the moment when you notice

I am extremely peevish at the moment, "the moment" easily encompassing the past month and probably longer. There's a longer post in that, related to ways in which both leftist and rightist intellectuals have been saying things so extraordinarily stupid that I have to question whether there are still intellectuals anywhere at all, and the simultaneous meltdowns of a number of organizations and subcultures into open racism, sexism, and general denial of reality. Every day is almost literally like waking up in a madhouse, surrounded by the kind of disordered thinking I associate with schizophrenics and people with varying levels of organic brain damage. (I am not speaking in metaphor. I have spent significant time around schizophrenics and people with varying levels of brain damage.)

I reassure myself by remembering "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" was written 90 years ago, well before the Internet, and it is probably not that things are getting worse so much as that stupid is always actively on display and what varies is probably how much attention I am paying. But it's isolating. Ciro and I have talked about making August a mental health recovery month, when we might set aside some of each day to read or watch things that we know are excellent, listen to very elevated music, look at flowers and things, and to try to spend time with people we actually like. Just anything at all to build back some scaffold of civilization.

The main thing that's bothering me, which has been on display nonstop thanks to drones and Snowden, is the notion that computers have morality - that machines do things. We don't have artificial intelligence yet, and maybe not ever; we don't have a "laws of robotics" or an emotion chip. Computers are totally amoral, and it's absurd to talk about them as if they have a morality. If you are afraid of computers, what you are afraid of, still, is people.

Machines do not make judgments. Hammers don't hammer in nails; carpenters do. Cameras don't spy on you; people watching through cameras spy on you. It's the "guns don't kill people; people kill people" argument, which is absolutely true. If you are on the side of gun control, which I am, you still have to acknowledge that what you're trying to limit is how efficient a tool a person can get his hands on. When someone follows my movements through my cell phone, is that better or worse than having someone tail me on the street? The cell phone signal is certainly less intrusive, and less likely to add editorial comments about whether I "look stressed." On the other hand, the organization following me doesn't have to commit an employee's time to following me, so the "yeah, worth it" calculation is different. So do we want to make this more efficient tool legal or not? Good question. But a question about people.

Organizations are people, too. There's no "the government." There's no "big agro." Sometimes it's useful to think of organizations as single entities, both legally (corporate personhood, so the assets and liabilities are tied to the company instead of the confusing tangle of individuals that make up the owners and operators of the company) and out of a recognition that people roleplay (as demonstrated by the behavior of the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment, among others, as well as a casual tendency for working women with children to say things like "this is who I am at my job, but when I get home, I'm mom"). Stereotypes are similarly useful when making quick judgments, and similarly flawed. You will be led down a lot of blind alleys if you make the leap to thinking that corporations really are possessed of motivations and moralities divorced from the people making decisions, or that "the government" should be trusted or not trusted regardless of who is making up that government at a given time. You will build odd regulatory frameworks, based on regulating imaginary friends instead of human beings.

Secular colleagues, we have rejected the idea that our lives are at the mercy of disembodied moral forces playing out whimsical and personality-driven games. You can't just start calling God "technology" or "the market," or Demeter "Monsanto," or insist that information, like Prometheus, wants freedom. That's still theist. It becomes a shell game.

The Public Mails

In one of those thoughts you have before falling asleep, it occurred to me other other day that if the US mail worked the way webmail does, it would be free, but all letters would be postcards and stamps would be advertisements selected by the postal clerk.

Big Data

[I wrote this a week or two ago, in the context of a private e-mail discussion]

The frightening thing about PRISM, in large part, is the security holes. Which points back to big data for me - now that computers store and sort so much information, and it's so easily copied, it is difficult if not impossible to know who knows what about you. The information exists; I'm generating it all the time. I'm being photographed if I go out in public; we don't have a CCTV network, but after the Boston Marathon Bombing, all the stores volunteered their security tapes and masses of spectators turned in their cell phone videos. Sure, a few people could hold out, and probably did, but enough to make a difference? Probably not. We're also leaving our genetic information all over the place - shedding hair and skin, throwing away paper cups we've drunk out of. It's all there, and it's all public.

It's entirely plausible that many private companies know more about me than I know about myself, or than my close friends know. Target (a big box store) recently had to manually change an automated system that sent out coupons in the mail because its pattern analysis had gotten very good at guessing from a cluster of innocuous purchases that a woman was recently pregnant, and their mailings were often "outing" her to her family before she had a chance to say anything. What I'm doing when I shop at a big box store is in the public sphere, and I've agreed to let them collect the data by using a customer loyalty card to get discounts - I have sold it to them. (Although in some cases, I haven't exactly - they're using my credit card as a tracker, and what I am getting in return is the ability not to carry cash.) But when they share it back with me, I may be upset. I may essentially feel as though I'm being blackmailed with public information.

More broadly, I think we're seeing a test of the notion that "he who would sacrifice freedom for safety deserves neither." At this point, freedom largely means consenting to be relentlessly monitored; if you start rejecting all the terms of service that would have you sign away your rights, you're left sitting with a lot of rights and absolutely nowhere to use them except your own kitchen. It's not clear what the practical difference is. I'm a young and attractive woman; I'm looked at all the time, and judged all the time for the minutest details of what I'm wearing, and told by strangers in every circumstance that I ought to be smiling and must talk with them whether I want to or not. How is a blanket of public surveillance with implied but rarely stated compulsion going to be different from my normal life? Is it actually worse to be monitored by a centralized entity like a government, or a decentralized entity like a culture? That's the question we're starting to run into.