Samir Chopra's Blog, page 86

Put Away Work; The World Cup Is Here

Good afternoon, world. The World Cup starts today. Let me tell you how serious this business is: I had intended to cancel my cable subscription a month or so ago, till a good friend reminded me about it. He stayed my hand, eager to claim time and money. Imagine: a cable cancellation delayed because of a sporting event.

But that’s not all that will be delayed.  Here are some other notable items due to be placed on the back-burner: my next book; my syllabus preparation for the fall; many meals; the completed readings of items on my to-read list; my child’s cognitive and linguistic development (a distracted parent is never a good thing for an eighteen-month old.)

Over the next few weeks, I will root for and against imagined allies and enemies; I will set up alliances with perfect strangers; I will lean on all kinds of stereotypes to bolster my support and disdain for imagined and temporary friends and foes. I will dredge up–only half-facetiously–all manner of historical and political offense to justify my lack of support for some; I will construct–only half-facetiously–innumerable virtues to justify my support for others. I will be easy prey for marketers and makers of sappy YouTube videos; commercials will find plenty of purchase on my heart and soul. I will speak knowledgeably about distant lands; I will reveal too, ignorance aplenty.

The World Cup is the closest thing, I think, we have to a genuine global party. Many bars will be full; much work will be missed; sick days will multiply as a pandemic of imagined afflictions sweeps the land; grandmothers will keel over by the score. It will be possible, on many occasions, to walk into a room full of people whom you will not know from Adam, and find yourself indulging in backslapping bonhomie a few moments later (depending on whether the ball has found the back of the net or merely hit the crossbar.)

Never mind that the World Cup is run by a catastrophically inept and corrupt parent organization; sports fans are ruefully accustomed, by now, to the venality and incompetence of those who administer their beloved obsessions. Their seeming passivity and helplessness, their resigned acceptance, often lends credence to the claim that organized, professional sports is just the latest soporific used by the Man to keep the unruly masses slumbering away, oblivious to the loot and plunder taking place around them.

This year’s World Cup takes place in the shadow of the many protests in Brazil at its associated waste and misdirected expenditure; this resistance is serious business, and might yet cast a pall over the entire proceedings. But only in Brazil, I think. Elsewhere, the familiar charms of this mother of all sporting events will work their usual magic, transforming millions of men, women, and children into obsessives, ready to have their hearts broken or uplifted by the doings of twenty-men kicking around a leather ball on a large field.

Sports is easily scorned, but it’s not so easily ignored.

On First and Second Languages-IV: Bringing Up Baby

I am often asked, by well-meaning friends, “Are you going to teach your daughter how to speak [Hindi, Urdu]?” My answer, invariably, is “I’ll try.” So I’m trying.  My efforts at teaching my daughter Hindi-Urdu consist primarily of speaking to her in it, with occasional lapses into English.

These lapses have become more frequent. I feel my resolve faltering. This is perhaps ludicrous. My daughter is only eighteen months, and is only now learning her first words. Among them, she has learned one in Hindi–a slightly colloquial, baby-talk term for milk. This surely, is the time to dig in, and press on.

But the challenges are daunting. Hindi-Urdu isn’t my first language; English is. I don’t read books in Hindi–though I have grand plans to read three novels, patiently waiting for me on my shelves; the frequency of my Hindi-movie watching is far outstripped by that of English–and other languages, subtitled in, naturally, English. Very few of my daughter’s local uncles and aunts–who do not live in New York City in any case–speak Hindi-Urdu (though some of them comprehend it well enough to converse with their immigrant parents.) Her grandparents–my wife’s parents–only occasionally speak to her in Hindi-Urdu. I have few Indian friends, and their children only speak English as well. Her linguistic community for Hindi-Urdu–that is, me–looks remarkably scant and impoverished.

Besides, I’m conflicted about this project. While I’m well aware of the virtues of bilingualism, I wonder about the choice of the second language. Wouldn’t Spanish be better for a child growing up in the modern United States? My English vocabulary is much richer than my Hindi-Urdu one; wouldn’t I be aiding her cognitive development more by speaking to her in a language in which I would be more expressive, more fluent, more able to express a broader range of concepts and ideas? Why should she learn Hindi-Urdu? I doubt she’ll become a South Asian studies scholar. And if she does, perhaps she can learn this language later in life? Many area studies scholars do just that, after all.  To ‘learn about her roots’ and ‘where she came from’? But her roots are in Brooklyn and New York City. This is where her father has lived for the last two decades; this is where she was born.  My trips to India look like becoming less, not more, frequent in the years to come. And lastly, I have neither the desire nor the ability to impose a specific Indian identity on her. Mine is confused enough; I doubt I should attempt to ‘bring her up Indian’, to ‘make her aware of her culture’. Perhaps she can sample the bits of Indianness that exist in my life along with all the other flavors of this Brooklyn life of ours and make of them what she will.

Perhaps I’m just lazy, unwilling to put in the hard yards to bring up a bilingual child–like watching movies with her or teaching her the alphabet. Perhaps; it won’t be the first time a dimly desirable project of mine has run aground for lack of drive.

For the time being, I’ll press on, talking as much as I can in my ‘mother-tongues’, trusting that my daughter will find some traction in our conversations. Perhaps she’ll let me know, by her facility, what she’d like to do.

Note: As might be surmised, I do feel some guilt about being so conflicted and insufficiently committed to this project. This emotion has only been exacerbated by a niece of mine–raised in Los Angeles–who has told me she would have much preferred it if her parents had taught her Hindi-Urdu.

The New American Dream: Becoming An Academic Administrator

Go West, young man; or perhaps, go into plastics. And now, go become an academic administrator.

The City University of New York’s new chancellor, James Milliken, will soon be drawing upon his $670,000 salary. When he does so, he’ll be able to entertain guests in style at his $18,000 a month apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan–paid for by CUNY (they did set aside 3.7 million dollars for his housing budget). His predecessor, Matthew Goldstein, is still making $300,000 a year in his emeritus position; perhaps offering sage advice to future presidents on how to make sure they come away with a really good retirement package.

Meanwhile, tuition rises, our classrooms continue to decay, faculty remain jammed into small offices, often four at a time. Our network connections remain glacial; journal subscriptions are cancelled every year for lack of funds; book budgets shrink; travel funds for conferences are routinely denied to even those who make presentations.  Full-time faculty are being steadily replaced by part-time adjuncts who make slave wages, receive no health benefits, and do not have an office or a phone. And there has been a freeze on wages for four years–at CUNY–because the contract expired that many years ago. (At Brooklyn College, I share a two-room office with three other faculty members; we ask for staggered teaching schedules so that we can, when needed, conduct conversations with our students in private. A dirty pool of reddish liquid appears to have seeped into our office and despite two calls to facilities to clean it up, the stain remains. Meanwhile the Dean for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences works in a three-chamber, wall-to-wall carpeted office, complete with attached conference room and multi-person secretarial staff).

There is an old joke about private universities which continues to make the rounds: they are real estate companies and investment houses that award degrees on the side. Their rent-seeking disease appears contagious: public universities want in on the act. They want to raise tuition and hire ever more administrators, who delight in walking into meetings with faculty, armed with the latest anti-tenure, anti-liberal arts education screed penned by a management consultant wanna-be, and telling them what time it is.  They want to hobnob with the rich and famous; sometimes they invite those who only recently strode the corridors of power, hoping that they will build networks of influence that will secure them well-paid lectures on the speaking circuit.

The new career path for those looking to make some serious bucks in academia looks something like this: get tenure; slowly work your way into administration, taking on one of those responsibilities that grant you release time from teaching and research; build up a portfolio of administrative accomplishments; indicate your desire to do this work full-time; work your way up to becoming a provost or a dean, ideal springboards for more senior positions; make a lateral move to accomplish this if necessary; the big prize, a university presidency will hopefully soon be yours.

Normally, this state of affairs would be a scandal. But this is a new America: bloated and bureaucratic and too-big-to-fail.

Sweatshops below; swank above. USA! USA! USA!

 

Getting What We Really Want: Heavily Armed Police Forces

A couple of months ago, I made note, yet again, of the steady militarization of US police. Today, we have more news from that ‘front.’ (A word that seems ever more appropriate).

The New York Times‘ Matt Apuzzo reports:

[A]s President Obama ushers in the end of what he called America’s “long season of war,” the former tools of combat — M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and more — are ending up in local police departments, often with little public notice.

During the Obama administration…police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.

Nothing quite brings out the idiocy of this relentless arming than the deployment of an armored combat vehicle in Neenah, Wisconsin, “a quiet city of about 25,000 people” with “a violent crime rate that is far below the national average.” It has “not had a homicide in more than five years.”

Moreover:

Congress created the military-transfer program in the early 1990s, when violent crime plagued America’s cities and the police felt outgunned by drug gangs. Today, crime has fallen to its lowest levels in a generation, the wars have wound down, and despite current fears, the number of domestic terrorist attacks has declined sharply from the 1960s and 1970s.

And of course, these weapons contribute to changing self-perceptions among police forces:

Recruiting videos feature clips of officers storming into homes with smoke grenades and firing automatic weapons. In Springdale, Ark., a police recruiting video is dominated by SWAT clips, including officers throwing a flash grenade into a house and creeping through a field in camouflage.

The indiscriminate arming also seems to have corroded police officers’ intelligence:

In South Carolina, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department’s website features its SWAT team, dressed in black with guns drawn, flanking an armored vehicle that looks like a tank and has a mounted .50-caliber gun. Capt. Chris Cowan, a department spokesman, said…police officers had taken it to schools and community events, where it was a conversation starter.

“All of a sudden, we start relationships with people,” he said.

These “relationships” terminus might, unfortunately, be a violent death.

Two ‘wars’–the one on drugs, and the one on terrorism–are having entirely unsurprising effects: the steady arming of domestic police forces, the evisceration of civil rights, the indiscriminate use of violence against citizenry (more often than not, of the darker-skinned persuasion). The citizens of this land continue to be socialized to the norm of the stop and frisk, the warrantless scan of communications, the invasive entry, the carefully circumscribed public protest. In all of this, the image of the policeman has morphed from neighborhood peacekeeper to external enforcer. One armed with the best weaponry available.

The US is awash with guns, often owned by those who claim they do so to protect themselves against governmental tyranny; their arguments often seem risible, but when news reports like these make the rounds, they seem a little less so.

Imagine that: finding yourself nodding in unison with armed militia wingnuts. Never thought you’d see the day? It might be here.

Beverly Gage Misses the Mark on Ken Burns’ ‘The War’

Ken Burns‘ The War–a seven-episode, fourteen-hour documentary on the Second World War, released in 2007–was never going to find favor with all who viewed it. Mostly because it is unabashedly sentimental, an unforgivable sin for those of ironic and skeptical persuasion. Even granted this, Beverly Gage‘s review in Slate–which I read after finishing my view of Burns’ opus–seems particularly misguided.

For Gage, The War is “manipulative, nostalgic, and nationalistic”, a bit like making “The Civil War solely from the Union perspective.” Of course, as Gage admits, Burns set out to provide an incomplete, all-American narrative:

Burns readily admits that The War is neither a complete nor balanced account of World War II. “The Second World War was fought in thousands of places, too many for any one accounting,” reads the opening screen of each episode. “This is the story of four American towns and how their citizens experienced that war.” He means this quite literally.

Imagine that: being forced to take a movie-maker’s manifesto at face value.

The War showcases a handful of lively, eloquent Americans from four disparate towns—Waterbury, Conn.; Sacramento, Calif.; Mobile, Ala.; and Luverne, Minn. The series contains no identifiable historical experts. (Though cultural historians Paul Fussell and Sam Hynes appear frequently, they are also veterans and are identified only as “infantry” and “Marine pilot.”)

This identification should have given the game away to Gage; this documentary was never intended to be an academic analysis of the Second World War; it is meant to give voice to those who are not often heard from–those who remained at home, and those who fought the war.

The War offers no commentary from the German or Japanese side, or even from the British or Canadians.

But a multi-faceted narrative of the Second World War need not be contained in the same source; perhaps we could stitch one–of the various home fronts during that conflict–by stitching together German, Japanese, British and Canadian ones. And since Gage did bring up the topic–why leave out the personal narratives associated with the many home fronts in that war? You know, the Russian, the Polish, the Czech, the Indian–the list goes on.

Indeed, apart from a few necessary mentions to move the plot along, the film says little about Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Hirohito, Churchill, FDR, or any of the other national leaders who presided over the worst catastrophe of the 20th century.

Of all the bizarre critiques that could have been mounted of Burns’ documentary, this one surely takes the proverbial cake. The Second World War remains the most profusely documented and forensically analyzed human event ever; millions of pages and miles of film have been expended on it; its political, economic, and military dimensions have been the object of study for professionals and amateurs alike. The names that Gage lists above are among the most recognizable names in human history–largely because of their role in the Second World War. And yet, somehow, an academic historian insists that a narrative, intended to be narrowly focused through a very particular lens, is flawed, precisely because it disdains traveling through some deep, well-worn grooves.

I could go on on, but I’ll stop here. Gage was clearly determined to castigate Burns for not having made another documentary altogether. Her mood in the review suggests she would have slammed comic book artists for using too many illustrations and comedians for being too facetious.

On Reading the Unreadable (or Persisting)

Michael Greenberg writes of Jorge Luis Borges:

He advises his students to leave a book if it bores them: “that book was not written for you,” no matter its reputation or fame.

Good advice, but not easily followed.

Borges’ advice isn’t easy to follow because the decision to continue reading is just another instance of that most insuperable of dilemmas: Should I stay or should I go? Should I press on to the summit, risking life and limb, or should I turn back, foregoing glory and the chance to prove myself against the unforgiving elements? I was warned, after all, that I would experience many, many, moments of utter exhaustion, that I would have to dig deep into reserves that I didn’t know existed. Should I persist in this floundering relationship and attempt to rescue it from the doldrums in which it finds itself, thus investigating the depths of my emotional and romantic commitment, or should I cut my losses and run, seeking a better partner elsewhere? The romantic was always supposed to be our sternest test, wasn’t it?

The reading of a book poses this question in particularly vexed form. We have been urged to show a little backbone in our intellectual endeavors; we have been warned pleasures of the mind are not so easily earned; we accuse ourselves, relentlessly, of indolence in matters of edification. We are convinced we are distracted and flighty, flitting from one easily earned pleasure to the next; we are well aware the classics are often ‘difficult’ and require ‘sustained attention’. If a book ‘bores’ us, surely it is our fault, not the author’s, and we should press on regardless, trusting the difficulty journey ahead will bring its own rewards soon enough. Glory, we well know, comes only to those who persist; those who take the first exit on the highway to greatness are destined to only enjoy minor pleasures. So, this boredom that afflicts us, surely it is a reflection of our intellectual infirmity, an entirely ersatz disease. Can its reports really be trusted?

Matters, of course, are made worse in this day and age, as we suffer the ever-growing deluge of the written word, online and offline. We learn every day, with growing dismay, of the decay of the reading mind, the growth of the 140-character missive. Boredom by book seems like an exceedingly common disease, possibly even over-diagnosed.

If we could only trust our own inclinations, our own expressed desires, Borges’ advice would be far more tractable. But we do not. They have gotten us into trouble many times in the past; we know they will continue to torment us so in the future.

Fears of premature abandonment aren’t going away any time soon.

Note: In the past year, I have abandoned classics by Stendhal and Balzac; my guilt lasted for several days, and it was not assuaged when, on reporting these surrenders to a friend, he responded, “Really? I’m surprised. Those are great reads!” Borges can at least rest content his writing will never bore me.

Of Annapurnas and Men: Maurice Herzog’s Epic Lives On

Just over sixty-four years ago, on June 3rd 1950, a pair of French mountaineers, Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal, stood on the summit of Annapurna, the world’s tenth highest peak. It was the first time mountaineers had succeeded in climbing a peak above eight thousand meters altitude. The French pair’s trials and travails were not over; their painfully extended return back to safety was a harrowing one, featuring snow-blindness, frostbite, and several missing fingers and toes (amputated on the go, without anaesthetic, and using only crude surgical implements, by the team’s doctor).

Thanks to Herzog’s best-selling book Annapurna, a classic of adventure literature, these details are familiar to those that follow the exploits of mountaineers. Despite my keen interest–a purely academic one as I have no ability whatsoever–in mountaineering, I had not read Herzog’s book till earlier this week, when, by a fortuitous coincidence, I finished reading it on the sixty-fourth anniversary of his summit climb.

There are good reasons for Annapurna‘s standing as a classic. Herzog’s tale is told with verve: the unforgiving harshness of the Himalayan peaks, which contrasts so starkly with their beauty, is a constant presence, as is the bravado and technical competence of the men who attempt to climb them. The book’s language shows its age in part: a post-colonial reader might object to some of the language used to describe the native Sherpas, who so ably assisted the French in their climbing, often performing brutal, back-breaking work in ferrying loads, setting up camp, and assisting the injured, and of course, there is  talk of ‘doing battle’ with, or otherwise ‘conquering’, the mountains. But these are exceedingly minor blemishes in a mostly lyrical tale of pioneering bravery.

Mention of pioneering reminds me that while a great deal of attention has justifiably been paid to the physical toll the beautiful but deadly mountains exacted on the French, much deserves too, to be centered on their initial reconnaissance of the Annapurna-Dhaulagiri pair of peaks. As a reminder: while these two peaks were known to surveyors and map-makers, they had never been traveled to, let alone attempted. Not only did Herzog’s expedition have to find a route up the mountain, they had to find a route to the mountain. The chapters in the book that detail these attempts are as engrossing as any other, bringing out clearly the peculiar and particular challenges the topography of the region posed for the French expedition’s route-finding attempts. An eight thousand meter peak is a huge object, and yet, finding it, and getting to it, is a non-trivial task when it is surrounded by natural barriers like deep river gorges and seven thousand meter peaks.

Modern mountaineering is a very different business from the activities undertaken in Herzog’s day. Some changes, like light, fast, Alpine-style climbing using minimal equipment, are desirable, while yet others like the guided climbs that have justifiably become controversial, remain far less so.  Annapurna also reminds us of a very different era, when mountaineers were still cultural heroes of a sort.

Classic adventure books are often tinged with a touch of the spiritual and inspirational. Annapurna is no exception, especially in its immortal closing words, as Herzog reconciles himself to the achievement of a long-desired goal and turns toward a new life, one bound to be different given his experiences and physical losses:

There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.

Maureen Dowd Lays Her Mile-High Bum Trip On Us

It might have been predicted, with probability one, that in the wake of Colorado legalizing marijuana, we would be inundated with tall tales of reefer madness sweeping the state, scouring the slopes and plains of that mountainous land like one of those snowy avalanches that sometimes afflict its more outdoorsy folk.

That moment is now upon us. And leading this undignified panicky charge is a long-time resident of that wasteland of privileged, pompous fatuity, the New York Times Op-Ed page:  Maureen Dowd.

Ms. Dowd, it seems, ate a marijuana-infused candy bar in Denver, and then had a bad time. Or rather, Ms. Dowd consumed an edible item without making the slightest attempt to determine what was in it, a strange move to make given marijuana’s known properties. Perhaps a query at the counter might have been helpful? You know, along the lines of, “Hey, how much pot is in this thing?”, or, perhaps, “How much of this should I eat at one time?”

Imagine traveling to an imaginary land, which has recently legalized an intoxicating substance–let’s call it Shmisky for the time being–and made it available for sale in bottled form. You know, as a grown mature adult, that this substance, if consumed in excess, can cause vomiting, loss of motor and sensory control, and perhaps even death. Yet, consumed in reasonable quantities, it leads to a loosening of inhibition and a pleasant sensation of well-being; many societies, just for that reason, have used it to enliven many forms of social gatherings.

On your first day in town, you walk into a shmaloon–places where shmisky is sold to the paying public–push open its batwing doors, park yourself at the counter, and say, “Garçon, hit me up with your finest shmisky.” Your friendly server pushes over an unlabeled bottle containing a dark liquid, suggesting you might like one of shmisky’s variants, blended with a sweet soft drink; some folks like drinking it in this form to change its taste. You begin consuming glass after glass, tossing them down, digging the sweetness of the additive, not bothering to ask your newly made friend what the potency of the drink is.

Hours later, you awake in the street. Your jaw aches, your wallet is missing, and a foul odor suggests you have thrown up all over yourself. You dimly remember a game of pool, and saying to a a large man with tattoos, “I’ll whip your ass all the way from here to kingdom come.”

You realize you were an idiot. You walk back to your hotel, take a shower, call the police and tell them about your missing wallet. When the police press for details, you shamefacedly admit you consumed an intoxicating substance without bothering to check the quantity you were consuming.  The police snicker, but keeping a straight face, continue to politely and solicitously take down your report.

When you return home, still chastened, you write an article on a national soapbox, telling your readers to not be a colossal idiot like you were.

You’re probably not Maureen Dowd.

Note: On a related note, read my post on Lohocla, the killer drug.

Programs as Agents, Persons, or just Programs?

Last week, The Nation published my essay “Programs are People, Too“. In it, I argued for treating smart programs as the legal agents of those that deploy them, a legal change I suggest would be more protective of our privacy rights.

Among some of the responses I received was one from a friend, JW, who wrote:

[You write: But automation somehow deludes some people—besides Internet users, many state and federal judges—into imagining our privacy has not been violated. We are vaguely aware something is wrong, but are not quite sure what.]
 
I think we are aware that something is wrong and that it is less wrong.  We already have an area of the law where we deal with this, namely, dog sniffs.  We think dog sniffs are less injurious than people rifling through our luggage, indeed, the law refers to those sniffs are “sui generis.”  And I think they *are* less injurious, just like it doesn’t bother me that google searches my email with an algorithm.  This isn’t to say that it’s unreasonable for some people to be bothered by it, but I do think people are rightly aware that it is different and less intrusive than if some human were looking through their email.  
 
We don’t need to attribute personhood to dogs to feel violated by police bringing their sniffing up to our house for no reason, but at the same time we basically accept their presence in airports.  And what bothers us isn’t what’s in the dog’s mind, but in the master’s.  If a police dog smelled around my house, made an alert, but no police officer was there to interpret the alert, I’m not sure it would bother me.  
 
Similarly, even attributing intentional states to algorithms as sophisticated as a dog, I don’t think their knowledge would bother me until it was given to some human (what happens when they are as sophisticated as humans is another question).  
 
I’m not sure good old fashioned Fourth Amendment balancing can’t be instructive here.  Do we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in x? What are the governmental interests at stake and how large of an intrusion is being made into the reasonable expectation of privacy?  
 

JW makes two interesting points. First, is scanning or reading by programs of our personal data really injurious to privacy in the way a human’s reading is? Second, is the legal change I’m suggesting even necessary?

Second point first. Treating smart programs as legal persons is not necessary to bring about the changes I’m suggesting in my essay. Plain old legal agency without legal personhood will do just fine. Most legal jurisdictions require legal agents to be persons too, but this has not always been the case. Consider the following passage, which did not make it to the final version of the online essay:

If such a change—to full-blown legal personhood and legal agency—is felt to be too much, too soon, then we could also grant programs a limited form of legal agency without legal personhood. There is a precedent for this too: slaves in Roman times, despite not being persons in the eyes of the law, were allowed to enter into contracts for their masters, and were thus treated as their legal intermediaries. I mention this precedent because the legal system might prefer that the change in legal status of artificial agents be an incremental one; before they become legal persons and thus full legal subjects, they could ‘enjoy’ this form of limited legal subjecthood. As a society we might find this status uncomfortable enough to want to change their status to legal persons if we think its doctrinal and political advantages—like those alluded to here—are significant enough.

Now to JW’s first point. Is a program’s access to my personal data less injurious than a human’s? I don’t think so. Programs can do things with data: they can act on it. The opening example in my essay demonstrates this quite well:

Imagine the following situation: Your credit card provider uses a risk assessment program that monitors your financial activity. Using the information it gathers, it notices your purchases are following a “high-risk pattern”; it does so on the basis of a secret, proprietary algorithm. The assessment program, acting on its own, cuts off the use of your credit card. It is courteous enough to email you a warning. Thereafter, you find that actions that were possible yesterday—like making electronic purchases—no longer are. No humans at the credit card company were involved in this decision; its representative program acted autonomously on the basis of pre-set risk thresholds.

Notice in this example that for my life to be impinged on by the agency/actions of others, it was not necessary that a single human being be involved. We so often interact with the world through programs that they command considerable agency in our lives. Our personal data is valuable to us because control of it may make a difference to our lives; if programs can use the data to do so then our privacy laws should regulate them too–explicitly.

Let us return to JW’s sniffer dog example and update it. The dog is a robotic one; it uses sophisticated scanning technology to detect traces of cocaine on a passenger’s bag. When it does so, the nametag/passport photo associated with the bag are automatically transmitted to a facial recognition system, which establishes a match, and immediately sets off a series of alarms: perhaps my bank accounts are closed, perhaps my sophisticated car is immobilized, and so on. No humans need be involved in this decision; I may find my actions curtailed without any human having taken a single action. We don’t need “a police offer to interpret the alert.” (But I’ve changed his dog to a robotic dog, haven’t I? Yes, because the programs I am considering are, in some dimensions, considerably smarter than a sniffer dog. They are much, much, dumber in others.)

In speaking of the sniffer dog, JW says “I don’t think their knowledge would bother me until it was given to some human.” But as our examples show, a program could make the knowledge available to other programs, which could take actions too.

Indeed, programs could embarrass us too: imagine a society in which sex offenders are automatically flagged in public by publishing their photos on giant television screens in Times Square. Scanning programs intercept an email of mine, in which I have sent photos–of my toddler daughter bathing with her pre-school friend–to my wife. They decide on the basis of this data that I am a sex offender and flag me as such. Perhaps I’m only ‘really’ embarrassed when humans ‘view’ my photo but the safeguards for accessing data and its use need to be placed ‘upstream.’

Humans aren’t the only ones taking actions in this world of ours; programs are agents too. It is their agency that makes their access to our data interesting and possibly problematic. The very notion of an autonomous program would be considerably less useful if they couldn’t act on their own, interact with each other, and bring about changes.

Lastly, JW also raises the question of whether we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our email–stored on our ISP’s providers’ storage. Thanks to the terrible third-party doctrine, the Supreme Court has decided we do not. But this notion is ripe for over-ruling in these days of cloud computing. Our legal changes–on legal and normative grounds–should not be held up by bad law. But even if this were to stand, it would not affect my arguments in the essay, which conclude that data in transit, which is subject to the Wiretap Act, is still something in which we may find a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Why You Hate Work (And Will Continue To)

Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath tell us why we hate work. (“Why You Hate Work“, New York Times, May 30, 2014; the “You” in their title article is less inclusive than it appears, for the primary focus of their study is white-collar workers. Still, perhaps there are lessons here to be learned by all.)

Their article has a familiar feel to it: there are several dimensions to employee satisfaction; employees do better and feel better when they are satisfied in those; employers are not sensitive to these spaces of desire; they ignore them, being all too easily satisfied with the fulfillment of work demands.

Put another way: employees are humans with needs; the workplace doesn’t meet them; the workplace-boss-employee relationship is asymmetrical.

Color me surprised.

Schwartz and Porath make recommendations to improve workplace environments: invest in employees; pay them enough; give them breaks; praise them; and so on.

It is tempting to say this is all common-sense, a temptation that finds its grounding in the utterly unsurprising nature of these recommendations. After all, who’da thunk it: humans need rest, adequate wage for labor, a little encouragement?

We have known for a very long time that ‘work’ is a four-letter word. The dichotomies are familiar. Work-bad; leisure-good; weekday-weekend; boss-friend; the list is easily extended (and extendable.) Everybody’s working for the weekend, after all.

A clue to why the Schwartz and Porath study might be cited extensively but almost certainly will not have its recommendations followed–once the initial hubbub following the publication of their Op-Ed in the nation’s leading newspaper has died down–may be found in the fact that while the word “profitability” shows up in their article, “short-term profits”, “shareholders”, “capitalism”, “first-quarter earnings” (and other such gems) do not.

Perhaps you might have guessed where I’m going with this: creating a workplace that keeps employees happy and satisfied has costs associated with it; these costs bite into profits, especially short-term ones;  employee satisfaction, to put it bluntly, is incompatible–economically–with short-term profits and quarterly earning reports; ergo, there is little chance the recommendations for the creation of such workspaces will be implemented.

There is something particularly terrifying about repetition compulsion: the endless recycling of a past, its contours showing up again and again to haunt the neurotic. Modern business is similarly afflicted; it rules over armies of the disgruntled, determine to repeatedly lurch from one past mistake to another, resolved to not make the changes that might palliate the suffering of those in its embrace.

This commentary of mine is incomplete; there is a more thoughtful, historically sophisticated take possible on our understanding (starting, perhaps, with the notion that ‘work’ was done by slaves.) More on that in another post in the near future.

Note: A budding neuroscientist might be interested in conducting an fMRI study in which it would be ascertained which brain centers were activated when subjects viewed the word ‘work’ or were asked to perform tasks that were described as ‘work.’  Performance on the latter could be compared with that of a control group which performed the same tasks not described as ‘work.’