Posts Tagged ‘information’
“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world”*…
Long-time readers of (R)D will know of your correspondent’s affection for– and commitment to– archives and archiving: see, e.g., here, here, here, here, or here. As the new administration is sytematically scrubbing government websites of public data and threatening the National Archive, it’s a painfully-timely concern.
Digital pioneer Mark Pesce weighs in with a reminder that our archiving efforts should be broad– and that we shouldn’t neglect the personal…
When moving house a few months back I found several heavy plastic tubs that, upon inspection, I saw contained my life’s work in print. They were full of articles, magazines, books and book chapters.
That informal archive represents only a small portion of my total output. I’ve been writing on and for the web pretty much since it came into existence outside of CERN, so have more than 30 years’ worth of material online.
Those plastic tubs are therefore a proverbial iceberg that represent perhaps a tenth of my output, the rest of which is submerged on networks.
I had wanted to write about how to make our invisible digital lives more visible; then two horrible events – one personal, the other of global significance – reset my compass.
Earlier this month I lost my good friend Tony Kastanos to lung cancer. I’d always known him as an artist – musician, painter, provocateur – but it wasn’t until he was gone that I learned from his collaborators that he’d also released three albums of electronic music, produced with collaborator Tim Gruchy, who showed me how to find it on iTunes and Spotify.
I’d known Tony for two decades, but he’d never told me about his electronica work. Nor had he told me about his award-winning stop-motion video animation, Amerika Amerika.
Tim wondered aloud how to ensure that their collaborations would continue to be available. It’s an essential question confronting any creative talent working in the digital era: How do we continue to offer our contributions to the generations that follow, when we’re no longer around to spruik them?
The Internet Archive has a pivotal role to play here – not just because of its immunity to the commercial mutability of a Spotify or an Apple Music, but because its very existence and name imply a promise to maintain a long-term archive of all online creative works. Tim – and all of Tony’s other collaborators – could be putting copies of all their works into a Tony-Kastanos-archive-within-The-Archive. If that happens, my friend won’t disappear completely.
Half an hour after I’d learned of Tony’s passing, a friend in Los Angeles sent me a long, harrowing text message expressing fear the fires battering the city could claim their home.
A week later, they were relieved to find their home intact – but many others did not.
Within a few days, a story began to circulate about one of the structures that did not survive: The building housing the archive of the Theosophical Society.
A century ago, Theosophists stood at the forefront of what today we’d call the “New Age” movement. Although the society’s star has dimmed in the decades since, their influence on religion, philosophy and culture remains profound. Their archive housed most the papers and correspondence of the founders and main movers of the Theosophical Society – its genesis and history.
As Errol Morris has said, “People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.” The best defense is wide distribution (per the full Aaron Swartz quote, below).
Where are the comprehensive archives to protect digital works, or allow us to memorialize friends? “Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise,” from @mpesce.arvr.social.ap.brid.gy in @theregister.com.
See also: “Century-Scale Storage” from Maxwell Neely-Cohen and the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School
Oh, and now is a good time to visit– and support– the Internet Archive.
* “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks… With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past.” — Aaron Swartz
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As we prioritize protection, we might recall that it was on this date in 1497 that Dominican friar and populist agitator Girolamo Savonarola, having convinced the citizenry of Florence to expel the Medici and recruited the city-state’s youth in a puritanical campaign, presided over “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” the public burning of art works, books, cosmetics, and other items deemed to be vessels of personal aggrandizement. Many art historians, relying on Vasari‘s account, believe that Botticelli, a partisan of Savonarola, consigned several of his paintings to the flames (and then “fell into very great distress”). Others are not so certain. In any case, it seems sure that the fire consumed works by Fra Bartolomeo, Lorenzo di Credi, and many other painters, along with books by Boccaccio, manuscripts of secular songs, a number of statues, and other antiquities.
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts”*…
In a recent post we considered “agnotology”—the study of ignorance. Today, John Timmer unpacks a related phenomenon…
The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a corollary to Dunning-Kruger: People have a strong tendency to believe that they always have enough data to make an informed decision—regardless of what information they actually have.
The work, done by Hunter Gehlbach, Carly Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, is based on an experiment in which they intentionally gave people only partial, biased information, finding that people never seemed to consider they might only have a partial picture. “Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not,” they write. The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions…
[Timmer explains the experiment and runs through the particulars of the results]
… This is especially problematic in the current media environment. Many outlets have been created with the clear intent of exposing their viewers to only a partial view of the facts—or, in a number of cases, the apparent intent of spreading misinformation. The new work clearly indicates that these efforts can have a powerful effect on beliefs, even if accurate information is available from various sources…
The full PLOS One paper is here.
When given partial info, most feel confident that’s all they need to know: “People think they already know everything they need to make decisions,” from @jtimmer.bsky.social in @arstechnica.com.
* Bertrand Russell
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As we read widely, we might spare a thought for a victim of just this sort of misplaced confidence, John Scopes; he died on this date in 1970. A teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, he was prosecuted in 1925 for teaching evolution in the local high school.
… [Scopes] was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it illegal for teachers to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he incriminated himself deliberately so the case could have a defendant.
Scopes was found guilty and was fined $100 (equivalent to $1,700 in 2023), but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. The trial served its purpose of drawing intense national publicity, as national reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the high-profile lawyers who had agreed to represent each side. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and former secretary of state, argued for the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow served as the defense attorney for Scopes. The trial publicized the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, which set modernists, who said evolution could be consistent with religion, against fundamentalists, who said the word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The case was thus seen both as a theological contest and as a trial on whether evolution should be taught in schools…
… In 1958 the National Defense Education Act was passed with the encouragement of many legislators who feared the United States education system was falling behind that of the Soviet Union. The act yielded textbooks, produced in cooperation with the American Institute of Biological Sciences, which stressed the importance of evolution as the unifying principle of biology. The new educational regime was not unchallenged. The greatest backlash was in Texas where attacks were launched in sermons and in the press. Complaints were lodged with the State Textbook Commission. However, in addition to federal support, a number of social trends had turned public discussion in favor of evolution. These included increased interest in improving public education, legal precedents separating religion and public education, and continued urbanization in the South. This led to a weakening of the backlash in Texas, as well as to the repeal of the Butler Law in Tennessee in 1967…
“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship”*…
… if then, even more so now. Ben Tarnoff takes off from Lowry Pressly‘s new book to ponder why privacy matters and why we have such trouble even thinking about how to protect it…
… Today, it is harder to keep one’s mind in place. Our thoughts leak through the sieve of our smartphones, where they join the great river of everyone else’s. The consequences, for both our personal and collective lives, are much discussed: How can we safeguard our privacy against state and corporate surveillance? Is Instagram making teen-agers depressed? Is our attention span shrinking?
There is no doubt that an omnipresent Internet connection, and the attendant computerization of everything, is inducing profound changes. Yet the conversation that has sprung up around these changes can sometimes feel a little predictable. The same themes and phrases tend to reappear. As the Internet and the companies that control it have become an object of permanent public concern, the concerns themselves have calcified into clichés. There is an algorithmic quality to our grievances with algorithmic life.
Lowry Pressly’s new book, “The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life,” defies this pattern. It is a radiantly original contribution to a conversation gravely in need of new thinking. Pressly, who teaches political science at Stanford, takes up familiar fixations of tech discourse—privacy, mental health, civic strife—but puts them into such a new and surprising arrangement that they are nearly unrecognizable. The effect is like walking through your home town after a tornado: you recognize the buildings, but after some vigorous jumbling they have acquired a very different shape.
Pressly trained as a philosopher, and he has a philosopher’s fondness for sniffing out unspoken assumptions. He finds one that he considers fundamental to our networked era: “the idea that information has a natural existence in human affairs, and that there are no aspects of human life which cannot be translated somehow into data.” This belief, which he calls the “ideology of information,” has an obvious instrumental value to companies whose business models depend on the mass production of data, and to government agencies whose machinery of monitoring and repression rely on the same.
But Pressly also sees the ideology of information lurking in a less likely place—among privacy advocates trying to defend us from digital intrusions. This is because the standard view of privacy assumes there is “some information that already exists,” and what matters is keeping it out of the wrong hands. Such an assumption, for Pressly, is fatal. It “misses privacy’s true value and unwittingly aids the forces it takes itself to be resisting,” he writes. To be clear, Pressly is not opposed to reforms that would give us more power over our data—but it is a mistake “to think that this is what privacy is for.” “Privacy is valuable not because it empowers us to exercise control over our information,” he argues, “but because it protects against the creation of such information in the first place.”
If this idea sounds intriguing but exotic, you may be surprised to learn how common it once was. “A sense that privacy is fundamentally opposed to information has animated public moral discourse on the subject since the very beginning,” Pressly writes…
[Tarnoff recaps Pressly’s a brief history of the technologies that changed our relationship to information, from Kodak through CCTV, to AI…]
… The reason that Pressly feels so strongly about imposing limits on datafication is not only because of the many ways that data can be used to damage us. It is also because, in his view, we lose something precious when we become information, regardless of how it is used. In the very moment when data are made, Pressly believes, a line is crossed. “Oblivion” is his word for what lies on the other side.
Oblivion is a realm of ambiguity and potential. It is fluid, formless, and opaque. A secret is an unknown that can become known. Oblivion, by contrast, is unknowable: it holds those varieties of human experience which are “essentially resistant to articulation and discovery.” It is also a place beyond “deliberate, rational control,” where we lose ourselves or, as Pressly puts it, “come apart.” Sex and sleep are two of the examples he provides. Both bring us into the “unaccountable regions of the self,” those depths at which our ego dissolves and about which it is difficult to speak in definite terms. Physical intimacy is hard to render in words—“The experience is deflated by description,” Pressly observes—and the same is notoriously true of the dreams we have while sleeping, which we struggle to narrate, or even to remember, on waking.
Oblivion is fragile, however. When it comes into contact with information, it disappears. This is why we need privacy: it is the protective barrier that keeps oblivion safe from information. Such protection insures that “one can actually enter into oblivion from time to time, and that it will form a reliably available part of the structure of one’s society.”
But why do we need to enter into oblivion from time to time, and what good does it do us? Pressly gives a long list of answers, drawn not only from the Victorians but also from the work of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gay Talese, Jorge Luis Borges, and Hannah Arendt. One is that oblivion is restorative: we come apart in order to come back together. (Sleep is a case in point; without a nightly suspension of our rational faculties, we go nuts.) Another is the notion that oblivion is integral to the possibility of personal evolution. “The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning,” Foucault writes. To do so, however, you must believe that the future can be different from the past—a belief that becomes harder to sustain when one is besieged by information, as the obsessive documentation of life makes it “more fixed, more factual, with less ambiguity and life-giving potentiality.” Oblivion, by setting aside a space for forgetting, offers a refuge from this “excess of memory,” and thus a standpoint from which to imagine alternative futures.
Oblivion is also essential for human dignity. Because we cannot be fully known, we cannot be fully instrumentalized. Immanuel Kant urged us to treat others as ends in themselves, not merely as means. For Pressly, our obscurities are precisely what endow us with a sense of value that exceeds our usefulness. This, in turn, helps assure us that life is worth living, and that our fellow human beings are worthy of our trust. “There can be no trust of any sort without some limits to knowledge,” Pressly writes…
… Psychoanalysis first emerged in the late nineteenth century, in parallel with the idea of privacy. This was a period when the boundary between public and private was being redrawn, not only with the onslaught of handheld cameras but also, more broadly, because of the dislocating forces of what historians call the Second Industrial Revolution. Urbanization pulled workers from the countryside and packed them into cities, while mass production meant they could buy (rather than make) most of what they needed. These developments weakened the institution of the family, which lost its primacy as people fled rural kin networks and the production of life’s necessities moved from the household to the factory.
In response, a new freedom appeared. For the first time, the historian Eli Zaretsky observes, “personal identity became a problem and a project for individuals.” If you didn’t have your family to tell you who you were, you had to figure it out yourself. Psychoanalysis helped the moderns to make sense of this question, and to try to arrive at an answer.
More than a century later, the situation looks different. If an earlier stage of capitalism laid the material foundations for a new experience of individuality, the present stage seems to be producing the opposite. In their taverns, theatres, and dance halls, the city dwellers of the Second Industrial Revolution created a culture of social and sexual experimentation. Today’s young people are lonely and sexless. At least part of the reason is the permanent connectivity that, as Pressly argues, conveys the feeling that “one’s time and attention—that is to say, one’s life—are not entirely one’s own.”
The modernist city promised anonymity, reinvention. The Internet is devoid of such pleasures. It is more like a village: a place where your identity is fixed. Online, we are the sum of what we have searched, clicked, liked, and bought. But there are futures beyond those predicted through statistical extrapolations from the present. In fact, the past is filled with the arrival of such futures: those blind corners when no amount of information could tell you what was coming. History has a habit of humbling its participants. Somewhere in its strange rhythms sits the lifelong work of making a life of one’s own…
We often want to keep some information to ourselves. But information itself may be the problem: “What Is Privacy For?” from @bentarnoff in @NewYorker. (Possible paywall; archived link here.)
Pair with the two (marvelous, provocative) documentary series from Adam Curtis and the BBC: The Century of Self and Hypernormalization, both of which are available on You Tube.)
* C. S. Lewis
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As we make room, we might send painfully-observant birthday greetings to Lenny Bruce; he was born on this date in 1925. A comedian, social critic, and satirist, he was ranked (in a 2017 Roling Stone poll) the third best stand-up comic of all time– behind Richard Pryor and George Carlin, both of whom credit Bruce as an influence.
“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret”*…
A graphic– and painful– reminder that the latter two are under constant attack…
Think about a personal and private google search and post it on this website. Something you might not have told the ones dearest to your heart. Google uses these searches to generate a data profile of you to sell on open bidding markets. This website creates a bubble for each search to remind us of all the data collected…
Every time we ask Google, we give it answers about ourselves: “Search TM.”
* Gabriel García Márquez
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As we Duck (Duck Go), we might recall that it was on this date in 1937 that Hormel introduced Spam. It was the company’s attempt to increase sales of pork shoulder, not at the time a very popular cut. While there are numerous speculations as to the “meaning of the name” (from a contraction of “spiced ham” to “Scientifically Processed Animal Matter”), its true genesis is known to only a small circle of former Hormel Foods executives.
As a result of the difficulty of delivering fresh meat to the front during World War II, Spam became a ubiquitous part of the U.S. soldier’s diet. It became variously referred to as “ham that didn’t pass its physical,” “meatloaf without basic training,” and “Special Army Meat.” Over 150 million pounds of Spam were purchased by the military before the war’s end. During the war and the occupations that followed, Spam was introduced into Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines, and other islands in the Pacific. Immediately absorbed into native diets, it has become a unique part of the history and effect of U.S. influence in the Pacific islands.
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.”*…
Further to a recent post on “seeing like a system” (and in a fashion, to last Monday’s post on misinformation), a provocative essay by Rohit Krishnan…
We’re living through a phase change that is at the root of a lot of our societal problems. It’s the fact that our information networks have become much more dense.
You exist as a node in a network. Other people are other nodes. They send you information, the edges. You process it, you create your own. Information flows in all directions.
There are all sorts of networks. If you imagine all of us as nodes and the information we receive from each other via edges, then the shape of the network defines the type of information that spreads.
When the type of information is extremely tantalising, one that spreads fast, then the whole network gets taken over with that information. And there’s even a tipping point at which the information breaks containment and spreads through the whole network. Here’s an excellent essay on the subject…
When there are a lot of neighbours to which a node is connected, then various types of information spreads much faster through the network. This is called network density, how many edges are connected on average to each node. And increased density means that there’s many more routes by which information can spread.
This is why cities have much higher rates of “cultural transmission” compared to rural areas. Or why in domains like fashion or ideas or innovation or language or even food, the speed of change and variety is much higher in cities. Because each new unit of culture can transmit from person to person so much faster when there are more people it can connect to.
Ok, this is basics about what a network is. But what happens when the entire world gets interconnected such that we’re all connected to each other much more densely? What would have changed in ourselves? Our culture?
Historically, you used to only have a few sources of news or information. Things that percolated through to your network or things you read in the news. Now information comes from all sides, hungry for your attention. And your “processing power” to make sense of this information hasn’t meaningfully changed.
Imagine seeing the world from this vantage point. A blinding array of data streaming at you, standing as a node. Some from near, some from afar. You take it all in, process it, and build up a sense of the world from it, including a sense of the other people and their beliefs reflecting back, from near and far.
If you do this, as a sentient being, you can’t help but develop a world model. A sense of the world, a sense of what others think of the world, perhaps even another layer or two. Even if you develop it only to help speed up the information processing that you need to do. It will be different in structure for each of you, of course, but part of a shared consensus reality nonetheless. A sense made up of all the information that came your way, including the sense you have of all the sense of information that came other people’s way, which helps them process the information flowing their way. Creating a collective sense of what’s going on, a knowledge of the shared reality in which we live.
We call this our culture…
Culture is the digital biosphere we create for ourselves. Culture is the infosphere we all swim in. If you think of the information that we all swap with each other as water, culture is the ocean made up of it, or a distilled version of the most common or communally known parts of that ocean.
Edward Hall, in his books Silent Language and Beyond Culture, writes about how culture is composed of the communication patterns, behaviours, and symbols that are shared amongst a group. We can think of culture as the common interconnected web that underlay the beliefs that we all hold, which constantly changes and evolves as our beliefs spread.
This is especially salient because part of the culture now is filled with efforts of many to escape it. This isn’t new, of course, and have existed since Thoreau. But there is an increase in it. People try tools for thought and software to recommend things or remember things, or AI to remember everything they read and interacted with, all so that there can be a way to deal with the information avalanche.
While this makes sense for an individual, the fact that this collectively defines the information ecosystem around us also means that the problem is on the supply side. This is why there is the rise of private spaces, especially since Twitter’s demise. Hence the theory that we live in the dark forest era of the internet:
Is our universe an empty forest or a dark one? If it’s a dark forest, then only Earth is foolish enough to ping the heavens and announce its presence. The rest of the universe already knows the real reason why the forest stays dark. It’s only a matter of time before the Earth learns as well.
This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.
In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.
The push to create private spaces, on discord or group chats, to truly express oneself or let mini-ecosystems flourish, they all are needed to make us stop sitting with our face deep inside the information superhighway. It’s to help make the networks you’re in a bit sparser.
And my thesis is that almost everything that we see that pushes against the cultural state we used to recognise, is as a result of this densification of our information networks. Whether it is group chats, private forums, discord, smartphones that are not that smart, yearning for the flip phones from Motorola, various tools for thought, AI software to help you focus, better note taking tools, the angst against media headlines, the disbelief in economic and political institutions, the underlying sense of malaise that seemingly everyone feels, the vibes.
And the way we’re interconnected changes the way we see and process information that comes our way, which changes the culture. The form of the network changes the way the network operates.
In the era of superfast many-to-many communication, the ideas that spread are the ones which can “take over” the entire spectrum. Small ideas grow, wither, die. It’s only the memetic megafauna that survive.
In a sparse network you might have pockets which retain their individuality and survive for longer. Like Galapagos syndrome for ideas. Both good and bad.
Letting your ecosystem interact with the external giant internet might mean it will die out or get outcompeted…
…
… The outcome of having a dense network is insidious but powerful. It means only the narratives which can go viral do go viral. The collective epistemic commons becomes filled with those narratives which outcompete the others and muscle their way to the top. It means that at a time of unprecedented low unemployment, high wages, high standard of living, GDP growth, high stock markets, strong dollar, people in the US still think they’re living in the worst of all possible times. An anti-Panglossian sentiment.
It means that everyone is convinced everyone else is having a bad time. We’re surrounded by vibes about everyone’s life getting worse, wars and famine and pestilence and injustice worldwide. We see gaffes and mistakes made by everyone laid bare instantly.
The denser network makes the impact of the message change. It molds itself to the medium.
At some level of interconnectivity, we all fall prey to the weaknesses of information deluge. Our attention is finite and so is our processing capacity for information. You can have the world do a denial of service attack on your cognition by overwhelming it with bits of information, so you’re stuck in place like a fly in amber. And it does this so easily that we haven’t even recognised when it happens let alone how to prevent it.
That too is why we have so many tools for thought, and ways to capture notes to search them afterwards, and tools for doing work about work, and endless lists and notes and contextual reminders and and and … It’s why we yearn for cultural islanding. It’s why there’s the never-ending “current thing”. We’re all left tilting at the windmill of being a node in a dense network…
Dense networks, dark forests: “Seeing Like a Network,” from @krishnanrohit.
(Image above: source)
* “Howard Beale” (Peter Finch), Network
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As we deal with density, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974, at 8:01a, that the bar code made its retail debut: the first OPC-coded item, a ten pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, was canned at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio by cashier Sharon Buchanan for customer Clyde Dawson.
Bar codes are now, of course, ubiquitous in retail, but are also widely used in healthcare, transport and logistics, mail, parcel, and baggage handling, and ticketing.
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