title: the fragility of effort
url: http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/
hash_url: a0c589399173f660397ba5ba2470d004

<h1 class="cooperhewitt dataporn email law moma motive museum">the holodeck of motive</h1>

<div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-001">

<div class="image640">
<img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.001.jpg"/>
</div>

<div>

<p>Last night I had the privilege of being asked to
participate in the thirteenth <a href="http://momarnd.moma.org/">MoMA R&amp;D
Salon</a> on <q>big(ger) data</q> alongside <a href="http://www.hilarymason.com">Hillary Mason</a>, <a href="http://blog.hannahdonovan.com">Hannah
Donovan</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/cocteau">Mark Hansen</a>. The bulk of the evening was a panel discussion
with <a href="http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/author/pantonelli">Paola
Antonelli</a>. Each participant was asked to do a
short presentation, where short was defined as
<q>about seven minutes</q>.</p>

<p>What follows is clearly more than seven minutes
so the talk itself got a little wobbly towards the
middle and the end. There is also <a href="http://momarnd.moma.org/salons/salon-13-bigger-data/">video of the event</a> so you can compare the text below that I meant and what I actually did say. This is what I tried to say.</p> 

</div>

<p>I'd like to start with three quotes. The first is
by Brian Barrett, <a href="http://gizmodo.com/the-sony-hacks-are-goddamn-terrifying-1668911102">writing about the Sony hack</a> for Gizmodo:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><q>The most painful stuff in the Sony cache is a
doctor shopping for Ritalin. It's an email about
trying to get pregnant. It's shit-talking coworkers
behind their backs ... It's even the harmless,
mundane, trivial stuff that makes up any day's email
load that suddenly feels ugly and raw out in the
open ... You may assume you'd
be fine in the same scenario, that you have nothing
to hide, that you wouldn't mind. But just take a
look through your Sent folder's last month. Last
week. Yesterday. There's something in there you
wouldn't want the world to see. There's some
conversation that would be misread without context,
or read correctly for its cloddishness. Our inboxes
are increasingly our id, a water cooler with
infinitely expandable memory.</q></p>

</blockquote>

<p>The second is by the sociologist <a href="http://www.karen-levy.net">Karen Levy</a>
speaking at a panel about <a href="https://soundcloud.com/eyebeamnyc/new-topics-in-social-computing-consent-and-the-network">Consent and the Network</a>,
at Eyebeam last month. Paraphrasing, she said:</p> 

<blockquote>
<p><q>...we act as though if we are able to develop
a technical means around a user's consent then we
have a right to do whatever we want.</q></p>

</blockquote>

<p>The third and final quote is by <a href="http://www.keirdotnet.net">Keir Winesmith</a>
describing how they think about the social and privacy
implications of <a href="http://www.sfmoma.org/about/research_projects/lab">the work they are do at SFMoMA</a>.</p>

</div>

<div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-002">

<div class="image640">
<img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.002.jpg"/>
</div>

<p>He said:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><q>We walk right up to the line of creepy. And then we take two steps back.</q></p>
</blockquote>

<p>When Flickr launched geotagging â the ability to
associate your photos with a physical location â we
did not try to establish so-called <q>sensible
defaults</q>. Instead we forced users to choose defaults
before they could use the feature.</p>

<p>First, they had to choose a default privacy setting
for all their geotagged photos. Second, they needed to
expressly indicate that they wanted us to import
any geographic metadata that their phone or camera
might have embedded in their photos.</p>

<p>This was back in August of 2006, six months before
the iPhone was announced and just under a year before
the phone was actually released and the whole notion
of camera phones automatically embedding GPS
information in a photo's metadata had not really been
normalized yet.</p>

<p>One of the consequences of our decision is that as
other photo-sharing services became more popular (most
notably Instagram) many never bothered to ask users
whether they wanted or expected that metadata to be
exposed. As if by magic their photos were suddenly
geotagged and a lot of people started thinking that our
geotagging support was broken.</p>

<p>Keep in mind that it wasn't even until 2008 that,
then NSA director, Keith Alexander asked his staff:
<q>Actually, why don't we just keep all the signals?</q> so
everyone was still pretty excited by the opportunity
that all of this data presented. People have always
written dates and places on the backs of their
photographs so having your technology take care of
those details as-if by magic is pretty cool.</p>

<p>It's not like we weren't excited about geotagging.
It's just that we were trying to be mindful of the implications of what
users were getting in to. But being mindful and
successfully conveying that mindfulness to people are
not the same thing and, like I said, it was 2008  and
everyone was feeling pretty good about things. We
still believed that the sum of the Internet was 
so big, too big, to prevent anyone from stitching it
all back together.</p>

<p>Did you know that if you assign a Creative Commons
license to one of your Flickr photos that setting trumps your
ability to prevent other people from downloading the
original photo? Even if you've said you don't want to
let other people download your original photos and
you've said you don't want to make your geotagged
photos public (because unless you explicitly opt-out
<em>all</em> photos are geotagged now) the license setting
takes precedence.</p>

<p>I mention that because even I didn't realize that's
what we were doing and I worked there for five
years. Or rather I had always assumed that we would
err on the side of caution when asked to choose
an order of precedence for something like that.</p>

<p>I tell you this because if there was ever a
cardinal rule at Flickr it was: Don't fuck with
people's original photos. This included the
metadata. We wouldn't have purged the EXIF data from
your pictures even if you had asked us to.</p>

<p>In a world where you might be able to imagine
something with the breadth and reach of a <a href="https://pinboard.in/search/u:straup?query=national+security+letter">National
Security Letter</a>, but perhaps the not apparent
liberalness of its application, this is a "feature"
right?</p>

<p>In a world where you might imagine a junior lawyer
drafting an argument claiming that algorithmic facial
detection, by virtue of its automated nature, should
be classified as <q><a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/metadata_equals.html">just metadata</a></q> along with all the
date/time and geographic information present in
digital photographs... well, yeah.</p>

<p>In a world where the phrase <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence#Definers_for_OSINT">open-source
information</a> even exists...</p>

</div>

<div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-003">

<div class="image640">
<img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.003.jpg"/>
</div>

<p>One of the burdens of the present is that we are all, forever, being forced to
pay the cost of someone else's near-future opportunity. The core of the
opportunity myth, in the United States anyway, is a celebration of someone seeing
value in something that no one else has recognized or
understood yet and in <a href="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2014/09/11/brand/#dconstruct">reaping the reward of extracting
that worth</a>.</p>

<p>In legal circles there is something known as the "exclusionary rule" which
doesn't seek to prevent the collection of data by making it a physical
impossibility but achieves the same result by nullifying its admissibility in
court. It is a very real example of a community simply deciding that <code>2 + 2 =
5</code>. We say that the manner in which cause and effect are established is,
frankly, more important than the fact being proved. Most people know the
exclusionary rule by its umbrella principle the Fourth Amendment â or the right to privacy â of the US
Constitution.</p>

<p>Right now <a href="http://www.aaronland.info/www.scotusblog.com/2014/06/symposium-in-riley-v-california-a-unanimous-supreme-court-sets-out-fourth-amendment-for-digital-age/">the manner in which the exclusionary rule is applied to big-data a
mess</a>. One court has ruled that the police can not physically install a GPS unit
on your car and track your movements while another has ruled that the police can
still demand that the phone companies hand over all the location data tied to
your cell phone.</p>

<p>I don't think anyone is entirely certain how the exclusionary rule squares with
something like a National Security Letter but Australia, at least, has made
short work of that debate by simply legislating that anything collected under
the auspices of their own surveillance laws is admissible in court.</p>

<p>There is a whole other discussion to be had about the approach Europe is taking with
their "right to privacy" laws and I want to mention
them only in passing because they are the closest
thing we may have gotten to something approaching an
exclusionary rule for the data that private companies
collect or the uses they put it to.</p>

<p>In the meantime absent our ability to craft narratives and social norms in step
with the instrumentation of our lives the resultant
"big-data" will remain a bountiful frontier of
opportunity for anyone willing to see the implications
of their actions as tomorrow's problem.</p>

</div>

<div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-004">

<div class="image640">
<img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.004.jpg"/>
</div>

<p>One of the things that we've been thinking about, at the Cooper Hewitt, is how
we collect contemporary design objects. What does a design museum do when the
meat of their practice has either become entirely digital â that is lacking any
singular manifest physicality â or whose full meaning and understanding, whose
implications, are opaque absent access to the underlying source code or the data
it produces.</p>

<p>To some degree thus has it ever been. We may never know, truly, the motivations
of an artists or a designer but there's usually a pretty thing to can
look at, fifty years later. This might be the actual thing that was produced or
it might be the relentless documentation that seems to define people hell-bent
on a practice that claims to leave no trace behind.</p>

<p>Take the Nest thermostat, for example. <a href="https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/search/collection/?query=Nest+thermostat">We acquired a pair in 2013</a> but that's
really all we did. We took them out of their boxes and put them on a shelf. We
also acquired some of <a href="https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/search/collection/?query=Nest+thermostat+sketch">the early sketches and preparatory drawing for the devices</a>
which are arguably more interesting, in the long-term, than the things
themselves. It would have been unfair and unrealistic for the Smithsonian to ask
Nest, or any on-going commercial interest, for the source code to their
device. In the case of Nest we would have been asking them to forfeit the 3.2
billion dollars they earned selling their company to Google.</p>

<p>Absent the source code with which we might investigate how the Nest
distinguishes itself from other thermostats or the decision to acquire the data
that those units collected (I'm not sure they've ever been plugged in...) in
order to demonstrate its use we are left with a lump of metal and plastic that
<a href="https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/exhibitions/51669015/section/69070603">we quite literally hang on a wall next its widely acknowledge inspiration</a>: Henry
Dreyfuss' classic <q>T68 Round</q> thermostat.</p>

<p>Note: We're actually
exhibiting Dreyfuss' <q>CT87K</q> thermostat, and not
the <q>T68</q> but you
get the idea.</p>

<p>With that in mind we have been asking ourselves:
What would it mean for museums and libraries establish
a kind of escrow for intellectual property for
products or the data they emit? Assuming we could
define a shared social contract around the practice
what would it mean for both individuals and
corporations to participate in the collection and
nurturing of this data not with a focus on the present
but with an eye to the future?</p>

<p>It is important to understand that the cultural
heritage sector is <span>in no way</span>
ready to take on the burden of maintaining an infrastructure like this. Some of
us, by virtue of the value of our collections, can imagine the kinds of targets
of opportunity we would become shepherding this kind
of stuff but the sheer volume and physicality of many
collections is a defense that "big data" doesn't enjoy.</p>

<p>What we do have though is a disposition for the long game, for keeping things
safe and at least in recent times doing these things <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/all-of-this-belongs-to-you/all-of-this-belongs-to-you/">in the service of the
community, at large</a>.</p>

</div>

<div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-005">

<div class="image640">
<img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.005.jpg"/>
</div>

<p>I mention this because there is a fairly new and often uncomfortable reality for
those of us in the cultural heritage business. That we are starting to share
more in common with agencies like the NSA than anyone quite knows how to
conceptualize.</p>

</div>

<div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-006">

<div class="image640">
<img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.006.jpg"/>
</div>

<p>Every time someone talks to you about <a href="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2008/10/08/tree/#pattern">personal
informatics</a>, or <a href="https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/35457211/">census data
from a distant past</a>, understand that the NSA is trying to solve the same
basic set of problems and replace the number of miles you ran or the colour of
your baby's poo with the question of Original Sin. In seeing the meaning of past
actions as a way to make sense of present intent. Of judgement.</p>

<p>Which is not unlike what the humanities does. It used to be that I would have
conversations with people where they would sketch out all sorts of
pie-in-the-sky database systems and inference engines that could be plumbed in
order to answer all their scholarly questions. What I've now come to realize is
that many of them were simply describing <a href="https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Edward%20Snowden%22">the systems that Edward Snowden says
the NSA has been building for itself</a> all along.</p>

<p>Those tools evoke many reactions but if we are honest we will be forced to admit
that envy is one of them.</p>

</div>

<div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-007">

<div class="image640">
<img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.007.jpg"/>
</div>

<p>Note: I didn't really
get to this part during the talk itself. I pointed to
it but it was all a bit rushed and disjointed by this
point. The slide for this
section is titled <q>post conspicuously</q> which is
a reference to the instructions from the New York City
Department of Health for restaurant owners to place
their permit to operate in a place where anyone can see it, without having to ask. There's something about that idea which relates
to everything below but you would be forgiven for not
really seeing where those two things are holding hands
because it's all still a fuzzy for me too...</p>

<p>One day all of that data the NSA is reported to be storing will be the raw
material for an AP high school digital humanities homework assignment.</p>

<p>One day that data will be where most of us long since forgotten after our deaths
might live on even the brief moments that someone sees
our past as something more than an abstraction.</p> 

<p>One day that data may be used to demonstrate that
it was, in fact, a fifth
column that finally ushered in a
global <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/The+Sunday+Edition/ID/2618301311/">confessional uniformity</a> â a
pursuit that seems to be present in every age for as long as we've been
telling these stories.</p>

<p>One day that data will be subpoenaed and used to
tell the stories that we may not want to remember but that
we need to. If you've not read the US Senate Intelligence
Committee's <a href="http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014.html">Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention
and Interrogation Program</a> you should. Someone has
to. It's
profoundly depressing but it is important
reading. Beyond the actions described in the report
the thing that struck me is that most of the proof
seems to have been found in the email that the various
actors sent themselves.</p>

<p>Email. <em>They talked about this stuff in email.</em></p>

<blockquote>
<p><q>It's even the harmless,
mundane, trivial stuff that makes up any day's email
load that suddenly feels ugly and raw out in the
open.</q></p>
</blockquote>

<p>Lots of private companies are establishing
corporate policies whereby email archives are purged
on a regular interval. Lots of security professionals
are recommending the practice to individuals precisely
because the cost to an opportunist to hoarde that data
and discover some clever use for it in the future is
negligable.</p> 

<p>Or <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/11/26/national-archives-backing-away-from-cia-e-mail-destruction-plan/">this</a>:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>The CIA sought permission in January to
destroy e-mail communications of all but 22 top CIA
officials within three years of their leaving the
agency â <q>or when no longer needed, whichever is
sooner.</q></p>
</blockquote>

<p><q>No longer needed.</q> I know, right?</p>

<p>In the end the National Archives announced that, at
least for now, <a href="http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2014/11/nara-cia-email/">they
won't indulge the CIA's request</a>. This isn't
necessarily about the CIA either. It seems that we give them a
long-enough leash that by their actions they routine provoke these
questions, but ask yourselves:
Do you really want <a href="http://gothamist.com/2015/02/25/email_enema_healthy_ny.php">any government agency</a> to have the
luxury of choosing the shadow it casts in to the
future and the stories it tells at dinner parties?</p>

<p>The practice is hardly new, historically,
but I'm not sure its one that's worked out very well
for most people, most of the time.</p>

<p>I do not mean to suggest that we supplicate ourselves to the imagined benefits
of the hypothetical futures I am describing. The question remains: How do we
protect the present from itself? The question remains:
How long needs to pass before the sting of all that
data in the moment is worth its yield in the
future?</p>

<p>We have never stopped looking back and trying to
figure out <em>what the fuck</em> the past was
thinking and I don't imagine we will stop anytime
soon. I think that is important to remember because
one of the opportunities that <q>big-data</q> suggests
is a better window on the past and, now that we've
seen it, it's difficult to imagine anyone choosing the
forfeit that possibility.</p>

<p>What upsets me about the "big-data" discussion is the way that
it is so often couched in a rhetoric of inevitability. It is the rhetoric of the
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140814040031/http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37364/37364-h/37364-h.htm#page_29">Law of the Jungle</a> and some of us, at least, have been
struggling to find viable alternatives for as
long as we've recognized it as such.</p>

<p>The rhetoric of
big-data is too often about absolute certainties and
not about choices, or reasons. On bad days it is an abdication of our shared
responsibility to articulate <em>why</em> we choose to
live the ways that we do.</p>

</div>

<div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-008">

<div class="image640">
<img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.008.jpg"/>
</div>

</div>
