Well, I think I’m winding down here. I can tell that I’m close to being out of things to say (for now, anyway); my mind has begun to wander back to my last multi-part monoramble on seeing time… Perhaps I’ll check in on that sometime soon.

In the meantime, the last few notes I had are probably not enough to chatter on about individually, so I’ll just briefly mention them here.

* * *

Is there a difference in the ethics of a user and the ethics of a creator? I think there is. When I began listing some ideas about ethics and technology, this was the first thing I wrote down. I never really fleshed it out, and still haven’t really. But what I’m thinking of is this: We all are users. There are no creators that are not also users. But there are some users that are not creators. Many of them, in fact. Therefore, creators have an ethical responsibility that users not only do not have, but cannot have. The user-creator has a scope of understanding that the user-consumer does not share, which creates the responsibility. What, specifically, is within the purview of that responsibility is probably very debatable. Does the user-creator have responsibility for issues of economy—the influence a technology might have on the world around it—sustainability—the resources required to create, distribute, and maintain a technology—or the well-being of the user—whether the use of a technology could have negative physical, mental or social repercussions? Are these questions being asked before an idea becomes a product? Are these questions being asked before a product is advertised?

* * *

The internet is a country Or, perhaps better said, corporations dealing in data must begin to think deeply about the political and diplomatic issues that arise from what they do. In response to efforts within some countries to restrict their citizens’ internet access, Secretary of State Clinton recently said:

“When ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled and people constrained in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us.”

I agree in principle, just as I agree that many people in the world would be largely better off if their country looked a bit more like ours. However, some of the freedoms and systems that we enjoy are inextricable from our culture, and therefore wouldn’t always be simple to export elsewhere. Political systems shape culture expansively, and are not as easily spread as, say, fast food franchises. What I’m getting at here is that I’m not sure we can say so simply that the internet is this meta-political, meta-cultural entity to which countries are subordinate. Perhaps this will end up being true—that the technological manifestation of the world population will supersede political boundaries in a way that restricts the level of control that sovereign nations have enjoyed for millennia—but at this point in time, it seems to me that internet companies should be acknowledging the political and diplomatic restrictions that are in place now. That is, unless they want to be international activists. If so, then go for it. But if not, I’d ask why a business dealing in information shouldn’t have to play by the same rules overseas as a business dealing in hamburgers.

Ok, one last thing…

* * *

Here’s an ethical rule that seems to be an internet extension of the The Golden Rule: Ask not for that which you would not give yourself. This is a huge problem in marketing: On the one hand, I as an individual am unlikely to trust those to whom I feel obliged to share personal information (i.e. corporations, banks, etc.). In those transactions, I am subject to their terms and have no means by which to control the relationship. This structure is responsible for the trend we see online today, where applications and services enable users to sign in with pre-existing social accounts (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and the like) rather than have to create entirely new ones. But this is not necessarily a benefit to the user. Sure, it’s convenient in the short-term—one less username/password to remember—but it also creates connections by which your information is now shared in a greater network than you probably intended. If you declined that opportunity, and created a unique user account for every service, you’d be shocked to discover some day that Twitter knew your comings and goings on Mint.com, down to the transaction, and therefore was able to build a detailed profile of your interests, decisions, etc. enriched by your tweets and then sell it to advertisers. Of course, this specific situation is not happening right now with Twitter, but it could. It is happening with Facebook, which is the largest advertising network on the internet today, and operating in exactly this way. Regardless of whether your Facebook account information has any overlap with any other service or website, Facebook has taken it upon themselves to follow you everywhere you go on the web, and sells that insight to anyone who wants to advertise to their millions of users. The exchange is socialization and convenience for the monetization of human beings.

Thoughts?

Posted at 5:48pm and tagged with: ethical technology, one column, ethics, technology,.

Continuing these thoughts in a meandering sort of way (Part 1 → Part 2 → You Are Here).

Yesterday I was talking about the filter bubbles that we are so easily caught within—especially on the internet, where an algorithmic approach to dealing with information begins with benign personalization, but can lead to a very real distortion of our worldview. The better the machine knows you, the more it tints your windows to your liking. On the one hand, it’s a surprising turn of events for those who have been engaging online since the days of Geocities—once a thriving a diverse community with one major thing in common: virtuality; now a ghetto in a snow globe. On the other, it’s human nature. We want the world to look more like us. It’s safer that way.

Today, the economics of the internet.

Just as we thought that the internet would increase the existential weight of diversity, we also believed it would evenly distribute opportunity and wealth. But that is not what has happened. Instead, the internet has apparently only further isolated wealth to the very few. When I mentioned this to a friend, his face took on a very distinct mix of confusion and distress—a look that is the result of knowing dissent but not what to make of it—and said,

“Well, what about email? Everyone uses email and benefits from it!”

I thought about that momentarily and realized that email was actually a perfect example of my point. Yes, email is in many ways a wonderful communication tool. For people like me, who lead in small companies and therefore have a large amount of autonomy, a fairly short line exists between tools like email and real, monetary value. But for most people who actively use email—aside from their personal use—their productivity has increased over time but out of proportion with their economic gain. Most people today are not earning substantially more than they were 10 or so years ago, taking inflation into account. Yet, corporations are making far more than they were 10 years ago (I dare you to Google “corporate profits vs wages” and not drown in the charts, but here’s a comprehensible one). Among other things, this shows that the corporation derives the value from technologies like email, but the individual does not. And, of course, this is just one isolated technology. The same could obviously be said about social media technology when you consider the vast number of hours we spend immersed in social networks which offer users virtually zero monetary value.

On that note, Edge.org recently pointed a camera at Jaron Lanier and let him talk for an hour, the result being a pretty fascinating point of view on the economics of the internet, or as Lanier calls it, “The Local-Global Flip.” If you’ve got an hour to spare, I’d recommend it. But on the social media side of things, here’s a quote I pulled from it (there’s no fancy technological way available for me to do this other than starting/typing/stopping/rewinding/starting/typing/etc., by the way):

“I’m really kind of astonished at how readily a great many people I know—young people—have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms, in any meaningful way, and traded them for being able to screw around online. There’s a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet to be seen by somebody once in a while gives them enough ego gratification that it’s ok with them to be still living with their parents in their thirties. That’s such a strange tradeoff and if you project that forward obviously it really does become a problem. I think that leads to a world that Wells and Kurt Vonnegut and many others wrote about where there just is enough virtual bread and circuses—just barely enough to keep the poor in check and they just kind of whither away through attrition or something.”

I think implicit in all of this is a very good question as to the meaning of progress.

I’ve quoted from Howard Rheingold already in this series of posts, so I’ll do it again. This come’s from The Virtual Community:

“What does it mean that the same hopes, described in the same words, for a decentralization of power, a deeper and more widespread citizen involvement in matters of state, a great equalizer for ordinary citizens to counter the forces of central control, have been voiced in the popular press for two centuries in reference to steam, electricity, and television? We’ve had enough time to live with steam, electricity, and television to recognize that they did indeed change the world, and to recognize that the utopia of technological millenarians has not yet materialized.

An entire worldview and sales job are packed into the word progress, which links the notion of improvement with the notion of innovation, highlights the benefits of innovation while hiding the toxic side-effects of extractive and lucrative technologies, and then sells more of it to people via television as a cure for the stress of living in a technology-dominated world. The hope that the next technology will solve the problems created by the way the last technology was used is a kind of millennial, even messianic, hope, apparently ever-latent in the breasts of the citizenry. The myth of technological progress emerged out of the same Age of Reason that gave us the myth of representative democracy, a new organizing vision that still works pretty well, despite the decline in vigor of the old democratic institutions. It’s hard to give up on one Enlightenment ideal while clinging to another.”

As I write this I realize that the lines between the economics of the internet and the politics of the internet are extraordinarily fuzzy, if not in some ways nonexistent. After all, economies are political structures, and political structures are economic. What Rheingold had his eye on back in 2000 is how this particular technology—which was already scaling beyond most other discreet technologies in history in terms of use and application—brought to the surface not only issues of politics and economy, but deeper, more foundational ideas of progress, even purpose.

Ten years later, immersed in it as we are, it is difficult not to follow the question of the purpose of the internet with another one: What is our purpose?

Posted at 3:49pm and tagged with: ethics, one column, technology, ethical technology,.

A few weeks ago, I sat down for a cup of coffee and conversation with a new friend—someone who had been put in touch with me by a mutual friend of ours who knew that we had a shared interest in technology, ethics, and all the “big ideas” in between. Vance teaches this stuff—hes’s an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy department at Guilford College—while I try to figure out how to apply it in a working world where few actively or deeply consider ethics (until it’s too late, that is). Our connector was Paul, director of iBiblio.org and Clinical Associate Professor of the schools of Journalism & Mass Communications and Information & Library Sciences at UNC. These guys are both way smarter than me; I’m glad to know them both.

Anyway, there Vance and I sat for several hours batting around all kinds of issues and ideas—from monopolies of information to informational transactional responsibility to the filter bubble to the economics and politics of informational systems to automation and on and on. This was one of those conversations I wish I had recorded, because when I got home, I felt that panicky sensation as my brain began—out of necessity—to hemorrhage vast swaths of detail that had been exchanged between us. I did jot down a bunch of notes and have been adding to them here and there since.

Which brings me here. I’d like to take my note-jotting to the web. So here begins a few days of rambling on what comes to my mind when I think about ethics and technology.

I’ll start with monopolies of information. Let the unedited rambling begin:

* * *

The big news: Digitized information is centralized, and therefore, easily controlled. I know, I know—the conventional wisdom has been that the revolutionary nature of the internet is in its decentralization of information, which is disruptive to the powers-that-be. But no, I don’t think that’s actually true. The internet has created the impression of decentralization. But, once information is digitized, it’s bits are part of someone’s property. Maybe that someone is just some relatively unknown person who happens to have her own server, but for the most part, that someone is Google, or Facebook, or some other massive corporation that has offered storage so plentiful that it almost disappears from common perception. As James Bridle has pointed out, the cloud is a lie. The cloud is marketing speak for sprawling, hot server facilities that horizontally out-scale most architecture you’ve ever encountered. They’re not invisible, they’re not lighter than air, they’re not public. They’re massive, opaque, and very, very private. The point is that once information is digitized, ownership becomes pretty complicated—which works to the corporate advantage, because in most cases, you the uploader actually hand ownership over the the host. The question of who owns your emails, your documents, your videos, pictures, music, etc. is fraught with issues that have not been worked out with you in mind. Think about what this means in the long term.

If books are digitized as a way of “extending” their reach (the anecdotally accepted motivation behind e-books), their success in extension will create economic pressure to no longer produce any physical copies. That’s just one example—one that many are pondering right now. But once that happens, where the physical is truly eclipsed by the digital, the entity which controls the storage of the digital controls the flow of information. Perceptions and knowledge can be controlled as never before. Of course, this isn’t a novel idea. Even at the beginning of the web—at least the web as we know it today, Howard Rheingold wrote of his concern for how the internet could be too easily dominated by too few powers:

“The telecommunications industry is a business, viewed primarily as an economic player. But telecommunications gives certain people access to means of influencing certain other people’s thoughts and perceptions, and that access—who has it and who doesn’t have it—is intimately connected with political power. The prospect of the technical capabilities of a near-ubiquitous high-bandwidth Net in the hands of a small number of commercial interests has dire political implications. Whoever gains the political edge on this technology will be able to use the technology to consolidate power.”

Before digitization, we had distributed freedoms—to browse and discover information in unique ways based upon the individualized freedoms of other individuals, store owners, and librarians to curate collections. Though access was challenged in physical ways (e.g. no central inventory, things going out of print, costs barring ownership in some cases), those factors were not centrally controlled. Once a book was printed, it was very hard to alter or destroy or control. But if all books go digital, they will be comparatively simple to alter, destroy or control. If someone at the top of the corporate food chain wanted to (or was persuaded to) blink a text out of digital existence, it could be possible to do so. It’s ironic: digitization appeals to the desire to spread and share information, yet it makes it easier than ever before to control, alter, or censor.

In between me and discreet information are other issue of exposure and access. When I am shopping on Amazon and see “people who bought ___ also bought ____” I think I am getting an objective, qualitative recommendation. After all, if people bought that thing I want also bought this other stuff, then maybe I’m more likely to want this other stuff than other other stuff. But the question underlying all of that is, What about the other stuff that’s not even in this ecosystem? Or, bigger yet, what about making stuff for yourself—not necessarily all of it, because the DIY thing can become an idol of its own—instead of buying everything?

And what about the role of privacy in all of this? What is amazing to me, now reading back in Rheingold’s writings, is not that some of the outcomes have indeed come to pass and were unseen by him decades ago (he did see many of them) but that the possible human responses to some of those outcomes elicited a could-you-imagine?! incredulity that, in its naiveté, makes me shake my head in sadness. Example:

“The second school of criticism focuses on the fact that high-bandwidth interactive networks could be used in conjunction with other technologies as a means of surveillance, control, and disinformation as well as a conduit for useful information. This direct assault on personal liberty is compounded by a more diffuse erosion of old social values due to the capabilities of new technologies; the most problematic example is the way traditional notions of privacy are challenged on several fronts by the ease of collecting and disseminating detailed information about individuals via cyberspace technologies. When people use the convenience of electronic communication or transaction, we leave invisible digital trails; now that technologies for tracking those trails are maturing, there is cause to worry. The spreading use of computer matching to piece together the digital trails we all leave in cyberspace is one indication of privacy problems to come.

Along with all the person-to-person communications exchanged on the world’s telecommunications networks are vast flows of other kinds of personal information—credit information, transaction processing, health information. Most people take it for granted that no one can search through all the electronic transactions that move through the world’s networks in order to pin down an individual for marketing—or political—motives. Remember the “knowbots” that would act as personal servants, swimming in the info-tides, fishing for information to suit your interests? What if people could turn loose knowbots to collect all the information digitally linked to you? What if the Net and cheap, powerful computers give that power not only to governments and large corporations but to everyone?

Every time we travel or shop or communicate, citizens of the credit-card society contribute to streams of information that travel between point of purchase, remote credit bureaus, municipal and federal information systems, crime information databases, central transaction databases. And all these other forms of cyberspace interaction take place via the same packet-switched, high-bandwidth network technology—those packets can contain transactions as well as video clips and text files. When these streams of information begin to connect together, the unscrupulous or would-be tyrants can use the Net to catch citizens in a more ominous kind of net.”

Not only has all of that come to pass, but we have come to pass on being concerned about it. What Rheingold characterized as “unscrupulous” and even tyranny has become basic business practice. So things have changed, but more importantly, so have we. The connection between information and democracy is extraordinarily meaningful, yet it seems to be one we take largely for granted. Of course, Rheingold continues on in that chapter to rail against “the selling of democracy” in a way that chillingly corresponds to what is going on all around us today. You should really read this. What it shows is that today’s circumstance didn’t just happen to us, it is the deliberate fulfillment of an agenda—one that should cause anyone to sincerely question the integrity of the democracy we live in.

That’s probably enough for today. More tomorrow…

Thoughts?

Posted at 3:22pm and tagged with: ethics, one column, technology, ethical technology,.