Lockdown, The Singularity, And The Idea of Post-Humanism

Back in 2010, when we were younger and more naive, a bunch of people were excited about something they called The Singularity, a time in the not-so-distant future when humanity would be replaced with ... something else. Post-humanity. A "superior intelligence that will dominate," so that life will take on a radically altered form that we cannot see and predict now.

Here at TKIN, I expressed my skepticism. Sure -- if you want to make an artificial liver or bionic limbs or whatever, awesome, I love it! But that's not post-humanity. It's the human experience, just somewhat improved. Longer, more fun, less painful, whatever. Beyond the human-upgrades interpretation, the suggestions get more radical but also more vague. We're going to meld minds and machines. We're going to upload your consciousness into a computer. You'll live forever, in some unforeseen Venn diagram overlap zone between virtual and real.

When I pondered this in 2010, I was like WTF, and now that we're in lockdown I feel even more like WTF. Aren't most the best pleasures of life embodied? In 2010 I listed sex, food, wine, sports, music, and dancing as things we like to do that are embodied, seemingly inaccessible to the computer-based post-human. And what's on the other side, on the post-human, singularity playlist? Math? Most people don't even like thinking about math.

I don't think I'm alone when I say that lockdown has made the importance of the embodied life even more vivid to me. We're sick of interacting through screens. We long for the touch of our family and friends. People are flocking to bake bread, grow plants, and acquire pets; the concept of "going for a walk to get some fresh air," at one time a symbol of a life lived quietly and meditatively, is now essential to the happiness of millions of people. I myself have taken care to notice the minute daily progress of leaves coming out on trees in my neighborhood.

I was mentally reviewing all the internet think-pieces I've read about what people are experiencing in lockdown, and the one disembodied activity now flourishing that I could spot was online chess. Touchingly, the New York Times places this news in the Sports section, where they are clearly dying for content.

Anyway, after writing that post in 2010, I expressed my doubts to some guys who were roughly in the robot-biz, and they smiled that guy-smile that comes up when a woman says something they think is stupid. It's not computer-based in that sense, they explained slowly to me. You'll still be able to do all the fun things. It's just that the whole system will be artificial, and therefore more permanent, less flawed, and better.

Fine, but as I've already said, I don't think that's post-humanity -- that's more like keeping your human self while being less susceptible to the world's problems: less vulnerable to injury, less in need of food and medical care, less dependent on others for your well-being. Our desires for life to be less difficult, less painful, less scary and less mortal are very human, and like the embodied pleasures, they have been intensified by the lockdown and the pandemic itself -- as we have all been reminded how vulnerable we are to illness and death, how challenging it is to care for others, and how fragile our little systems are.

Of course, in our radically unequal world, these things bear more heavily on some people than others, and awareness of our shared situation and our interdependence has been a bit of a wake-up call to some people who maybe used to imagine themselves as self-sufficient tech-oriented rich people.

I don't know what those people are dreaming of now, and whether it's still something like The Singularity or whether it's more like a walled city in New Zealand with a stockpile of ventilators. But whatever it is, I hope they'll remember it's not really post-humanism that they're hankering after. It's more like human life made less difficult and scary. And that dream is not only shared by everyone, it's also about the most human thing you could possibly have.

The Flattened Context Of The Internet, Implicature, And Political Discourse

Imagine you're having a political conversation with someone and they say these things:

"You know, Obama deported/targeted/droned a lot of people too."

or

"Racism in America? It's not really any worse now than it was before."

Question: What do you think the speaker means in expressing these sentences?

Here's what I think. I think there is no answer about what the speaker means, because to know the answer you'd have to know the context. This is something we've all known forever, and yet something we seem to be constantly forgetting.

For example, first imagine that the conversation is about the nature of racism in the US. Many people, especially people of color, have recently been pointing out that what might look like an explosion of racism in the US in the past year or so is better understood as bringing to the surface, and thus to more people's attention, deep pernicious attitudes and widespread injustices that have always been there.

Expressing a related idea, in this interview in the Guardian, the actor Aldis Hodge talks about his experience of racism in the US and the art he is now creating to expose racism and make people confront it. Toward the end, he talks about how he thinks the past year has exposed problems that have been there all along: 

"When people ask if it’s gotten worse, they ask from the perspective of not having understood the reality," he says. "Harmonia (his co-creator) is an African woman; I’m a black man. This is not different for us ... I was raised with being taught how to speak to cops so I don’t lose my life at a young age. We’ve always dealt with police brutality. I don’t walk around without being aware of my surroundings. It is the people who have not been affected or targeted who are starting to say: ‘Wow, is this what really goes on in this country?’"

In the context of this conversation, one could easily use the second sentence to express what Hodge and others have said, and one could then easily use the sentence about Obama to make the broader claim that US racism is not only domestic but also international.

Now imagine that it's a different conversation, this time about whether the current US administration is any worse than the former. Many people feel that even if racism has always been there, and even if US foreign policy has always been involved in unjust killing, there are still important senses in which current policies and the current president are worse -- perhaps outrageously so -- than what came before. 

It's an emotional and deeply felt topic, for real reasons related to party politics, lesser-of-two-evils thinking, and actual impacts on vulnerable people's lives. If someone makes the argument that things are now bad in some special way, and their interlocutor uses the two sentences above, that interlocutor could plausibly be taken to be denying what the first person said.

Thus, in the context of this conversation, one could easily use the first sentence to mean something like "Meh, don't get all upset about the Dreamers or the people losing health insurance or whatever. It doesn't matter whose in charge. The two parties are basically the same." And one could easily use the second to try to support that claim, by denying that new pernicious racist effects have been created by this administration in particular.

I hope it's obvious that the two meanings, in the two different contexts, are radically different. I bet a lot of people who agree with one of them would not agree with the other.

The fancy name for this is "implicature," but it's also part of everyone's common sense about how people communicate. We all know that if we're reading a letter of recommendation for a job as a prof or lawyer or doctor and the recommender says, "During the year I knew X, they always showed up on time," that would be very peculiar and would suggest that the reviewer didn't have enough good things to say. It would not be a positive. But if we were reading a teacher's report about a teen who was struggling with lateness and had recently gotten things on track, it could be a completely appropriate piece of praise. Context not only affects interpretation, it affects what is said, meant, and heard.

The problem is -- as we all know -- the internet. As we've discussed, the internet flattens all context. Everything is treated like it's your final, context-free opinion on everything. You might think you're having the first conversation, and then someone comes along and doesn't see the context, or ignores it, and treats your comment as if it is part of the second conversation.

In the absence of context, I think we try to fill things in by taking statements to be relevant to whatever we think is the most salient and important overall context. Among other things, one result is that anything you say is taken to indicate that you think the things you're talking about is the most important thing to be talking about. But why? Can't you have an opinion about X without meaning to suggest X is the most important thing going? Then, too, you feel you have to be at-the-ready to respond and clarify what you did and didn't mean. I admire the people on Twitter who express complicated opinions and then go on and do just that, sometimes for hours on end.

Anyway, personally, I think it is important to talk about how racism has always been a problem in the US, and about how bad policies go way back, and sometimes in that connection I sometimes want to say things like "You know, Obama deported/targeted/droned a lot of people too." But because of our political situation, I hesitate -- because I fear I'll be interpreted as having expressed the meaning of the second argument.

Sometimes, a long blog post or actual article can, in fact, help with context and interpretation, so it is disturbing to feel our collective patience for that sort of thing dwindling and narrowing. Of course, from the point of view of the attention merchants, all this chaos is plausibly a feature, and not a bug, so I'm not expecting things to get better any time soon.

Duo Lingo And The Sneakier Downsides Of Gamification

 A few days ago I started using Duo Lingo -- the website and app for language learning. For now, I'm trying to improve my French.

As maybe you know, Duo Lingo uses gamification, which, as I understand it, means harnessing the power of visuals and rewards associated with games to make whatever you are doing really fun and engaging and maybe even addictive.

Before I used Duo Lingo, I had a sort of low-level general suspicion of gamification. But I thought language-learning was one area where it made total sense.

My general suspicions were grounded in several kinds of considerations.

First, it seems to me like there's a fine line between gamification and the saddest aspects of the "attention economy" described by Tim Wu and others. Capitalism means someone is paying to get your attention in one place rather than another. Using finely-honed techniques that make people really really good at that has got to end in depressing conclusions. Wu says the forces controlling our attention have us narcotized with listicles and that "fame, or the hunger for it, would become something of a pandemic, swallowing up more and more people and leaving them with scars of chronic attention-whoredom."

All this to say: the more sophisticated the techniques for harvesting your attention, the more someone is getting you to pay attention to what they want you to pay attention to. You could call this mind-control and not even really be exaggerating.

Furthermore, it seems to me that even learning through gamification could be a problem. A lot of what I teach -- and a lot of what I think matters most -- is inherently complex, open-ended, and subject to interpretation. It has been depressing the last year or so to see people saying things like "I guess statistics don't tell us everything we need to know" or "people believe what they believe for all kinds of complex reasons." FFS. Yes, in the humanities, we've known that forever, and if I sound bitter it's only because not only is teaching humanities hard, we've had to scramble to even keep our existence lately. Despite the fact that so many problems are actually people problems and not technology problems.

It's bad enough when people want to be able to learn via bullet points and slides, so that even a short essay seems to them a hopelessly dull and involved kind of thing. With gamification that's going to get even worse. "What do you mean I can't learn about the Middle East Crisis or income inequality or decoloniation in a few minutes with fun graphics? OK .. just forget the whole thing."

Before I used Duo Lingo, I thought that language-learning -- especially at the early stages -- was perhaps one context well-suited to gamification. A lot of the questions have straightforward right-or-wrong answers. There are some straightforward things to learn. And you need a lot of repetition. The ideal conditions for gamification!

To a certain extent, my experience so far has proven that to be true. Duo Lingo is fun to use, I feel an incentive to use it regularly, and I appreciate the way the algorithm keeps track of what I'm up on and what I need to work on and adjusts my practice. It is non-stressful and also not boring, which are qualities that almost never go together in the modern world.

And yet. I was disturbed to find myself thinking at several points over the last day or two, "Oh, this writing/teaching prep/answering email/ is difficult. Maybe I should take a break and do some Duo Lingo?"

I actually found myself having to fight off the urge. The power of the desire comes partly from the sense that using Duo Lingo is doing something productive. So -- sure, why not take a break from a difficult and frustrating productive thing to do an easy and fun productive thing?

And this, honestly, is just what I was worried about in the first place. Somehow, through a combination of luck and effort, I have that rarest of things: an ability to do and even enjoy quiet and complicated things. I use this ability in my work, but I also use it to enjoy literature, music, and other things. I am very protective of it.

If using Duo Lingo everyday means I'm going to stop getting lost in long novels and opera performances and start looking up every five minutes to be like "Oh, should I stop this quiet activity and go use Duo Lingo"? Well -- then forget it.

For now, we're good. I'll keep you posted. A bientôt!

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.

Selective Implementation Of The Algorithmic Ideal Is Intellectually Dishonest: Hillary Clinton Book Review Edition

The thing that got me wildly, disproportionately pissed off this week was the news that Amazon had been deleting one-star reviews of Hillary Clinton's new book. What the actual fuck?

The reason this enraged me so much didn't have anything to do with Hillary Clinton or the content of her book, but rather the way it laid bare the depth of intellectual dishonesty and cynicism of the tech-retail industry. I used to think the algorithmic approach to the world was coherent and reasonably well-intentioned, while also massively and dangerously flawed. But this episode shows that "coherent and reasonably well-intentioned" may have been giving people too much credit.

As we've discussed before, and as you can learn much more about from the master herself, Cathy O'Neill, the algorithmic approach to the world is massively and dangerously flawed along several dimensions. There's a pernicious illusion that algorithms are "neutral," when they're anything but. The problems of legitimacy are problems of trust, not data. The attempt to draw lines while avoiding ethical judgment leads to policies that disproportionately target people who are already oppressed.

Still, I was able to sort of see the inner logic of the thing. I mean, I believe algorithms are problematic. But I could see how someone who didn't believe that might push forward toward more data and more rules and less judgment and so on. I think they'd be wrong, but they'd have a coherent position on the world, and might be acting with integrity.

But then going on and making an exception ... for Hillary Clinton? Are you kidding?

As I understand it, the main reason was that they thought the reviews were posted by people who hadn't read the book. As the publisher is quoted saying here, “It seems highly unlikely that approximately 1,500 people read Hillary Clinton’s book overnight and came to the stark conclusion that it is either brilliant or awful.”

But ... this a problem for all Amazon reviews. Admittedly, it's usually a less dramatic problem. But there are plenty of stories of people trying to sandbag other people's books for all kinds of reasons, there's sock-puppetry, and there are all kinds of other problems with the review system.

While yes, Hillary Clinton's book prompted a dramatic showcase of some of these issues, she's also like one of the most powerful people on the planet. She hardly needs protection from her critics to get people interested in reading her book. It's bizarre to me that it would be like, well, when it's everyone else, sorry, but when it's a power player politician, oh, then we have to do something.

When things like this happen, I always try to imagine how these decisions get made. Does Amazon have a hundred meetings in a row where someone brings up fake reviews and blah blah blah, and then on the 101st they bring up Hillary Clinton and people suddenly say OMG we have to do something? Is it that the issue doesn't come up those 100 previous times because the incentive structure of power players at places like Amazon discourages it?

Or is the ultra cynical interpretation the right one: that PR with prospective customers will work best when they intervene selectively in only the most high-profile situations -- i. e., just when it is the power players of the world?

In any case, I'd just like to remind everyone that they can shop for books at Indigo, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and Powell's. I'm not saying these are some kind of do-gooder organizations: in a dog-eat-dog capitalist society, being less than ruthless than your competitors is death, so bad behavior is kind of baked into the system. But isn't it better to have several flawed tech-retail companies than just one flawed tech company, which can then go ahead and rule the world?

How Many Awful Things Are In This One NYT Education Story?

The Times ran a story over the weekend about "teacher-influencers" -- elementary school teachers who are using technology in classrooms and connecting with Silicon Valley companies to trade influence for perks. The story focused on the potential conflicts of interest, which, sure, of course, but I was amazed how many other awful things there were.

The story starts off fine, talking about how this one teacher has reorganized her classroom into flexible-use space and has the class run social media accounts. When I was a kid I learned math in a flexible-use and flexible-time kind of way and it was awesome, so sure, if that's working for you and your students, great.

Then you get to the "teacher-influencer" business. The main teacher being profiled has a personal brand and makes deals with companies like Seesaw, which facilitates students sharing work in various forms electronically. Of Seesaw, she says, "I will embed it in my brand every day."

In return for promoting their products, teachers get personal perks like meals, travel, or Amazon gift cards, but also perks for their students and schools, like technology goodies. At a time when schools are so poor that "teachers shell out an average of $600 of their own money every year just to buy student supplies like pencils" (!!!), every little bit helps.

OK, how depressing is it that underfunded schools have to rely on brand ambassador teachers to get even basic things they need? I feel like if that were happening in a different country, people like Nicholas Kristof would be all over it with hand-wringing and "we have to take action now" because this crazy injustice and exploitation just can't continue.

Then I got to the part about the 3D printing. One teacher-influencer "used a $1,299 3-D printer" in conjunction with an assignment on the book To Kill a Mockingbird. One student used the printer to make a gavel in connection with their presentation, "representing the struggle for justice in the novel."

Wait, what? Are they seriously telling me that in the modern world, we're going to engage with the themes of a book about race, injustice, and culture in the American South by 3D printing a gavel? I don't care if it was meant to "supplement" a more substantive engagement with the book in the presentation. That time should be spent doing old fashioned things like talking with other people about the complicated ideas in the book. Plus, how non-creative is the idea of making a gavel to represent justice? Even the "innovative" part becomes dull and unoriginal!

I was also creeped out by the social media lessons, which focus on helping students "understand how to maintain an upbeat online image." One third-grader said "You don’t want to post something bad, because if you want a job, those people are probably going to look at your social media page and they are going to decide if they’ll let you have the job."A sign on the classroom wall says, "I am building my digital footprint every day."

WTF? If that was in a futuristic dystopian novel, you can imagine David Denby calling it a "fanciful" but unrealistic detail.

I really don't blame the teachers for any of this -- they're obviously super-committed and trying as hard as they can to teach students what they need to know. And maybe learning about an "upbeat" social media image is what they need to know. Just yesterday, Arwa Mahdawi was writing in the Guardian about how social media presence is becoming a must-have for getting a job, with one ad for an independent contractor requiring you to "identify, assign, edit and publish at least 10 articles per day" and also have an "amazing personal Twitter feed."

We're always hearing about "innovation" in education and how important it is, and people are always moaning about how teachers are reluctant to innovate because they're stuck in their ways. But often it's unclear how the good things in education can be protected and improved on, especially when it comes to technology. If you're trying to teach students to think about ideas and communicate verbally and in writing, there really isn't much better than the slow process of being in a room together, talking, and giving them individualized feedback. What teachers need to do that is support and proper funding. A 3D printing of a gavel, advertised later on Twitter, isn't really an important part of that process.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Dystopian Tech Edition

Regular readers know that I recently deactivated my Facebook account. This was not an isolated act but rather part of a concerted effort toward ... something. Something involving indignation and fear at the way the tech giants are gaining so much control over our lives. Something about not giving them my constant attention. Something about knowing that "I am the product." Something about wanting to support alternative systems.

Naked Capitalism calls them "The Five Horsemen "Techpocalypse": Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and ... oh yeah, the always forgettable Microsoft. It's not that I think alternatives to these companies are magically outside the nexus of labor-exploiting, surveilling, content-managing, eyeball-directing evils of the modern tech world. What frightens me is their dominance.

What's it going to be like when Amazon is the only place the buy things and Google is the only place to find things and Facebook replaces your passport? Not good. Already Amazon can push around publishers, affecting what we can and can't buy from them. Remember how they just deleted people's purchased e-copies of 1984? Google recently "changed its search algorithms to favor 'authoritative content' meaning the mainstream media"; sites like the Black Agenda Report and TruthDig saw large drops in traffic from searches. Now a new Chrome extension will block the ads of 700 publishers.

I'm as embedded in all of this as the next person. Hell, this blog is hosted by Google. But I made a note to myself to start the process of ... something. I started buying my books from Indigo and reading e-books on the Kobo app. I changed my default search engine to Duck Duck Go. I deleted Google Maps from my phone. I'm using a lot more cash. I'm still using a wide array of Apple products, and I know these are baby steps and largely symbolic. Still, they are steps.

I was thinking about the practical effects of these steps and what good, if any, they do in the world. I think that, in principle anyway, there is some effect of supporting alternatives. I am comforted to know there are other places to buy things and other ways to authenticate and other search engines, and I'm glad to know that by giving them my business, I am helping to support them.

On the other hand, I got to thinking about the potential pointlessness of supporting alternative when the entire world is lined up on the other side. If everyone is using Facebook and Google, my choice to use Duck Duck Go .. well, it's hardly going to have any actual effect. In fact, it may be completely different -- that it would be better to pile on to the same things everyone else is using and try to change them for the better.

As I mentioned in my Facebook post, this is the idea behind the 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. I don't remember the specifics very well, but the general idea is that if you don't like something, there's a difference between "exit" and "voice": if you exit, you no longer have input or causal effects on how something develops and changes. But if you stay connected, you do.

Maybe the millions of Facebook users will be more effecting at challenging Facebook's attempt at world domination. Maybe Google users will be more effective at challenging the way Google affects our search outcomes or how it chooses to monetize and demonetize youtube users to destroy alternative media.

Still, though, I feel like the choice I'm making has a lot going for it. Sometimes the world needs a few people willing to do weird annoying things that other people don't want to do -- even if it's just to remind everyone they can be done. For whatever reason, I'm more temperamentally suited to being that person than I am to being the other person -- the "voice" person, the person who does the mainstream things and tries, through activism and talking, to make it better.

Of course, given that Facebook tracks everyone online whether they use Facebook or not, I'll have to go a lot further to be really disconnected from these companies. How far will I go? Will I avoid all the sites that use cookies and give up most of the internet? 

I guess we will just have to wait and see. 

The Dying Art Of Difficult And Awkward Conversations

A few years ago, I was trying to sleep around 2:00 in the morning and the people in the apartment next to me were making a racket having some kind of party. As I lay there in bed, I contemplated my options and waffled over whether to get up and knock on their door. I believe in the right to party and make noise, but as it got toward 2:30 or 3:00 I decided enough was enough.

As I threw on some clothes, I worked myself up to a state of dread and fear about the conversation. I had never met the neighbors, who had moved in not that long before. I pictured energetic partying people, angry at me for interrupting them. I pictured large guys answering the door and looking at me like I was the worst person ever. I pictured years of living next door to these people who regarded me as an asshole. I pictured them finding the smallest reason to complain back, as the years wore on.

I crept out into the hall and knocked on their door. A woman answered, with a man standing a bit behind her. They were smiling. I explained, nicely, that I was trying to sleep. They were extremely apologetic. They hadn't realized how the noise would carry. They expressed concern and kindness. They immediately quieted down, and the next day they left a ten dollar Starbucks gift card and a note on my door. I wrote them a thank-you note.

And as I have on other occasions, I found myself wondering at the power of talking to people in person and the difference between what we imagine and what is real when it comes to certain kinds of difficult conversations. I have had many similar experiences, where reality confounded expectations. It's a platitude that open honest conversation produces good results, but it's also human nature to want to shy away from conflict. And platitudes are often stupid. But in this case there's something to it.

It's not always true and there are assholes everywhere. But if you have a problem or something you need or want, and you express yourself with respect and kindness, it's amazing how many people will be respectful and kind right back to you. 

I would go even further and say that negative or difficult conversations often draw people closer together. I don't know if you've had this experience where only someone's judgment or need conveyed to you the depth of their concern. When people are a hundred percent live and let live, you can't get any grip on where you are with them.

I'm not one of those people who are always complaining about "kids these days" and I think generally speaking the younger generations are wonderful and unjustly accused of all kinds of ridiculousness. I don't buy into the idea that their desire to make the world a better and more just place speaks to some kind of weakness on their part.

But I do think that all of us are getting even more reluctant to have difficult or awkward conversations, probably for a range of reasons, some of which involve the internet. Sometimes out and about, I see people waiting and waiting for their needs to be acknowledged -- by a stranger or a service person -- seemingly reluctant to speak up and say "Excuse me, can I get some help"?

I don't know if you've noticed this, but in women's bathrooms in public places, women will line up behind one another, entering only the stalls that someone is coming out of, and leaving a bunch of stalls open and unused, because they don't want to be "that person" who is either knocking, or trying the door, or looking for shoes under the stall, to see which ones are empty. Because it's awkward.

Somehow I feel like the extra negativity we feel when we hear these things by email or virtually has infected our impression of how we'll feel when we have these difficult conversations in person. It's tempting to think that bad news should come virtually, since the person can react privately and won't be put on the spot. But I think that's a mistake. When I have bad news to convey, I feel like conveying it in person just passes along so many human emotions along with the news, it can't help but be made better.

I remember a long time ago when I was in high school, I had these two teachers. One was relentlessly positive and always told us the nicest, most supportive things. She was like a cheerleader for students. The other was difficult, and caustic; she was the faculty member in charge of the literary magazine and when she thought students were being stupid or lazy she would tell them so in no uncertain terms.

I remember that when I applied to a summer arts program, I had to get some letters of recommendation. And I was so much more comfortable asking the grouchy teacher than the supportive teacher. Because the supportive teacher was so supportive -- I had no idea what she really thought of me, or what she really thought about anything. The grouchy teacher, I knew she thought I was smart and talented, and I knew she thought I was imperfect, and we were good to go.

Difficult and awkward conversations are difficult and awkward. But especially when you have them in person, they're often OK. As we get less comfortable being awkward together, I hope they don't disappear entirely.

Why I Deactivated My Facebook Account

I recently deactivated my Facebook account. When Facebook asked me why I was deactivating, I put in the text box: "I don't want to aid in Facebook's quest to take over the entire universe."

I know social media platforms all share the same kinds of problems. I know that "if you're not paying, you're the product." I know that their ultimate goal is to make money off us, often by tracking our info and selling it to advertisers or whatever. I know that they're all engaged in various shenanigans.

But Facebook is in a class by itself. I've always felt pushed around and creeped out by Facebook, what with its perverse privacy settings and options and with Mark Zuckerberg basically acting like if you're not willing to make something public you must be some kind of criminal. Every time I went on Facebook -- and often by email when I didn't log in -- Facebook would remind me that I didn't really have a lot of friends, and I might be able to connect with more friends, and the things I posted weren't really getting any traction, and there might be ways to make traction happen.

Just last week, I wanted to message something to an old friend, and --oops! -- You can't message people any more unless you've properly opted into the chat feature and signed on to all the extra crap Facebook wants to you to sign on for. Good god.

But beyond the manipulation, to me the deeper threat is the depth to which Facebook is embedding itself in everyone's lives, becoming something you can't live without, becoming essential to what you thought were entirely non-Facebook related things. I'm sure you heard about the old news that lenders were going to use Facebook to judge your credit worthiness. Recently I was using a book reading app and there was an option to share notes. How do you share notes? You have to authenticate through Facebook. Want to use a dating app? Oh -- you can authenticate through Facebook.

What's it going to be like when you have to authenticate through Facebook to vote, to apply for a job, or to satisfy a customs official?

It also freaks me out that people are increasingly getting their news -- and their everything -- from Facebook. People often tell me they won't see anything unless a link pops up on their Facebook feed. It is disturbing. Plus, as we've written about before, do you really want Facebook determining what is and isn't a genuine news source?

The way Facebook deploys its real name policy is frightening. The brilliant sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about her experience being kicked off Facebook for using "TressieMcPhd" -- the name she uses in her online writing and with her 20,000+ Twitter following -- as her name. Someone reported her -- and bam! As Dr. Cottom explains, for all kinds of reasons, the enforcement of these kinds of policies have particularly negative effects for people who are already oppressed:

"It is more common that Facebook will ban non-white, non-male, non-Western users for violating ethical codes when they write against racism or sexism or inequality than they will ban those who post actual racist or sexist content."

In my academic field of philosophy, it is amazing how much discussion relevant to issues in the profession happens on Facebook. Often, before I learn about something from a blog post, there has already been extensive discussion of it on Facebook. But one problem with this is that Facebook actually reinforces some of the problems we're already having. For example, philosophy has an in-group out-group problem: some people are, or are perceived to be, the in-crowd, while others are, or feel, marginalized; overlaid on that there is a sense of people in factions or cliques. Because Facebook encourages and facilitates sharing with your friends, more than with strangers, opinions are shared in ways that track, rather than challenging, the sense of factions, groups, subgroups, who's in, and who's out.

I know my deactivation will go zero distance toward challenging Facebook's success at global domination. It is a tiny symbolic gesture in a cold and uncaring universe. But maybe some day some event or something will be organized and there will be this tiny resistance of people who aren't on Facebook, and the whole business will have to be conducted in some other way, like a blog, or on the non-walled garden parts of the internet, or -- god forbid -- email.

As I was writing this post, I was reminded of the 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman. Hirschman argues that when an organization of any kind is being a pain in the ass, its members can "exit" but they also have the alternative of "voice" -- of sticking around and trying to change things. Maybe the current members of Facebook can change the way Facebook operates, as they did when drag queens won the right to use their preferred names. God knows, when it comes to members of Facebook, there certainly are enough of them.

It's a testament to the power of Facebook that I didn't delete my account but merely deactivated it. Which is temporary. We'll see how things go. In the meantime, why not connect with me on Twitter? It's far from perfect, but there's no real name bullshit. Plus, isn't it weirdly comforting that Twitter is so far from world domination that they still haven't even managed to make any money?

Facebook, Fake News, And The Problems Of Trust And Legitimacy

When I heard that Facebook was going to try to "do something" about fake news, my first thought was "Oh yeah, that'll end well. What could go wrong"?

It's not that lies, hoaxes, and misinformation aren't a problem (and by the way, what was wrong with "lies" "hoaxes" and "misinformation"?) -- it's just that truth and factuality are not simple problems, they're not algorithmic problems, and they're not problems you can take a "neutral" stand on. Yet you know Facebook will try to treat them as if they are.

The first kind of example that came into my mind on thinking about this was about the aftermath of the protests in Ferguson after the shooting of Michael Brown. I got a lot of my news from following people on Twitter who were there -- some, like Jelani Cobb, professional journalists, and others people who were not. 

Often, what I read on Twitter did not match up with what I read in the mainstream press. The press interviewed the police or asked government officials to comment on things; in the nature of things they had a vested interested in portraying the protestors as initiators of violence. Reports from people there emphasized the militarized police response and also the number of peaceful protestors doing things like protecting property and cleaning up.

When the reports of the citizens on the ground don't match up with official reports or reports in the news, who are you going to trust to tell you the truth? And when, and why? These are difficult questions. But do you really want Facebook answering them for you?

Maybe you might say the is for simpler, more straightforward cases (like, you know, "lies," "hoaxes" and "misinformation"). But that's not how the response to "fake news" has been shaking out so far. Maybe you've heard about the "B. S. Detector" that claims to "alert users to unreliable news sources." One of the first things that happened was the site Naked Capitalism got incorrectly tagged as a "fake news" site. In fact, what Naked Capitalism is is in-depth analysis of current events that sometimes diverges from official positions and mainstream media.

Are we really so far down the rabbit hole that we want social media companies to pronounce on what is and is not a legitimate critique of government statements or the New York Times?

Facebook, in fashion characteristic of the tech industry, wants to be address the problem of "fake news" while also maintaining "neutrality." As we've discussed before, the dream is to off-load judgments onto users so that algorithm's can solve all problems and no value judgments have to be explicitly endorsed. And as we've discussed before, this is impossible: there is no "value-free" way to offload judgments about what is and is not acceptable speech, or what does and does not constitute unacceptable forms of discrimination, or what is or is not sexist, racist, and so on. You let users decide you're often going to get an outcome that goes horribly wrong.

I had to laugh when I learned that the term Facebook is going to use for hoaxes, lies, and misinformation is "disputed." For one thing, could anything be a more obvious attempt to sound "neutral?" It's like, "WE'RE not saying there's a problem. But SOMEBODY out there is disputing this."

In a more sinister vein, when it comes to actual hoaxes, lies, and misinformation, doesn't "disputed" actually seem like it would add an air of legitimacy? One of the more interesting things I read about "fake news" was how that guy in California created a ton of fake news  -- like "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide" -- and earned a ton of money. You can read an interview with him here. But then it turns out that teens in Macedonia (and presumably people all over the world) are creating fake news just for profit.

Isn't using the term "disputed" to describe "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide" heading off in the wrong direction entirely? Doesn't that make it sound like some obscure point about Benghazi, where some partisans think one thing happened and some partisans think another thing happened, but who really knows? Doesn't it make it sound like a possibly legit thing? When, in fact, it is just a hoax, a set of lies!

The problem of truth and belief goes way beyond algorithms and neutrality and involves complicated issues of community and trust. When the New York Times ran a whole article explaining why "pizzagate" was based on a set of lies, do you think people who believed in pizzagate said to themselves "Oh, I guess that pizzagate wasn't true." Of course not. They went and wrote articles debunking the debunking. Just a few days ago there was a protest in DC with people demanding an inquiry. 

Looking up pizzagate on Wikipedia, I see a journalist quoted as saying that pizzagate is "two worlds clashing. People don't trust the mainstream media anymore, but it's true that people shouldn't take the alternative media as truth, either." This is aptly said. People trust different sources. No algorithm is going to deal with that problem.

If Facebook's proposed solution is to add a "disputed" tag to posts, potentially undermining citizen reports that contradict official news, and legitimating things that are lies and hoaxes in the first place -- well, it seems to me this may well do more harm than good. Maybe Facebook should stay out of the social epistemology business altogether.

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.

Airspace, Cosmpolitanism, Frictionlessness, And Global Gentrification

Last week in my post about cash I mentioned this idea about how the drive toward the frictionless world sometimes ends up leading us away from where we want to go. Silent cars are dangerous unless we build in fake noises. Virtual payment schemes screw up our spending unless we build in fake pain. As we've noted before, dreams of a frictionless world run into the hard fact that even the internet needs things like energy-sucking data centres and so on.

After the post went up, my friend directed me toward this discussion of "Airspace." "Airspace" is that space of modern capitalist nowhere: the coffee shop, office, or shared work space that all have the same comfort symbols: fast wifi, innocuous background music, wood tables, exposed brick, minimalist furniture.

Noting the increasing homogenization in AirBbB rentals, this article explores the "aesthetic gentrification" that is causing the rise in global sameness. As Lambert says over at Naked Capitalism, one thing about Airspace is that it's frictionless.

This was all on my mind  a few days ago when I encountered this profile of a guy who only owns fifteen objects. James Altucher, described here as "the world's least likely success guru," got rich from being involved with a successful start-up, lived lavishly, tried to make even more money through investments, then went broke.

After losing all his money, he had various epiphanies. He gave away or threw away everything he owns, and now he travels with his laptop and three pairs of chinos and three T-shirts, staying with friends and in AirBnB rentals.

In a way, this whole "own nothing" trend is really the height of frictionlessness, and of course it goes hand in hand with Airspace. To me, it is also annoying. "Own nothing" is always treated as some kind of anti-materialism, but in fact it's only the most ultra privileged, and usually male, people who can live with no objects. Most of us have objects because we are using them to do things -- often with and for other people. We cook meals with our pots and pans, we eat off our dishes, and we sit on our sofas with friends. If we have kids, we provide them with toys and educational materials and things they like to wear. Shared activities require objects, so either you own those objects or you're using someone else's.

And speaking of this whole "other people" thing, there is one moment in the interview where Mr. Altucher makes a joke about his "kids." Does he have children? Did the reporter ask? If he does, how does he make food for them? Where are their toys? As we've noted before, if you're reading about "Mister Interesting," somehow the whole fatherhood thing never comes up. If "Ms. Interesting" was running around being the "Oprah of the internet" and owning fifteen objects -- wouldn't the very first question be "OMG, how do you take care of your children?!"

Anyway, this was all percolating in my mind when I read this article about how "Intellectuals are Freaks." The article points out that intellectuals are atypical, which is absolutely true. I think often about how my hours and hours of education and time alone in a library reading make the texture of my life radically unlike that of most other people. Many intellectuals probably start off atypical, and then become even more atypical as they go along.

One of the ways the article says intellectuals are atypical is in their cosmopolitanism. Intellectuals often consider themselves "citizens of the world" and see borders and boundaries as arbitrary and meaningless. Sometimes this extends to the idea that being invested in the local -- a family, a community, a nation -- is somehow stupidly parochial or naive. Intellectuals, seeing their own experience, are likely to endorse education as a means of curing the inequality and other ills that forces like globalization sometimes create.

I consider myself an intellectual, and I think this critique points to something real and important. It's not naive or stupid to want to live in a particular community, tied to particular people, with a particular way of life. For many people, these are the things that make up a good life.

And while education is wonderful, it's not a cure for inequality. As long as there are agricultural workers and baristas and Amazon warehouse workers and call center employees, there are going to be people who are deeply vulnerable to the forces of inequality. It doesn't matter what degrees they have.


I feel like that whole idea of cosmopolitanism, of feeling at home anywhere, a citizen of the world -- it has something to do with frictionlessness, with the idea of transcending specifics and ties, with owning nothing, with the feeling of Airspace.

This is not to say that frictionlessness is always bad. I spend a huge amount of time in Airspace, and I feel like I thrive there. Traveling the world is wonderful, and it's one of the great things of our time that we communicate with a zillion different people and feel like citizens of the world.

It's just that there's lot to say for friction too -- for the feeling that specific people, specific ways of life, and even specific objects are part of what makes human life what it is.

The Pernicious Illusion Of User-Generated Neutrality

I feel like this there's this dream in late-capitalist societies that somehow you can write a neutral set of rules for human interaction -- that is, a way of setting up a set of rules or procedures that doesn't rely on contentious and messy stuff like what matters and why, or what is or isn't harmful, or what people do or don't have the right to do.

Of course that isn't true. There's no such thing as a neutral set of rules for human interaction. If you're going to talk about how people should treat one another, you're going to have to base that on all kinds of value-laden beliefs.

But there's this tenacious implicit idea or hope that somehow, if you just wrote the right rules, and got an effective enforcement mechanism, you'd be good to go. On the internet, this often takes the form of letting users determine everything. The dream is we can introduce a ratings system, step back, and let it all sort it self out.

I feel like it's getting more and more difficult to ignore the fact that this dream is an illusion. You can't make things work without some dialogue and agreement about what's important and what's sort of OK and what isn't OK.

It's long been known that the sharing economy has a race problem. But I was reminded of this issue when I read this recent article on "Broadly," about discrimination and the gig economy. It starts with the story of a trans woman, who wants to rent a room on AirBnB. When she informs her potential host she is trans, she is refused because the host doesn't want her son to feel uncomfortable.

The article also has this other story, where a young woman hires a cleaner through a gig economy site. When he shows up, he becomes aggressive and angry and tells her off for how messy her place is. She can't get him to leave, and eventually gives him an extra 40 dollars to go home.

Then there's also discussion of how, when women let out rooms to men, they end up feeling uncomfortable in their homes -- not threatened, just uneasy, because of the way the men take up a lot of space, put their stuff everywhere, and help themselves to the music collection.

The focus of the article is on women, people of color, and others being "safe" in the gig economy, but it also touches briefly on the deeper problem: that having an app "ratings" system -- effectively punishing bad guys -- really just doesn't cut it. Proper resolution of all of these cases requires not "ratings" from customers but rather informed judgment about what is and isn't appropriate in the way we treat one another.

It's complicated. People get to feel comfortable and not threatened. But sometimes -- as in the trans case -- if a person feels unsafe or uncomfortable it's their problem. Other times -- as in the cleaner case -- if a person feels unsafe or uncomfortable it's the other person's problem. Still others -- as in the case of guys "taking up space" -- I'm really not sure whose problem it is.

To say that everyone can rent to whoever they want and that people can go ahead and "rate" one another really doesn't address the relevant difficulties. You actually have to make judgments about what's fair, not fair, OK, not OK. And then you have to have some system for putting those judgments into practice.

It's the same thing for social media. You can't distinguish protected speech from abusive speech without making value judgments about what kinds of things are OK and not OK. For example, did you read about how Facebook banned a plus-sized model who was advertising a thing about positive and healthy body-image? 

Though the reversed the decision later, Facebook banned it for showing "body parts in an undesirable manner."

Explaining their decision, Facebook wrote: "Ads may not depict a state of health or body weight as being perfect or extremely undesirable. Ads like these are not allowed since they make viewers feel bad about themselves. Instead, we recommend using an image of a relevant activity, such as running or riding a bike."

Leaving aside all the other baffling questions this passage raises -- like, you're going to ban all ads that make people feel bad about themselves? WTF? -- obviously it's a value judgment to say that making people feel "bad" is worth banning and it's a value judgment to say when making people feel bad is OK and when it isn't. Anti-smoking campaigns make people feel bad too. So what?

In reversing the decision, Facebook said that the policy was meant to guard against the promotion of anorexia and eating disorders. A worthy goal, but again, not a factual one, not a value-neutral one, and not an obvious one to put into practice -- as the kerfuffle itself shows.

At the end of the Broadly article, an expert on the gig economy is quoted as saying,

"It's not really fashionable to be in favour of bureaucracy and rules, but equal pay for equal work, minimum wage laws, employment standards that limit employers' right to fire at will, and anti-discrimination laws were the results of years of struggle by feminists, unionists, and anti-racism groups," he says. "I don't think they should be thrown away just because a new app has a rating system."

I think this is spot-on. I've never understood the depth of antagonism to bureaucracy. If you're falsely accused, it's bureaucracy that's going to save you. If you want safe drinking water, it's bureaucracy that's there for you. And if you want fairness -- in education, in employment, or even just in your gig economy -- it's bureaucracy that's going to do that for you.

But it's not because they're value-neutral that bureaucracies do this. It's because, at least when they're working well, they encode values that we care about, and they put into place systems for making things happen. Systems that epitomize what tech companies seem to be trying to get away from.

An user-generated ratings system does neither of these things. It just allows everyone to put into concrete practice all the crappy, racist, sexist, transphobic, hate and phobia that they're carrying around. It's not "user-generated neutrality." It's like an amplifier for all of our worst qualities.

Are Internet Trolls Otherwise Ordinary People?

Trolls from a kinder, gentler era.

I used to think that people being horrible assholes on the internet were, generally speaking, people who were horrible assholes off the internet. I thought they were exceptional, unusual -- the kind of people that if you met them in real life you'd be like: "Oh my god, get me away from this person."

But I keep reading stories -- true ones -- where people got to know their trolls, and these stories share feature that is, to me, really disturbing. Namely: that trolls are otherwise ordinary people -- ordinary people who somehow feel entitled to act out wild murderous rage when they feel like it.

The first one that sticks in my mind is from 2012. This guy -- a writer and blogger in Ireland -- started getting relentless messages on Twitter calling him a "dirty fucking Jewish scumbag" and sending images of concentration camps and dismembered bodies. The abuse went on and on, his Facebook account was hacked, violent racist messages, etc etc. Eventually it escalated, with parcels of ashes arriving at his home with notes like "Say hello to your relatives from Auschwitz."

The writer was understandably freaked out. He hired a friend to try to figure out the IP address of his troll, and -- long story short, it ended up being the 17 year old son of an old friend of his. He talks to the friend. They decide to all go out to lunch, and toward the end they show the kid printouts of all the abusive and threatening messages. Kid bursts into tears. Pressed, he says "I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry. It was like a game thing."

Then in 2014, there was this great piece about the classicist Mary Beard in the New Yorker. The story covers many topics: Beard's scholarly approach, the general misogyny she encounters whenever she does anything, her boundless energy for engaging with, and showing up, people who say hateful and stupid things to and about her on the internet. And there are a lot of hateful and stupid things. This, for example, from a university student: "You filthy old slut. I bet your vagina is disgusting."

Instead of ignoring the trolls, Beard engages with them. She retweets, calls out, talks to the press. When she retweeted the university student, someone who knew him offered to tell his mom; he later apologized. To the BBC, she said, "I’d take him out for a drink and smack his bottom."

When she was on Question Time, commenters vilified her online, and one posted an image where a woman’s genitals was superimposed over Beard’s face. Later, she posted the image to her blog at the Times Literary Supplement website. The site was overwhelmed with traffic, and the story made international news.

Then, what happened was this: the man who ran the site where the image originally appeared contacted Beard to apologize, via a long and personal letter. He said he never should have done it. He said he was in difficult circumstances: he was married with kids; he wanted to move to Spain; he couldn't understand the bureaucracy. Mary Beard looked up the documents he needed and sent them along. Now, whenever she gets in "internet trouble," he gets in touch with her -- to make sure she is OK.

Understandably, Beard resists the interpretation of these stories as "happy endings" where a wise and maternal woman takes men to task and teaches them a lesson. What the attacks show, she says, is the persistence of misogyny and the way gender hierarchies persist. Still, she finds the outcomes emotionally satisfying. That university student who called her a slut with a disgusting vagina? After he apologized he took her out to lunch, and she's going to write him a letter of reference. After all, when you google his name, calling Beard a "filthy slut" is what comes up, and he is going to need all the help he can get.

The final story is from 2015. Lindy West is a writer who often deals with feminism and body size issues -- and so receives a ton of vitriol, abuse, and threats online. In this essay, she describes how she usually deals -- by deleting, by useless blocking, by trying to ignore. But then eventually, a troll set up something that reached a new level of awfulness, by setting up a Twitter account in the name of West's recently deceased father -- with a photo of him, and a username like "[Lindy's father] Donezo."

West found she couldn't ignore it. She wrote an essay on Jezebel about the issue and mentioned the account. Astonishingly, she then received an email from the troll, apologizing. He said he was wrong and he shouldn't have done it, and that his trolling hadn't been caused by something particular she said. He wrote in part, "I think my anger towards you stems from your happiness with your own being. It offended me because it served to highlight my unhappiness with my own self."

Later, West invited him to participate in an episode of This American Life, talking about what happened. He said he'd felt fat, unloved, passionless and purposeless." Though he was unable to explain why this made generalized rage at women seem like a good idea, he did say that he had changed. He'd become a teacher, and he took better care of his health. He apologized, again, for the hurt he'd caused: as a teacher, he could now see how hurt and sad his students were when other kids were mean to them.

There's so much to say about these stories -- and I agree with West and Beard when they call attention to the special role that misogyny plays. But among the other things, I'm still just astonished at the way these trolls all seem like ordinary people who got caught up in something even they don't really understand.

It's destabilizing to me to think that otherwise ordinary people who are sad, or bored, or self-hating can get something out of abusing and threatening other people on the internet. At the deepest possible level, I just don't get it. Even a playground bully at least gets status, or attention, or something. But these internet trolls are mostly anonymous. What motivates them to act this way? What positive feeling for them makes them do this?

It's like finding out I live among people of a completely different species.