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

Humans Inside Machines

Review:  Mark Poster, The Mode of Information:  Post-Structuralism and Social Context

Everyone who wants to understand how subjectivity, the “in here” of each of us, is shaped in the late modern age must read two chapters of this book. What McLuhan did for media, Poster does for information; he explains how databases and computer science set us up and bring us forth in their own distinctive ways. Saying he “explains” is perhaps too strong; the shaping of our “in here” is an elusive matter. But if you’re looking to understand critics who complain that our everyday life is “informatized” and that the self is “multiplied by databases,” these chapters are superior to anything I’ve read eleswhere, especially given their brevity. The remainder –an introduction to post-industrial society and chapters on TV commercials and electronic writing–are excellent and will be useful to many.

Poster’s perspective is commonly known as “post-modern,” and he enlists four seminal thinkers to do the heavy lifting: Jean Baudrillard (TV commercials), Michel Foucault (databases), Jacques Derrida (electronic writing) and Francois Lyotard (computer science). Readers who are not familiar with this perspective or these authors may find themselves befuddled. Poster doesn’t do much handholding; the book is a terse 150+ pages. To remedy this situation, readers may want to bone up with Robert Hollinger Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: A Thematic Approach (Contemporary Social Theory) and/or Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences.

Once you’re up to speed, anyone thinking hard about how the self, the hero of modernism, emerges within post-modern or more modestly late modern conditions will find Poster’s slender volume an important contribution.

Three Cheers for Cyber-sociology

Review: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (New York: Penguin, 2008)

Three virtues–sociological, political and historical–make this book important.

For part of the 19^th and most of the 20^th centuries, the role of groups in our collective life has been on the wane.  Modernism is anchored in individuality; consumerism is centered in self-expression; privatism promotes social isolation.  Books such as The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Bowling Alone (2000) have ably documented this situation.   Clay Shirky argues that digital media counter-balance this historical trend because they enable groups to organize easily and autonomously and for both short and long term goals.  IMHO that is the big picture import of this book: it’s a pioneering sociological exploration of this empowerment.

Shirky thinks that the resulting groups will in general improve our lives if only because these groups form autonomously around their own members’ goals.  There’s logic but not necessity in that view, as Shirky knows.  Each group will have its own impacts—greater and lesser benefits as well as unintended consequences, positive and/or negative—that could, moreover, extend beyond its members.  Only time will tell where this empowerment nets out at the societal level.  Still, his politics lean in a power-to-the-people direction and the book’s second virtue is to present this potential as an opportunity available to all today with some leanings en passant about how to leverage it.

Decades from now, this book will be important for an historical reason: it’s an eyewitness account of a dynamic situation.  Shirky does propose basic principles that underlie successful group formation and they have practical “how to” value. But he does not serve up some neat and tidy model.  Quite the contrary, he describes with enthusiasm the diversity—on many dimensions—of the groups being formed today via this empowerment.  This first-hand account by an informed observer, conscious of his biases and comfortable with the messiness of reality, has value on that score alone.

In short, three cheers for three virtues.

W.H. Auden on Datamining

The Unknown Citizen
W.H. Auden

 

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

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.   

Emily Dickinson on Blogging

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Emily Dickinson

I‘m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us–don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog,
To tell your name the live long day
To an admiring bog.

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.  

 

The Flapdoodle over Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus

Anyone who’s taken Art History 101 has seen a lot of pictures of young naked women with a lot more flesh exposed than Annie Liebovitz’s controversial photo of Miley Cyrus draped in a bedsheet for the current issue of Vanity Fair.  What irks me is the artistic banality; the bared-back, over-the-shoulder, come-hither portrait of silent screen sirens was a staple of this magazine’s first iteration back in the 1920s.  But others are down right outraged by something else:  the contradiction between Disney’s good girl character Hannah Montana and Vanity Fair‘s sexually charged photos of the actress who portrays her. 

Apparently, parents are worried that their pre-teen daughters who identify with the character will now identify with the actress.  Moms and dads should give their girls more credit; they’re smarter and stronger than this parental backlash implies.  I suspect this outrage has more to do with adult prurience than with teen-age sexuality and is one more instance in a very long history of adults working out–perhaps, acting out–their own desires and fears under the guise of protecting children. 

The useful lesson in this flapdoodle is that the clean-cut character and the sultry celebrity are both fictional and provide a widely known instance of a larger situation that’s engulfing each of us.  Thanks largely to the Internet, we’re entering an era in which each of us is responsbile for actively constructing public (albeit virtual) personas that reflect different facets of the same person but none of which captures the whole self.  

Younger generations are already pioneering the tasks and skills for managing an increasingly kaleidoscopic identity.  They protested loudly, for example, when Facebook started distributing without permission their profile updates and online purchases to their Facebook friends, and in both cases Facebook had to back off.  Although framed as a privacy issue, it’s better understood as a publicity issue–the right to control one’s public personas.  

Adults still hung up on old hang ups should wise up to the new challenges.  As for teenage sexuality, honi soit qui mal y pense.