Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

Who Really Owns “Our” Stuff?

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In the long run there is something to be said for less manufacturing and more borrowing.  But its a painful transition. 

When we purchase a “product” these days it seems less like we have taken ownership of something and more like we have purchased a set of open-ended permissions. Our relationship to some products is now much more fraught with ambiguous limits about how they may be used, loaned or copied.  I’m still not sure who actually owns “my” music on ITunes. Apple treats every music customer like a supplicant. Ditto for e-book purchases from Amazon.  I can read them, but their portability beyond their approved platforms seems limited.  The same ambiguity exists with films purchased via a cable supplier.  I have access to the one film I did “buy” through our cable provider.  But it’s not like I can put it into my pocket and share it anywhere.  And just last week I was surprised to be asked to log on to a Microsoft site with a work password to look at my Word files on my home computer.  If we ever had the fortitude to read the fine print, we would find that the digital rights of a copy of something we think we “own” still belong to the seller.  Companies apparently pay people a lot of money to dream up ways to put strings on lots of different kinds of products.  They want to be gatekeepers.

It turns out the Tesla Automobiles appears to operate under the same logic. I can imagine that buyers of their electric cars are accustomed to leasing everything from from property to music. But to an older car buyer, it might take some attitude adjustment to get used to the idea that the performance characteristics and driving range of a given car can be reset remotely by Tesla.  Pay more, and they can send code to the car’s computer that will make it run longer or faster.

Without doubt, digital library books seem to work well.  In the case of libraries, we know that the borrowed book is never ours.  And it certainly is far more convenient when the return process can happen without having to travel to the library’s physical location.

Anyone who looks at offices or homes will notice the people still like to collect things. In my home CDs and books are still on the shelves.  There are even some 78s hanging around and ready to live again on a 1904 Victor record player. Sure, I could pay to have digital access to Irving Aaronson’s 1928 recording of Let’s Misbehave. It’s not Stravinsky, but it’s fun.  And sometimes an older medium is the message. Seeing a needle the size of a nail working through the old shellac recording is part of the experience of hearing Cole Porter’s  irreverent lyrics.

In the long run there is something to be said for less manufacturing and more borrowing.  but its a painful transition.  There are predictions by thoughtful people that even the age of the private automobile will pass.  It’s hard to imagine, especially if a person lives in a rural location.  I’m also from a generation when a car was seen as a freedom machine.  Then, the more open road was always an irresistible temptation.

red concave bar

Putting Only 45 Cards on the Table

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                              Source: Annalect

This is what the erosion of personal choice can look like.  We may not act on the best options available, because others are choosing them.

In the West we cherish the idea of individual freedom.  We act on the belief that we have ‘agency.’ That’s to say, the choices that matter are ours alone to make.  It’s a basic tenet of American life. Within the broad boundaries set by a civil society, no one has the right to deny or ignore them. But we are beginning to hear more for mathematician’s and others about “decisions” that are not as informed or self-generated as we may think.

Hannah Fry, a mathematician at University College, London has written about “tiny decisions on our behalf” that can be made without our blessing or our awareness. In an interview in reproduced in Vox, she notes that algorithms now effect many functions within our lives: “From what we choose to read and watch to who we choose to date, algorithms are increasingly playing a huge role. And it’s not just the obvious cases, like Google search algorithms or Amazon recommendation algorithms.”(Vox, October 1, 2018).

The broad palette of options presented to us from internet-based material have obviously been preselected, first and most obviously by advertisers who pay for high search placement, but also by algorithms used by internet providers to ostensibly match our interests.  If you have puzzled over why certain Facebook feeds go to some and not to others, you may have a growing sense that someone else is dealing the cards from a stacked deck. What someone sees at a given site is always a mystery: partly a function of the digital footprints we leave every time we double-click, but also because of unknowable algorithms.  We already know this, but its easy to forget about choices we never see.

By shifting decisions to mathematical formulas composed of triggering conditions we do not know we have essentially given up some of our autonomy.

At its most basic, an algorithm is just a formula for content selection that seems appropriate for a given consumer or class of consumers. It’s an efficient gatekeeping tool. And, to be sure, we have always had gatekeepers channeling some content in our direction and filtering out other items. But most of those decision-makers, especially in the news business, presumably use journalistic or source credibility standards for winnowing content.  Yet based on what I’ve seen from various feeds, its clear that those standards have been replaced by various triggers that have little to do with the quality of a given story.  For example, I see lots of stories of celebrity gossip from unknown “publications” on my Google Play, even though my interests lie elsewhere.

By shifting decisions to mathematical formulas composed of triggering conditions, we do not know what we have essentially given up.  Even a system truly based on probabilities and past practices is bound to yield results that are less than they should be. So when we are given “choices”—ranging from the best Asian restaurant “nearby,” to the most qualified news source for a specialized story—the recommendations are based on criteria we generally do not know.

All of this suggests that we have less to fear from robots than from programmed servers that only appear to be offering targeted information. In the 21st Century this is what the erosion of agency can mean.  Too often we are acting on options that have been set by others.