v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Fresh, Cutting Edge Corporatism

Nathan Jurgenson at The New Inquiry writes about the downside to the TED conference:

Perhaps the biggest complaint I heard was that TED smells of corporatism. With the Facebook IPO around the corner, we are all well aware of the big venture-capital sums floating around Silicon Valley (the new Wall Street?). What’s infuriating is how Silicon Valley capitalism consistently attempts to sell itself as outside or even above corporatism. In announcing Facebook’s IPO, Mark Zuckerberg, whose company has consistently violated user privacy in the name of profit, stated that “we don’t build services to make money.” He actually said that.

Fewer and fewer people are falling for this. And they have begun to realize TED events raise similar corporate-speak red flags as well. Yes, people want new and entertaining ideas but feel alienated by the branding and packaging reminiscent of the corporate Silicon Valley establishment. “Consumers” are savvy, and they know when they are being sold to. So many of the TED talks take on the form of those famous patent medicine tonic cure-all pitches of previous centuries, as though they must convince you not through the content of what’s being said but through the hyper-engaging style of the delivery. Each new “big idea” to “inspire the world” and “change everything” pitched from the TED stage reminds me of the swamp root and snake oil liniment being sold from a wagon a hundred years past. As Mike Bulajewski pointed out in a Tweet, “TED’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ mask capitalism as usual, giving it a narrative of progress and change.”

TED attempts to present itself as fresh, cutting edge, and outside the box but often fails to deliver. It’s become the Urban Outfitters of the ideas world, finding “cool” concepts suitable for being packaged and sold to the masses, thereby extinguishing the “cool” in the process. Cutting-edge ideas not carrying the Apple-esque branding are difficult to find.

At TED, “everyone is Steve Jobs” and every idea is treated like an iPad. The conferences have come to resemble religious meetings and the TED talks techno-spiritual sermons, pushing an evangelical, cultish attitude toward “the new ideas that will change the world.” Everything becomes “magical” and “inspirational.” In just the top-ten most-viewed TED talks, we get the messages of “inspiration,” “astonishment,” “insight,” “mathmagic” and the “thrilling potential of SixthSense technology”! The ideas most popular are those that pander to a metaphysical, magical portrayal of the role of technology in the world.

The way TED talks fuse sales-pitch slickness with evangelical intensity leads to perhaps the most damming argument against the TED epistemology: It necessarily leaves out other groups and other ways of knowing and presenting ideas. As Paul Currion tweeted, TED seems “unaware of its own ideological bias.” Let’s take one example. Take a wild guess which gender is massively over-represented as TED speakers (answer, via Tom Slee @whimsley). And TEDxWomen stinks of tokenism. Hint: It is better to be more inclusive through and through than to segregate marginalized groups into their own token corners. But the TED style aligns much more easily to articulating ideas that sell than ideas that concern power, domination, and social inequalities. Real cutting-edge ideas also come from the margins. TED’s corporate-establishment voice and style aren’t without their uses, but they are certainly not innovative or cutting edge.

As problematic as TED is in itself, its popularity is more troublesome, coming to dominate the social conversation about what new technologies mean. Not that TED should be barred a role in the conversation. Because of the conference, some complex ideas get wider exposure than they otherwise would (as Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal pointed out in a Tweet). But TED and the larger TED-like world of Silicon Valley corporatism have far too much importance, as Evgeny Morozov points out when criticizing the “Internet guru.”

Our own moment of technological change

From Kristen Daily's essay The Dissipating Aura of Cinema:

The idea of the original is tightly linked to the concept of the auteur. Digital technologies serve to undermine the status and authenticity of the auteur. Jean-Luc Godard, whose new mode of cinema helped solidify the concept of auteur, admits outrage at this state of events. He says, “The cinema, as we knew it and as it no longer exists, helped make things visible. . . . The metaphor of the film negative and the positive print was a moral metaphor. But with digital cameras the negative no longer exists – there’s no more negative!” (Bonnaud 40) The unique negative provided a measure of authenticity and auteurity. With digital moving images, the negative has been transformed into a code, thus having, as Jean Baudrillard and W.T.J. Mitchell have pointed out, much in common with viral replication. Digital technologies unhinge the ties between auteur, negative and original as movies become variable and ubiquitous. Roland Barthes sees the death of the Author as the birth of the Reader. He writes of how a text’s unity no longer lies in its origin but in its destination, which is the Reader, who can hold all the different parts, viewpoints of a text together. (148) In this way, cinema follows in the footsteps of text. Novels have long been intertextual and interactive, requiring user-participation and user-interpretation. While film remained ephemeral and inaccessible, subject to a one-time reel-time viewing, it could retain its aura and reduce the mass audience to a single spectator, but as the cinema becomes subject to remix and review and user engagement, it becomes increasingly heterogeneous and hypertextual. [2] New Wave auteurs laid the groundwork for this type of reader, creating texts which were discursive, intertextual and subject to interpretation, but digital and computer technology has made this type of reading ubiquitous as the language of cinema becomes increasingly two-way. As Niels Ole Finneman puts it, the receiver is “changed to the more active role of ‘writer,’ ‘co-writer,’ ‘selector,’ ‘editor’ or simply user” (233). William J. Mitchell takes this to be the next step from Benjamin’s description of mechanical image reproduction. As he says, if exhibition was substituted for cult value in Benjamin’s description, then digital imaging substitutes use value, or “input value” for exhibition value. (52) Digital technology can greatly empower Barthes’s Reader who now has authorial capacity and is capable not only of interpreting texts, but interacting with them and changing them.

Squeezing the margins

From Counterpunch, Scott Nova  writes about the corporate realities of "responsibility":

While Apple and its competitors know they must pay lip service to concern for worker rights, lest their brand’s image be tarnished, the practical reality is that if worker rights were genuinely respected in places like China, production costs would be higher, deliver times slower, and profits correspondingly lower. The last thing these brands want is for any of the countries where they exploit low-wage labor to actually enforce their own workplace laws, much less comply with international standards.

This is why there is a yawning gap between the public rhetoric of these corporations on labor rights issues and the actual manner in which they operate their supply chains. Their public statements are suffused with pious expressions of concern for workers and accounts of ostensibly strenuous efforts to promote labor rights compliance by their suppliers. In practice, these corporations maintain a production model that routinely exploits the very labor abuses they claim to abhor. The Times reporters exposed this mammoth hypocrisy, on the part of the world’s most revered and profitable company, by getting former Apple executives to speak candidly (albeit anonymously) on the subject – the kind of enterprising effort to pierce the corporate public relations veil that is seen all too rarely in mainstream journalism.

Here is new Apple CEO Tim Cook, articulating the company’s official position – that it is deeply committed to uprooting abuses in its supply chain, but that this arduous work that will take years to complete: “We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain…Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners… [W]e’ve made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers. We know of no one in our industry doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people.”

Meanwhile, here is a former Apple executive, telling the truth: “We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on. Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice. If half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?” The abuses in question include unconscionable safety practices that have led to numerous workplace deaths and injuries.

More

Worth their time to read

Interview with Richard Nash on publishing and the book:

Matt Runkle: There’s a lot of worrying about the disappearance of the book as an object. Do you see the printed book in the same state of flux as the publishing industry?

Richard Nash: If people want something, why do they think it’s not going to exist? Not to get all sort of laissez-faire capitalist about this, but I’m going to have a moment of laissez-faire capitalism here and note that if people want to read the book in its printed form, then I predict there are going to be ways in which they can ensure that they will continue to get it in printed form because people are going to be willing to pay for it.

I mean the reality is that soon enough—even right now, technically—anyone will be able to get a digital version of a book and go and get it made into a physical printed book if they want. I mean right now, whether you’re using the espresso machine or—goodness gracious—3D printing, which is very, very, very much in its infancy, any kind of manufacturing over the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years is going to be able to be done as a hobby. So if you want a printed book, you will be able to get a printed book.

It has been a fascinating phenomenon in the discussion around publishing how adversarial people get around other people’s choices. So if someone says “I like an ebook,” a person will respond “Ohhh, I can’t believe—how can you do that?” It’s like that obnoxious person who you don’t want to go out to dinner with anymore because they can’t just order what they want, they have to comment on what you’re eating as well. What’s been epidemic in this discussion is that when both camps talk about their own preferences, they have to malign other people’s preferences too, and make grandiose extrapolations about the consequences of other people’s preferences for their own. If they like printed books, they should be buying the damn things instead of whining about other people’s preferred mode of reading. So I’m tremendously optimistic about the future of the book as an object. I think the worst years of the book as an object have been the last 50 years.

MR: Why?

RN: When I started at Soft Skull in 2001 we were printing on 55-pound paper. By 2005, we were typically printing on 50-pound paper. By 2008, half our books were on 45-pound groundwood. And that’s because our print runs were going down. And even with publishers whose print runs weren’t going down, they were trying to save money. Because when the book’s primary purpose was not to be an object, but rather to be a mass-produced item for sale in big-box retail, then there’s going to be downward pressure on costs. And so what we have witnessed over the last 50 years is the progressive shittification of the book as an object—a process that is not external to publishing as it was practiced over the last 100 years, but has in fact been at its fore.

If you’ve got a manufacturing supply chain, then the dictates of manufacturing are going to be the ones that drive the business. And there’s certainly going to be some ad hoc occasional efforts not to do that: certain independent publishers will try to focus on quality, and certain individual books from other publishers might be tarted up for one reason or another, for marketing purposes. But those are the exceptions. Basically, when you’ve got an industry that is pushing out $25 billion worth of physical products into a supply chain, the vast majority of businesses are going to try to cut costs and increase revenues. And the simplest way to cut costs is going to be on the production side. So if the core of the business is no longer a supply chain, but rather the orchestration of writing and reading communities, the book is freed of its obligation to be the sole means for the broad mass dissemination of the word, and instead become a thing where the intrinsic qualities of the book itself can be explored.

MR: How did you come up with the idea for Cursor?

RN: For the last hundred years, publishers had been behaving not so much as connectors of writers and readers but as suppliers of products to bookstores in the same way that hammer manufacturers supplied product to hardware stores. The customer was the bookstore and the company was organized in ways that were designed to supply the product to retailers. We were basically all manufacturers.

I had come to publishing without really knowing anything about it. I was a theater director. I took over Soft Skull just to basically help out some people I’d become friendly with. As it turned out, I was lucky to have such a naïve point of view, because that was in fact what publishing needed, to restore it effectively to the status quo ante, to the act of connecting writers and readers.

I started Cursor basically to begin the process of trying to figure out what in fact publishing is. Because what we thought publishing was, was not in fact what publishing was. It’s not what writers and readers needed.

More

Mark Weiser- A Look Into the Past and Present

From Scientific American 1991:

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Consider writing, perhaps the first information technology: The ability to capture a symbolic representation of spoken language for long-term storage freed information from the limits of individual memory. Today this technology is ubiquitous in industrialized countries. Not only do books, magazines and newspapers convey written information, but so do street signs, billboards, shop signs and even graffiti. Candy wrappers are covered in writing. The constant background presence of these products of "literacy technology" does not require active attention, but the information to be conveyed is ready for use at a glance. It is difficult to imagine modern life otherwise.

Silicon-based information technology, in contrast, is far from having become part of the environment. More than 50 million personal computers have been sold, and nonetheless the computer remains largely in a world of its own. It is approachable only through complex jargon that has nothing to do with the tasks for which which people actually use computers. The state of the art is perhaps analogous to the period when scribes had to know as much about making ink or baking clay as they did about writing.

The arcane aura that surrounds personal computers is not just a "user interface" problem. My colleagues and I at PARC think that the idea of a "personal" computer itself is misplaced, and that the vision of laptop machines, dynabooks and "knowledge navigators" is only a transitional step toward achieving the real potential of information technology. Such machines cannot truly make computing an integral, invisible part of the way people live their lives. Therefore we are trying to conceive a new way of thinking about computers in the world, one that takes into account the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background.

Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When you look at a street sign, for example, you absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading.. Computer scientist, economist, and Nobelist Herb Simon calls this phenomenon "compiling"; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it the "tacit dimension"; psychologist TK Gibson calls it "visual invariants"; philosophers Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger call it "the horizon" and the "ready-to-hand", John Seely Brown at PARC calls it the "periphery". All say, in essence, that only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals.

The idea of integrating computers seamlessly into the world at large runs counter to a number of present-day trends. "Ubiquitous computing" in this context does not just mean computers that can be carried to the beach, jungle or airport. Even the most powerful notebook computer, with access to a worldwide information network, still focuses attention on a single box. By analogy to writing, carrying a super-laptop is like owning just one very important book. Customizing this book, even writing millions of other books, does not begin to capture the real power of literacy.

Furthermore, although ubiquitous computers may employ sound and video in addition to text and graphics, that does not make them "multimedia computers." Today's multimedia machine makes the computer screen into a demanding focus of attention rather than allowing it to fade into the background.

Perhaps most diametrically opposed to our vision is the notion of "virtual reality," which attempts to make a world inside the computer. Users don special goggles that project an artificial scene on their eyes; they wear gloves or even body suits that sense their motions and gestures so that they can move about and manipulate virtual objects. Although it may have its purpose in allowing people to explore realms otherwise inaccessible -- the insides of cells, the surfaces of distant planets, the information web of complex databases -- virtual reality is only a map, not a territory. It excludes desks, offices, other people not wearing goggles and body suits, weather, grass, trees, walks, chance encounters and in general the infinite richness of the universe. Virtual reality focuses an enormous apparatus on simulating the world rather than on invisibly enhancing the world that already exists.

More

The Promise of Online Media

From the blog Tomorrow Museum:

Every writer should aim to read at least as much as he writes — to feel, at the very least, you are in someway advancing the pursuit of ideas rather than offering something redundant to the hundreds of thousands of books published every year. And that’s true for anyone on the Internet.

But discussion on blog posts usually disintegrates into repetitive or inflammatory remarks when a thread gets lengthy. Arguably no one, at comment 1,000, read everything before he pressed submit. Marginal Revolution once posed the question, “Does the quality of blog comments deteriorate?”

1. The truly smart people only like to make smart points on “fresh” posts. For instance more people read the comments on fresh posts (but why?), so the benefit of a quality comment is lower as the post becomes older.

2. As time passes, the chance that a warring twosome find each other, and take over the thread, increases.

3. There is a tendency to attack or respond to the stupidest or most controversial thing said, and the longer the comments thread runs for, the stupider this will get.

4. As the number of comments multiplies, so does the number of independent discussion threads and the optimal number of threads is exceeded.

5. (Addended) As one (early) commentator notes below, the simple fact of diminishing marginal utility.

If more and more people start reading online media on mobile phones and Kindle, the incentive to leave a comment will go down dramatically. Do you really want to save this post for later and comment in a couple hours? Or do you want to struggle with writing something on the inadequate keyboard?

The Dullness of Crowds

Jaron Lanier, author of "You are not a Gadget" says to Chris Hedges:

“There are some things crowds can do, such as count the jelly beans in the jar or guess the weight of the ox,” Lanier added. “I acknowledge this phenomenon is real. But I propose that the line between when crowds can think effectively as a crowd and when they can’t is a little different. If you read [James] Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds,” he, as well as other theorists, say that if you want a crowd to be wise the key is to reduce the communication flow between the members so they do not influence each other, so they are truly independent and have separate sample points. It brings up an interesting paradox. The starting point for online crowd enthusiasts is that connection is good and everyone should be connected. But when they talk about what makes a crowd smart they say people should not be talking to each other. They should be isolated. There is a contradiction there. What makes a crowd smart is the type of question you ask. If you ask a group of informed people to choose a single numeric value such as the weight of an ox and they all have some reason to have a theory that is not entirely crazy they will center on the answer. You can get something useful. This phenomenon is what accounts for price fitting in capitalism. This is how markets can function. If you ask them to create anything, if you ask them to do something constructive or synthetic or engage in compound reasoning then they will fail. Then you get something dull or an averaging out. One danger of the crowd is violence, which is when they turn into a mob. The other is dullness or mundaneness, when you design by committee.”

Torture realities

Revelations in the UK reveal much, as emptywheel reports:

As Bill Egnor has reported (and Jim White mentioned here) a court in the UK has forced the government to release a passage of an earlier court ruling that it had fought to suppress. Assuming the passage has been released in complete form, the key passage concludes that the sleep deprivation that Americans subjected Binyam Mohamed to while held incommunicado in Pakistan was “at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities.”

Now, this revelation is critical not just because it shows British Courts concluding that, at the very least, the United States violated the Convention Against Torture. As Jim White notes in his diary on this, the US is now obligated by the Convention Against Torture to investigate this act.

But note two details of the passage.

It was reported that a new series of interviews was conducted by the United States authorities prior to 17 May 2002 as part of a new strategy designed by an expert interviewer. [my emphasis]

Mohamed was subjected to sleep deprivation, the British Government tells us, more than 75 days before the Bybee Two memo authorized such treatment.

And that abuse was inflicted by “an expert interviewer” implementing “a new strategy.”

That “expert interviewer” and that “new strategy” almost certainly were associated with Mitchell and Jessen, who were at that moment pitching using their “new strategy” with Abu Zubaydah.

So this is not just proof that the US was engaging in torture before they got their CYA memo authorizing such torture. But it was proof that they were using Mohamed, in addition to Abu Zubaydah, as guinea pigs to test out that torture.

This proves the entire myth told to explain the torture memos (and Abu Zubaydah’s treatment) to be a lie.

The Death of Privacy?

From the blog /message:

There is a fundamentally Western perception of rights of privacy -- the right to seclude oneself -- as in the privacy of one's home -- and to conceal information from other people and the state. This includes the right to selectively decide what to reveal about oneself. The notion of what sorts of information may be kept private differs widely across cultures, and while some governments have established laws ensuring privacy rights, many do not. And other laws -- like tax laws -- explicitly require access to information that individuals might otherwise want to keep private.

Our ideas of privacy are not universal, and can't be translated well into languages where cultural norms vary greatly. For example, physical modesty varies greatly across cultures, ranging from nearly naked models on catwalks or the average person on a Miami beach, to women in Islamic countries covering their body, hair, arms, legs, and even the face. But even within a country like the US, bodily modesty varies enormously.

We find similar variability in people's notions of privacy online. Some people are the web equivalent of nudists: they live very open lives on the web, revealing the intimate details of their relationships, what they think of friends and co-workers, their interactions with family and authorities. But, as in the Márquez quote, even these apparently wide open web denizens may keep some things private, or secret.

Secrecy carries connotations beyond those linked to privacy. Secrets are often shared, and as such are social objects that link those sharing the secrets together, and excluding others. Secrecy also may imply shame, or the likelihood of repercussions if the secret is revealed. This dimension of secrecy does overlap with some of the deeper motivations for personal privacy. Lastly, corporations and governments have and keep secrets, like the Coca Cola formula or cell phone recordings of prisoners at Guantanamo. And of course, repressive governments may attempt to conceal large parts of what is going on elsewhere from their citizens, like the the way that China is selectively blocking access to the web.

Obviously secrecy and privacy are critically important aspects of what is happening on the web, and much of the design of social tools is based on certain premises about privacy and secrecy, and the role that they play in social interactions.

Consider the core premises of pre-web and Web 1.0 era collaborative tools, which are still the major form of enterprise software. These are based on the premise that an individual's rights and responsibilities are based on group membership, and the role that individuals play within these groups.

More

The Missing from Now

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Philip Agre was an associate professor of information sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, and for years he ran a popular technology e-mail list with thousands of subscribers. But one day the 49-year-old scholar just stopped showing up on the campus, and now colleagues have deployed Twitter, Facebook, and the Web to try to find him.

Last month the university police department put out a missing-person alert for Mr. Agre, whose absence was reported to authorities by his sister. The alert says he abandoned his apartment and his job "sometime between December 2008 and May 2009." It also notes that he suffers from "manic depression."

The scholar apparently had many professional contacts but few close friends. An expert on privacy, he was always guarded about his own, say those who know him.

"In his personal life, he never wanted to discuss social things," said Charlotte Lee, an assistant professor of human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington who worked under Mr. Agre when she was a doctoral student. "When his behavior got more erratic, nobody felt close enough to him to help, and we thought we'd help by protecting his zone of privacy," she said. "Respecting that zone of privacy is what allowed him to slip away."

Ms. Lee helped set up a Web site last month asking the scholar to get in touch with his friends. The goal is to make sure he knows he is missed, she said. "Phil, if you are reading this, please let us know your whereabouts, how you are doing, or if there is anything you need," reads a note on the site. "We care."

Several scholars who have worked with Mr. Agre over the years have posted notes to the site wishing him well, with a tone that is a mix of extending a hand and offering tribute.

More