Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.
“I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,” he adds. “I’m not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things,” he says.
The weirdest thing about it is that, at this point, he’s probably correct that it will be easier to legally change a person’s name than to purge information from Google. I imagine Google will eventually sell name-change kits or peddle some kind of protection service against online exposure by Google products.
Via Schinders. Community-based artists from 3d Ward Brooklyn are leading Sweatshop Socials to make bags out of old clothes. The project is meant to reduce the use of plastic bags and teach people the lost art of sewing. Imagine that: you can actually repair or tailor your clothes instead of throwing them out. Funny to think that most women born before 1970 can probably sew in some shape or form and amazing how quickly such a vital skill can fall out of favor. Time was, almost everyone could skin an animal or make a candle.
Back in 1996, my then boyfriend and I loved XY. It was the first magazine that catered specifically to young gays (the average age of a subscriber was around 21). I bought it at the newsstand: that’s how long ago this was. It was better produced than a ‘zine and had glossy pictures, but was still charmingly homemade. The comics were great, the journalism was flimsy, and every issue featured tons of photos of real life young gay dudes and cute boys kissing. The whole vibe of the magazine was exactly, perfectly of its time.
The magazine went bankrupt many years ago, but today the final death knell came in the form of the company’s decision to destroy the records of XY’s subscription and online dating profiles databases. In the process of selling of all of XY’s assets, an attempt was made to secure these records and sell them to another party, a practice the FCC likens to “deceptive trade practices.” In addition to the records being sensitive because of the nature of XY, many of the magazine’s readers were underage (They did a special issue on the difficulty of being an underage gay). Needless to say, selling off the personal data of a bunch of vulnerable young gay guys, or formerly young and vulnerable gay guys, would be an atrocious action. Of course librarires have made it part of their mission to protect this kind of data, but I suppose that ship has sailed, in many respects.
The publishers did the right thing in this case, but the law is lagging behind technological reality here. Steve Smith at Minonlinewrites:
The agreement highlights an important issue that sits below the surface of the digital economy. As companies close and buy and sell to one another, the fate of the valuable user data everyone holds becomes an issue. Most privacy policies are unclear about this issue or do allow for transfer of personal information to new owners. But as the tracking and ad targeting technologies online become more sophisticated, user profiles will be come denser and more valuable.
Happy birthday, Dolores Huerta. She’ll be celebrating her 80th with a big conert at the Greek Theatre called (unfortunately) “Weaving Movements Together.” The line-up stars Zack de la Rocha and Carlos Santana; the event will be webcast.
Via Schinders. On Friday, September 17, 2010, people all over the world will set up temporary parks in metered parking spaces for Park(ing) Day. The orginal Park(ing) Day, an art project, took place in 2005. Organizers encourage an open-source, DIY approach:
PARK(ing) Day has since been adapted and remixed to address a variety of social issues in diverse urban contexts around the world, and the project continues to expand to include interventions and experiments well beyond the basic “tree-bench-sod” park typology first modeled by Rebar. In recent years, participants have built free health clinics, planted temporary urban farms, produced ecology demonstrations, held political seminars, built art installations, opened free bike repair shops and even held a wedding ceremony! All this in the context of this most modest urban territory – the metered parking space.
And this is the true power of the open-source model: organizers identify specific community needs and values and use the event to draw attention to issues that are important to their local public—everything from experimentation and play to acts of generosity and kindness, to political issues such as water rights, labor equity, health care and marriage equality. All of these interventions, irrespective of where they fall on the political spectrum, support the original vision of PARK(ing) Day: to challenge existing notions of public urban space and empower people to help redefine space to suit specific community needs.
So Google and Verizon have agreed to non-discrimination in providing wired broadband communications, but want to allow wireless service providers to sell tiered access. What this means is that internet service providers like Verizon (companies that will increasingly provide their services through wireless networks) will be allowed to sell faster delivery for certain content: the companies can pick and chose which content gets delivered to consumers at what speed.
If a company pays Verizon more, it will be given priority in the delivery of its content. The problem is that the media companies most likely to pay for preferential access are likely to drown out other forms of communication. Also, many of the companies that provide Internet access sell other kinds of content and are likely to grant sweetheart deals or prioritize in-house shows, news, music, commerce, or other vital communications. This agreement favors the control of big companies in deciding what kind of content gets to your computer, or, more likely, your phone or mobile computing device.
Professor Lawrence Lessig calls this “Another Deregulation Debacle.” Government inaction on this matter is stunningly irresponsible. Take action at Free Press’ “Save the Internet” portal.
Via NYT. Jaron Lanier of the Annenberg School and Micrososft, author of “You are Not a Gadget,” criticizes the way the marketing of artificial intelligence belittles and confuses the role of the human intellect. He argues that robots and “smart” software are useful but relatively unsophisticated examples of “high-tech puppetry,” but he worries these inventions threaten to promote a fundamental misunderstanding about what computers should do. He cautions that thinking of computers as human opens us up to the fallacious equation of humans and computers:
What all this comes down to is that the very idea of artificial intelligence gives us the cover to avoid accountability by pretending that machines can take on more and more human responsibility. This holds for things that we don’t even think of as artificial intelligence, like the recommendations made by Netflix and Pandora. Seeing movies and listening to music suggested to us by algorithms is relatively harmless, I suppose. But I hope that once in a while the users of those services resist the recommendations; our exposure to art shouldn’t be hemmed in by an algorithm that we merely want to believe predicts our tastes accurately. These algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only statistics and correlations.
Google and Verizon may or may not have ended Net Neutrality today, which is super troubling, but I suppose we’ll have to wait for the paper of record to stand up for its reporting. While the Times is working through that story, the WSJ Journal has a great series called “What They Know” that starts with a review of the number and kinds of software trackers popular websites are already using called “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets“:
Tracking isn’t new. But the technology is growing so powerful and ubiquitous that even some of America’s biggest sites say they were unaware, until informed by the Journal, that they were installing intrusive files on visitors’ computers.
The Journal found that Microsoft Corp.’s popular Web portal, MSN.com, planted a tracking file packed with data: It had a prediction of a surfer’s age, ZIP Code and gender, plus a code containing estimates of income, marital status, presence of children and home ownership, according to the tracking company that created the file, Targus Information Corp.
UPDATE:
See what I mean about the NY TImes and Portland? This came out the following day: Bar + Food | Portland’s Happiest Hours. The article begins with instructions to “[a]dd this to the growing list of reasons to visit (or relocate to) Portland, Ore.”
Is it all the fault of the Gray Lady? Perhaps I have become obsessed with Detroit because it gets so much coverage in the Times (second only to my hometown, Portland, Oregon; the New York Times simply cannot resist fellating the City of Roses in print). I live in Los Angeles now and have lived in New York as well, but Detroit seems to me to be some kind of wonderland. Articles like “Wringing Art Out of the Rubble in Detroit” by Melina Ryzik make Detroit seem like a frontier of some kind, a post-gentrification paradise of opportunity. If a house really costs only a dollar and you can open an art house movie theater with a credit card, I think a person who wanted to live a creative life would be hard pressed to find a better spot:
Detroit is plagued by all the urban problems that make it fodder for big-picture editorializing and cop shows. Its long-dwindling population and landscape of abandoned buildings have made it a singular — or perhaps prophetic — case study in Rust Belt decline. But its particular brand of civic and economic decay has also drawn something unexpected: a small but well-publicized movement of artists and other creative types trying to wring something out of the rubble.
Maker Faire, the California festival for tinkerers and conceptualists, made its Detroit debut — albeit in nearby Dearborn — last weekend; TEDx, a brainstorming conference will arrive in September; and Matthew Barney will perform after that. Banksy has already been. Two weeks ago Detroit hired a film, culture and special-events liaison to occupy a new position in the office of Mayor Dave Bing. The city that birthed the assembly-line age is now cultivating a slew of handmade salvagers, and it has not gone unnoticed.
“There’s an excitement here,” said Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of Make magazine, which spawned Maker Faire. “There’s a sense that it’s a frontier again, that it’s open, that you can do things without a lot of people telling you, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ ” Maker Faire follows that ethos; it drew over 22,000 people for demonstrations of wind-powered cars and fire-spewing bicycles to the parking lot of the Henry Ford Museum.
