Tuesday, July 9, 2019

still creepy

I read a New York Times opinion piece by Charlie Warzel, about tracking behavior in a mail client called Superhuman – it embeds tracking pixels in all its sent mail so it can report views back to the sender. The piece starts off with a succinct and reasonably accurate reading of how this sort of thing usually plays out:

Call it the Five Stages of Privacy Erosion.

Tech Company builds popular product.

Product is exposed in the press for doing something shady behind the scenes.

Tech Company apologizes/clarifies/signals a fix.

Brief phase of collective rejoicing and moving on.

It’s revealed (usually by the same people) that Product was never really fixed.

…and then midway through it comes to this disclaimer:

(I want to pause here to offer an email-tracking disclosure and some clarification. Tracking is a tricky subject. It isn’t inherently nefarious. This newsletter tracks things like how many times the newsletter email is opened and what links are clicked, which helps to improve the newsletter. But like all privacy issues, it’s a matter of transparency and expectations. When it comes to marketing emails and newsletters, which often come from corporate entities, there’s often more of an expectation that open rates might be tracked. In Superhuman’s case, as Davidson notes, the tracking takes place with every personal email sent, which is more likely to violate the expectation of privacy.)

Which I think demonstrates how fucked we are just about as well as anything. The tracking is creepy, under this model, when you don’t expect it from an individual quite as much as you do from a company, which has legitimate reasons to hoard your data. Don’t you want the newsletter to improve?

This is the mode of reasoning that’s gotten us where we are now, after decades of principled objection from people with both functioning consciences and a coherent grasp of privacy: to an ever-ratcheting state of intrusive, unregulated, irremediable surveillance. Surveillance as a cornerstone of the economy and a baseline expectation of business, publishing, government, and law.

I don’t mean to pick on Charlie Warzel and if he reads this I hope he doesn’t take it as mean-spirited. I don’t disagree with the rest of the column, and including that parenthetical disclosure shows more self-awareness than the majority of editorializing you read about this stuff, hosted as it is on websites with dozens of embedded trackers and ad services. But! When a journalist specializing in privacy topics explains that the technology he’s calling out as creepy isn’t creepy when it’s built into the platform he writes on, it says something about what understandings are possible and allowed.

It’s possible to understand that these behaviors are inherently nefarious, but taking that idea seriously, let alone saying so out loud, isn’t compatible with keeping a lot of jobs. You always have to soften the blow, to acquiesce in ways that undermine either your own awareness or your honesty. You might try to fight it, but in most situations it’s like shoveling back the tide with a fork. I’ve tried more times than I can count and I’ve lost pretty much every time, in every way that matters.

All the same, that this is an intractable situation for anyone whose livelihood is caught up in it doesn’t change that the shady behaviors are shady. The creepy stuff is still creepy even when a respected media outlet does it for reasons that seem to bolster the media outlet’s interests.

new-york-times, panopticon, surveillance :: p1k3 / 2019 / 7 / 9

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

word of the day: wildering

$ dict wildering
2 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Wilder \Wil"der\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Wildered}; p. pr. & vb.
     n. {Wildering}.] [Akin to E. wild, Dan. forvilde to bewilder,
     Icel. villr bewildered, villa to bewilder; cf. AS. wildor a
     wild animal. See {Wild}, a., and cf. {Wilderness}.]
     To bewilder; to perplex.
     [1913 Webster]

           Long lost and wildered in the maze of fate. --Pope.
     [1913 Webster]

           Again the wildered fancy dreams
           Of spouting fountains, frozen as they rose. --Bryant.
     [1913 Webster]

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Wildering \Wild"er*ing\, n. (Bot.)
     A plant growing in a state of nature; especially, one which
     has run wild, or escaped from cultivation.
     [1913 Webster]

dict :: p1k3 / 2019 / 7 / 3

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Some weeks ago, I read a New York Times review of Jared Diamond’s latest:

If you’ve ever been at a wedding or conference or on board a United connection from O’Hare, and been cornered by a man with Theories About It All, and you came away thinking, “That was a great experience,” have I got the book for you.

Jared Diamond’s “Upheaval” belongs to the genre of 30,000-foot books, which sell an explanation of everything. I travel often and see them a lot: at airport bookstores, where Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari (both of whom blurbed “Upheaval”) and Diamond, of course, deserve permanent shelves; and in the air, where I’ve noticed that a pretty disproportionate fraction of readers who read in the quiet of 30,000 feet have a preference for writers who write from the viewpoint of 30,000 feet.

…

When Diamond describes “highly egalitarian social values” as an ethos that has “remained unchanged” in Australia, despite having written a chapter about the country’s history of legalized racism, he is using a definition of egalitarian that applies only to white people. When he says, “Social status in Japan depends more on education than on heredity and family connection,” he is ignoring what it means to be born a woman. “Of course, my list of U.S. problems isn’t exhaustive,” he admits. “Problems that I don’t discuss include race relations and the role of women.” You know, the problems affecting the vast majority of Americans.

I don’t quote this by way of piling on Diamond. I’m pretty sure I won’t read Upheaval, but I also doubt it’s going to do as much damage in the world as, say, any given bestseller by the NYT’s own Thomas Friedman.

I mention it here because that review got me thinking about a time when I was really drawn to this kind of book: Big, framework-y pop science and history narratives with (at least ostensibly) a grand cross-disciplinary synthesis to communicate. Stuff like Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, E.O. Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. (Subtitles included for maximum effect.)

I pulled that specific grouping of books out of memory, but the list probably stuck in my head in the first place because I wrote this p1k3 entry, or others like it. It’s cringey material, like a lot of things I wrote in those years. I was at the time 23 years old, inexperienced, constantly drunk, and months out of a mediocre undergraduate degree with no idea what to do next. I had spent time around very smart people who were nevertheless too much in the grip of Evolutionary Psych and similar ideas, and I was too lazy by far to be a tenth as well-read as I pretended to be. In general I was insufferable, and it comes through in the text.

✵

As usual, “I didn’t understand a lot of things when I was younger” is true, but not very interesting. I have plenty of regrets, but if I couldn’t forgive myself for being a posturing jackass when I was trying to figure out my place in the world, I’d just be permanently crippled by self-loathing, which is no use to anyone.

Anyhow, what strikes me now, aside from a lot of ideological drift, is how much my own hopes and ambitions have changed since then. I once wanted to write something big, encompassing, cross-cutting, etc. I wanted, even if I didn’t have the work ethic or the cognitive capacity, to understand as much as I could and abstract it across as many domains as I could touch. I was inclined to manifestos, grand plans, programs, prescriptions, the idea of an overarching research project. At least I thought about those things a lot. And even once I’d mostly given up on designing that kind of project, maybe I sincerely thought that something more or less whole, greater than the sum of its parts, could emerge from the slow iteration of my work. (One from 2007 and one from 2016 suggest as much.)

In 2019, I still hold plenty of strong opinions (a few even grounded in experience), but I hope I have fewer illusions about their coherence or my grasp of the overall set of problems. I think a lot about just how brittle and partial and misleading the materials of history tend to be, how difficult and fallible it is to construct science, journalism, or historical narrative that doesn’t crucially misrepresent the world. The feeling that once kept me from writing fiction — an uneasiness about my ability to describe or portray any experience outside my own — has deepened and spread to other domains.

These days I’m uncomfortable, despite a long-time fixation on the idea that you should write for someone, with the idea of publishing at all, at least in the deranged and weaponized shitstorm climate of the modern network. I haven’t given up on the long project of a lifetime’s jotting and correspondence. If anything I do more of it — but I don’t expect it to yield much besides a better memory and some communication with friends. Those are good things in themselves, and I’m not seeking any broader justification for the habits that underpin them. Still, they’re very different from the work of the writer I might have become, if I’d had more raw ability and worked harder at it.

I’m not altogether sure that’s a bad thing.

❦

(As a postscript, I want to acknowledge the strong possibility that I’m still insufferable.)

history, jared-diamond, steven-pinker, writing :: p1k3 / 2019 / 6 / 19

Thursday, June 13, 2019

Maciej Cegłowski, the New Wilderness:

So why have the gravediggers of online privacy suddenly grown so worried about the health of the patient?

Part of the answer is a defect in the language we use to talk about privacy. That language, especially as it is codified in law, is not adequate for the new reality of ubiquitous, mechanized surveillance.

In the eyes of regulators, privacy still means what it did in the eighteenth century—protecting specific categories of personal data, or communications between individuals, from unauthorized disclosure. Third parties that are given access to our personal data have a duty to protect it, and to the extent that they discharge this duty, they are respecting our privacy.

Seen in this light, the giant tech companies can make a credible claim to be the defenders of privacy, just like a dragon can truthfully boast that it is good at protecting its hoard of gold. Nobody spends more money securing user data, or does it more effectively, than Facebook and Google.

The question we need to ask is not whether our data is safe, but why there is suddenly so much of it that needs protecting. The problem with the dragon, after all, is not its stockpile stewardship, but its appetite.

facebook, google, panopticon, policy, politics, scale, surveillance :: p1k3 / 2019 / 6 / 13

Sunday, June 2, 2019

I recently read At least one Vim trick you might not know, which is a pretty high-quality example of the stuff-about-text-editors blog post.

There are- very roughly- two categories of Vim users. Purists value Vim’s small size and ubiquitousness. They tend to keep configuration to a minimum in case they need to use it on an unfamiliar computer (such as during ssh). Exobrains, on the other hand, stuff Vim full of plugins, functions, and homebrew mappings in a vain attempt to pretend they’re using Emacs. If you took away an exobrain’s vimrc they’d be completely helpless.

Not too unreasonable a model of the thing, probably. I’m definitely somewhere in “exobrain” territory at this point.

I ought to write one of these eventually - or maybe follow Tyler’s lead and write a literate .vimrc. My existing one has a lot of comments, but it’s not exactly a coherent document.

technical, vim :: p1k3 / 2019 / 6 / 2