“Social media is a nuance destruction machine…”
— Jeff Bezos, in testimony at an antitrust hearing of the US House Committee on the Judiciary, 29 July 2020. Via Geekwire

The full quote, in response to a question about so-called “cancel culture”, was, “What I find a little discouraging is that it appears to me that social media is a nuance destruction machine, and I don’t think that’s helpful for a democracy.”

The Bible could not have known numbers such as these

India:

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. …He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice?

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual. 

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these.

The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police.

Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border [over 500km].

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said. 

“Us” means approximately 460m people.
The Pandemic is a Portal, by novelist Arundhati Roy, on India's response to the Coronavirus. Financial Times, 3 April 2020

Brave New Workplace

1980:

The computerized control of work has become so pervasive in Bell Telephone's clerical sector that management now has the capacity to measure how many times a phone rings before it is answered, how long a customer is put on hold, how long it takes a clerk to complete a call. …Each morning, workers receive computer printouts listing their break and lunch times based on the anticipated traffic patterns of the day. …Before computerization, a worker's morning break normally came about two hours after the beginning of the shift; now, it can come as early as fifteen minutes into the working day. Workers cannot go to the bathroom unless they find someone to take their place. If you close your terminal, right away the computer starts clacking away and starts ringing a bell.
From Brave New Workplace by Robert Howard, in Working Papers for a New Society, Cambridge Policy Studies Institute, November-December 1980 (As cited in New Information Technology: For What by Tom Athanisou, Processed World, April 1981)

The essay ends with, “In a world where everything and everyone is treated as an object to be bought and sold, the new technologies — and most of the old ones for that matter — will inevitably create hardship and human misery. […] The ease with which computers are used as instruments of social control cannot be allowed to obscure their liberatory potential.”

Only until they are personal

Crises are political only until they are personal. As news of Mr. Frilot’s diagnosis spread, among his friends and on Nola.com, his story was no longer just that of a young, healthy person who caught a virus that young, healthy people had been told they were not supposed to catch. It was a revelation for the conservative suburbs of New Orleans, where many had written off the pandemic as liberal fear-mongering. Mr. Frilot, a registered Republican, and his family are generally apolitical, and were not thinking much about the virus — whether as a fiction or anything else — before he got sick.
covid-infection-story.jpg
On Facebook, Kathy Perilloux shared a similar conversion. Before March 16, Ms. Perilloux’s page was almost solely posts questioning the severity of the virus. March 10: “Hurricane Corona …. HYPE …. sigh,” she wrote. (“I stole that from Rush, but I was thinking the same before he said it!!!!!” she added in a comment.)

Then Ms. Perilloux commented on Ms. Frilot’s post: “Your story puts a real face on a real danger, that’s what had been missing.” She hasn’t posted anything else about the pandemic.

Since Friday, March 13, Mark Frilot has managed just two breaths on his own.
Her Facebook Friends Asked if Anyone Was Actually Sick. She Had an Answer, by Elaina Plott, New York Times, 19 March 2020

More Gibson than Gibson

“Welcome to 2020, time travelers, where white grandads fighting for racial equity mid pandemic are equipped with n95s and super charged leaf blowers to ‘blow the tear gas away.’”
— Jacqueline Alemany @JaxAlemany, 24 July 2020, in response to Sergio Olmos' video of Portland protestor Peter Buck. With "Gibson" I'm referring to the work of cyberpunk/speculative fiction author William Gibson.

Imagine a world in which

We don’t know exactly what this new future looks like, of course. But one can imagine a world in which, to get on a flight, perhaps you’ll have to be signed up to a service that tracks your movements via your phone. The airline wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infected people or disease hot spots. There’d be similar requirements at the entrance to large venues, government buildings, or public transport hubs. There would be temperature scanners everywhere, and your workplace might demand you wear a monitor that tracks your temperature or other vital signs. Where nightclubs ask for proof of age, in future they might ask for proof of immunity—an identity card or some kind of digital verification via your phone, showing you’ve already recovered from or been vaccinated against the latest virus strains.

All of us will have to adapt to a new way of living, working, and forging relationships. But as with all change, there will be some who lose more than most, and they will be the ones who have lost far too much already. The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force countries—the US, in particular—to fix the yawning social inequities that make large swaths of their populations so intensely vulnerable.
We’re not going back to normal, by Gideon Lichfield, Technology Review, 17 March 2020. With light edits.

In small places, close to home

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works.

Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.
Eleanor Roosevelt, from her remarks known as "The Great Question", delivered at the United Nations in New York on March 27, 1958.

This quote was a little hard to track down, but I found this in Kathryn Kish Sklar’s essay in Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights: "Roosevelt's remarks were extemporaneous and no document of them survives… [She] was speaking at the UN on the occasion of presenting a pamphlet co-authored with Ethel Philips, In Your Hands: a Guide for Community Action (New York: Church Peace Union, 1958).”

Cultural Engagement to Mitigate Social Isolation

My collaborator Dana Mitroff Silvers and I have received a grant from the Aspen Institute Tech Policy Hub, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Omidyar Network, to help museums, libraries, and performing arts organizations work more directly with their communities during this awful, challenging moment in America.

The Aspen Tech Policy Hub announcement and press release is here.

10 cultural organizations, together serving over 4 million people across the United States, have joined us.

Our partners are,

The idea of this project is very humble and straightforward: Dana and I will bring the group together and provide workshops, facilitation, coaching, know-how, and outside perspectives; and the participants will bring their vast professional expertise, imagination, and intimate knowledge of their communities, missions, and values. We’ll meet weekly over the course of 10 weeks and together we’ll try to nudge new experiments and ideas into the light of day.

When we conceived this project back in April we were focused exclusively on addressing the harm being caused to communities and individuals by the social isolation of Covid-19, but April seems like it was 100 years ago. Now, with our hearts aching from the eruption of pain, fear, and anger of what we have all lived through and witnessed over the last few days here in the US, and with many of our collaborators dealing with the immediate consequences and long-term root causes of violence and injustice on their own doorsteps, we will inevitably be drawn together towards a larger and more consequential response.

I hope you will follow this project here, with the participants directly, on my Twitter and Dana’s Twitter — and I also hope that everyone, everywhere, will become more deeply committed to the social and cultural life, social justice, and wellbeing of their own communities.

P.S.

In addition to this Aspen project I’m also beginning to lead a series of sense-making workshops with Europeana Network members this week, with Jasper Visser, to help understand and support the digital transformation they are currently experiencing across the European cultural sector.

Also, we have launched a call for participation for What Matters Now, an online community event to be held on July 10, 2020 [was previously July 3]. Please check it out and join us!

“The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to emotionally comprehend the exponential function”
https://twitter.com/ryanstruyk/status/1263661094024994818

https://twitter.com/ryanstruyk/status/1263661094024994818

This “extinction of the human race” statement is often attributed to Edward Teller but I can't find a reference to a specific time or place he said or wrote it. The closest I can find is the statement “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function,” by a Manhattan Project colleague of Mr. Teller, physicist Albert Allen Bartlett. See Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101 from Bartlett's website.

“When we balance out what’s more important, speed or accuracy, it’s not even a close call. We should be expecting accuracy and adjusting our expectations in regards to speed.”
— David Becker, Executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, in Iowa’s Lesson: Political Parties Are Not as Good as Government Officials at Counting Votes, by Jessica Huseman, Jack Gillum and Derek Willis, 4 February 2020

20-cents off a can of corn

Most large companies doing business in California are required by the state’s new privacy law to disclose what they know about customers and how that information is used.

This resulted in fairly straightforward announcements by many businesses.

Then there’s Ralphs, the supermarket chain owned by Kroger.

…As part of signing up for a rewards card, Ralphs “may collect” information such as “your level of education, type of employment, information about your health and information about insurance coverage you might carry.”

It says Ralphs may pry into “financial and payment information like your bank account, credit and debit card numbers, and your credit history.” […]

Ralphs says it’s gathering “behavioral information” such as “your purchase and transaction histories” and “geolocation data,” which could mean the specific Ralphs aisles you browse or could mean the places you go when not shopping for groceries, thanks to the tracking capability of your smartphone.

Ralphs also reserves the right to go after “information about what you do online” and says it will make “inferences” about your interests “based on analysis of other information we have collected.”

Other information? This can include files from “consumer research firms” — read: professional data brokers — and “public databases,” such as property records and bankruptcy filings.

[The article also notes that Ralphs' parent company Kroger also owns a company 'devoted solely to using customer data as a business resource' by aggregating data about its customers and selling it on the open market.]

“This level of intrusiveness seems like a very unfair bargain in return for, say, 20 cents off a can of corn,” Fordham’s Reidenberg said.

Is a supermarket discount coupon worth giving away your privacy?, by David Lazarus, Los Angeles Times, 21 January 2020
“Precisely because technology is now moving so fast, and parliaments and dictators alike are overwhelmed by data they cannot process quickly enough, present-day politicians are thinking on a far smaller scale than their predecessors a century ago. Consequently, in the early twenty-first century polities is bereft of grand visions.”
— Homo Deus, by Yavul Harari, 2015. Page 372

Meaningful Visions of the Future

“In the coming decades it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on polities. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies — and our bodies and minds too — but they are hardly a blip on the current political radar. Present-day democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic polities is losing control of events, and is failing to present us with meaningful visions of the future.”
Homo Deus, by Yavul Harari, 2015. Page 372