Aggregation Aggravation

The "Brave New World" of internet aggregation is upon us! Rejoice and be glad for all the freedom we now have!

Freedom. Hmmm. Freedom of information? Well, that is the "product" that we have been sold (hook, line and sinker). But is it really ours? And is it really free? Are there unseen costs associated with this freedom?

These questions are too big for a little blogger to answer. But I will endeavor to give us all some food for thought.

I recently finished reading "You Are Not A Gadget; a manifesto" by Jaron Lanier. (Some of you may remember that I had read an article in the London Review of Books that referred to this book; see the November 21st blog entry from this year, entitled Reflections on Social Networking By Computer.) I found Lanier’s writing voice to be awkward, in that computerese/geeky way that gizmo folk have. However, when I got past that, the ultimate message he was trying to impart was vivid and riveting, on many levels.

Lanier gives MIDI coding and technology as an example of what is limiting our creativity, in the world of computing.

Before MIDI, a musical note was a bottomless idea that transcended absolute definition. 

It was a way for a musician to think, or a way to teach and document music. It was a mental tool 

distinguishable from the music itself...

After MIDI, a musical note was no longer just an idea, but a rigid, mandatory structure 

you couldn‟t avoid in the aspects of life that had gone digital. The process of lock-in is like a 

wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as 

more and more thought structures are solidified into effectively permanent reality. 

This notion of computer code "lock-in" is developed by Lanier, throughout his book, as being the great weakness in all of computing. If you know what a MIDI file is, and have ever heard MIDI files, they are music that is not musical, but probably the tinniest representations of music imaginable. MIDI, because it is low level, is the base on which all digital music is founded. MIDI, Lanier suggests, is one of the factors of modern computing that limits human creativity, and he lists many others.

Having worked for a company that wrote proprietary software used in direct mail marketing, I know what he is talking about when he speaks of "lock-in" from the standpoint of limiting the way people can think, as well as limiting what they can do. The programming department wanted to create programs that the users could not use. The programmers did not want users to understand what the programs were doing because they wanted the users to use the programs in only one way. The programmers did not want the users to think, only to do, and do things only the way that the programmers wanted things done.

As a consequence of so much of our computing being based on what I might call codes of limitations, we are now into the second and third generation of people using computers and other electronic products that are frustrating because they do not work at the speed of our thoughts, nor with the naturalness of our body movements.


I want you to think on this, particularly as you consider the many products that you have purchased in the past few years, or even over the recent holidays, that all contain proprietary software and proprietary hardware and yet one more power cord that you have to keep track of (and have an available power source socket to plug into), because it is different from all the power cords you have in your house.

As you think on this, turn your attention to the internet and to social networking, information and marketing. Wow! That is a big shift, and a lot to consider at a crack, isn’t it?

Think about anytime recently when you have used a search engine on the internet to look up specific information.  I have noticed a few disturbing things about internet information: first, it is superficial; it is either completely contradictory from article to or it is nearly verbatim the same from article to article. The rush to fill up bandwidth with content from everyone and their extended families has meant a lot of copying as in duplicating and as in not original work. Lots and lots of useless and repetitive or even incorrect information is available for free all over the place. But you have to pay, just as you always did, for the in depth, likely more accurate information via a subscription service.

And what about all those ads that are festooned all over the articles you try to wade through? What is that all about? Well, this is called monetization, but you can seriously doubt that people are really making any money. I could, for example, be monetizing this blog, but that is not the point of this blog. I don’t want to be a product; I want to be a person. But there are web URLs that are trying to get my attention (can you believe it?), perhaps as a subtle bid to get me to put up their ads.

These aggregation tools are all over the place, every time you use the internet to find a product or even to look up articles, your use of the internet is tabulated, categorized and parsed, then used to send you ads on Facebook, Amazon, AOL or any of the many services where you have a sign-in account.

I commend Jaron Lanier’s book to you, which you can read via the link below, or check out from your local library, or purchase in hardcopy. I also include a link to a white paper put out by a consulting firm, a mere five years ago, called Re-Inventing Aggregation. This paper reveals, with simplistic brevity, the thinking behind modern aggregation (and also causes me to wonder how much work was put into it and how much money was made off of it).

My point in this article is to get us all to think about all the ways in which the world is getting small. We need to consider whether the information available to us is limiting. We need to consider whether our personal creativity is being limited by all that is electronic. We need to consider the role of the internet in terms of privacy, creative ownership, marketing and finance. Wars are waged and people die over the energy and resources the internet sucks from our environment. I believe that the freedom, creativity and privacy of us all hangs in the balance of this fragmentary, aggregate world of internet, and I ask you to think on all this, long and hard.

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Lanier, Jaron.  You Are Not A Gadget. 2010. http://r-u-ins.org/resource/pdfs/YouAreNotAGadget-A_Manifesto.pdf

Electronic Publishing Services  Ltd, in association with Peter Sefton-Williams. Re-Inventing Aggregation. 2005. http://www.verisign.com/stellent/groups/public/documents/white_paper/dev035582.pdf

Reflections on Social Networking by Computer: Living From Our Smallness

If you have not read it, I highly commend to you an article (in the November 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books) by Zadie Smith, entitled Generation Why? 


The article offers some review and commentary on the much discussed film The Social Network, and also includes some bit of review and context from You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jerome Lanier.

Zadie Smith amazed me by putting into print a lot of the discussion I have been having (with myself in my mind, and with peers) about being part of the "Facebook Generation". The title grabbed me, first of all: why? Is all really about networking? What do we get from sharing what is often most banal of our daily existence with our list of friends?

Not much in the way of substance seems to be my answer and Smith's.

I don't ultimately think this lack of substance is horrible, but I do think that if one seeks deeper and more integral relationship with family, friends and other travelers on this grand journey of ours, the first place one can count on not finding that is on Facebook.

Once again, I can feel the outcry "Luddite! Luddite!"

Not at all, not at all. No, not so.

Here are the things I really like about Facebook: I have been able to reconnect with people I knew in High School and elsewhere. There are people that I really wanted to keep in touch with, and it was a shame that we all lost track of one another when we went off to university, got married, moved away, such and so on, etc. I love being able to see what people have done in their lives. It is marvelous to be able to "chat" with people in other parts of the world. To share recipes and jokes. Possibly the biggest plus is to get the earliest report of some critical national or international news happening from someone closest to the scene.

But, as Ms. Smith points out in her article, all this had been possible before Facebook, and is possible now through various other computer options. While Facebook is touted as being all about networking, it is really all about taking our "personal information," mostly in the form of our likes and dislikes, and forwarding this to various parsing agencies that will, over time, bombard us with offers based on them. In other words, it is not about promoting brotherhood and sisterhood, but about promoting sales.

If you are a member of Facebook, you don't have as many choices as you might think you have for controlling the your personal information, and what is available reaches a wider audience than you would imagine. You might not want to have everyone be your friend, first of all. And you might not want to have some of the quips you share with pals be shared with absolutely everyone you know and all the people they and their friends and family know. But that happens, and we have no control over it. We are at the mercy of our most unguarded moments on the internet. And it is can be hilariously laughable, such as this very funny BBC satire of Queen Elizabeth as Facebook member.

Hilarious. Laughable. Okay, now what?

The internet was invented to be a tool for the free exchange of information, but, to some extent there is nothing free about it, and what is being exchanged is our personal dignity. Why? Because all of our cute (or not so cute) little quips and quirks live on and on, even after we have departed from the internet or, indeed, the world. Zadie Smith recounts that the FB "wall" of a murdered British teen had notices from people to the deceased, as if she was still alive or would be checking her FB account from the grave.

I have not seen The Social Network, yet, and I am not sure that I particularly want to. Yes, I am sure that the portrait of Mark Zuckerberg is slanted in a particularly vile way, and I am equally sure that Zuckerberg is the kind of geek that lives from and through his computer.

There is a smallness about boiling the human brain and heart down to binary code in "if-then-else" language parsing. I have not read You Are Not A Gadget, by Lanier--but I plan to, based on what Zadie Smith has shared in her NY Review article, and what I see in an excerpt made available by the publisher through the New York Times. It is clear the book is a reminder that being is much more than the sum of parts. Here is a quote from Lanier's book: "Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality."

Facebook can only ever show an extremely limited portion of our reality. It boils us down to the smallest we can be, for as many people as want to view that. This is not where revolutions will be fostered, or world peace, or very much, indeed, in the way of achievement. Marketing and sales are likely all we can expect of Facebook. And what we share there, discreet or indiscreet, will be "carried forward" into whatever fad the next computer generation cooks up, networking or otherwise.

We'll never be able to live large or deeply on Facebook. And, thankfully, we don't have to live on Facebook at all.

Fear and Trembling, Sold and Purchased

More and more, I think we live in what Frances Moore Lappé calls “a thin Democracy.” In her 2007 book, Getting A Grip, she demonstrates that one of the major thinning aspect of democracy is the existence of, not to mention the over-riding interest of, capitalism and free market economy. Lappé suggests that we are sold on the idea of scarcity, and that the complicit, if not leading, marketplace drives consumption by promoting fear. Lappé is not the only person to have made this observation.

In an interview with Amy Goodman on the radio program Democracy Now!, Naomi Klein, author of Shock Doctrine; the Rise of Disaster Capitalism and other books, said. 

[Milton] Friedman believed in a radical vision of society in which profit and the market drive every aspect of life, from schools to healthcare, even the army. He called for abolishing all trade protections, deregulating all prices and eviscerating government services.

These ideas have always been tremendously unpopular, and understandably so. They cause waves of unemployment, send prices soaring, and make life more precarious for millions. Unable to advance their agenda democratically, Friedman and his disciples were drawn to the power of shock… Friedman understood that just as prisoners are softened up for interrogation by the shock of their capture, massive disasters could serve to soften us up for his radical free-market crusade. He advised politicians that immediately after a crisis, they should push through all the painful policies at once, before people could regain their footing. He called this method "economic shock treatment." I call it "the shock doctrine."

Take a second look at the iconic events of our era, and behind many you will find its logic at work. This is the secret history of the free market. It wasn’t born in freedom and democracy; it was born in shock.

To return to Frances Moore Lappe:

… Private power supersedes public power—as FDR warned us seven decades ago… To pick just a few frightening examples:

* for almost six years after 9/11, the chemical industry lobby was able to resist measures needed to secure fifteen thousand chemical plants against attack.

* While five thousand Americans die annually from food-borne illnesses, the food industry is able to block mandatory recalls.

* Ex-oil lobbyist Philip Cooney was so tight with the Bush White House that he edited official reports to downplay climate change.

* Pharmaceutical lobbyists helped craft a healthcare law that forbids Medicare to negotiate drug prices—while we pay double what Europeans do for identical drugs.

The biggest product on the market today is fear. We purchase fear every day, in the form of some product marketed to protect us. Overstatement?

Think about the recent H1N1 pandemic that was forecast and, supposedly, averted by means of a vaccine. Do you remember how there was a scarcity of the vaccine? Then, suddenly, a huge flood of the vaccine hit the marketplace, but mostly right after the containment of the outbreaks. This did not stop people from purchasing the vaccine. Interesting that we had to purchase it, if we wanted it and didn't have a health plan that provided it. When I was a child, inoculations against Rubella were given to every school child by the county health department, for free. People purchased the H1N1 vaccine based on their fear, not because there was an outbreak, or even just a few reported cases, in their area.

Now, think about the new TSA (Transportation Security Administration) airport security pat downs. The fear being marketed here is terrorism. The price of your airline ticket entitles you to the indignities of an extremely invasive full-body search, that by law you must submit yourself to. The public outcry has been loud. But Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and TSA Administrator John Pistole Monday claim the new practices are necessary to protect the flying public.

Now, recall the last visit you made to your local pharmacy. Have you looked around the shelves immediately adjacent to the pharmacist’s window? What are the primary products lining those shelves? I’ll tell: hand sanitizer. The fear being marketed here is germs, viruses and bacteria that lead to sickness and possibly death. The sanitizers that are alcohol based are probably fine, unless over-used, but those that are marketed as being anti-bacterial are probably overkill. Why? Because, as a friend of mine who is an emergency room physician said, “oh, these products are good. They are so good that they take away the good stuff as well as the bad stuff.”  The human body naturally contains bacteria, yeast fungi,  and bunches of other things like protists and archaea. Details from www.wisegeek.com: 

Bacteria help digest complex carbohydrates which would be indigestible otherwise, promote growth of intestinal cells, repress pathogenic microbes, prevent allergies, inflammatory bowel disease, and play crucial roles in the immune system. Body flora and the body it occupies have been co-evolving for tens of millions of years. 

Is it possible that we are fiddling with the delicate balance of our immune systems when we over-use some of these products, rather than rely on soap and water as our first line of hygiene? I know octogenarians who have never received flu shots and have never used hand sanitizers. They are some of the healthiest people I have ever met.

On a website called Medical News Today, there is a “fact” page about hand sanitizer. The information for this “fact” page has been provided by Johnson & Johnson Consumer Companies the makers of Purell ®. I quote from it: 

Do you have enough PURELL(R) products available to consumers? 

We are committed to providing optimal distribution of the product to meet the increasing need and demand, particularly in areas where cases of illness outbreaks have been reported.

I find that an interesting statement, from a marketing perspective. It speaks to the issue of scarcity,  relieving potential consumer fear of not being able to obtain the product.

I do not suggest that an alcohol based hand product is a necessarily a bad thing for people, but that we have been advised to use a lot of it, and in situations where washing the hands with soap and water might be quite sufficient. This USA Today article from 2007 talks about the kind of money these products generate for their producers: 

U.S. hand sanitizer sales have grown in double digits since 2003, according to marketing data company ACNielsen. Through late 2006, sales in supermarkets and drugstores alone were up 14.4% from 2005 to $70 million, with Purell the market leader at $36.6 million. That growth built on a huge 53.5% rise in 2005, according to ACNielsen.

 What I suggest is that we need to think about what is being marketed and by whom. I think that we are steered into paying out big money to buy fear, and that there are no regulations to protect us from the fear peddlers, many of whom are big business lobbyist in Washington, D.C.

If you have not read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, I highly recommend the book.

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http://www.democracynow.org/2007/9/17/the_shock_doctrine_naomi_klein_on

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/148203.php

http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/2007-01-03-santizers_x.htm

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-some-types-of-body-flora.htm

Moore Lappé, Frances. Getting A Grip. Small Planet Media Group, 2007. Pp. 13, 17.