[iDC] A Curmudgeonly Look at last month's Conference.

Sun Dec 20 21:18:31 UTC 2009

I have two specific points to take issue with:

1) You state that " the idea that there are some highly vital data about
personal preferences that advertisers can grab hold of and somehow influence
purchases strikes me as exaggerated, unimportant and of basically trivial
impact on individuals."

You give a few examples of why this type of data collection might not be
effective for an advertiser.  But what about the larger cultural
issue--that individuals are influenced and classified in ways that they
cannot evaluate? The relevant databases are trade secrets, and good luck
getting access to those.

Rather than being "unimportant and basically trivial," data gathered on the
web may have a devastating impact on indviduals. For example, a person who's
looked for drugs for cancer treatments might be classified as a bad risk on
the individual insurance market.  It is easy to imagine an alliance
between online databrokers and "medical credit scorers," just as insurance
companies use applicants' prescription records to deny coverage (see article
at
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_31/b4094000643943.htm

2) You also dispute that "we are supposed to be very worried about
governments finding out our political convictions or other damaging
information.  Since when do inquisitions bother with accurate fact
collection?"

The people at the ACLU who worry about these issues for a living are not
worried about the return of Torquemada or McCarthy.  They are
instead alarmed about new government data collection facilities (like fusion
centers) that create probabilistic profiles of suspicious individuals using
undisclosed algorithms.  Thousands of US citizens have been placed on "watch
lists."  This article describes one tip of this iceberg:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231

"At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion [NSA data center] will be
one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy
as every house in Salt Lake City combined. . . .  [A]t the NSA, electrical
power *is* political power. In its top-secret world, the coin of the realm
is the kilowatt. More electrical power ensures bigger data centers. Bigger
data centers, in turn, generate a need for more access to phone calls and
e-mail and, conversely, less privacy. The more data that comes in, the more
reports flow out. And the more reports that flow out, the more political
power for the agency."

In other words, there is a self-sustaining dynamic of surveillance at work
here, which has less to do with persecution of any given group than with
bureaucratic empire-building familiar to any student of public choice
theory.  The ACLU report "What's Wrong with Fusion Centers" also describes
some of the dangers:

http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/whats-wrong-fusion-centers-executive-summary

"Fusion centers are incorporating private-sector corporations into the
intelligence process, breaking down the arm's length relationship that
protects the privacy of innocent Americans who are employees or customers of
these companies, and increasing the risk of a data breach."

Their reports give examples of invasive surveillance, garnered via online
sources, designed to harass political activists.  It's no wonder that large
internet companies, such as Google, are in no mood to disclose their degree
of cooperation with such entities:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/google-talks-out-its-portal/

"We asked Google some simple questions about how much user data it turns
over to the government. . . .Google, however, declined to address the
question adequately."

Glenn Greenwald has observed that this fusion of public and private is a
hallmark of our age, nearly as strong in the Obama administration as it was
in the Bush years: "In the intelligence and surveillance
realms<http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/15/amnesty/>,
for instance, the line between government agencies and private corporations
barely exists<http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/radio/2008/07/30/shorrock/index.html>.
Military policy is carried out almost as much by private
contractors<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091221/scahill_video2>as by
our state's armed forces.  Corporate executives and lobbyists can
shuffle
between the public and private
sectors<http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/01/08/mcconnell/>so
seamlessly because the divisions have been so eroded."

We need more people studying these connections. The new "inquisition" will
probably not be a direct persecution of unpopular groups, but will instead
take place in the form of a subtle, steady, and stealthy erosion of millions
of individuals' life chances via unaccountable computerized decisionmaking.
Kafka's and Huxley's worlds, not Orwell's, are the dystopias we should be
concerned about--a point made eloquently by the work of legal scholars
Danielle Citron ("Technological Due Process") and Daniel J. Solove ("The
Digital Person").

In conclusion: I have no idea what Marx would think of this conference.  But
as a legal scholar frustrated by the bloodless, piecemeal cost-benefit
analysis of individualized disputes now dominant in my field, I was very
grateful for the number of speakers who dared to take a broader and more
synthetic perspective.

--Frank Pasquale

Frank A. Pasquale
Professor of Law, Seton Hall Law School
One Newark Center
Newark, NJ 07102
(973)-642-8485 (w)
(201)-988-5774 (c)

PS: on the topic of "medical credit scores," this article is good: Robert
Berners, *Hospitals X-Ray Patient Credit Scores: More and More are Buying
Credit Data to See if the Sick Can Afford Treatment*, Businessweek, at
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_48/b4110080413532.htm?chan=magazine+channel_what%27s+next

I'm still working through it, but I've seen nothing so far i the Senate
health reform bill to stop that practice.

 That's so even assuming, which is often not the case, that these data are
at all useful in drawing Internet users' attention to what is advertised.
These ads rarely work, because we are already inundated with too many ads,
leading us to ignore them however they are presented. Further, knowing that
somebody was interested in a category of item or service as recently as  as
a few minutes ago may be utterly useless in reaching  that person now,
because they quite likely already made a relevant purchase and do not want
more ( A new suit? A new mortgage? A new plane reservation? —Too late,
already chosen or rejected.)
Likewise, we are supposed to be very worried about governments finding out
our political convictions or other damaging information. Since when do
inquisitions bother with accurate fact collection?  Domestic spy agencies
from the KGB to the FBI act on the basis of misunderstandings, rumor,
innuendo, outright lies, prejudice, corruption, etc. By asserting that “Big
Brother is Watching” we only help spread the paranoia that in Orwell’s
novel  the slogan was designed to create. Detailed and precise data
collection has very little to do with it.

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:55 AM, Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh at well.com>wrote:

>
> Missing the Forest for the Trees: A Curmudgeonly Look at the IPF
> Conference.
>
> As with others, if a bit belatedly, I join in offering kudos to Trebor
> Scholz and everyone else involved in bringing about and running the
> conference, handling the complex logistics, volunteering their time, etc.
> The conference was a success for me in stimulating a lot of thoughts,
> introducing me to some quite interesting new people, as well as renewing a
> few old friendships.  What I heard from  Catherine Driscoll, Gabriella
> Coleman, Fred Turner and Chris Kelty seemed especially fresh a nd
> insightful, and it was probably no accident that the last three spoke in a
> session delightfully moderated by Ted Byfield.  There were more than a few
> other talks I was sorry to miss. However, based on the majority of the
> sessions I ended up attending, including the final plenary — and maybe I
> chose badly —  what I heard had also had a negative side, which I think is
> worth addressing.
>
> The Internet is arguably the largest collective creation of humanity in all
> of history. In various degrees it has incorporated an ever-growing series of
> inventions, modes of participation and very widespread involvement in one or
> another of its forms, from e-mail to blogs to social media to search engines
> etc, etc. All of this activity I think fits neatly under the broad rubric of
> work and/or play, to which the conference seemingly was addressed.  Yet I
> think from Trebor’s intro on, the conference on the whole mischaracterized
> this vast and unparalleled achievement, seeing it as  primarily a source of
> profits for capitalists. The prime evidence, beyond an ideological bias in
> favor of such views, comes from the fact that corporations officially own
> many websites and try, sometimes with some success to make money,
> principally by selling advertising and by offering data they collect as
> tools for advertisers.
>
> In order to be outraged at this, a number of speakers at the conference
> take it for granted or loudly proclaim that very bad results can come from
> this, including the highly nonsensical claim that extracting data on from
> the actions, say, of Facebook users, amounts to infinite exploitation. This
> is a total misuse and misunderstanding both of what goes on with advertising
> and of Marx’s (anyway antiquated) formulations. Marx would have laughed
> uproariously at this absurdity, I suspect.
>
> Incidentally, the same person who made that bizarre claim misstated
> Google’s stock policy — falsely asserting that employees do not own shares —
> and misunderstands Facebook’s terms of service — implying that the company
> asserts rights to use  personal creations in other settings for its own
> reasons, rather than to permit users to post pretty much where they expect
> to while still acknowledging their ownership of their own “intellectual
> property.” In each case, the bias is towards making capitalism re the
> Internet seem considerably worse than it actually is.
>
> It is not just one person's shocking incomprehension that is at issue, for
> a number of other speakers focussed on the practice of collecting data from
> users as the basis for their intense criticism of the Internet, as well as
> for proof that it is fundamentally a capitalist tool. Advertising is an
> annoyance at best, in my view, but the idea that there are some highly vital
> data about personal preferences that advertisers can grab hold of and
> somehow influence purchases strikes me as exaggerated, unimportant and of
> basically trivial impact on individuals. That's so even assuming, which is
> often not the case, that these data are at all useful in drawing Internet
> users' attention to what is advertised. These ads rarely work, because we
> are already inundated with too many ads, leading us to ignore them however
> they are presented. Further, knowing that somebody was interested in a
> category of item or service as recently as  as a few minutes ago may be
> utterly useless in reaching  that person now, because they quite likely
> already made a relevant purchase and do not want more ( A new suit? A new
> mortgage? A new plane reservation? —Too late, already chosen or rejected.)
>
> Likewise, we are supposed to be very worried about governments finding out
> our political convictions or other damaging information. Since when do
> inquisitions bother with accurate fact collection?  Domestic spy agencies
> from the KGB to the FBI act on the basis of misunderstandings, rumor,
> innuendo, outright lies, prejudice, corruption, etc. By asserting that “Big
> Brother is Watching” we only help spread the paranoia that in Orwell’s
> novel  the slogan was designed to create. Detailed and precise data
> collection has very little to do with it.
>
> Anyway all such data collection is  done only because capitalist firms have
> found few other ways to make the Internet — and the services through it that
> people enjoy — pay for themselves. Advertisers and governments are always
> desperate for new tools, but that doesn't imply that  the tools on offer
> will be of any great use to them, or even that very much will be paid for
> such data or for very long. Meanwhile, the Internet keeps functioning in
> other ways of much greater import. As I have long argued, and find more
> valid than ever, the Internet  is primarily a system for individuals to
> obtain attention for themselves, even if they do make use of channels
> provided by corporations. (By the way, Lenin supposedly said, more or less,
> “the capitalist will be happy to sell you the rope you will use to hang
> him;” why do I suspect some at the conference would say, ”Don’t buy the
> rope; the capitalist will make a profit” ?) Using these tools adroitly we
> may get some form of socialism, or we may simply find that those who do use
> them have created a new kind of post-capitalist class economy. In the latter
> case, would-be supporters of socialism would certainly need to understand
> the new system if they hope to make progress in their preferred direction.
> For those wearing the heavy blinders that many did at this conference, no
> such enlightenment would be possible.
>
> As is typical of most academic conferences, a great many of the papers only
> discuss trivia because that is the route to academic success. This seems
> particularly true in the sorts of theories put forward under the guise of
> cultural studies; I found it indicative that after the conference several
> people think the most exciting thing that occurred was a discussion of in
> terms of Said’s “Orientalism” as applied to a miscellany including the
> “Mechanical Turk” and and Chinese ‘World-of-Warcraft gold” hunters. The
> point is not wrong, and it may reveal a bit of bias, but given that numerous
> participants in Internet firms hail from or work in various Asian countries
> and are treated with just about the same respect as anyone else, the charges
> of Orientalist exoticization seem overwrought and beside the point. This is
> simply not anything to get excited about except for scoring purely academic
> points. It says nothing about the value of the Internet, or even about how
> it might better promote international exchange and understanding.
>
> Along the same lines, another conference participant is fond of asserting
> that billions of people have been disposessed by capitalism. As he uses it,
> this seems more a rhetorical stratagem to criticize capitalism than any
> indication that he wants to try to see how the Internet might be used to
> help ameliorate that suffering. In some ways capitalism is to blame for such
> immiseration, but the situation is complicated. So many would not be
> suffering were it not that since the advent of industrial capitalism
> population has grown rapidly as famines and infant mortality have been much
> reduced, even in the worst-off countries. This due in part to better food
> distribution, higher crop yields, better hygiene, vaccination, some spread
> of drugs such as antibiotics, and the like, for which capitalism certainly
> deserves some credit.
>
> In most social systems historically, there were many who were
> supernumerary; in the past most such people were killed in infancy, starved
> to death or had to to take up vows that kept them from reproducing. Less of
> that happens now, though they still live with much less than others in the
> same culture, and very often live permanently quite close to starvation. It
> is a huge and horrendous problem, but not one that should be used for
> scoring purely rhetorical points. The Internet does hold out great promise
> in this regard, but that is not a promise that many at the conference seemed
> much interested in investigating, forwarding or even discussing.
>
> Another comment at the final session, from Jodi Dean, struck me. It is that
> she had finally been convinced by Christian Fuchs that “communism” cannot be
> achieved without “computers.” One reason this struck me is that it is such
> an old idea, dating back to the 1950’s, when the Soviets and others — such
> as the Western economist Wassily Leontief —  in fact devoted considerable
> efforts to  investigating how to use mainframe computers to do better with
> central planning. But I also found it odd that in the context of this
> conference Professor Dean would say “computers” rather than “the Internet,”
> which has much more promise in terms of bringing about some sort of
> participatory socialism.
>
> Jodi Dean is well-known for promulgating the thought of “communicative
> capitalism” to describe the Internet,,etc. It’s very easy to claim that
> whatever change has occurred is just some new sort of capitalism, but this
> hardly an analytic success, as I see it. Of course any term can be stretched
> to mean whatever one chooses, but hiding distinctions in this way is not
> necessarily perspicuous. To be sure, Dean is far from alone in engaging in
> such broad use of terms like capitalism and capital.  “Human resource”
> people widely speak of “human capital,” though it hard to see how a human a
> can be capital (for herself), and certainly not simply by being educated as
> they imply. Likewise, Pierre Bourdieu was fond of such terms as “cultural
> capital,” which again is certainly not capital in the Marxian sense, and
> does not suppose the same sort of exploitation as plain old capital. Many on
> the left, such as David Harvey, and many not at all on the left take most
> changes in the life around them to be proof of the continued strength of
> capitalism, when an entirely different possibility is utterly neglected.
> Inflating a formerly precise term in this fashion should be avoided if one
> wishes to speak  with any sort of intellectual or analytic precision,
> certainly in a conference such as this one. But that is not widely done.
>
> All this highlights for me that what some cleave to as “theory” does not
> seem deserving of that name. I started out my professional life as a
> theoretical physicist, and as I changed fields still referred to myself as a
> social theorist. I love theory, if it is good theory — of many sorts from
> astronomical to zoological, from political to literary theory.  By good
> theory  I mean a search for new understanding , often through new concepts
> of what the world is, how it works, how it can work, and what it should be.
> Such theorizing has to be self-examining, subject to doubt and critique,
> always a bit tentative, and certainly constantly tested for its coherence
> and meaningfulness  against new ranges of experience, as well as in
> comparison with other theories. It should of course strive to be rational,
> but it can never and probably should never be that purely. To get anywhere,
> not all hypotheses can be put in question at the same time, yet nothing
> should be beyond examination. Theory must always be seeking to add  new
> kinds of observations and predictions, examining how it comports or
> contrasts with other theories, whether it can be improved in its logic and
> strength of conclusions, where it is on possibly shaky grounds , in what
> ways it can be useful rather than merely descriptive or pejorative, when it
> is prematurely reductionist, when it can no longer easily be extended, when
> there are aspects of the world it has has overlooked, etc.
>
>
> Good theory must always be — to use a favorite post-modernist term —
> transgressive —as well as audacious, surprising and  offering up new
> concepts, which lead to new percepts. But even the best theory, by the time
> it is articulated and typeset, is surely wrong in some significant aspects.
> It always must be subject to critique, modification, enlargement, and
> eventual abandonment. Any textual formulation of it is by no means Holy
> Writ. It is not to be quoted with an air of devotion, or as if by itself it
> stands for or can prove anything.
>
> For too many people at the conference, I found, too much is taken for
> granted; too much is asserted without compelling argument; existing texts
> are treated as if sacrosanct and unarguably correct, as if they were bits of
> the Bible and we were fundamentalists; and metaphoric or analogical points
> are taken for logic or careful analysis. (Though thought — as Derrida among
> others has indicated — can never fully escape metaphor, that is no reason
> not to seek to do so.) Again, too much that is said seems to be intended as
> nothing other than academic preening. That leads to highly mistaken
> assumptions, focussing on trivia, unwarranted smugness, and other irksome
> behavior. It makes intrinsically intelligent people come off as fools or
> jerks.
>
> Three things are widely held to be true in the western world today: first,
> that we live in a more or less strictly capitalist society; second, that,
> except possibly for some sort of socialism, nothing other than capitalism is
> possible; and third, that capitalism is much to be preferred to socialism.
> (What socialism is generally taken to mean — especially in the US, but
> increasingly elsewhere — is usually some variant of Stalinism. With this
> definition, if the first two hypotheses are taken as correct, a good
> argument can indeed be made for the third.) Many or even most participants
> at this conference reject only the third hypothesis, pointing to or taking
> for granted the evils of capitalism, while also leaving unstated and little
> thought how a humane socialism would work. But how do we know that our
> system is primarily capitalist? Certainly not just by assertion. Nor by
> metaphor. And equally not by superficial observation of capitalist forms and
> notions, for the question has to be what other forms might be present at a
> less explicit level. In other words, without new concepts we cannot  clearly
> perceive what is around us.
>
> But having made the conceptual break with capitalism, perhaps most
> participants find it too hard to take a further step; perhaps many of you
> already feel yourselves too far out on a limb. Or, as I suspect, an
> adherence to Marxism is enough to secure a comfortable academic niche, so
> why even think of questioning it? One can publish endless papers finding
> some way to  criticize, say, the Internet as inherently and irrevocably
> capitalist, without having to have any thoughts of doing anything about it.
> (One speaker even sneeringly joked that he was going to use Facebook to
> organize a march on Washington in favor of single-payer health care. Many
> smaller but effective organizing projects have in fact been accomplished
> through Facebook, but the built-in sneer evidently better preserves his
> academic pretenses.)
>
> That’s not how to do good theory. The humanist tradition quite honorably
> has taken up exact quotation, and  a desire to get back to the text, in the
> case of poetry —in the largest sense —  or in studying what a particular
> author thought or said.  Such activities are commendable, but they should
> not be mistaken for theory, any more than a portion of a painting or
> snatches of a symphony would be . Not even a  mathematical formula, not even
> “E equals m c- squared,”  can rest in that light.
>
> All this is true of scientific theories, but it is even more vital to
> consider when dealing with theories that refer to the state or the future of
> humanity, for through its own actions the human word is in endless flux.
> What were indisputable “laws” cease to be, what was the state of affairs has
> changed. Marx himself wrote in 1851, “The tradition of all dead generations
> weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Whatever he exactly
> meant by that then, it has value for us only if reinterpreted to apply to
> now. Marx’s own work and that of everyone who came after him — in whatever
> tradition — is today part of a similar “nightmare.”   To live now,  we
> must be fully awake to now, not letting the clanking chains of our dreamt
> ghosts entrap us in fears and formulations of the dead past., not the past
> of the1860’s, nor the 1960’s, nor even more recent times.
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Michael
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (
> distributedcreativity.org)
> iDC at mailman.thing.net
> https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc
>
> List Archive:
> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
>
> iDC Photo Stream:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/
>
> RSS feed:
> http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc
>
> iDC Chat on Facebook:
> http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647
>
> Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us <http://del.icio.us/> by adding the tag
> iDCref
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/attachments/20091220/065a9edc/attachment-0001.htm 