Post-humans Sighted

I’ve exorcised my demons and put them between covers under the title Silicon Simulacra: Post-humans of the Machines Worlds.   If you don’t want to buy, you can download PDF files of individual chapters at www.lenellis.com/books.  An abstract is below. 

Abstract

The assimilation of humans into machines, once science fiction, is a well advanced reality today.  Each of us has virtual versions inside the two great machines of the late modern age.  In the datascape, the vast array of databases in which the details of our daily lives are recorded and analyzed, we appear as profiles.  In cyberspace, the global network of computers in which everyone can connect with everyone, we appear as personas.  Both are part human.  We continually update both machines, passively and actively, and, as we do, our simulacra change in tandem.  Both are part machine.  The profile is a probabilistic portrait, conjured up by others to inform their decision making; it’s an informational output.  The persona is a pattern of connections, created as we present ourselves to and interact with others; it’s a network effect.  Drawing upon humans in near real time but manifested inside machines, neither looks like the continuous, whole and bounded self of the modern tradition.  Rather, these hybrid entities are contingent, relative and open.  Silicon Simulacra describes how these two semblances come to be, how each represents us and what opportunities and challenges each poses and suggests they are the post-human forms of humans assimilated into these machine worlds

Crisis as the New Normal

The only appropriate response to any crisis is always the same:  Regret, restitution and reform.  We’re sorry this happened.  We’ll make whole anyone who’s been harmed.  We’ll change so this won’t happen again. 

Craig Reiss in Entrepreneur.com provides a thorough and insightful “PR playbook” for how to implement the three R’s.  Here, I will only add and advocate that response readiness should become the new normal for most companies.

Four factors contribute to this assessment.

First, the Internet has enabled activists, investigators, regulators, analysts and others including disgruntled employees and unsatisfied customers with easier and faster access to company documents.  In short, more eyes are prying more often.

Second, the recent spread of Web 2.0 tools has created an “attention economy” that encourages the reporting of not only mishaps, misdeeds and misrepresentations but also miscues, missteps and mistakes, all with investigative fervor and headlines to match.  In short, every errant action is now suspect.

At the same time and for the same reason, there are no more news cycles and thus no interim time periods during which to prepare a response.  Operating 24/7 means both all the time and at any time.  In short, preparedness is too slow.

Fourth and most recently, the volatility of the equity markets means that more errant events will be reflected in a company’s stock price and thus qualify as “material” events. To such events regulations require companies respond with appropriate disclosures. 

In summary, attacks on a company’s reputation are becoming easier, broader and faster with material impacts more likely.  To me those conditions suggest that response-readiness needs to be the steady state of a company’s communications capabilities.

Internet Naysayer Doesn’t Go Far Enough

In the “The Dangers of Web Tracking” (August 6 Wall Street Journal) Internet skeptic/critic Nicholas Carr describes how we are and could be tracked, profiled and identified from our online activities.  But the dangers he cites are flimsy and he seems to shy away from naming the danger that concerns him.

Carr offers three dangers. 

The first is crime, e.g.,  identity theft and the frauds enabling by the theft.  Yes, the data generated by our online activities add to the data generted by our use of credit cards, store cards, toll tags, catalogs, warranties, etc., but theft and fraud have no special tie to online tracking.

Second, prediction can blur into manipulation but Carr doesn’t define the latter   If he means behavior-based persuasion, that’s as old as the hills. Every salesman listens to what customers say with their mouths and with their eyes, heads, shoulders, hands and feet and then adjusts the sales pitch accordingly.  Most persuasion encounters are feedback-governed interactions and until recently a task for humans.  In the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), two questions gained a lot of attention early on: could computers teach and could computers persuade?  Marketers are figuring  out the latter in their workaday activities; in specific a lot of interactive design involves mapping out diverse consumers’ different decision paths en route to a purchase and then laying in at each step along  the path the content and/or tools that will lead the customer onward.  This is SOP.  But even ”persuasion” may be too strong a term.  Many designers say instead that they’re helping the customer buy.  If something is wrong with being persuiaded by a machine, I’d like to know what that is.  Labelling it manipulation doesn’t help.   

Third and his greatest danger is the chilling effect of surveillance.  He writes, ” When we feel that we’re always being watched, we begin to lose our sense of self-reliance and free will and, along with it, our individuality.”   It is certainly true that the machine does not care about us as individuals.   Rather we are persons in a population who can be differentiated into groups, some of which are more likely than others to respond to certain persuasions.  Whether the continuous surveillance of our activities for the purpose of parsing us into probabalistic groups erodes our self-reliance, free will and individuality — or even the sense of same — is arguable at best.

Earlier in the piece Carr hints at the danger that I think he actually fears:  specifically, that government could identify those whom it considers opponents.  The headline on the WSJ’s online edition tried to make the point.  This is not paranoia.   To the contrary it’s an axiomatic truth. 

All governments, everywhere and always, have not just a potential but an actual tendency to encroach on the rights of those they are to protect.  Many governments have gone too far; they can and should be prevented and it requires the level of citizen awareness and vigilance that Carr calls for.    Americans don’t like to think that our government could take such a turn, but it did and recently.  Members of the “greatest generation” remember the 1950s Red Scare led by Joseph McCarthy; baby boomers in the anti-war movement can testify to egregious overreaching by both police and FBI.    

If we’re going to deal with the dangers of web tracking, we need to be more forthright in naming them.

WSJ’s Flawed Exposé of User Tracking

There’s an old PR saying—“Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel and paper by the ton.”   So, I won’t post this comment on the Wall Street Journal’s web site but will share it here.

Its research on user-tracking software, “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets,” reported in three full pages of its July 31-August 1, 2010 weekend edition, is solid on facts but wrong on the one fact upon which its argument depends.  After introducing the types of user behavior collected by cookies, Flash cookies and beacons, the fifth paragraph asserts that this data is packaged into profiles about individuals.   This is wrong as a matter of fact.

Individual-level data are stored in what’s called a record.  Database administrators perform certain hygiene procedures on records and they’re continually updated with fresh individual-level data, but records as such are raw material; they just sit there until someone queries the database.   When that happens, the software scans the data inside each record and sorts the records into groups that comform in greater and lesser degrees to the query.  The resulting group portraits are profiles.  

Typically, the software is designed so that profiles express a probability.  Measuring the variability of individuals on one or more attributes (the raw material), it differentiates these persons as more likely than those persons (the profiles) to behave in the way desired by a business marketer or a government administrator (the query).  This statistical differentiation then becomes the basis for real-world discrimination: treating these persons differently from those persons, in the service of business profits or government efficiency.  Social statistics at birth and all its descendents since including user-tracking software parse populations into probabilistic groups.  The method cannot say—and does not want to say—anything at all about individuals as such. 

That’s why consumers, despite telling pollsters that they are “concerned” or “very concerned” about online privacy, don’t use the privacy protecting tools that have long been available.  They know that this surveillance does not threaten them as individuals.  Scare-mongering about privacy by the media and activists only perpetuates the belief that individuals are important to business and government.  Fortunately, we aren’t.

The Old Spice Man: A Traditional Triumph

The viral success of The Old Spice Man campaign prompted Craig Reiss to parse its success factors and explain how companies of any size can apply them.  His dissection offers breadth and many practical insights.  Here’s the link: http://blog.entrepreneur.com/2010/07/lessons-from-the-old-spice-man.php

There’s a “meta” lesson, too.  Created by ad agency Weiden + Kennedy, the campaign was conceived as entertainment.  It handled the Web accordingly—as TV but in near real-time and two-way—and the work itself was genuinely entertaining.

Entertainment is not a core competency in interaction design.  Its prevailing paradigm assumes a purposeful user with her own intentions the fulfillment of which drives her further interaction.  Assuming a purposeful user doesn’t rule out but does militate against entertainment.  The prevailing paradigm also assumes optimization: a steady stream of user data informs ongoing redesign that in turn yields continually improving results.  Optimization and entertainment are not antithetical but they are apples and oranges. 

My somewhat ironic take-away is that the type of talent capable of creating a campaign like The Old Spice Man may more likely be found among the creative staffs of ad agencies where entertainment is the prevailing paradigm than among digital experts.

Imaginative Hedonism

Review:  Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism

This important book aspires to complement Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Specifically, just as Weber provided an historical account for the rise of “instrumental rationality” that drives the sphere of production, Campbell offers an historical account of the rise of “imaginative hedonism” that drives modern consumption.

His central theme is that pleasure itself was redefined in the 18th century. In former times, it was sought through the senses: food, sex, music, laughter. Thus, elites had banquets, harems, musicians, and clowns while the masses had carnivals, their annual taste of the same. The modern economy, according to Campbell, replaced the sensory experience of the body with the emotional experience of the imagination – daydreams of finer lifestyles, novel consumer goods, exotic experiences et al. Centrally important, these images are created or modified by the individual for self-consumption. In other words, it is not the buying, owning or consuming but the imagining – “the ability to create an illusion known to be false but felt to be true” – that pleasures us. Moderns became adept at what Campbell calls “autonomous imaginative hedonism” long before there was media or advertising; it’s not our wants but our wanting that is insatiable.

The book is organized in two parts. The first half is critical and dissects the inadequacies of economic explanations of wants and their origins in terms of increasing population, increasing standards of living and other macro trends and of sociological explanations that rely on emulation effects. The second half is historical. Like Weber Campbell anchors his account in the Calvinist strain of 17th century Protestantism but the legacy that he follows leads to the 18th century pietistic cults of sensibility and melancholy, then on to Sentimentalism (sensibility + Christian benevolence), culminating in 19th century Romanticism and finally democratizing as bohemianism in the early 20th century.

Densely argued and quite long, this is not an easy read. Moreover, those who prefer their historical explanations anchored in a society’s organization of power and wealth will not likely be convinced by a history of ideas based sermons, novels and philosophy. Finally, the scope is limited largely to Great Britain with some attention to France and Germany.

Those weaknesses pale when compared with this volume’s three important contributions. First, the argument makes room for the pursuit of pleasure along side the pursuit of wealth in understanding the evolution of modern society. Similarly, it makes room for emotion along side reason in that evolution. Second, it explains why we embrace rather than reject an everyday life diffused by the shimmers of advertising. Finally, it puts the consumer as the active and creative force at the center of consumerism.

The Value of You: Not Much, Says US Law

Consumer data is big business.  Leading aggregators like Acxiom, Experian and others make hundreds of milions each year, but the individuals about whom this information pertains don’t get a penny.  In legal terms, we have a right of privacy in order to prevent harm but no corresponding right of publicity to ensure benefit from our profiles in the datascape. 

Because business and government make decisions about individuals based on the personal information about them stored in databases, society’s protections have focused on restricting the collection and disclosure of that information and ensuring its truthfulness, largely to prevent institutions from making harmful decisions, e.g., about job offers, insurance rates, bank loans etc. on the basis of incomplete, outdated or erroneous data.  Accordingly, the rights that individuals need—and are increasingly getting–are notice that the institution is collecting information, an explanation of the uses to which the institution will put that information, access to the individual record in the institution’s database, the ability to correct inaccuracies in that record, etc.

Designed to protect the individual from harm, the privacy framework does nothing to ensure the individual can benefit from her personal data.  That’s a matter for tort law, and decisions in that arena have largely denied consumers any interest in the exploitation of the own data for their own benefit.

The tort of appropriation occurs when one “appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another.”  For an appropriate tort to be actionable, the likeness must be complete and generally recognizable.   Consumer profiles in the datascape are never complete—they’re always partial by design—and the courts have upheld the tort of appreciation only for celebrities.  Similarly, the right of publicity—to own, protect and commercially exploit one’s own name and likeness—has been confined to celebrities.

In fact, the courts have ruled that the individual’s personal information has no commercial value.  Specifically, American Express was exonerated for selling its card-members names to merchants because “an individual name has value only when it is associated with the defendant’s lists.”  That is, the aggregator by compiling and categorizing our personal information had created all the value.  

Since aggregators are not alchemists, however, the value of the individual data they aggregate cannot be zero.  Accordingly, some legal scholars have argued that the value of the individual data is determined by how much it takes for a person to relinquish it.  Since millions of us readily give up our information for supermarket discounts, ring tones and other trifles, its value to us must be low, they argue and then conclude that we’re already adequately compensated by the marketplace.

I don’t think it’s adequate and hope some clever entrepreneur figures out a way for me to get a bigger piece of the consumer information business.  After all, I generated that data, it describes me and I’d like to get paid for the use of my likeness.   

Advice for Innovators

Technology forecaster Paul Saffo’s oft-repeated dictum is worth sharing and remembering:

Do not mistake a clear vision for a short distance.

The Devil in the Data?

People get creeped out by data but usually can’t explain why. One reason is that the devil doesn’t lie in the data but in the algorithms–the rules that process the data.

These rules rule. They sit atop the data and crunch it into something meaningful. They could be arguable and could lead to errors of various types but, largely invisible, they are beyond critique.

Fortunately, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston recently issued a report on redlining by credit-card companies that offers an excellent example of exactly what makes people ill at ease with the machinations of data.

The top-line finding is that credit-card companies discriminate among customers, offering higher credit lines to similarly qualified residents of White neighborhoods than to residents of Black neighborhoods.

“After controlling for the influence of such other place-specific factors as crime, housing vacancy rates, and general population demographics, the paper finds qualitatively large differences in the amount of credit offered to similarly qualified applicants living in Black versus White areas.”

Obviously, having less credit available is a disadvantage but that’s only the half of it.  The other half is a rule that compounds the problem.

In determining an individual’s credit score, the credit-card companies’ rule compares the amount borrowed to the amount available. The smaller this ratio, the higher the credit score. So, two individuals with the same loan and same history of timely repayment will get different credit scores based on the different amounts of credit that were available to them—a factor about which they can do nothing.

There are numerous problems here. Racism is one.  That is a particular version of another and more general problem: the ethics of applying a group-based parameter—here, neighborhood-based credit lines—to an individual’s profile—here, his or her credit-worthiness. But what creeps people out is their “sense” that calculations, judgments and decisions about them are being made behind the scenes in mysterious ways that could be damaging and over which they are powerless.

This concern is are neither paranoid not Luddite. People are right to be concerned and they’re concerned for the right reasons. There’s more to the datascape than data. Over and above data are the invisible rules that determine what data ultimately mean.

 Unfortunately, these conerns are being addressed by politicians in a slew of proposed laws to regulate Internet advertising.  IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg offers a comprehensive and well grounded critique of these ill-conceived initiatives.   But fending off government interference in the marketplace will not address the root problem.   That would require the data-crunching community–public and private–to introduce and examine their practices through the lens of ethics in addition to the lens of optimization.  

 

America’s Skittish Psyche

Behaviors like that described below are often symptoms and portents.

According to Reuters| NY – Costco Wholesale Corp said on Tuesday that the warehouse club operator has seen some unusual demand for certain items like rice and flour as US customers, worried over global food shortages, look to stock up on basic items.  CEO James Sinegal told Reuters the retailer had seen increased demand in the past week and a half, and some of its stores, including certain locations in California’s Bay Area, had put limits on the sales of these items.

 ”There’s been an increase in purchasing but we think it’s manageable. At the moment, we think we have it relatively under control,” he said. 

Sinegal believes the surge in demand was prompted by media reports in recent weeks discussing rising global demand and shortages in some countries for basic food items like rice and flour.

The Reuters story is here.