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- 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&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>
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