Eine Kleine Alptraummusik!

Nachtmahr (“The Nightmare”), by Johann Heinrich Füssli

TIL that the German translation of the word “nightmare” is “alptraum”, which led me to the wonderful painting above. While “alp” is the German cognate of the English word “elf”, the creature in question bears little resemblance to the Tolkienian Elves most of us are familiar with.

Instead, they appear to be more closely associated with the vampire, or incubus, and attack sleeping people, either by giving them “elf dreams” (“alptraum”), or attacking them by sitting on their chest and becoming heavier and heavier until the crushing weight wakes the sleeper, who is unable to move. This “elf-pressure” (“alpdruck”) may have been an early explanation for a range of sleep-related phenomena, such as sleep apnea, sleep paralysis, and night terrors.

While fascinating, not the type of nightmare I had in mind.

Instead, I wanted to start with P.D.Q. Bach’s infamous work, “A Little Nightmare Music: An opera in one irrevocable act”. This work is based on a dream that P.D.Q. Bach had on the night of December 4, 1791, the night that “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died and Antonio Salieri didn’t”. In the dream, he saw himself as a servant who ultimately spills wine on the coat of one of the guests, and later described Mozart as “the greatest billiards player known to me either in person or by name”.

For those not familiar with the work of P.D.Q. Bach, he is described as the youngest of Johann Sebastian Bach’s 20-odd children, and certainly the oddest. Peter Schickele, the primary person responsible for inflicting the music of this... composer? ...upon the world, has exhumed many works, including The 1712 Overture, The Abduction of Figaro, The Short-Tempered Clavier, and many others. He was nothing if not innovative, and attempted (unsuccessfully) to integrate, uh, non-standard instruments into the standard orchestral repertoire, including bagpipes, the kazoo, slide-whistle, and even experimental instruments such as the pastaphone (made of uncooked manicotti) and the tromboon (which combines the double-reeds of the bassoon with the slide of a trombone in a concoction that emphasizes the disadvantages of each).

In any case, this talk of nightmares leads me to the idea of nightmare fuel, and back to age verification.

I recently commented on legislation around restricting online access to “adult” content, and some options available for providing proof of age in a privacy-preserving way. The real question is around why groups pushing for restricting access to such material don’t appear to care about whether there are privacy-preserving options available – in fact, I would assert that any difficulties in providing proof of age are actually a “feature rather than a bug” for some proponents of such legislation.

Consider the benefits of government-provided digital identification (already available in some places), which can be used to provide proof of age or identity. As an example, the government of Victoria, Australia provides a digital driver’s license that can be used to provide proof of address or age without sharing other information.

Great, right?

Verifiable proof of age, that doesn’t “leak” anything the user doesn’t want.

Problem solved, right?

Well...

Er, right?

Consider the possibility that digital identification starts to be rolled out broadly.

Yes.

... and starts being used by a large variety of services, such as banks, social media, telecom, and so on.

Yes, exactly.

... and quickly becomes the preferred method for such verification.

Right.

... and gets to the point that some governments start requiring companies to use it as the only acceptable form of such verification in that region.

Um, ok.

... and then start including other features which can be validated...

Uh...

Like citizenship...

Oh...

Or existence of a criminal record...

Wait...

Or political affiliation...

Now, hold on...

Or religious affiliation...

Uh, oh.

Or sex assigned at birth...

Now, wait a minute!

Or “race”...

Aw, damn!

Or a Social Credit score...

Please stop!

Now, I’m not saying this will happen, or even that it’s likely. Until relatively recently, I’d have said the chances of things like this happening were slim-to-none. But over the last decade, I’ve watched a lot of things happen that I would have sincerely hoped were impossible.

The problem, as with most things, is that the situation is inconceivably complex. While conspiracy theorists love to come up with simplistic explanations that include some grand strategy carried out by groups which are simultaneously powerful enough to control all facets of society, and stupid enough to leave “obvious” clues to things “they don’t want you to know”, the real world is so immensely complex and complicated that it cannot be controlled in the ways imagined.

And, while we can learn to understand the mechanics of how many things work, the immense complexity of human society is a chaotic system which appears to be inherently non-deterministic. That said, while it’s almost certainly impossible to predict the details precisely, we can develop tools to understand the larger trends in the system.

One common trope of time travel stories is to prevent Hitler from leading the Nazi party, by whatever means. The problem is that fascism in the early 20^th century was the result of not only Hitler, but also of many other people and societal forces, so removing one person might change the details, but not the broader trends.

What we can do, though, is try to understand those broader trends, and work to choose paths which avoid the worst examples of what could be.

To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr, instead of a nightmare, we can try to build a dream!

Cheers!