Archive for April, 2009

I just went to a very interesting book talk by Stanley Nollen, a professor at Georgetown, and Neil Gregory of the IFC. Their new book, “New Industries from New Places: the Emergence of Hardware and Software Industries in India and China,” examines the reasons for the rise of different ICT sectors in the two Asian giants.

They began by showing graphs of the exponential rise in software revenues in both China and India since the 1990s, but when broken down into exports and imports, it becomes clear that Indian software is predominently written for exportation while Chinese software is for the domestic market. And although India does not have a similarly developed hardware industry, when that sector is analyzed, Chinese hardware is overwhelmingly exported while what hardware India does make is for domestic consumption.

A number of explanations are typically given for the difference, notably India’s English language proficiency, its higher education system that created a large labor pool of software engineers, and the overbearing regulation that was not extended to Indian software firms. The authors of this book believe that while these are necessary explanations, they are not sufficient. Using a variety of data, including firm-level interviews with 300 Chinese and Indian companies, they think they have flushed out the answer.

Their research suggests that Indian management, not labor, and their pool of larger, better educated professionals were largely responsible. The management can be applauded for seeking quality certifications for Indian software firms and utilizing the diaspora ties. Further, they strategically partnered with far more American software companies than the Chinese did – 60% of surveyed Indian firms had Western partners, compared to only 12% in China. (There was a lot of data thrown into the presentation that focused on the software industry, but I didn’t copy most of it down.) A final reason offered by the authors, more tentatively, was a cultural explanation – Indians tend to be more outspoken and tolerant of ambiguity. Because software creation is a creative enterprise, perhaps they have an inherent comparative advantage.

During the Q&A, Professor Mike Nelson offered some helpful insights from his time with the American IT industry:

• In hardware, you can thrive with 2-3 clients whereas in software, you need many more. Therefore, overcoming the “foreignness” of China is more of a factor than in India where multiple Western clients can be easily courted due to the relative institutional familiarity.
• Timezones shouldn’t be discounted – India is apparently much easier to schedule with than China.
• Given India’s relative governance instability, software (with lower fixed costs) is a more flexible industry – Wipro or Infosys can leave localities more easily than OEMs.

Overall a very interesting talk that adds great data to the debate while debunking commonly held beliefs like the importance of Y2K.

Yesterday, Ken Lipartito of Florida International University gave a lecture at Georgetown about his early research into an upcoming book entitled “Inside the Corporate Panopticon.” Lipartito’s focus is on commercial survieillance, which he sees as far more worrisome than government surveillance. I’ve copied my notes below (sloppy, mistakes, etc.), but two things Lipartito does really well:

• Elucidate how surveillance is dehumanizing: although the information obtained through surveillance (broadly defined) is personal, its use is impersonal and de-contextualized. For example, although Visa has access to vast amounts of information about me, it is hardly a definitive account of who I am. Take Michael Phelps – one photo of him doing drugs (surveillance) is taken out of context and comes to define him in the public eye; his humanity is lost to one fact.
• Explain the paradoxical, self-reinforcing cycle of surveillance: in order to find this dehumanization, people must provide context – they must provide more information, thus adding to the lack of privacy. Lipartito realized this when filling out a job application that asked if he had ever been in trouble with the law but provided no space to explain that it was a minor traffic violation. His instinct was to provide this information, but it only adds to the surveillance. The same phenomenon can be seen with the push for more financial transparency.

Inside the Corporate Panopticon

• Economic surveillance is the more important part of the surveillance
• Manifests in labor, management, credit, consumer knowledge
• Working on a book
• 1935 small town – total fingerprint surveillance
  • Had been controversial but was established by the ’30s. By this time there were 10 million files and and by ‘45 there were 100 million. Young Hoover expanded it drastically.
  • The argument of “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” was made
  • 52,000 prints were collected and sent in after an enormous drive
  • Is this fear and paranoia in a small American town?
  • Yep. It happened in Berkeley, CA. These are broader
• Surveillance is not always imposed from the outside; it is often something we do to ourselves.
• Surv is a tool of social knowledge – gathering, sorting, maintaining of it is modern.
• Only over the past two hundred years have these demands arisen – a result of a distended society of relationships.
• Surv accompanied the shift from closeknit societies to urban ones of strangers
• We have little personal information, surveillance provides impersonal information
• Our lives are enabled via surv – birth cert, ssn, dmv, etc.
  • Those cut off from surv are cut off from the social benefits (illegal immigrants)
• Married women before the 70s were cut out from credit market because they couldnt get individual credit
• But we can be excluded via surv – police
• Memory hole in 1984 as dangerous because it is the lack of surveillance of the state. same story in kafka’s the trial because he cannot see the file.
• Surv’d facts are often limited and out of context
• Try to get the system to see us as we are, not as it wants to represent us. But in explaining ourselves, we are caught in the web.
• Mac 1984 ad plays to the myth that surv is easy to attack and see
• Modern economy runs on information. Much surv focuses on state, but commerce survs too
• Surv isnt brought about via one decider or technology. Surv grows on itself.
• Scientific knowledge can be transformed to surv, too (dna, etc.)
• Fingerprinting was taken to by eugenicists (Galton)
• Much of surv seeks to measure and categorize the human body
  • Anecdote about shoe sizing science (xray)
  • “needed level of exactitude”
  • Transfered authority from customer to shoe
  • What prevailed was not xray machines, but the branick foot measurers
  • “When surv is to be done on a large scale, the cheap and easy to use techs increase the spread of surv.”
  • Measuring of the body is implicated in far worse scenarios: slavery
  • “strange technologies of surveillance” and with surv, strange often meet soft – paper, bit/bytes.
  • Anything that augments memory/transfering info aids surv [what way does the flow happen? intentional tech or incidental?]
• Kodak brought archivable surveillnce to the masses
  • Newspapers brought wider circulation to photography, causing worse spread of private info
  • Prompted the first calls for privacy protection – Brandeis and Warren article – “right to be left alone”
  • privacy was now a matter for both government and private business
• corporations are giant information processing machines
• [short on time so moves on to labor]
• surv techniques were use in factories by a utopian welshman who sought “new harmony” where factory owned life and play, etc.
• by the 20th century, labor surv grew to facilitate info flow from floor to manager
• and personal lives were penetrated – ford.
• firms that invest in workers also raise the level of intrusion – efficiency experts, hr, drug tests, company towns, computer monitoring.
• calls into question those who think networked economy is more humane. he thinks it is a higher form of surveillance
• science of consumption – quant and psych methods
• “tell me what you buy and i will tell you who you are”
• focuses on predicting wants.
• surveillance categories capture the current zeitgeist – rice as female. muslim as terrorists.
• google continues a long time trend
• is surv a step towards panopticon or is it necessary to allow living in a globalized world
• credit reporting used to be investigation but in the 70s that started to change to constant surveillance
  • these investigations encoded the prejudices of the time
• credit rating ignored the complexities of local conditions. homogenized experience.
• the answer to criticisms of surveillance is often ‘more surveillance’
• FICO and other algorithms allowed them to say that the credit rating was objective [what about the values embedded in algorithms]
• epistemological conundrum of the marketplace
• information reduces uncertainty, but there is no way to determine reliability of information. which leads to more and more surveillance
• “1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual”