Posts Tagged ‘lessig’

To what extent can we quantify human action?

Given rapidly expanding computational capacity and the proliferation of cheap sensors, there is a large, distributed trend towards human quantification. Wired Magazine confidently threw it on the cover of its July 2009 issue, celebrating self-tracking as popularized by the Nike + iPod system. It’s certainly a trend with a lot of momentum, and I imagine a lot of success will be had by people building businesses around it, but I’m increasingly worried about the way in which the concept is treated in gushing terms and without an understanding of its limitations.

To be clear, I think there is solid evidence that making explicit certain types of information can induce better behavior. One of the best examples is the feedback loop created by displaying energy use in real-time to homeowners, a practice that has been shown to reduce energy consumption. In fact, anyone who has driven a Prius can probably attest to their effort to keep the real-time MPG monitor in the higher numbers, an effort that changed my driving habit for the more efficient.

But I think too much exuberance for human quantification runs the risk of falling prey to a form of techno-utopianism that has already stricken many fields.

This post was catalyzed by two recent articles. The first, by copyright crusader turned political reformer, Larry Lessig, is an extended critique of the drive towards more transparency in government. He writes,

“We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust.”

For Lessig, the work of groups like the Sunlight Foundation or MAPLight (“money and politics: illuminating the connection”) are too simplistic. The problems these groups rightfully seek to fix are too complex to be solved by transparency alone.

“This is the problem of attention-span. To understand something–an essay, an argument, a proof of innocence– requires a certain amount of attention. But on many issues, the average, or even rational, amount of attention given to understand many of these correlations, and their defamatory implications, is almost always less than the amount of time required. The result is a systemic misunderstanding–at least if the story is reported in a context, or in a manner, that does not neutralize such misunderstanding. The listing and correlating of data hardly qualifies as such a context. Understanding how and why some stories will be understood, or not understood, provides the key to grasping what is wrong with the tyranny of transparency.”

Now, perhaps the people who need to know the entire story – the trial judges, the political decision-makers – will take the time to look past a simplistic “money + politician = bribe” equation, but I think the worry is legitimate. The reason for the worry is the seductiveness of simplicity.

This is a point Paul Krugman makes strongly in his recent essay about failure of economists to predict or avoid the current recession. As he chronicles the shortcomings of modern economic thought, he writes,

“As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.”

The “impressive-looking mathematics” are the economic models that academics have conceived and investors embraced. The short-comings of these have been noted time-and-again by critics like Nassim Nicholas Taleb or Richard Bookstaber (whose book I reviewed here), but these are minority voices. Bookstaber’s Congressional testimony is actually quoted by Krugman:

One thing that seems clear is that risk models that are designed to function in normal market conditions should not be relied upon to predict outcomes in times of crisis. On this account, VaR doesn’t kill banks; executives who don’t recognize the limits of VaR [the value-at-risk financial model] kill banks. As Bookstaber put it, “one has to look beyond VaR, to culprits such as sheer stupidity or collective management failure: The risk managers missed the growing inventory [of risky assets], or did not have the courage of their conviction to insist on its reduction, or the senior management was not willing to heed their demands. In other words, models succeed because they meet the needs of real human beings, and VaR was just what they needed during the boom.

This, to me, is the same point that Lessig was making – technologically-induced simplicity (in the form of “money + politician = bribe” or VaR) is seductive and likely to be misinterpreted to the detriment of society.

Certainly some people understand this. Carl Malamud, who has led an impressive effort to opening up government, responded to Lessig’s article as such,

“Lessig’s point is that transparency, naked and by itself, with no broader and deeper aims, will not automatically produce good results, and may indeed produce randomness in our government or far worse. Merely revealing data is not enough. One must work with it, work with policy, and monitor effects. Transparency without a long-term commitment to policy is transparency without context, transparency that is merely naked…”

The parallel for Krugman’s world is, very likely, the work of behavioral economists who are placing humanity’s knack for irrational activity within the framework of economic thought. However, in his vehement response to Krugman’s essay, U Chicago professor John Cochrane writes,

“The sad fact is that few in Washington pay the slightest attention to modern macroeconomic research…”

This is what Lessig calls “the problem of attention-span,” and even were Krugman and Cochrane to coalesce into a sophisticated macroeconomic theory that took into account the limits of human quantification, I fear the simple, erroneous models will win the day (again).

Update: Tim Wu responds to Lessig’s piece with an important reminder that civic virtue is the key ingredient, not technology.

[Image Credit 1 and 2]

A while back, an otherwise unknown anthropologist at Kansas State University posted a video to YouTube which captured the imagination of a wide variety of Internet users. Entitled “The Machine Is Us/ing Us,” the video, embedded below, gave an inventive explanation of Web 2.0.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE]

Overtime, that professor, Michael Wesch, has released a number of other videos, each with his unique stylistic flair and educational explanations. Professor Wesch is really doing fascinating work to understand the social implications of our new mediated spaces – YouTube, MySpace, etc.

He recently gave a talk at the Library of Congress about his research.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU]

It begins explaining the ability of distributed people to challenge the power of traditional media. All the hours of content created by NBC, CBS and ABC since 1948 (1.5 million hours) have been surpassed by amateurs without producers on YouTube in 6 months. His video topped charts even when competing with Super Bowl commercials – typically the king of short duration content. The Numa Numa webcam video became a worldwide phenomenon, replicated by thousands who share they music, dance and joy with millions online.

To Wesch, the anthropologist, media is not content or technology. It is the mediation of human relations. When media change, human relationships change.

He and his students do a lot of research on YouTube and examine the users, video and data. Plenty of old people upload videos, popular videos are often remixed or remade, the majority are home videos, nearly 10,000 videos per day are addressed to the YouTube community.

Is this search of community an outgrowth of a loss of civil society a la Putnam’s Bowling Alone thesis? Networked individualism is the term used to describe the increasing individualism of modern society, but the human nature of desiring community. However, the search for community through webcams has some important implications: one of those is the ‘context collapse’ which comes from speaking to an inanimate object without immediate feedback. Another is the ability to replay and “stare” without seeming rude. Wesch thinks YouTube represents the potential to connect without constraint. “Media do not just distance us, they connect us in different ways.” He points to the Free Hugs movement as an attempt to reconnect to humanity in this networked individuality; and YouTube’s role in spreading Free Hugs is important.

In essence, we all become producers of ourselves, creating identity as we upload and specifically create content to reflect ourselves online. But in doing so, we live in a remix culture which is at odds with the intellectual property laws. Wesch draws on Larry Lessig’s work to explain the criminalization of communication (which, by the way, is the subject of Lessig’s next book). The developing values of the YouTube community are one of oneness. It really is a reason for optimism – and not the blind techno-utopianism associated with many technologies. Wesch has studied the society and shows the great things coming from it.

But perhaps what I like most is that a guy in Kansas – once the epitome of windswept prairie isolation – can become the expert of a worldwide community.

The growing menace of Internet crime is really astounding. Phishing. Malware. Spam. The volume of attacks and deceptions are extraordinarily high. Estimates of the number of personal computers which are controlled by botnets range from 12-30% of connected computers; these hundreds of millions of machines are then harnessed to attack servers, mine the net for personal data or any number of other nefarious activities. No longer is hacking the pursuit of curious tinkerers or bored teens. Today an entire industry, estimated recently by Gartner to be worth $3.2 billion in 2007, has arisen to sell malicious computer activities.

Cybercrime takes advantage of both the generative nature of the net, poorly written code and user ignorance. Like all crime, cybercrime has brought about attempts to regulate the Internet, and often these regulations err on the side of caution and over-regulate, limiting beneficial activities. Rampant copyright infringement brought about the DMCA which tried to limit illegal song-swapping, but instead has been used to silence critics or sue adorable kids. And, most likely, it hasn’t done a whole lot to stop copyright infringement.

What is at risk with Internet crime is a similar course of events. In briefly reviewing Zittrain’s book, Lessig poses the question:

“Whether a single event, or a coordinated event, whether intentional, or accidental, it is simply a matter of time before a catastrophic network event happens. And when it happens — think of it as a kind of i9/11 event, but the bad guys are not Al-Qaeda — will we be prepared for the inevitable iPatriot Act response? Are we better prepared than civil libertarians were when we were hit with the USA Patriot Act? Have we even framed the right debate?”

Arguably this over-regulation has already started to take place, but it could certainly get worse. To help flesh out some of the important ideas about the future of cybercrime, the Publius Project has commissioned three essays.

Michael Barrett, head of information security at PayPal, writes that the impetus for regulation of cars and airplanes were prominent accidents. Paul Starr tells a similar story in The Creation of the Media about the beginning of radio regulation. Following the sinking of the Titanic, the Radio Act of 1912 required all radio operators to be licensed, all ships to have transmitters and allocated bands of spectrum for certain purposes. Barrett thinks that cybercrime will have the same effect that the Titanic did and be the cause of serious government regulation of the Internet. In fact, he welcomes it as an important part of the interconnecting regulation needed from government, private industry and users.

First of all, it is not clear that cybercrime will be able to have the dramatic effects that a sinking Titanic did. Many of the threats from online activity, especially identity theft, are well-known and publicized. Others are becoming more publicized, like Internet-facilitated espionage. These cybercrimes will not necessarily serve as the shock that government needs to begin regulation. But, let’s say there is an event or series of events which are powerful enough to induce government response, like Barrett welcomes and Lessig fears, is that the right response?

Cybercrime, as best we know, is not centralized. There is no capital city to bomb, leaders to sanction or even mob boss to imprison. As security expert Bruce Schneier says, even the alleged Chinese spy-hackers are not controlled by the state. So, what the cyber-police or other government regulation would be up against is a distributed network of criminals – a classic starfish – and one does not combat decentralized organizations in the same manner as centralized ones. As The Starfish and the Spider points out, to beat a decentralized foe, in this case, cybercrime, one must decentralized oneself, centralize the opponent or change the ideology. In this light, Barrett’s assertion that “it’s quite possible that a new global governance organization is needed” seems misguided. While I welcome his support of a shared responsibility between stakeholders, I am fearful that calling for government regulation may be regrettable.

Instead, the words of Internet guru David Clark seem more nuanced:

So the starting point for improving the state of Internet security must be a social dialog, not just a technical dialog, about what sort of Internet we want. The challenge to the technical community is not to build a very secure Internet—that might be more of a price than we actually want to pay. The challenge is to find clever ways to give us more security without taking away our freedom of action. And finding these better solutions will require a design process that involves both technologists and social observers, because it will take both technical imagination and social imagination to conceive of a different Internet from what we have today, more secure but still suited to our desires for open, diverse access.

This social dialog should recognize the power of defaults and architect a security-bias. Beau Brendler, in his essay, embraces this by calling for simple solutions which “nudge,” to use Sunstein and Thaler’s expression, users towards more secure computing. Provide free anti-virus software and simple-to-understand security manuals, for one.

But if these soft-power solutions are to emerge, they had better do so quickly because while mainstream media rhetoric on the issues may border on panicked, those who know best are worried, too. And if we are to save the open, generative net, it will need saving from both itself and outside regulation.

Last week, the House of Representatives voted to pass a “compromise” bill which updated FISA; in it, it granted retroactive immunity to the telecommunications firms which are facing lawsuits alleging civil liberties violations from their work with the NSA in wiretapping Americans. This deal, which effectively removes the Judiciary from the legal process, had been rejected earlier this year by the same Congressional body. Even though the EFF and others have shown that this bill is not a compromise, for some reasons Congress supported it now.

What gives?

Well, it turns out the telcos do.

MAPLight, one of many organizations working to shed light on the influence of money in politics, has analyzed the political contributions of ATT, Sprint and Verizon over the past couple months and found that the 94 Democrats who changed their position received an average of $8,359 from the telco PACs. More of their findings are here, including the fact that 88% of flip-flopping Democrats received telco money.

The effect of money in DC is abysmal. It is a procedural cancer which retards the political system. I’m ashamed to say that my representative, Judy Biggert, is a proud supporter of George Bush’s policies and has voted with him 80% of the time, including on this issue. As election season approaches, I was hopeful that the Democratic candidate, Scott Harper, would be able to unseat her and bring some measure of change to DC.

However, at a recent house party, when I asked Mr. Harper about accepting money, he sorely dissapointed me. Although I was impressed with much of what he had to say, Mr. Harper flippantly dismissed the malignant effects of money in politics. He spoke proudly of accepting money from unions and had sought environmental contributions, too. I fully appreciate the difficulty of raising money in a Congressional race, but was disheartened to hear him laud contributions from those he supports.

Mr. Harper or Mrs. Biggert could easily support the unions or telcos without accepting their money. They could meet with lobbyists and executives to learn about issues with which they have little experience. However, when money changes hands, political thought is biased. Both attorneys and lobbyists seek to influence a supposedly impartial decision-maker, but we would never allow an attorney to legally pay a judge. Why should lobbyists?

The Change Congress movement is Larry Lessig’s new project to end the economy of influence in DC. They are asking candidates to 1) not accept lobbyists/PAC money, 2) vote to end earmarks, 3) support increased transparency and 4) support public financing. Lessig elaborates on the goal in this video.

I sincerely hope the effort is successful so that politicians like Mrs. Biggert and Mr. Harper can represent their constituencies without the bias which is endemic to today’s political system. No longer can we afford the change that $8,000 brings about.