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  1. title: the fragility of effort
  2. url: http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/
  3. hash_url: a0c589399173f660397ba5ba2470d004
  4. <h1 class="cooperhewitt dataporn email law moma motive museum">the holodeck of motive</h1>
  5. <div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-001">
  6. <div class="image640">
  7. <img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.001.jpg"/>
  8. </div>
  9. <div>
  10. <p>Last night I had the privilege of being asked to
  11. participate in the thirteenth <a href="http://momarnd.moma.org/">MoMA R&amp;D
  12. 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
  13. Donovan</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/cocteau">Mark Hansen</a>. The bulk of the evening was a panel discussion
  14. with <a href="http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/author/pantonelli">Paola
  15. Antonelli</a>. Each participant was asked to do a
  16. short presentation, where short was defined as
  17. <q>about seven minutes</q>.</p>
  18. <p>What follows is clearly more than seven minutes
  19. so the talk itself got a little wobbly towards the
  20. 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>
  21. </div>
  22. <p>I'd like to start with three quotes. The first is
  23. by Brian Barrett, <a href="http://gizmodo.com/the-sony-hacks-are-goddamn-terrifying-1668911102">writing about the Sony hack</a> for Gizmodo:</p>
  24. <blockquote>
  25. <p><q>The most painful stuff in the Sony cache is a
  26. doctor shopping for Ritalin. It's an email about
  27. trying to get pregnant. It's shit-talking coworkers
  28. behind their backs ... It's even the harmless,
  29. mundane, trivial stuff that makes up any day's email
  30. load that suddenly feels ugly and raw out in the
  31. open ... You may assume you'd
  32. be fine in the same scenario, that you have nothing
  33. to hide, that you wouldn't mind. But just take a
  34. look through your Sent folder's last month. Last
  35. week. Yesterday. There's something in there you
  36. wouldn't want the world to see. There's some
  37. conversation that would be misread without context,
  38. or read correctly for its cloddishness. Our inboxes
  39. are increasingly our id, a water cooler with
  40. infinitely expandable memory.</q></p>
  41. </blockquote>
  42. <p>The second is by the sociologist <a href="http://www.karen-levy.net">Karen Levy</a>
  43. 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>,
  44. at Eyebeam last month. Paraphrasing, she said:</p>
  45. <blockquote>
  46. <p><q>...we act as though if we are able to develop
  47. a technical means around a user's consent then we
  48. have a right to do whatever we want.</q></p>
  49. </blockquote>
  50. <p>The third and final quote is by <a href="http://www.keirdotnet.net">Keir Winesmith</a>
  51. describing how they think about the social and privacy
  52. implications of <a href="http://www.sfmoma.org/about/research_projects/lab">the work they are do at SFMoMA</a>.</p>
  53. </div>
  54. <div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-002">
  55. <div class="image640">
  56. <img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.002.jpg"/>
  57. </div>
  58. <p>He said:</p>
  59. <blockquote>
  60. <p><q>We walk right up to the line of creepy. And then we take two steps back.</q></p>
  61. </blockquote>
  62. <p>When Flickr launched geotagging – the ability to
  63. associate your photos with a physical location – we
  64. did not try to establish so-called <q>sensible
  65. defaults</q>. Instead we forced users to choose defaults
  66. before they could use the feature.</p>
  67. <p>First, they had to choose a default privacy setting
  68. for all their geotagged photos. Second, they needed to
  69. expressly indicate that they wanted us to import
  70. any geographic metadata that their phone or camera
  71. might have embedded in their photos.</p>
  72. <p>This was back in August of 2006, six months before
  73. the iPhone was announced and just under a year before
  74. the phone was actually released and the whole notion
  75. of camera phones automatically embedding GPS
  76. information in a photo's metadata had not really been
  77. normalized yet.</p>
  78. <p>One of the consequences of our decision is that as
  79. other photo-sharing services became more popular (most
  80. notably Instagram) many never bothered to ask users
  81. whether they wanted or expected that metadata to be
  82. exposed. As if by magic their photos were suddenly
  83. geotagged and a lot of people started thinking that our
  84. geotagging support was broken.</p>
  85. <p>Keep in mind that it wasn't even until 2008 that,
  86. then NSA director, Keith Alexander asked his staff:
  87. <q>Actually, why don't we just keep all the signals?</q> so
  88. everyone was still pretty excited by the opportunity
  89. that all of this data presented. People have always
  90. written dates and places on the backs of their
  91. photographs so having your technology take care of
  92. those details as-if by magic is pretty cool.</p>
  93. <p>It's not like we weren't excited about geotagging.
  94. It's just that we were trying to be mindful of the implications of what
  95. users were getting in to. But being mindful and
  96. successfully conveying that mindfulness to people are
  97. not the same thing and, like I said, it was 2008 and
  98. everyone was feeling pretty good about things. We
  99. still believed that the sum of the Internet was
  100. so big, too big, to prevent anyone from stitching it
  101. all back together.</p>
  102. <p>Did you know that if you assign a Creative Commons
  103. license to one of your Flickr photos that setting trumps your
  104. ability to prevent other people from downloading the
  105. original photo? Even if you've said you don't want to
  106. let other people download your original photos and
  107. you've said you don't want to make your geotagged
  108. photos public (because unless you explicitly opt-out
  109. <em>all</em> photos are geotagged now) the license setting
  110. takes precedence.</p>
  111. <p>I mention that because even I didn't realize that's
  112. what we were doing and I worked there for five
  113. years. Or rather I had always assumed that we would
  114. err on the side of caution when asked to choose
  115. an order of precedence for something like that.</p>
  116. <p>I tell you this because if there was ever a
  117. cardinal rule at Flickr it was: Don't fuck with
  118. people's original photos. This included the
  119. metadata. We wouldn't have purged the EXIF data from
  120. your pictures even if you had asked us to.</p>
  121. <p>In a world where you might be able to imagine
  122. something with the breadth and reach of a <a href="https://pinboard.in/search/u:straup?query=national+security+letter">National
  123. Security Letter</a>, but perhaps the not apparent
  124. liberalness of its application, this is a "feature"
  125. right?</p>
  126. <p>In a world where you might imagine a junior lawyer
  127. drafting an argument claiming that algorithmic facial
  128. detection, by virtue of its automated nature, should
  129. 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
  130. date/time and geographic information present in
  131. digital photographs... well, yeah.</p>
  132. <p>In a world where the phrase <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence#Definers_for_OSINT">open-source
  133. information</a> even exists...</p>
  134. </div>
  135. <div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-003">
  136. <div class="image640">
  137. <img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.003.jpg"/>
  138. </div>
  139. <p>One of the burdens of the present is that we are all, forever, being forced to
  140. pay the cost of someone else's near-future opportunity. The core of the
  141. opportunity myth, in the United States anyway, is a celebration of someone seeing
  142. value in something that no one else has recognized or
  143. understood yet and in <a href="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2014/09/11/brand/#dconstruct">reaping the reward of extracting
  144. that worth</a>.</p>
  145. <p>In legal circles there is something known as the "exclusionary rule" which
  146. doesn't seek to prevent the collection of data by making it a physical
  147. impossibility but achieves the same result by nullifying its admissibility in
  148. court. It is a very real example of a community simply deciding that <code>2 + 2 =
  149. 5</code>. We say that the manner in which cause and effect are established is,
  150. frankly, more important than the fact being proved. Most people know the
  151. exclusionary rule by its umbrella principle the Fourth Amendment – or the right to privacy – of the US
  152. Constitution.</p>
  153. <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
  154. mess</a>. One court has ruled that the police can not physically install a GPS unit
  155. on your car and track your movements while another has ruled that the police can
  156. still demand that the phone companies hand over all the location data tied to
  157. your cell phone.</p>
  158. <p>I don't think anyone is entirely certain how the exclusionary rule squares with
  159. something like a National Security Letter but Australia, at least, has made
  160. short work of that debate by simply legislating that anything collected under
  161. the auspices of their own surveillance laws is admissible in court.</p>
  162. <p>There is a whole other discussion to be had about the approach Europe is taking with
  163. their "right to privacy" laws and I want to mention
  164. them only in passing because they are the closest
  165. thing we may have gotten to something approaching an
  166. exclusionary rule for the data that private companies
  167. collect or the uses they put it to.</p>
  168. <p>In the meantime absent our ability to craft narratives and social norms in step
  169. with the instrumentation of our lives the resultant
  170. "big-data" will remain a bountiful frontier of
  171. opportunity for anyone willing to see the implications
  172. of their actions as tomorrow's problem.</p>
  173. </div>
  174. <div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-004">
  175. <div class="image640">
  176. <img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.004.jpg"/>
  177. </div>
  178. <p>One of the things that we've been thinking about, at the Cooper Hewitt, is how
  179. we collect contemporary design objects. What does a design museum do when the
  180. meat of their practice has either become entirely digital – that is lacking any
  181. singular manifest physicality – or whose full meaning and understanding, whose
  182. implications, are opaque absent access to the underlying source code or the data
  183. it produces.</p>
  184. <p>To some degree thus has it ever been. We may never know, truly, the motivations
  185. of an artists or a designer but there's usually a pretty thing to can
  186. look at, fifty years later. This might be the actual thing that was produced or
  187. it might be the relentless documentation that seems to define people hell-bent
  188. on a practice that claims to leave no trace behind.</p>
  189. <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
  190. really all we did. We took them out of their boxes and put them on a shelf. We
  191. 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>
  192. which are arguably more interesting, in the long-term, than the things
  193. themselves. It would have been unfair and unrealistic for the Smithsonian to ask
  194. Nest, or any on-going commercial interest, for the source code to their
  195. device. In the case of Nest we would have been asking them to forfeit the 3.2
  196. billion dollars they earned selling their company to Google.</p>
  197. <p>Absent the source code with which we might investigate how the Nest
  198. distinguishes itself from other thermostats or the decision to acquire the data
  199. that those units collected (I'm not sure they've ever been plugged in...) in
  200. order to demonstrate its use we are left with a lump of metal and plastic that
  201. <a href="https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/exhibitions/51669015/section/69070603">we quite literally hang on a wall next its widely acknowledge inspiration</a>: Henry
  202. Dreyfuss' classic <q>T68 Round</q> thermostat.</p>
  203. <p>Note: We're actually
  204. exhibiting Dreyfuss' <q>CT87K</q> thermostat, and not
  205. the <q>T68</q> but you
  206. get the idea.</p>
  207. <p>With that in mind we have been asking ourselves:
  208. What would it mean for museums and libraries establish
  209. a kind of escrow for intellectual property for
  210. products or the data they emit? Assuming we could
  211. define a shared social contract around the practice
  212. what would it mean for both individuals and
  213. corporations to participate in the collection and
  214. nurturing of this data not with a focus on the present
  215. but with an eye to the future?</p>
  216. <p>It is important to understand that the cultural
  217. heritage sector is <span>in no way</span>
  218. ready to take on the burden of maintaining an infrastructure like this. Some of
  219. us, by virtue of the value of our collections, can imagine the kinds of targets
  220. of opportunity we would become shepherding this kind
  221. of stuff but the sheer volume and physicality of many
  222. collections is a defense that "big data" doesn't enjoy.</p>
  223. <p>What we do have though is a disposition for the long game, for keeping things
  224. 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
  225. community, at large</a>.</p>
  226. </div>
  227. <div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-005">
  228. <div class="image640">
  229. <img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.005.jpg"/>
  230. </div>
  231. <p>I mention this because there is a fairly new and often uncomfortable reality for
  232. those of us in the cultural heritage business. That we are starting to share
  233. more in common with agencies like the NSA than anyone quite knows how to
  234. conceptualize.</p>
  235. </div>
  236. <div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-006">
  237. <div class="image640">
  238. <img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.006.jpg"/>
  239. </div>
  240. <p>Every time someone talks to you about <a href="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2008/10/08/tree/#pattern">personal
  241. informatics</a>, or <a href="https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/35457211/">census data
  242. from a distant past</a>, understand that the NSA is trying to solve the same
  243. basic set of problems and replace the number of miles you ran or the colour of
  244. your baby's poo with the question of Original Sin. In seeing the meaning of past
  245. actions as a way to make sense of present intent. Of judgement.</p>
  246. <p>Which is not unlike what the humanities does. It used to be that I would have
  247. conversations with people where they would sketch out all sorts of
  248. pie-in-the-sky database systems and inference engines that could be plumbed in
  249. order to answer all their scholarly questions. What I've now come to realize is
  250. 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
  251. the NSA has been building for itself</a> all along.</p>
  252. <p>Those tools evoke many reactions but if we are honest we will be forced to admit
  253. that envy is one of them.</p>
  254. </div>
  255. <div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-007">
  256. <div class="image640">
  257. <img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.007.jpg"/>
  258. </div>
  259. <p>Note: I didn't really
  260. get to this part during the talk itself. I pointed to
  261. it but it was all a bit rushed and disjointed by this
  262. point. The slide for this
  263. section is titled <q>post conspicuously</q> which is
  264. a reference to the instructions from the New York City
  265. Department of Health for restaurant owners to place
  266. their permit to operate in a place where anyone can see it, without having to ask. There's something about that idea which relates
  267. to everything below but you would be forgiven for not
  268. really seeing where those two things are holding hands
  269. because it's all still a fuzzy for me too...</p>
  270. <p>One day all of that data the NSA is reported to be storing will be the raw
  271. material for an AP high school digital humanities homework assignment.</p>
  272. <p>One day that data will be where most of us long since forgotten after our deaths
  273. might live on even the brief moments that someone sees
  274. our past as something more than an abstraction.</p>
  275. <p>One day that data may be used to demonstrate that
  276. it was, in fact, a fifth
  277. column that finally ushered in a
  278. global <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/The+Sunday+Edition/ID/2618301311/">confessional uniformity</a> — a
  279. pursuit that seems to be present in every age for as long as we've been
  280. telling these stories.</p>
  281. <p>One day that data will be subpoenaed and used to
  282. tell the stories that we may not want to remember but that
  283. we need to. If you've not read the US Senate Intelligence
  284. Committee's <a href="http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014.html">Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention
  285. and Interrogation Program</a> you should. Someone has
  286. to. It's
  287. profoundly depressing but it is important
  288. reading. Beyond the actions described in the report
  289. the thing that struck me is that most of the proof
  290. seems to have been found in the email that the various
  291. actors sent themselves.</p>
  292. <p>Email. <em>They talked about this stuff in email.</em></p>
  293. <blockquote>
  294. <p><q>It's even the harmless,
  295. mundane, trivial stuff that makes up any day's email
  296. load that suddenly feels ugly and raw out in the
  297. open.</q></p>
  298. </blockquote>
  299. <p>Lots of private companies are establishing
  300. corporate policies whereby email archives are purged
  301. on a regular interval. Lots of security professionals
  302. are recommending the practice to individuals precisely
  303. because the cost to an opportunist to hoarde that data
  304. and discover some clever use for it in the future is
  305. negligable.</p>
  306. <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>
  307. <blockquote>
  308. <p>The CIA sought permission in January to
  309. destroy e-mail communications of all but 22 top CIA
  310. officials within three years of their leaving the
  311. agency — <q>or when no longer needed, whichever is
  312. sooner.</q></p>
  313. </blockquote>
  314. <p><q>No longer needed.</q> I know, right?</p>
  315. <p>In the end the National Archives announced that, at
  316. least for now, <a href="http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2014/11/nara-cia-email/">they
  317. won't indulge the CIA's request</a>. This isn't
  318. necessarily about the CIA either. It seems that we give them a
  319. long-enough leash that by their actions they routine provoke these
  320. questions, but ask yourselves:
  321. Do you really want <a href="http://gothamist.com/2015/02/25/email_enema_healthy_ny.php">any government agency</a> to have the
  322. luxury of choosing the shadow it casts in to the
  323. future and the stories it tells at dinner parties?</p>
  324. <p>The practice is hardly new, historically,
  325. but I'm not sure its one that's worked out very well
  326. for most people, most of the time.</p>
  327. <p>I do not mean to suggest that we supplicate ourselves to the imagined benefits
  328. of the hypothetical futures I am describing. The question remains: How do we
  329. protect the present from itself? The question remains:
  330. How long needs to pass before the sting of all that
  331. data in the moment is worth its yield in the
  332. future?</p>
  333. <p>We have never stopped looking back and trying to
  334. figure out <em>what the fuck</em> the past was
  335. thinking and I don't imagine we will stop anytime
  336. soon. I think that is important to remember because
  337. one of the opportunities that <q>big-data</q> suggests
  338. is a better window on the past and, now that we've
  339. seen it, it's difficult to imagine anyone choosing the
  340. forfeit that possibility.</p>
  341. <p>What upsets me about the "big-data" discussion is the way that
  342. it is so often couched in a rhetoric of inevitability. It is the rhetoric of the
  343. <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
  344. struggling to find viable alternatives for as
  345. long as we've recognized it as such.</p>
  346. <p>The rhetoric of
  347. big-data is too often about absolute certainties and
  348. not about choices, or reasons. On bad days it is an abdication of our shared
  349. responsibility to articulate <em>why</em> we choose to
  350. live the ways that we do.</p>
  351. </div>
  352. <div class="slide" id="moma-big-data-008">
  353. <div class="image640">
  354. <img src="http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2015/02/24/effort/images/moma-big-data.008.jpg"/>
  355. </div>
  356. </div>