re not allowed to call your results significant. Autism-vaccine research has not reached that level yet.

In fact, the peer-reviewed research that does exist suggests that there is no connection between autism and vaccination. In Denmark, researchers checked health records for children born from 1971 to 2000. Even though the Danish government had eliminated thimerosal (the preservative that anti-vaccination people believe causes autism) from its vaccines in 1992, rates of autism have continued to increase. Another Danish team checked the records of 500,000 Danes vaccinated for pertussis, and found that autism rates were no different for those who got thimerosal and those who didn’t. Scads of other peer-reviewed studies have found the same thing. It’s true that autism rates are rising, for reasons still mysterious; there is not a scrap of scientific proof showing that vaccines are to blame.

Yet here’s the bigger problem. You can wave this evidence around all you want; you can cite as many lab reports as you can lay your hands on. But it has not convinced the growing number of critics who regard all manner of studies and scientifc reports with gimlet-eyed suspicion. This is the truly scary thing that’s happening: A highly vocal part of contemporary alternative culture is in a fast retreat from science. For them, it is nothing more than a right-wing conspiracy. The new enemies are the guys wearing lab coats.

This cultural clash has a name and an intellectual backdrop. In the academe, they call it the “Science Wars.” Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, postmodern theorists energized the left with a powerful idea: that most of the people in society who claimed to be authorities were really just pushing ideological agendas. At first, the targets of this critique were the obvious ones: right-wing politicians, conservative economists, and family values nuts—people who regularly claim their opinions are objectively true.

But pretty soon science, too, came under the gun. For postmodern and identity politics thinkers, science seemed infused with the same sort of pompous faux-authority as right-wing politicians. All those white guys with Geiger counters, measuring stuff into beakers! It seemed like a transparently ideological ploy to bludgeon people into believing that science was the ultimate dispassionate authority. Sure, scientists might claim they only seek truth—but in the nineties, the very idea of truth became politically suspect. In a postmodern world, everything is subjective; truth is just a grim fight among opposing groups; and science is just another ir1fluence­pedd1ing scam.

As you might imagine, this critique began to annoy real, practicing scientists. Physicists were particularly irritated, since they deal with things like gravity speed and mass, which are kind of hard to shrug off as “subjective” (especially if you’ve ever been in, say, a car crash). In 1994, a physicist named Alan Sokal hatched a plan to humiliate the po-mo critics of science. The influential journal Social Text had announced that it would do an issue themed on the Science Wars. Sokal submitted a mock essay claiming that “physical ‘reality’ no less than social ‘reality’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct” and went on to present a mangled argument suggesting that the laws of physics are just a matter of opinion. The spoof was so over-the top and ham-fìsted that Sokal assumed any half-awake scientist—actually, any “undergraduate physics or math major” he later wrote—ought to have been able to recognize it was a hoax.

But the Social Text editors didn’t. They didn’t even vet the paper with actual physicists; what did those poseurs know anyway? The editors never suspected Sokal’s argument was a parody, because it supported their view that science was just as ideological as politics. So they published it.

When Sokal revealed his hoax, the resulting controversy hit the front page of newspapers across the country and created an enormous cultural rift: Leftwing social theorists huffily claimed The ruse proved nothing; scientists grew snarlier and nastier and more self-righteous. Ten years later, both sides are still seething about it. When I met the editor of Social Text at a literary conference, I made the mistake of trying to joke about the Sokal hoax. The editor fixed me with an icy stare and refused to talk to me for the rest ofthe meeting.

It might seem that this is just an airy debate, but the Science Wars have infected—and reflected—trends in activist thought. A troubling number of progressives have swallowed whole the idea that scientists are as laden with agendas as Ayn Rand or the Fraser Institute. Convinced that science is just politics by anather name, many have gone off in the opposite direction—and embraced irrationality.

It’s particularly noticeable in the world of alternative health and medicine, where the counterculture’s tendency toward crystal-waving has metastasized into full hippie dementia. Walk into a health-food store these days and it’s like stumbling into a medieval fair, crammed full of garlic enemas and magnetic devices for reorienting your energy. This might all seem like charming lunacy, but the alternative-health industry is enjoying a boom bigger than the snake-oil sales of 19th-century America: According to research by AC Nielsen, 48 percent of Canadians have used herbal remedies. Statistics Canada figures indicate that 10 million Canadians have used herbal remedies and similar products—an increase of 25 percent since 1995. And those healing aids aren’t required to scientifically prove their claims. They can just sit on the shelf and soak up the good vibes.

This is not to say one shouldn’t criticize science. Some concerns about it are clearly valid. The dominance of men in science, for example, explains part of why research into women’s health has lagged behind studies of male disorders. The same goes for research into illnesses that affect third world populations.

And as progressives have long noted, there’s the question of corporate influence. Last year I spent a weekend at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, a famous lab for marine biology and genetic science. One evening, I attended a lecture by Craig Venter, the founder of Celera, the private company that sequenced the entire human genome. Venter asked the audience if we had any questions. Annalee Newitz, a journalist, posed an interesting one. In the near future, she pointed out, we’re likely to see designer genetic therapies: Doctors will scan your personal genome and design a drug or therapy specific to your condition. But the question is, if Celera were to scan your genome, who would own that information? Would you have the rights to it yourself? Or would Celera get it? If a doctor wanted to make a drug to help you out, would she have to pay Celera for the rights to your genetic information? Would Celera, in effect, control the most basic information about who you are?

Venter coughed uncomfortably. He launched into a rambling discussion of some minutiae of genetic sequencing. Newitz asked the question again, and he dodged it again. Venter either didn’t know the answer, or—more likely—he didn’t want to admit the scarier proposition: that people like him fully intend to make buckets of cash by owning people’s genetic information. Celera is the world’s most advanced genetic-sequenc ing company; it’s also a profìt-making enterprise. If they and their competitors are going to make money, it’ll be by owning a piece of you.

The real danger in the world of science right now isn’t scientists and their political agendas. It’s corporations. In the past few decades, governments worldwide have cut back on their willingness to support pure science—particularly expensive science like genetics. Instead, they’ve been leaving it up to for-profit firms like Celera and bioengineering firms like Monsanto. Whatever positive contributions have been made by for-profit science, there’s one inescapable fact: it exists to serve the market, and the market often has no interest in the public good. Ever wonder why there isn’t a vaccine for AIDS? It’s certainly possible to create and it would save the lives of billions of the world’s poorest people. But there’s no money in it. In the crude calculus of the market, people infected With AIDS are more profitable than ones who’ve been inoculated against it; they buy more pills. Almost no pharmaceutical company will bother with the incredible expense and legal liability of developing a vaccine. That’s why, right now, there is only one lone company working seriously on an HIV vaccine.

University researchers, theoretically, are free to do whatever research they want, but since so much research funding comes from corporations now, they’re in the same bind. Recently, University of Pennsylvania researchers announced a breakthrough in using stem cells for therapeutic purposes. What were they doing? Replacing heart valves? Growing new livers? Rebuilding spinal cords? Nope. They were figuring out how to use stem cells to cure baldness. Hair loss is a $1-billion-a-year industry in the U.S. alone, so there’s plenty of money to support research for the follically challenged. At this rate, we’ll have cutting-edge ways to cure comb-overs before We stop AIDS.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that scientists are horrifìed by the way corporations are gaining control of their work. Many have told me—off the record, since they’re afraid for their jobs—that entire areas of public interest science are languishing because so much science is now under private control. Research into energy efficiency, a crucial area of science, is sketchy because the oil and gas industries regard it as a threat to their market and won’t pay for it. Governments are not stepping up to the plate either»-because no one is pressuring them. “Science” is never a campaign issue because the free-market right doesn’t want the government involved in profitable discoveries. And progressives won’t take it on because they’re blinded by the ridiculous cultural Wars of the last decade, a quest for alternatives to traditional health care and a hissing intellectual objection to the idea of “objectivity” to take it on as an issue.

The problem with many of science’s critics is that they fundamentally do not understand the way science works. Sure, scientists can be jerked around by corporate money and put to work on stupid, seemingly pointless projects. But they are not, by and large, ideological freaks bent on lording their intellectual power over the public.

On the contrary, I’d argue that scientists are the paradigm of the good citizen. They’re staunch believers in meritocracy and wildly suspicious of authority—hell, they’re practically anarchistic in orientation. A scientist will never accept any argument on face value, no matter who yells it at them or how powerful that person is. The inverse is also true: If an unknown grad student at a minor school discovers data that upends accepted wisdom, it doesn’t matter if she’s a total nobody; smart scientists will always accept her conclusions, even if it means changing their most basic beliefs.

This is the lovely paradox that stands at the heart ofthe scientifìc method. We believe scientific facts to be true—even though the whole point of science is to overturn sacred cows, usher in new “facts” and make us realize we were wrong all along. Far from being ideologically blindered, scientists have a deeply nuanced understanding that the World is never quite as it seems, because they know that at any point in their lives someone could make a discovery that shakes them to their foundations.

Mind you, to win over a scientist, you can’t just blather at them: You have to prove you’re right. You have to offer data that back up your assertion. The scientific method means that to prove your point, you have to find other people who can independently reproduce your results; it’s an inherently communal system. In our increasingly ideological world, where the rich and powerful win battles by shouting down their opponents, you would expect the left to embrace science as a wonderful ideal. “How nice it is not to have to take people at their dogma,” the science writer Natalie Angier wrote in an essay two years ago, “but to be able to ask, in that snarly, whiny, chummy way that scientists do, what exactly the evidence is.”

That’s the main reason I fell in love with science. I started my career as a political writer, but soon realized that politics wasn’t a game of progress. On the contrary, human history is pretty much just the same grim cycle over and over: A group of people gain power, then use it to screw over everyone else. Rinse and repeat. Open today’s paper and you’1l see stories of Paul Martin’s graft, or tax cuts for the rich, or First Nations bands wrestling over ancient land claims. Go back 3,000 years and you’ll find hieroglyphs describing esseniially the same things.

This is not to disparage political activism; the sheer intractabiìity of injustice is why we have a moral imperative to fight it. But when I started writing about science, I felt, for the first time in a long while, an unusual emotion: optimism. The dogged focus on progress, on knowing a bit more about the world than we knew a few years ao, is insanely infectious. A while ago, I wandered into a cancer lab at Harvard and watched bleary-eyed grad students injecting thousands of genetic samples into test tubes for analysis over and over and over again. It was a humbling scene: Young kids spending hours and hours doing the most mind-numbingly boring repetitive tasks, all on the off-chance that it might lead somewhere good.

Sure, they’re hoping to advance their careers—but talk to them and it’s their deep idealism that’s most striking. “I’m on number 2,000 I think. My thumb is going to fall off,” one of them joked to me as he pumped another syringe. We chatted for a bit, and it turned out that he had arrived the year before on a scholarship from India. This is another lovely thing I’ve noticed in my journeys into labs: Science is a wildly international group of people, sharing information across national boundaries, all in the service of making some tiny contribution to human knowledge. What is there not to admire about that?

The sheer intellectual rìgour of scientists can be kind of mind-blowing. Consider the story of Gottlob Frege, a mathematical logician from the tum ofthe centuly. In 1902, he was 53 years old and about to send his second major book off to the printers, a tome intended to seal his reputation. But then he received a letter from Bertrand Russell, who was then a young professor barely out of school. Russell was writing to point out a central flaw he had discovered in Frege’s mathematical framework. When Frege read Russell’s letter, he realized in shock that the kid was right. Frege rushed to the printers and added an appendix, admitting his error—and crediting Russell. Frege was willing to recant his entire 1ife’s work because someone had come along with better data.

Can you imagine that sort of integrity in the world of business or politics? Can you imagine a politician or CEO admitting that—whoops—they’d been wrong about their central beliefs throughout their entire careers? Of course you can’t. It’s utterly inconceivable, because when it’s practised at its worst, which is how it’s too often practised, politics is the opposite of science. It is the art of baldfacedly lying with such persistence and guile that your critics give up and walk away. Down in the U.S., George W. Bush spent a year fluffing up evidence of Iraq’s arsenal to whip the country into war, then another year denying he’d ever done such a thing. He’ll probably be re-elected. In a laboratory setting, he’d be torn to pieces.

This is not to say there aren’t venal scientists, or self-important scientists, or scientists blinded by ambition or ideologies, or even scientists who blatantly falsify data to score a point. Those all exist. But the basic values that govern the field—accountability, proof and the ability to replicate results—keep malfeasance mostly in check. Science is a stunning example of human civilization gone right. Far from criticizing researchers for their occasional failures of subjectivity, the left ought to be reclaiming the scientifìc method as a progressive ideal. It is one of the few moral compasses we’ve got left.

The current issue of This features Andrew Webster’s profile of Canada’s independent videogame scene, which came to mind recently when I stumbled across Lose/Lose, a video-game/conceptual-art-project that adds some real risk to the normally consequence-free world of blowing up aliens. When you play Lose/Lose, the alien attackers are stand-ins for actual files on your computer. When you blow them up, those files are deleted. If the aliens blow you up, the game deletes itself and you have to download it again. I didn’t play it, because, well, that’s not really the point. It’s a thought experiment.

The game’s creator, Zach Gage, explains the concept:

Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player’s mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?

Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon and awarded for using it, that doing so is right?

That’s a pretty explicit question, and a politically charged one—the kind that videogames have traditionally avoided.

As an art form, games seem to remain ideologically inert in comparison to other media. Partly that’s a function of the cost of developing them. When you spend millions building a blockbuster game, you can’t afford to turn it into a searing commentary on morality in pop culture; stuff just has to blow up real good. That’s true of film and music too, other high-capital undertakings that can’t afford to alienate the audience. But in those fields, independent, aggressively avant-garde projects still flourish on the margins. With video games, even the tiny indie producers seldom seem to venture into serious commentary on social, political, or economic issues. It’s all “dance dance” and no “revolution.” There’s the “serious games” genre, but those seem more like educational games, and less focused on commentary.

Does anyone have suggestions for video games (any platform) that have real political content? Who is the Brecht of X-Box? The Godard of GameBoy? The Breillat of Wii? Suggest them in the comments section below or email them to editor at this magazine dot ca.

“Just a matter of skill, that’s all!” Archie Andrews’ first words (said as he stood precariously atop his bike) may have seemed spontaneous in 1941, but 70 years have imbued the line with more weight than a supersized chocolate malt. The comic world’s most famous redhead proved to be not only adept at bicycle acrobatics, but also at juggling women. He’s also suddenly emerged as something unexpected: a culture warrior.

Ostensibly about a gaggle of teens from Riverdale, Archie comics are buoyed by the hero’s love triangle with two chipmunk-nosed teens: best friends Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge. The former is marketed as the quintessential girl next door and appeared alongside Archie in the comic’s premier issue. Betty remained Archie’s sole female interest until April 1942, when Veronica slinked into the frame.

Betty and Veronica have been feuding over Archiekins for seven decades and, until recently, there appeared to be no end in sight. But on May 15, 2009, it was announced that the eternal 17-year-old had finally made up his mind. While everyone believed Archie would settle for dependable and—let’s face it—less exciting Betty, he surprised fans by deciding to marry Veronica. In so doing, Archie subverted society’s traditional view of what makes a good wife.

Betty and Veronica are both feminine archetypes, as two-dimensional as the comic book world they live in. Wholesome, domesticated, and devoted to her beloved, Betty Cooper is the era’s perfect wife. Created by Bob Montana in the wake of the Great Depression, Betty comes from a world where no one has ever burned a bra, and only men work outside the home. Years later, the rise of feminism added book smarts and auto mechanics to Betty’s roster of domestic talents, but her unabated crush on Archie subverted even these liberated pursuits. She was often found under the hood of his jalopy, for instance, or sitting one of his exams.

Veronica Lodge is the closest thing Montana ever got to a femme fatale. Well travelled and sophisticated, the buxom brunette comes from the richest family in Riverdale and is appropriately spoiled to the core. As a girl who has always been indulged, Veronica treats even her lovers like possessions she can dispose of at will. She often “borrows” Archie away from her best friend, Betty, for example, because what Ronnie wants, Ronnie gets.

The girls are obvious Freudian archetypes: Betty represents the “Madonna” and Veronica is the “whore.” Freud believed that for some men, a wife acted also as a mother—a “Madonna” figure—which keeps him from being sexually attracted to her. He reserves sex for the “whore,” for whom he does not develop feelings of love. Thus, he is destined to love a woman who can’t satisfy him sexually, while he’s sexually satisfied by a woman he can’t love. Despite decades of feminist critique, our popular culture is still filled with these simple characterizations—with Betty and Veronica being one of the longest-running examples (and most resistant to progress). Archie refers to Betty as his best friend, a confidante with whom he is extremely comfortable, the first person he contacts when he needs an ego boost. On the other hand, Archie is powerless when it comes to Veronica’s feminine wiles. Ronnie uses her sex appeal to manipulate her freckle-faced paramour—much like the “whore” who dominates the sexual side of the Madonna-whore complex.

The general outrage and surprise at Archie’s decision to marry Veronica has proven that we still buy into Freud’s Madonna-whore complex. Western pop culture still deeply believes that conspicuously chaste, non-threatening, compliant girls next door, like Betty, make “good wives,” while more outspoken, willful, and liberated Veronica-esque vixens are only worthy as mistresses. Astonishingly, Archie has turned out to be more progressive than his fans, overturning such archaic dualism. In this case, it’s not a matter of skill; it’s just a matter of looking beyond two dimensions.