Why Hoax Theorists And Online Harassment Are A Difficult And Not Easy Problem

I don't know if you saw this recent Guardian article about how conspiracy theorists are hounding the victims of shootings and making their lives unlivable. People who survived the Vegas shooting, parents whose kids were shot in the Sandy Hook shooting, a guy whose daughter was shot live on TV -- for some reason a sizable number of people take it on themselves to harass, threaten, demean and degrade these victims. They create video commentary with inane remarks about whether the person had a weird expression on their face; they make post endless speculation about alternative theories; and they target victims on social media with comments like "you fake asshole, I hope you die soon, you deserve to get shot for real."

This turns out to be a difficult problem to solve. Social media companies like Google, who owns YouTube, are trying to maximize engagement with the site, while the law regards content providers as not legally responsible for the content shared on their websites. Tech companies are trying to craft ethical guidelines, but the work is massive and difficult to scale.

For example, a person can flag a video and recommend it be taken down, but this is described as being "like trying to kill roaches with a fly swatter." The guy whose daughter was shot on live TV decided to try to flag the annotated videos of his daughter being shot -- but he just couldn't do it. Even looking at thumbnail after thumbnail of the video was too much for him.

Not unreasonably, he and other victims would like Google to do something about it. Instead of waiting for victims to flag the videos, couldn't they be proactive? Couldn't they, perhaps, hire people to search for a delete these harassing videos?

The answer is no. As an MIT computer scientist put it: "would they need to hire someone else to handle all the white supremacist harassment, and someone else to handle all the gender harassment? It’s an issue of scale."

To me, it's not surprising that this is a difficult problem. Distinguishing harassing content from non-harassing content is not easy, and there are reasons it's difficult to automate. One reason is that it's a matter of judgment, and judgment reflects a point of view. For instance, posting a video calling the Vegas shooting a hoax and the heroic survivors who saved lives "lying cunts" (as people did) is harassment. But posting a video about whether the government lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is not -- it's political speech. And it's political speech whether or not you use words like "cunt."

These judgments reflect points of view on the world and involve actual normative and ethical judgements. They reflect judgments about what is true, but also about what matters and how much and why, and about when being called a liar is a harm and how harmful it is. For complicated reasons in our society we tend toward the desire for meta-normative principles instead of normative judgments. Like, we seem happy debating the norms of engagement and debate -- "free exchanges of ideas" versus "words can harm people" -- but seem reluctant to acknowledge that the hard cases often come down to actual judgments about actual particulars.

For example, the Guardian article mentions how "YouTube .... has no policy against conspiracy or hoax theory videos in general." As if the judgment call -- this hoax theory/conspiracy theory versus that one -- is irrelevant and the issue can be decided by metanorms -- hoax theory/conspiracy theory versus not that.

But that doesn't seem right to me. Actually, for YouTube to have a policy against hoax theories and conspiracy theories in general would be outrageous. Governments, corporations, and individuals lie all the time. Of course we should be allowed to call them liars. It's not an issue you can decide with metanorms like hoax theories versus no hoax theories.

Among all the heartbreaking things in this article, like Vegas guy who saved someone's life whose name now autocompletes with "crisis actor" in the search bar, one of the most discouraging is the woman who, when contacted by the Guardian, expresses her regret. On a GoFundMe page for the Vegas victim, she called him "beyond fake," saying the he was was guilty of the "worst acting" she had ever seen. When contacted by the Guardian a few weeks later, she said she "had never attacked the family and said she was just searching for answers." Reminded that she had posted a meme on the Facebook page of the victim's brother that called the victim a "lying cunt," she said she didn’t remember and must have been caught up in the moment.

“I do feel bad," she said. "They are people, just like everybody else. Who am I to be calling anybody any kind of names?” she said. Asked if she regrets the attacks, she said: “I 100% do, and if I could apologize to them, I would."

Often when I disagree with people, I feel I can sort of see inside their worldview, or understand where they are coming from. But this left me utterly perplexed, sad, and bereft. How can a person be so hurtful and awful, just for no reason?

Ethics in Tech and the Humanities Classroom

I don't know if you saw this piece in the Guardian the other day, about how part of the problem with modern technology and its role in our lives is that people in the tech industry tend to study computer science and math and not the humanities.

Of course it's a subject close to my heart, and I've always said that most of the world's difficult problems are social and political problems, not technology problems. But I was interested to see a certain number of apt comments challenging the idea that classes in the humanities or ethics would make people more ethical, more motivated to do the right thing, or even more perceptive about what the right thing is.

In certain ways, I think these comments are spot-on. For one thing, it's always strange when universities require cheating students to take an ethics course. In ethics class, we study ethical theories, debates in ethics, and how different ethical perspectives lead to different conclusions about practical issues. Not only doesn't that make you a better person, it might have the opposite effect, insofar as you might learn about all this debate and disagreement and think to yourself: "If the experts can't even agree, maybe this is all BS. Should I just do whatever I want?"

Furthermore, I agreed with this perceptive comment in the Guardian from a "tech insider." This commenter drew on experience working with kids to say that "the thing that makes the biggest difference in knocking adolescent heads is exposing kids to people that aren't like them." He said that if you take a group of rich white guys from rich families, and you put them in a room together to study Plato, that won't have much effect in terms of making them care about negative consequences of their actions for people "on the other side of the screen." But actually interacting with people from different backgrounds could make a difference.

This commenter also pointed out, correctly in my opinion, that if you really want change, you can't rely on the tech industry to change itself, through people having "ethics." In a world of venture capital and people relying on tech jobs for their income and well-being, the incentives are all on the other side. You need political will and structural change if you want things to be different. Regular readers will understand why this point resonates with me.

Indeed, another commenter replied to the first to express indignation at the way "elites" act like learning the truth about life and love requires learning Greek  and traveling to India, and then, only if you come back with the "right" opinions. Whatever the reality, if this is the perception, the humanities are in trouble.

But no one will be surprised to hear that I think that there are also many things to say about the importance of studying the humanities and how this study is relevant to issues, especially where there are societal consequences to be considered. There are lots of areas, but one of them is learning about how complicated things are, and thus how unlikely it is that you can find and use simple general statements about social facts to understand the world.

For example, when you first encounter the idea that the thing to do is the thing that will bring about the best consequences, it might sound like simple common sense. But then you might learn in a philosophy class that applying this theory can lead to the conclusion that it's OK to kill disabled infants, and you might start wondering about whether there are other important human norms. Or you might start out thinking that society being based on free choice and individualism is just how societies work, but then you might take a history class and learn that ideas about individual autonomy emerged through a contingent set of forces. You might think that preventing deaths of innocents abroad is a good thing, but then you might learn in political science class about the complex effects of using weapons to kill people in other countries, even when your aims are good.

I'm occasionally appalled by the simple statements expressed by people in the tech industry. When Mark Zuckerberg says that integrity requires acting the same in all contexts, or that he dreams of a fundamental law of human behavior, that increased sharing will lead to increased tolerance and openness in society or that the solution is just cracking down on "bad stuff" ... well, those things seem wildly wrong to me.

Maybe being in a humanities or social science classroom -- not just reading certain texts, but also having back and forth, seeing conflicting opinions, hearing from people who have the opposite point of view -- would at least shake someone's confidence about these things? Lend a little epistemic humility?

Also, if that first Guardian commenter is right when they say it's not individual responsibility but rather structural change that is needed, then it's not so much that "tech elites" need humanistic education as that the rest of us do.

If you want to understand why people spread misinformation online, why people seek out anti-vaccine evidence, and why people doubt climate change, you're going to get much further in a sociology and social epistemology class than anywhere else. That's not about "ethics," exactly, but it is about understanding why people do the things that they do -- not in the "fundamental law of human behavior" kind of way, but in the actual "why do people do the things that they do" kind of way. 


What I Learned Using "Alternative" Tech

Regular readers know that I recently decided to use alternatives-to-Google. I am not boycotting Google, and I am not so naive to think that other tech products don't have the same ultra-surviellance-you-are-the-product problems that Google has. I just feel like, if tech companies are going to be the man-behind-the-curtain while we live out our little Oz-lives, wouldn't it better to have a few of them rather than just one? So -- you know, the one couldn't rule the world?

Two practical steps I've taken are 1) switching my search engine to Duck-Duck-Go and 2) deleting Google maps on my phone. Oh yeah -- I also disabled location on my weather app, when I read that weather apps sell data location and I came home one day after shopping for physical shoes and was inundated with shoe-related web ads. I know: whatever. But also: creepy.

So: what have I learned so far?

1. People have a lot of opinions about other people's technology choices. 

This starts with a long story, so bear with me. As regular readers also know, while I often take the Greyhound bus between Toronto and Waterloo, I decided to experiment recently with the GO bus. Specifically, in this case, I took a 7:20 am bus from Toronto to Bramalea, where I would change to catch a different bus to Kitchener terminal, where I'd get a local bus to Waterloo. This schedule has a "timed transfer," which means that the bus in Bramalea is supposed to wait to leave until after the bus from Toronto has arrived.

When I got on the bus in Toronto the driver got up in front and said, "Is anyone going to Kitchener"? I raised my hand. As he acknowledged me, his face fell. "OK, he said, I'll have them hold the bus for you. There's an accident and long delay on the 401, so we're likely to be quite late."

As we started off, I sat in the pre-dawn darkness digesting this information and fretting about my responsibilities. If we were going to be late, should I ethically tell the drive not to bother, that I'd just catch whatever bus I could? But they only come every hour. How late would we be? This is the kind of small stupid thing that I can really get myself into an anxiety about, so I was thrilled when a guy, Mr. X we'll call him, got on at the next stop and said, "I'm going to Kitchener. They're going to hold the bus, right?" Out of my hands.

The trip ended up being epic and complicated along multiple dimensions. We were quite late. At first, the driver couldn't get ahold of the Bramalea drive to ask him to wait. At the last minute, he did, but the Bramalea bus had already left the stop, so we had to catch up to him along the service road. We were admonished "Do not run to catch the bus!" which I guess is because they're afraid people will fall. Then between Bramalea and Kitchener, an even more massive car crash had actually closed the highway, and our bus, along with a million other vehicles, got off and crept along the side streets.

As we'd made our bus connection, I had briefly engaged Mr. X in conversation about our situation. Turns out he was making this trip for the first time as well. Didn't know where he was going, was heading to some kind of business conference thing near Kitchener. He asked me for directions. I didn't know. He asked me what I taught at the university. I told him. He leaned in for follow up convo. I put my headphones on.

At something like 11:00, when we'd all been trapped on this bathroom-less bus together literally for hours, Mr. X asked me if I had data on my phone, and I told him yes, and he asked me to look up the location of his event, and I said why don't you just borrow my phone and look up whatever you need to. And he took my phone -- an iPhone -- and he stared at it, befuddled.

"Um," I said, "are you looking for the browser or the maps program?" And he said, "Google maps." And I said, "Yeah ... I don't have Google maps. You can use the Apple maps, or a browser." And he looked up, and -- honest to god -- started lecturing me on how Google maps was better than other maps programs, including Apple maps. He had a friend in tech. He knew all about it. There was research. Google was better. Way better. I'm sitting there, looking at this guy, a stranger to whom I have just lent my phone, a profound act of trust and -- he is fucking lecturing me?

I didn't tell him I was engaged in a complicated non-boycott. I didn't tell him I knew that Apple is just as bad as everyone, but that it didn't seem in the same world-domination business as everyone else which is one reason I feel OK using it. I just stared at him, and, eventually, took my phone back.

I wish I could say this is an isolated incident, but it's just a relatively dramatic one. Often I'm in conversation, and some question or problem comes up, and I'm like "Oh, I'll look it up," and enter into the search bar and  ... hmm. And I say to my friend or acquaintance, "I can't find it..." and they're like "Wait, you can't find it? Really?" And I start to explain, "Well, you see, Duck-Duck-Go ... and etc. etc., ..." and they look at me like "What planet are you from again?

2. The surveillance bubble is the surveillance bubble

I am constantly taken aback by my search results on alternative search engines. On Google, I search for a philosopher by name, and I see a philosopher. I search for a Toronto bar by name, and I see a Toronto bar. I search for health and science info, and I see help sites and scholarly sites.

It's not like that out in the search wilderness. You type in a philosopher's name, you see a million links of athletes and celebrities and random people with Instagram accounts who have the same name. You type in the name of a Toronto bar, and you see a pub in Idaho. You search for health and science info, and you get some site like "mystichealthhealing.com"

It's bracing. I mean, intellectually, I always knew that Google was shaping my results to tailor them to me based on the vast data about me that they had at their fingertips. But seeing it in action is something else. For one thing, it makes you realize your part of the world is way smaller than you think-- a salutary lesson that probably most of us could stand to have reinforced every day. For another thing, it reminds you that the bad things about Google -- the infinite tracking, the knowing your favorite brand of toothpaste -- is essential to the good thing about Google -- the knowing just what you were looking for.

This means the conflict between convenience and privacy is an essential one. There's no magic world where we get the one without losing the other. It's always going to be a trade off. The surveillance bubble that tells you what you want to learn is the same surveillance bubble that keeps you trapped in the world of your own information.

3.  Google is a really good search engine.

Sometimes when I really need to find something, I go to the Google search page. It works amazingly well. I guess we all knew this, but still.

If they could ratchet back the dreams of world domination, and stop trying to make entire "smart" neighborhoods in cities I care about, Google and I might be able to get back together.

In the meantime, though, not finding the things I'm looking for is not really that big of a deal. Sometimes, I ask people, and we chat. It's nice.

I Went Down The Ethical Cell Phone Rabbit Hole

Fairphone: modularity FTW.

I want a new phone. I don't need a new phone. I have a perfectly serviceable iPhone 6 that is about two and a half years old. But I never liked my iPhone 6. It's too big for me: I can't use it with one hand, which drives me crazy when I'm using it to read a book or when I'm trying to keep one hand in my pocket because it's freezing outside. When I got it, they hadn't had the brainstorm of the iPhone SE normal-size-phone concept. I also want a new phone because, like everyone else, I am a cog in the consumer paradise machine we are all caught up in.

I know that getting a new phone would be ridiculous along several dimensions. The most obvious is the negative impact that new phones have on the world. Some of these are obvious environmental impacts. But there are also issues related to conflict mines, where profits from minerals fund violence and war, children are working in dangerous conditions, workers sometimes handle toxic chemicals in contexts where workers have few protections. These latter impacts are negative impacts directly on people.

I often think about electronic gadget production when I'm teaching about theories of ownership in philosophy class. In one theory, ownership is historical. You have a right to what you get through voluntary exchanges, and the state of wealth distribution is just when it arises out of such exchanges. When exchanges are unjust -- through slavery or coercion or stealing or whatever -- the just distribution is the one that would have resulted had those injustices not happened.

As we've discussed before, it seems that if you take this literally, you'd end up with some dramatic conclusions, like the obligation for all non-Indigenous people to leave North America. But there are also smaller questions, like what about your phone?

I got my phone by paying for it in a voluntary transaction, but if you trace all the elements of the phone back, you get slavery and coercion and all the other things. What would it mean to truly own your phone under this theory of ownership?

Thinking about all this, I decided to see if there was an ethical phone available. I searched (with Duck Duck Go!) for "ethical cell phone." I found a lot of bad news, but I also found a phone. The "Fairphone." The Fairphone is an "ethical, modular smartphone." It's modular so that when it breaks, you can fix it easily, and use it longer, and recycle the parts. It's "ethical" in the sense of the supply chain and worker conditions. 

The complexity of the phone situation really comes to light when you see how many challenges Fairphone encounters. According to this article, they have sourced four out of thirty minerals in an ethical way. There is still child labor in the supply chain, because they get some minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Tin mining is still hugely environmentally destructive, even when done in a better way. The article concludes that Fairphone is making great progress, but still the concept of "ethical smartphone" is an oxymoron.

I probably wouldn't love the Fairphone. It's not a very attractive object, which is not surprising given that there's no Jonathan Ive equivalent hovering over everyone insisting on beauty. But whatever. It doesn't matter, because, surprise, surprise! the Fairphone doesn't even exist in North America. It's only available for Europeans.

Obviously, the thing to do is to not get a new phone. Compared to a lot of people, I don't even use my phone that much, so it's a testament to the power of advertising and consumerism that I'm even finding that any kind of challenge.

Ethical Perspectives On Social Equality And Innovation In the US Health Care Debate

There are many reasons people favor market-based health care systems over alternatives like universal care and single-payer, and this post is about just one of them: the idea that the innovations produced by market systems are worth the trade-offs required by the deficiencies of market systems.

About a month ago, Vox ran an interview with health care economist Craig Garthwaite, who said that market-based solutions are important because competition drives innovation. Innovation creates new treatment options, so we can cure more diseases and help more people. In fact, he said, the health care systems of other countries -- like those in Western Europe and presumably Canada -- are sort of mooching off the innovation produced in the US and thus not paying their fair share. Acknowledging that health care for some people will suffer under a market system no matter what, he says that we should try to create an improved market-based system, making the ACA work better and properly funding Medicaid to take care of people who can't afford insurance.

Correctly inferring that the issues are fundamentally value-based, the author of the piece summarizes this way:

"Either we value providing adequate care to the most people possible or we value providing ideal care to fewer people in a system that produces more innovation. That’s the fundamental trade-off, and where you come down turns on what you value."

I don't know whether those empirical claims are true -- whether, in fact, innovation markedly suffers when you move away from a market-based health care system. It's a complicated question, because there are so many variables. But let's say for the sake of argument that it is true. In that case, how should we go about making these value-based trade-offs?

It's sometimes suggested that there are rational ways of calculating that would give you an answer. For example, in consequentialism, we evaluate actions and policies based on a calculation of costs-and benefits. You could estimate the QALY's -- quality adjusted life-years -- that would be produced or preserved by various policies and choose that way. This means directly weighing the negatives of under-treated people -- like women who die in childbirth or poorer people with long-term diseases like cystic fibrosis -- against the positives of new treatments like innovative cures for cancer, brain injuries, etc. You'd count how long people live, and how many people, and just add it up.

For a lot of complicated reasons, I think this wouldn't be the right way to judge the trade-off. One reason has to do with justice and fairness. What about the fact that people who are already the subjects of discrimination and historical injustice end up also being the "costs" instead of the benefits? For example, if you can increase the life-span of a few rich white people by worsening health care for poor black people, then cost-benefit analysis seems to say that as long as the increases are dramatic enough, that's a good plan. That must be the wrong answer. Another reason has to do with the idea of "quality-adjusted." As disability-rights activists point out, their lives are systematically undervalued in this framework. Because of the way "quality-adjustment" tends to be operationalized, improvements to able-bodied people count as more significant.

A more subtle way of making trade-offs is through the "interchangeability" concept associated with the work of John Rawls. Rawls suggests that to determine what is a just society, we should ask what we'd be willing to agree to if we didn't know who in that society we would be -- whether we'd be rich or poor, healthy or sick, educated or not.

This way of proceeding also faces problems and challenges, but it's interesting that the economist being interviewed says that in a Rawlsian framework he'd "probably want to be in another country." That is, if you didn't know whether you might be at the bottom, you'd choose to structure your society with more protections for more people -- even if that's at the cost of innovation. Given the cost of the ACA insurance, I expect a lot of middle-class people would prefer to be in the other systems as well.

I think a lot of people have a value-system that includes various potentially conflicting ideals, and that these ideals often include a commitment to the idea that someone who works hard should be able to afford a decent life. Prioritizing this ideal over others would also lead us to conclude that it's worth sacrificing some innovation to make sure everyone can access health care.

When I think about innovation and trade-offs, I sometimes imagine returning to the technology of the 1980s, when I was young. In the 1980s we had no internet. If you wanted to call someone on the phone, they had to be home. If you wanted to see them, you'd have to arrange in advance. If you wanted to buy something, you had to go to the store, and if you wanted to do research, you had to go to the library and track down bibliographies on paper and use these huge books that would index research articles. If you wanted to watch porn, you had to go somewhere and get it.

Would we sacrifice all the innovation improvements of the last few decades if it meant an improved way of life for people who are poorer and sicker? I don't know about you, but I would in a heartbeat. Sure, in a world where everyone has a cell phone, it sucks not to have one. But if no one had one, who cares? Were people really less happy in the 1980s? Given that modern crises of inequality and anxiety, especially for young people, we may well have been mostly better off.

In reality, there are no easy trade-offs like this, and slowing innovation would definitely be bad in some ways. For example, for some people who have health conditions and disabilities, the innovations of the last few decades may well have led to radically improved lives. But if it's really true that only certain kinds of systems produce that kind of innovation, then we need new solutions for ameliorating the costs.

And it's worth remembering that innovation isn't always technology. US maternal mortality is rising, and is three times that of the UK and eight times that of Norway. California recently bucked the US national trend of more and more US women dying in childbirth through innovative organizational changes in how pregnant women are evaluated and treated. Ultimately, those researchers also said that it comes down to a question of values: "a key driver of America’s maternal mortality problem is that America doesn’t value women."

These innovations came partly from Stanford University and partly through the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative, not from markets.

Again, I don't know if it's true that the deficiencies of the US system are essential to its successes. But given that the costs of the deficiencies are so high, and given that the successes are mostly enjoyed by the already privileged, and given the many social factors that can bring about innovation -- we have to look for new alternatives.

A Trip To The Sex Machines Museum

When I was in Prague recently, I went to the Sex Machines Museum. It was small and it could have used more in the way of historicizing information, but it was interesting. I was excited to get a professional discount for being a professor and I considered requesting reimbursement for my ticket as a research expense -- but honestly the price was so low it would have purely been symbolic and not worth the hassle.

I don't know what you think when you think "sex machines," but the first thing I think of is the vibrator and its amazing history. If you don't know anything about the history of the modern vibrator, you owe it to yourself to find out about it. We live in an era where we think that the way we see things is the only obvious way to see them, and this -- very recent! -- period in Anglo history can really shake up your complacency.

I learned about this years ago from Rachel Maines's amazing book, The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction, but you can get a good quick overview here.

Basically, it was common in the Victorian era to think that women were not sexual beings -- that they tolerated sex for the sake of their husbands and to have children. Especially since women do not typically have orgasms from intercourse alone, women in this context would sometimes develop a nervous irritability accompanied by a feeling of heaviness in the abdomen, wetness between the legs, and erotic fantasies. We would call this sexual frustration, but because this wasn't a concept, it was understood as "hysteria," -- a medical ailment that needed treatment.

Medical treatment involved a physician rubbing the woman between the legs until "hysterical paroxysm" occurred. Again, we would call this an orgasm, but it wasn't understood as sexual, it was understood as medical. Though it brought in good money, the treatment was considered a pain: boring and time-consuming. It also gave the doctors achy cramped hands. Maines calls it "the job nobody wanted."

So the vibrator was introduced as a labor saving device for doctors, something they would use on women to treat them. Not long after, technology evolved to the point where vibrators could be designed for use inside the home; at the same time their connection to sexuality became more obvious and so they were marketed blandly as "massagers."

The sex machine museum did have vibrators from this period, and it had some other interesting things I thought I'd share. First, here are two characteristic vibrators:

 

An early vibrator.

A later vibrator.

One of the things that surprised me the most at the Sex Machines Museum was the number of machines using electricity -- I mean, not just powered machines but machines that would deliver current. Yikes! Here is a picture of some complicated contraptions where a "soaked ring" would be slipped onto the penis allowing electrical current stimulates erections:

"Portable electric device" for the penis.

Another thing I was surprised by was this enormous wooden contraption:

German "erotic device."

The information card for it reads "A faithful copy of the instruments used by a female prison in Germany to calm the 'restless minds' of some prisoners. The penis moved by stepping on the pedal."

So many questions. I don't know if you can see in the photo but the "penis" in this thing is huge, especially at the base. Is the implication that it was intentionally painful and abusive? If not, how did penetration from a wooden penis avoid the same problem the vibrator was meant to solve -- that women don't usually have orgasms from penetration?  Was "calm the restless minds" a euphemism? Or is the whole thing just fake? I have no idea.

Another thing I learned was about chastity belts. I always had the same cartoon thought that most moderns have about this concept, that it was a thing a jealous or possessive spouse or parent would put on a person to make sure they didn't have sex. In fact, they were often used by women to protect themselves from rape! Check out this amazing picture:

Chastity belt.

Most of the machines in the museum were for having a good time, but of course not all. The "anti-masturbation" belts for male adolescents were to prevent nocturnal masturbation; in the event of an erection, sharp spikes would dig into the penis.

To me the most disturbing of these devices was the one below, meant to alert parents to nocturnal erections: as the placard explains, "there was a ring on the boy's penis, and when an erection would occur, it rang a bell placed in the parents' bedroom."

Anti-masturbation device for boys.

OMG.

I Am Away But Here Are Two Photos That Gave Me A Complicated Feeling

I'm away at a conference in Prague, and I thought I'd have time to write something, but the stresses and complexities of international travel got to me and I didn't.

For your entertainment, however, I can offer these two photos, of a Prague window/storefront for a place offering iPhone repair: 

In case you can't tell, this is window-areas littered with broken and discarded iPhone parts, mostly screens, with one actual Mac showing gadgetry insides.

I had a complicated emotional response to this sight. I thought it was a cool, original, and artistic idea. I like the way it looks -- it actually does look like art. I like the idea. On the other hand, it's depressing to see all this junk, and it's awful to be reminded of the mass of garbage that our lives generate.

I'm even ambivalent about all the broken screens. I'm the type of person who uses a protective cover for my phone, because I'm the of person who drops my phone and doesn't want to deal with breaking it. When I see young people (and it is mostly young people) using fancy phones with no protection, my first instinct is something to be like "What are you doing! That's a nice phone! What happens if you drop it!"

And yet -- there's something I love admire about the anti-protection commitment. I was also the kind of young person who wouldn't have used any protection on my phone, and would have been heartbroken when the screen cracked, but who would also have gone on the same way, unwilling to give up the aesthetic commitment for some dumb practicality like "the phone might break."

I know I'm more sensible now, but sometimes I miss that adolescent spirit I had, and wish I could be that person again. 

The Thing On The Other Side Of "Political Correctness" Is (Often) Not "Free Speech"

Often when people argue over political correctness, you hear the opposing point of view framed in terms of "free speech": proponents of political correctness, it is suggested, want to restrict speech, and opponents want not to restrict it.

But for a long time I've felt like something about this doesn't fit. The term "political correctness" is typically used to refer to a specific content -- speech that respects certain norms surrounding certain issues. Those norms are themselves contested, of course -- but still, if a neo-nazi party put a ban on anti-racist speech at their convention, no one would use the term "political correctness" to describe that. The term "political correctness" is about a certain set of ideas.

By contrast, "free speech" is a general principle -- a principle about speech that does not refer to specific content surrounding certain issues. In the classic formulation, speech should be in some sense protected as long as it's not harming other people. Again, these boundaries are themselves contested -- does "protection" mean just legal protection or does it mean you shouldn't lose your job? what is "harm"? But again, even those questions are general ones, potentially applicable in the same way to any content.

This suggests that there is something wrong with treating the two as if they're directly opposed. I think that this is true, and I think it's possible to see it by thinking about how often the concept of "political correctness" is used in contexts where it doesn't refer to formal policies or punishments but just with what ideas of appropriateness will inform which contexts. This contextuality means that the real question often isn't about "free speech" but rather about the specific content in specific contexts.

As is often pointed out, in a lot of cases where people talk about "free speech," there is no policy or punishment in question, it's just a matter of getting criticized a lot -- and criticism is an exercise of free speech not a way of limiting it. But it's also important to notice that in a lot of cases, the question turns not on general considerations but rather on "appropriateness" in context.

There's a lot of agreement, I think, that for many contexts, there ought to be standards of appropriateness. And this means that when we argue about "free speech" versus "political correctness," the real disagreement often isn't over abstractions like "free speech," but rather over the specific content in the specific context.

For example, if there are guidelines about appropriate speech and conduct in a classroom, that is something context-specific, and there is wide agreement that some such standards make sense. I can't find it now, but in the aftermath of one of the big US campus controversies, someone wrote a humor piece in which a student claimed a "free speech" restriction because they weren't allowed to spend the entire class shouting over and over that fellow-student "Bob" was a moron. Of course, it's funny because that's not a restriction on free speech because the guideline in question -- you can't disrupt class to personally malign other students -- is a context-specific and reasonable one.

Other contexts allow people to create guidelines. If you have people over and one of them says something horrible and offensive, you can ask them to leave: it's your house; you can set the guidelines. If a visitor calls your spouse an ugly, lying, piece of shit, you're not violating their free speech when you ask them to leave.

The real question, I think, often isn't "free speech" but rather what's appropriate in what context and why. In a classroom, it's reasonable to have guidelines that foster a learning atmosphere. If some forms of speech destroy that atmosphere, it's reasonable to restrict them. In a home, the people who live there get to set the guidelines.

What critics of "political correctness" often have in mind, I think, really has to do with what they feel is regarded as appropriate in certain contexts: they think this "appropriateness" criterion is often set too broadly, or includes the wrong things.

I often disagree completely with these critics about specific items (like, of course I think names like "Redskins" are racist and offensive) but I think at the abstract level the question of what is and isn't appropriate in context can be fraught, unclear, contested, something without an obvious right answer. In these cases, though, we're not arguing about "free speech" at all -- we're arguing about the actual content of the actual example and the actual context in question.

For example, in the case of the Yale Halloween controversy, the initial email asked students to think carefully about their choices, and to consider the negative impact that culturally insensitive costumes could have. It's been framed as an issue about "free speech." But not only was there no policy or punishment suggested, the question of costumes in a community of students is one that is obviously bound by *some* standards and guidelines. If a student had a physical disability or an unusual appearance and a hundred other students got organized to mock them via costume on Halloween, this would be inappropriate and wrong. The question has to do not with freedom of expression but rather with how the standards and guidelines should be interpreted and set.

If this is right, then contested speech really turns on discussion of the ins and outs of the particular content in question. This, I believe, can be simple, or it can be very complicated. In the case of the costumes, I think the initial email proposed a guideline that was completely reasonable: your costume could hurt and alienate someone else, and on the other side ... what? Some important truth is going unseen?

But in other cases, it might be less clear. In what contexts is it appropriate or inappropriate to say that women belong at home taking care of domestic matters? I think if you're debating a policy or intellectual issue with someone who happens to be a woman, it's completely inappropriate. But what if you're debating the nature and limits of multiculturalism? Or what if you're trying to challenge the Western feminist orthodoxy that choice and autonomy always make for the good life? What if this is part of your brand of communitarian radical feminism?

When matters are contested, I think we're often really debating the particular speech in question, and how it fits into the particular context. If this is right, there can be reasonable disagreements, even among the most well-meaning people -- and even among people ultra committed to "free speech"! -- over what speech should be regarded in what way and when and so on. If this is right, it also means that speech that gets criticized for being politically incorrect needs more than "free speech' as a defense: it needs a specific reason why the speech is appropriate or potentially important to protect in the given context.

I think one reason these matters have come to seem so confusing and flattened out these days is that so much speech is happening on "the internet," which is something tech people want to pretend is like a street corner soap box -- no particular context, free speech! -- but which functions in people's lives as as series of very specific mini-contexts where many things are not OK. As I've said before, it drives me crazy to see the tech companies treat as simple and algorithmic problems that are ultra complicated and require thought and judgment.  

Again, I don't mean to imply here that all free speech debates are of the category I'm discussing in this post. If you're talking about a law restricting speech, that is a free speech issue, and there are a lot of grey areas, such as policies that create punishments for forms of speech.

It's just to say that in a lot of cases, the issue has more to do with the content of the speech than any principle of "free speech." As a corollary, it would follow that, contra what we keep reading on the internet, being in favor of "free speech" and also in favor of "political correctness" is a coherent and consistent position.

It Was The Russians! No, Wait, It Was A Shadowy Collective! DDoS, IoT, and WTF

Last week I wrote about a minor DDoS attack that harnessed an army of small household appliances and cameras to take down websites. Then this week, there was a major DDoS attack that harnessed an army of small household appliances and cameras to take down major parts of the internet. Am I surfing the zeitgeist or what?

Reaction to these events has been somewhat puzzling. The party line seems to be something like "It was the Russians." At CBS News, the "homeland security consultant" Fran Townsend immediately pointed to Russia, asking "Is this sort of a brushback pitch from the Russians sending us a message that we should be pretty careful about engaging in this sort of cyberactivity with them because they are very capable[?]" A Guardian writer who, like me, wanted a chance to fly off the handle about the Internet of Things (IoT) and how stupid and pointless it is got the headline "Do you want your shower to help Russian hackers?"

But the same CBS story quoting expert opinion alleging state sponsored cyber-terrorism then goes on to explain that a "shadowy collective" called "New World Hacking" had claimed responsibility. People speaking anonymously and claiming to be associated with New World Hacking said they did it to "test power," that they "sought only to expose security vulnerabilities," and that when it came to demands, there was only one: "We will make one demand actually. Secure your website and get better servers, otherwise be attacked again."

I don't know about you, but I thought these seemed like intelligent and reasonable things to say. I don't know if they're true -- whatever that means in this day and age -- but, as we say nowadays, whatever.

I was standing in the espresso line when I first encountered this news on my phone, and I decided to go and look up New World Hacking. From Google I was able to easily find their website, where I saw a simple form with boxes and a simple message -- offering DDoS attacks. Not powerful enough to bring down a government, they said, but if you want to harass your friends and stir up trouble, you've come to the right place!

OK I am paraphrasing that part -- because New World Hackers took down their site. On their Twitter account they said they've retired, hanging it all up. Now when you try to visit their page, you just get "The fact that you are seeing this page indicates that the website you just visited is either experiencing problems or is undergoing routine maintenance."

When we're entering the realm of thermostats and children's toys taking down the internet, things are sufficiently bizarre that I can't claim to have a handle on the situation. But here are some questions I have.

1. Why am I the only one freaking out about this?

This DDoS attack was treated as news but it was not treated as major, earth-shattering news. This seems bizarre to me. If, as seems utterly plausible, someone manages to stymie major parts of the internet -- meaning people can't communicate, can't move money around, and probably can't even make stop lights work -- how long do you think it's going to be before there's no more food in the supermarket, no more water coming out of the tap, and no more electricity to charge your phone?

I feel like people have this idea that somehow because we used to do all these things without the internet we can go back to doing things "the old way." But as we've said before, that's an illusion. The analogue systems of society aren't somehow buried somewhere, ready to be dusted off and used. They're over. For example: masses of people used to be employed in huge buildings all over North America to old-fashioned banking a thing. There's no simple "going back to the way it was."

2. Why doesn't the media talk to actual hackers?

These stories are always the same: they talk to security experts, they talk to the target of the attack (who knows nothing), they talk to some political person. Everyone says the same thing: we don't know the motives, sinister forces are out there trying to get us, there is a problem with internet security because blah blah blah reasons that people have known about for a long time.

As far as I know, one AP reporter had one DM with New World Hackers on Twitter, and some people tried to talk to people who said they'd been involved with a similar hack before. Aren't there other people who know more about this who can be interviewed? Not "security experts" but people who actually do these things and know why people do them and have relevant thoughts instead of just dumb boiler-plate? Why not talk to those people?

3. What is going on with "decentralized" control?


Part of the relevant "blah blah blah" in these circumstances always has to do with how there's no one really in charge of the internet, because it's not really that kind of thing, and there's no governing body that is supposed to oversee stuff and make sure things are secure, and there's no government that contains a bureaucracy devoted to such matters. Sometimes you get the feeling that there are people who think this is a really good thing, because governments are "political" and because "decentralized" control is actually safer because of the way nodes and important parts are all distributed around instead of being physically or logically organized.

But it's no secret that when you leave things alone to organize themselves, they often ... organize themselves. What results is the opposite of decentralized control and is more like massively centralized control. This DDoS attack, for example, worked so well because the target, Dyn, was providing infrastructure and domain name support to a large number of large clients like Twitter, Netflix, and PayPal. It's not really decentralized. It's more like auto-centralized: it centralized itself.

4. Do some people sort of want it to be proto-war with Russia? 


There's a lot I just don't understand.

Don't Tech People Ever Encounter Dystopian Fiction?

The drones from Iron Man.

 Often when I read the news these days, I think to myself: don't these people ever encounter dystopian futuristic books and movies?

To me, it seems like modern narratives are full of of very plausible depictions of the very awful and disastrous consequences of creating and adopting new technologies that are of very dubious usefulness in the first place. Don't the people creating these technologies ever think to themselves "Wow, I'm like the inadvertently evil person in a futuristic disaster movie"?


One obvious example is the Internet of Things. I'm not even a huge sci-fi fan, but even I know that many of the classics depict objects turning, or being turned, against us. It's not in the least far-fetched. In fact, just recently a successful DDoS attack was executed by a bunch of "innocuous things like digital video recorders and security cameras."

When I first read that, I felt like, 'Well, duh." This is what novelists and artists have been telling us for years. Isn't one of the main sci-fi moments when Dave says "Open the pod bay doors, HAL," and Hal says "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"? Didn't Philip K. Dick write about a door that wouldn't open unless you pay? Aren't these the logical extensions of having your fridge or your front door connected to the internet, and, by obvious extension, to mega-corporations and the NSA?

I don't even get why people want the Internet of Things. What's so tough about making a note to buy milk, and if you forget and run out one day, it's not the end of the world? What's inadequate about the existing concept of, say, a key to get into your home? The electric grid is fragile from years of neglect. One good shot could knock out communications satellite. If the power is out, do you really want to be unable to get into your own home? I picture the poor befuddled people of the future, thinking "If only there were some simple technology where you could fashion a device, maybe out of metal and it would just ... open the door." Sad!

I thought the same thing when I read about how Facebook wants to help banks evaluate your credit-worthiness by looking at the creditworthiness of your friends. For fuck's sake, people. Isn't this well-worn territory? In just the latest incarnation I happen to know of, Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story describes a system where people's scores are constantly broadcast so everyone knows exactly how you stack up mony-wise and prestige-wise. I'd tell you more about Super Sad True Love Story but the truth is I haven't read it, partly because it seems too insanely depressing and I have other things to worry about.

And what about new and improved facial recognition technology? The dystopian possibilities of 100 percent surveillance are well-explored, and yet we keep marching forward. The always great MathBabe says that a new company headed by "two 20-something Russian tech dudes" is producing software pretty good at it. Faced with the obvious ethical questions, their response is along the lines of "It's too late to worry; we can distinguish the good guys from the bad guys; Luddites gonna be Luddites."

Finally, I'm sure you've read about Amazon testing drone delivery, out in the back-wilds of the UK (and, I now learn, in Canada!). Drones? To bring consumer crap to your house? Don't these people go to the movies? You'd think the Iron Man franchise was some kind of Indie cult film you could only get on Blu-ray.

So: what is the deal? Is it that the powers of capitalism are so intense that people forge ahead knowing that it will all end in tears? Is it some kind of cognitive bias for optimism, where people just think "this time it will be different"?

The popularity and style of modern dystopian narratives almost suggests to me a much darker and creepier possibility: that there is a desire for dystopia, a yearning for a crisis that will throw us out of our current state of moral complexity and our compromised ways of living and boredom. The problems of modern life are so complicated and unglamorous. It's hard to do a good thing without worrying you're also doing bad. Solutions to problems like the refugee crisis, systemic injustice, and climate change are going to require thinking and dealing with laws, education, and bureaucracy.

Are people secretly longing for a new situation, one where some of us are heroes and some of us are vulture food? Where instead of dealing with difficult problems that we don't know how to solve, we'll be in a more Mad Max situation, where it's like "Weakness = bad! Protecting daughter by killing guy = good!"

I don't know. But whenever I go along with this train of thought, I always end up in the same place. Should I give up this whole "philosophy professor" biz, and to learn how to repair low-tech kitchen appliances?

Philosophy Of The Post-Apocalypse: Station Eleven Edition

Over the break I read this excellent post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven. Unlike a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, this book really got to me -- in the sense of making me feel I should learn some post-apocalyptic-appropriate skill like fighting or sewing, and also in the sense of making me feel like somehow the apocalypse is realistically right around the corner.

I think the reason this book made me feel its reality so effectively is because it is .. well, completely realistic. It's not about some weird future world. It's about what our total actual world would be like if an awful contagious and fatal disease killed 99 percent of people and everything completely collapsed.

Like a lot of dystopian novels, this one is pretty philosophical. Partly because it involves a pandemic instead of a man-made oh-we-brought-this-all-on-ourselves, it goes beyond some of the more obvious cheap-shots at humankind that dystopian novels can sometimes take.  

Yes, this post has spoilers. But in a book where the apocalypse happens at the beginning, it hardly matters, does it? So: in no particular order, a few themes from Station Eleven.

1. The post-apocalyptic future is not a future of moral clarity.

I am so sick of narratives involving good guys and bad guys, where the whole story is about good and evil and how evil people do evil things and good people try to stop them. Not only is this a completely inaccurate representation of our world of moral complexity, I think it's turning a lot of people into moral morons. You're with us or against us! We'll bomb them back into the stone age! You can't let the terrorists win!

Only a citizenry stuffed to the gills with Star Wars Death Star Good Versus Evil simplicity could be sold this sort of black and white vision of the world. In Station Eleven, some good people have to do some pretty awful things, and the bad people -- well, even the main hero of the book is like, "Who knows why? I bet they saw some awful things."

2. Civilization is kind of a human miracle.

Sometimes in modern life civilization seems so inevitable, so part of the landscape, you can almost forget it about how surprising and miraculous it is. Over and over in this book the characters who survive and make their way through the empty world marvel at the leftover remnants of the civilized world, and especially at the way that world was a world of people.

At one point one of the characters muses that we tend to think of the modern era as somehow depersonalized, when in fact it's people who do everything to keep it moving along. The pandemic doesn't destroy any of the material world -- it just kills people. But without people, there's no one to fix the grid, there's no one to make anything or move anything around -- the whole world just comes to a complete standstill.

At one point one of the characters beholds a snowglobe. On the one hand, it's just a trite object from an airport gift shop. But on the other hand, it's an object that represents massive global interaction: someone to design the object, someone to make and assemble it, someone to package it in a box, someone to put it on a container ship to somewhere.

This crazy sense of a world of billions of people coordinating their actions --without which we're just a bunch of scared bipeds trying to shoot deer for food.

3. The everything-happens-for-a-reason-people are going to kill us all.

One of the biggest dangers of the post-apocalyptic world is prophets and cults -- the people who believe that their connection to the deep meaning of it all gives them license to threaten, dominate, and kill others. One of the scariest prophets in the book is someone who was about eleven years old when the pandemic strikes, and whose mother always taught him that "everything happens for a reason." He naturally infers that the saved were saved because the are the special people. 

Well- meaning citizens try to explain to him that no -- in this case it's just germs, and they got some people and not others, there really isn't any deeper meaning to it. But, post-apocalyptic moods being what they are, he doesn't really buy it.

The main story line of the book follows a traveling symphony that goes around in rusted out vans pulled by horses, playing classical music and also performing Shakespeare. Their motto is "Survivial is not enough" -- a slogan they got from an old Star Trek episode. They're always a bit baffled by the point of what they're doing, and whether it's pointless to perform Shakespeare instead of something more suited to their strange condition.

I loved the way they were muddling through, confused, uncertain, and just trying to do something. It seemed to me the opposite perspective to everything-happens-for-a-reason, more like Who-the-hell-knows-what's-going-on-and-why? It might be hard to see the Forces of Uncertainty as the Forces of Good, but I think surprisingly often, they are.

Sensory Neuroscience, Snackology, and the Market Failure of Food

I don't know if you saw this article in The New Yorker last week about how the sound of a potato chip, the music in a bar, and the color of your coffee mug can seriously alter the flavor of your
food.

If you think I'm exaggerating you should read the article. They recorded sounds of potato chip crunching, and when they amplified those sounds and sharpened them, people rated the chips as fresher and better tasting. Mellifluous organ music changed a creamy ale into a bitter one. When coffee's in a white mug it tastes "nearly twice as intense but only two-thirds as sweet" than when it's in a clear glass one.

Thoughts:

1. This is obviously a philosophical topic, leading immediately to questions like "what is taste, anyway?" More specifically, these results press on us the question of whether the perceptual experience itself changes in the presence of other stimuli or whether we just interpret the experience to ourselves differently in the presence of other stimuli.

If the importance of this question isn't immediate to you, consider that it's a specific instance of the more general question: do we perceive a shared pre-existing world or does everyone kind of live in their own reality? It doesn't really get more profound or disturbing.

2. It's long been known that presentation affects experience. This is why people like me are always going around saying things like "HEY PEOPLE: STYLE IS AN ACTUAL THING." I don't know if it's the long arm of the protestant reformation or what, but I feel there is huge resistance to this idea.

For example, I'm always hearing people talk smugly about how they value substance over style, or the importance of not getting distracted by style, like it's some kind of moral superiority if you drive a plain-looking car or you wear only Dockers (see: "On the Self-Satisfaction of the Casually Dressed.")

I use a Mac, and I love my Mac partly because of small details like the way the font smoothing on the "Pages" app looks. It's so good. I could not be more sick of people having opinions about this, like somehow my selection on aesthetic grounds reflects a poor character.

3. The whole idea of an ale that's creamy when there's xylophone music and bitter when there's organ music reminded me of this post on rationality and preferences. There I mention the example of the person who prefers to eat lobster for dinner, but not if they've just seen the lobster swimming in the tank.

These preferences could seem irrational. But as discussed in the post, it doesn't have to -- all you have to do is attribute to a person different preferences depending on whether they've just seen their dinner. Is that artificial and ad hoc? Maybe not. If you're someone who likes bitter ale, and you prefer X ale to Y, but only when the organ music is on -- given this research, that's seems to me like as real a preference as you're going to get.

4. But the most disturbing thing in the article is the same thing that always seems to come up in the early twenty-first century when we talk about science, namely: who wants to know?

Of course the whole point is food technology.  Of course in 2015 you can't do research like this without funding from the same marketers and food technologists that want to use your findings to sell more things. The scientist in the article estimates that 75% of his research is industry-funded. 

That is, the main thing that's going to happen as a result of this research is you can get people to buy more potato chips if you make the sound of the crunch different without having to bother about things like actual freshness.

Let me be clear: if people want to put their soft drinks in red cans because red-means-sweet, what do I care? Knock yourselves out.

But you know it's not going to stop there. You know that it's going to turn into red peppers that sound crunchy but are mushy and stale inside and crap like that, and pretty soon everything will be like the apples arms-race toward redness and away from flavor, and the market failure of food will become even worse, and eventually nutritionists will move beyond saying "to be healthy, just cook food at home!" to "to be healthy, just grow everything yourself from heirloom seeds!"

5. The article says this:

"We are accustomed to thinking of food and its packaging as distinct phenomena, but to a brain seeking flavor they seem to be one and the same."

Welcome to the modern world. Have a good time!

That People Want To Go To Mars Makes Me Sad And Angry

A proposed settlement from the Mars One website.

I know this will strike some readers as peculiar, but it makes me sad and angry that people want to go to Mars.

Let's start by looking at this New Yorker article, which certainly did nothing to challenge those feelings. Drawing on cases where ships got stuck in the ice, the story starts out with a discussion, of how harrowing -- and even fatal -- it can be to be shut up with a crew on a long voyage. The Mars trip, of course, will be much longer than the two months in 1898 that the Belgica spent trapped in Antarctic ice -- when people went crazy, developed debilitating melancholia, and died.

The piece goes on to describe a huge test being undertaken in Hawaii, where a specially selected small group of especially affable, especially fit, and especially cool-headed special young people are living in a special dome, 24-7 -- where they can't even communicate with the outside world in real time because they're trying to mimic conditions on a trip to Mars, where it's so far away even an email takes twenty minutes to get to its recipient.

To go to Mars will take eight months. But because of planetary motion, planning the trip home one confronts a dilemma: stay on Mars for a year-and-a-half, or spend more than a year getting home. Looming issues include: not driving one another crazy, not getting bored literally to death, putting up with weird food, not driving one another crazy, literally staying alive, staving off melancholy, and not driving one another crazy.

Everything about this makes me feel sad. Earth is so perfect -- why go somewhere else? And under such harsh conditions? Even though I know it's because we evolved here, it still kind of blows my mind the way Earth has everything we humans need for happiness. Air, water, plants, sunshine, tons of space, and lots of other people.

To me, leaving Earth is like leaving the Garden of Eden. And going to Mars is like leaving the Garden of Eden to go on a horrible trip in the most dangerous and oppressive conditions imaginable. Why would you do a thing like that? Who are these people?

Always in these cases you hear about the idea that if climate change ruins Earth, we're going to need somewhere else to go. I find this idea seriously troubling. Really? The reaction to the possibility that we've ruined our entire planetary home is just "oh, well, guess we'll need another one?" Can't we spend that time and energy preserving our lovely home planet instead of making plans to move? The idea that we're going to go leave a bunch of garbage on a new planet is kind of infuriating.

I realize this is a dark thought, but part of me feels like if we humans screw up that badly, we should just let it go. Let the cockroaches and bacteria repopulate Earth with some new, hopefully improved, evolutionary products. We had a good run.

Anyway, the other thing you hear about Why Mars has a vague reference to some supposedly essentially aspect of human nature that makes us want to find new places and "discover" and colonize them.

Always, there are analogies with going to unexplored parts of Earth. In the New Yorker article, someone is quoted as saying, "It’s hard to say when, but we will go with humans to Mars ... It’s like humans exploring parts of the earth we didn’t know. We’re made that way."

Am I the only one for whom these analogies feel creepy? I mean, a lot of the "exploring" and "discovering" that "humans" did of the earth was actually one group of people moving in on and colonizing and brutalizing another. Not that I'm worried about potential Martians -- but just to say, the impulse to "explore," historically, was often not an impulse of curiosity but rather an impulse of domination.

Looking at it that way, no, "we" aren't "made that way." Yes, some people and some cultures seem to have a thing for priding themselves on "Doing Important Things," where doing novel or physically challenging things seems to get more points for some reason I've never been able to understand.

But other people seem happy at home. They create food, or pictures, or stories -- or they just sit around taking care of kids and gardening and drinking tea. Seriously, given the effect we're having on Earth and on other people, it would seem the homebodies are the ones we should be struggling to imitate, not the conquerors of new lands.

Of course, at the end of the day, people who want to go to Mars are going to go to Mars, and my opinion doesn't really matter. The picture at the top is a depiction of a proposed Mars One settlement -- where people will live out the rest of their days, because Mars One is proposing one way trips to Mars. 


It astonishes me that someone could look at that picture and think, 'Ooh, I want to go live there!" But obviously people do.

Forced Social Choices And The Rhetoric Of Individualism, Or, I Don't Want An Apple Watch -- Yet

On a scale of 1-10, my current desire for an Apple watch is trending near 0. I don't know about you, but I'm trying for a little less intimacy with my gadgets, not more. Certainly the Guardian's description of its new "Moments" for the Apple watch didn't bump me up. Moments from the news tailored for my needs? "Timely, simple, glanceable?" "If a reader wants more, they can turn to our phone app to get the full story"? WTF?

I speak of my desire "currently" trending advisedly, because we all know how changeable and easily manipulated consumer desires are. Maybe in five years I'll be the one with the watch connector embedded in my skin, stopping by the Mac genius bar whenever I get a rash or take an unapproved form of bubble bath. Who knows?

Anyway, I was thinking about the Apple watch the other day, and I got to imagining what circumstances would make me change my mind, and I got to musing about how massively socially influenced our decisions about such things are these days. "Influenced" is probably too weak a word, even. Basically when it comes to the fabric of life these days, there are lots of things where you can't realistically opt out at all.  

For example, many jobs now require not only cars and cellphones but also that you be on social media. I hate Microsoft Word and I try to avoid using it, but when there are these ubiquitous requirements to submit in .doc format -- what's a girl supposed to do? Just this morning there was an article in the New York Times about how online programs that are partly games and partly social media are going to force workers to bust their asses 110% or get canned.

Watch-wise, what's going to happen when your workplace tells you that it's a requirement that you wear a smartwatch so they can track your emotions and health so they can fire you for inefficient feelings and doing crazy shit like eating candy bars? Will we be glad to have the watch "option" around then? Isn't anyone else worried about these things?

I'm constantly trying in my tiny way to buck trends I think are awful, but sometimes I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness. As a person who is "carless by choice" catching or calling an occasional taxi is essential to my life. I live in dread of the time that "ride sharing" takes over, and traditional taxi service disappears, so that only smart-phone users can get rides and anyone who displeases their driver -- or is of the the wrong race/gender/sexual orientation/appearance/ability to afford a nice handbag -- can't get picked up. In hopes of supporting the old ways as long as possible, I ride the old-fashioned way. But I feel like it's a losing proposition.

I'm also freaking out about the possible disappearance of cash. I keep seeing these stories about how cash, being difficult to trace and antithetical to corporate interests in tracking customers' info, is going to be disappear. So I started trying to use it as often as possible. You may not know this, but cash is actually a pretty convenient form of payment. You can just put some "dollars" in a wallet or something, and then when it's time to pay you take them out and give them to the salesclerk. Voilà! It takes like two seconds. But -- call me crazy -- I don't see "cash" as one of the big twenty-first century trends.

Every time I think about the coming Internet of Things I remind myself not to buy any "smart" appliances that can track my Pinot Grigio consumption, my preference for full-fat yogurt, and so on, and share it with corporate and government interests. But then I think about how that's going to be -- about how to get repair or replacement parts you're going to have to go on eBay and connect with enthusiasts and get to know someone who knows a guy who fixes things in his basement. Maybe I should quit my job and become an appliance repair apprentice?

What changes all this from an interesting set of sociological changes and into something bizarre and confounding is that the new impossibility of social independence is happening alongside a huge recommitment to the rhetoric of individuality.

Aren't you sick of hearing that people can do what they want, and make their own future, and have to take responsibility for their choices? Aren't you sick of the presumption that if you chose a thing, you freely opted in, and you don't get to complain about the consequences?

The way people talk, you'd think we were living on a fucking prairie and keeping alive by  killing more small animals than the next guy, instead of facing, every day, choices like "play this ridiculous game and get nudged by your colleagues or ... starve." Thank you for playing!

Getting back to the watch. The one thing that might put me into positive watch desire territory would be if you could go out with just your watch. If your watch could function as your keys and your wallet and your phone -- and you didn't have to carry anything? No purse, or bag, or backpack? If you could wear a dress and shoes and a watch and that's it? Not have to carry anything? Hmmm ... if that were the deal I'd be crossing into dilemma territory.

But no -- the watch isn't even a replacement for your phone, which you still have to carry. It's just  kind of a way for you to be more intimate with your phone, which you then have to find a place for and not lose. Lucky, I guess, for all those surveillance companies that are using your phone to secretly track your whereabouts and share them with law enforcement.

But hey -- you phone users? You chose to have a phone, right? So you'll have to suck it up.

Lifehacking: WTF?

Adriaen van Utrecht (1599-1652), Still Life. Via Wikimedia Commons

You heard about Soylent, right? That new thing where you mix a powder with some oil and some water and you shake it up and it replenishes your body with a mix of nutrients so you can .. um, do all the things people want to do when they can't be bothered to eat food?

You know -- like, Ensure for hipsters?

You can read about it in The New Yorker ("The End of Food"). I guess some young guys were trying to do a start-up thing, and their idea wasn't working out, and they were trying to come up with another idea, and they were eating a lot of ramen, corn dogs, and frozen quesadillas, and eventually one of them thought to himself Ah, If Only We Didn't Have To Eat. Food seemed like "a system that’s too complex and too expensive and too fragile."

Soylent can be bought in a package but the formula is online and there are a lot of people DIYing their own. The concept of many enthusiasts is that Soylent replaces any eating you do to survive, so that the remaining eating that you do is "recreational." You might subsist on only Soylent for a few days, then go to Nobu with your friends and "eat" -- and really make an occasion of it. Woo-hoo.

This is an application of the approach to life associated with the "lifehacking" movement: as the New Yorker says, this is "devising tricks to streamline the obligations of daily life, thereby freeing yourself up for whatever you’d rather be doing."

This is interesting because -- well, how can I put this nicely? It seems to me fucking insane?

What is "whatever you'd rather be doing" that is so great and so important that you can't be bothered to eat some food? I mean, we're not talking laundry. We're talking eating. It's fun. It's pleasant. It isn't all that time-consuming. What's so great that you have to get back to it in thirty seconds instead of twenty-minutes?

It's a perfect instantiation of the problem of the previous post -- of The Great Fun Crisis of the Twenty First Century. If you structure everything as either a cost or a benefit, you define out of existence the "just sort of nice and fun in a mild healthy sort of way," so it's irresistible to reduce costs and maximize benefits.

It's like a digitization of an analogue life. Sorry: sitting down to a baked potato or some pasta and a salad, talking with a friend or family member, what are you doing? It's neither the 0 of costs minimized or the 1 of pleasure maximized. So it comes out as irrational.

The New Yorker author, Lizzie Widdicome, after a few days drinking Soylent, finds on waking she's at a loss: she doesn't want to settle down to work yet, so what to do? She goes out for coffee. She sees someone order a bagel at her neighborhood place. She's envious: "Mmm, bagel with butter." But of course, she's not hungry, and she doesn't need the calories -- she's already had her Soylent. She concludes the experience this way:

... I knew that I was better off than the bagel eater: the Soylent was cheaper, and it had provided me with fewer empty calories and much better nutrition. Buttered bagels aren’t even that great; I shouldn’t be eating them. But Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.

I get what she's saying. But what are we, training for the apocalypse? Every moment, maximizing efficiency? It's like, bagels: not a perfect food! BUT: also not a good enough indulgence! Like if you're going to get your pleasure, you have to max it out.

The whole thing makes you wonder what the point is, in the whole meaning-of-life way, like what are we doing all of this for?  Honestly, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that for most people, the bagel with butter, and similar foods, especially if you eat them with other people, really are the meaning of life.

Enthusiasts of lifehacking clearly feel another call: they have things they need to get back to, STAT.

So: If lifehacking is about getting back to "things we'd rather be doing?" what are those things exactly? Sex? Dancing? Making music? Painting pictures? Taking care of children? Taking care of sick people?



Honestly those are answers I'd sort of understand. But they're almost never the ones that seem to come up. What comes up a lot is work.

I get that some people have to work all the time to make ends meet. And that is a serious social problem. The solution to this problem is not Soylent -- what, so rich people can eat food and poor people can suck it? No, the solution to this problem involves spreading the wealth around, more sensible social organization, investment in infrastructure. As is frequently mentioned, the world is making more food than ever. The problem is in moving it around appropriately.

And that, friends, is not a problem with a "start up" solution.

I get the impression, though, that a lot of people drinking Soylent just want to get back to studying, or coding, or playing video games. Why? Are those things really so great? Or is the problem competition -- that in a competitive society you have to do all the ridiculous time-saving things other people do if you're going to keep up?

Toward the end of the article the main creator of Soylent says admiringly, "Bucky [Buckminster Fuller] has a very important idea of ephemeralization, which is something almost as a ghost -- as pure energy or information."

Like the whole post-human thing, I am always mystified by this. What is it you're so eager to do that doesn't involve bodies, senses, being in the world, laughter, or romance? Is Minecraft really that fun?