The Internet Panopticon

Can the Internet keep us informed and socially integrated?

The Internet is a vast collection of information, opinion, images, and data.  It informs my discussions with facts and figures, it delights me with photographs and stories from around the world, it serves data and algorithms that help me to help others.

The Internet is a dense and personal communications network,  keeping me connected to family, to friends ,to colleagues, to interest groups.  More than email or Facebook / Instagram, it gives me a showcase for my photographs, a medium to discuss my writing, and a forum to plan travel and meals.  As an expat, it teaches me language; as an entrepreneur, it finds me investors.  It both creates and solves many social problems.

Can the Internet predict our behaviors?

• The Internet remembers
  • Your searches, your purchases, your location, your correspondence.
• The Internet associates
  • The movies, music, books, friends and web sites that people like you prefer.
• The Internet anticipates
  • The best route to the places you are likely to go next, which email to prioritize, the news stories you’ll want to read, coupons for your most-purchased grocery and personal items.
• The Internet advises
  • How long it will take you to read an article on Kindle or Medium, people you should get to know better on LinkedIn and Facebook, your forgotten photos that can be bundled into a pleasing memory scrapbook.

The Internet does this by continuously collecting data and signals, building up a detailed profile and narrative of our individual qualities and activities.  It is primarily done by businesses, not governments.

It is surveillance on a scale and detail that no population has ever experienced.

Of late, my tablet has started to congratulate me for meeting a standard fitness goal (a laughable You’ve walked an hour! ).  My phone reminds me that I have twelve Dutch vocabulary words waiting for review, and Google Now is inquiring about my daily trips to the Leisure Center, asking whether I work there.

How large a step is it to making these messages directive?  Will recipe searches yield only results that fit my nutrition goals?  Will my driving speeds and efficiencies factor into the way that my TomTom chooses routes to my destinations?  Will my digital assistant change tone and language to keep my stress low and my outlook positive?

Can the Internet hold us accountable for our actions?

In Western countries, while government surveillance is generally unpopular (74% opposed), commercial surveillance is less of an issue (45% opposed) as long as privacy isn’t breached, benefits are delivered, and recommendations don’t become too ‘creepy’.   However, research into the psychological effects of constant surveillance suggests that it could cause stress and social friction.  Up to a quarter of people already report changing their online habits to avoid unfavourable monitoring.

Totalitarian societies are considering how personal profiles and narratives can be used to promote better socia; behaviour.  It is a painful awakening to find that the libertarian ethos underpinning much of the evolution of technology has fostered systems that enable more total control over individual lives than at any time in the past, observes Rogier Creemers in a recent article on how the government is shaping the Internet in China.  Internet technologies are increasing the ways to stabilize political and social systems, manipulating rules, norms and computer code in such a way that citizens are nudged into rationally acting out the leadership’s will.

In 1843, Bentham proposed an architecture for a model prison, the Panopticon:

The building is a series of holding cells fitting within a semi-circular structure, with a tower in the center for guards.  Ideally, the prisoners cannot tell if the tower is occupied at any given time.  A social energy is created from this, as inmates can see across into other cells and feel the suggested presence of authority, holding each other accountable for maintaining order.  In this way, power becomes homogenized and more perfect.

Has the Internet become a virtual Panopticon? 

The Internet remains a free space whose inhabitants may follow their interests and express themselves as they want.

But our activities are continually recorded and statistically analyzed by surveillance programs.  Recurring patterns are used to build comprehensive individual profiles.  statistical extrapolations and  comparisons allow predictions of individual preferences and behaviours.

The result has the potential to inhibit, promote, and mold people’s perceptions and actions to serve broader political, commercial, and social goals.

P.S.: (Added Jul 24 2015):  Universities assess remote tracking to maximise study habits.

At Dartmouth College, tutors have trialled an app installed on students’ phones that measures how long they spend sleeping, studying, partying and exercising. The intention is to advise undergraduates on how to change their behaviour to maximise their grade potential, as well as identifying those who may be under stress and likely to drop out of the course early.

Writing on texting

A virtual organization and an expat’s long-distance friendships means my face-to-face meetings and close conversations are sadly infrequent.  So a lot of my business and personal communication is, by necessity, done in writing.  I seldom send anything by postal mail unless it involves requires a real signature on a contract or a significant event, relying mostly on emails for everyday keeping-in-touch. 

For more immediate thoughts, I rely on a messaging app, generally via phone text, Facebook, Skype, or WhatsApp.  I like being able to poke a note directly into someone’s hand, where I’ll get a rapid acknowledgement that they’ve seen it and (often) an immediate answer to a simple question.

But one response begets another, and exchanges quickly turn conversational.   When light and casual, it’s a nice measured way to catch up on gossip and bind a friendship. However, when talk turns to serious or difficult topics, things break down badly.  Misunderstandings occur more frequently in text conversations than in any other medium I use; people’s attitudes and feelings are distorted and my biases and worries sound more pronounced.  And, too often, I end up tediously spending precious face-time resolving the misperceptions.

A few others have also commented on the inadequacy of text messaging for sorting out strong emotions or confrontational questions.  I’ve learned to be more self-aware when approaching that furrowed brow / tensing gut feeling while messaging,  If I don’t stgep back altogether (Let’s come back to this later when I see you?), I have adopted a few guidelines to be mindful of:

• ‘Seen’ means a message has been received by the device, not that it has been read nor considered by the recipient.  Above all, silence doesn’t signify that you’re being ignored or that s message has met with disapproval.
• Remember that texts are time- and location- stamped; they set an unintended context that can change the meaning of words.
• When messages are stark and blunt, they can evoke strong emotions.  Do take a moment and don't react to texts that feel provocative.
• Humor simply doesn’t work in most text conversations, even when punctuated with emoticons.
• Avoid having multiple streams in a conversation. The juxtaposition of comments in one thread with responses from another can lead to bad, bad misinterpretations.  Stick to one conversation, pause occasionally, and sync up regularly: make transitions obvious.
• Check the temperature periodically and give clear signals.  80% of normal communication (tone, expression, gesture, prosody) is lost in texts, and you can get way out of bounds without realizing it.
• Avoid head-down mad-dash typing when feeling strongly.  It’s hard to keep up with, and answers fly off the screen without being read if you don’t stop and look up regularly.
• Let the conversation pull you rather than pushing it in the direction you want it to go.  Stop to trade control of the conversation.
• Watch out for accidently inserting homophones when using voice-recognition (hands-free) transcription, and recognize that cross-cultural differences in vocabulary and nuance can be deadly.

CEOs and social networks

Brendan Eich was forced to step down as CEO of the Mozilla Foundation this week after less than two weeks as CEO.  He’s an exceptional technical talent and visionary, but failed to understand the criticism that his personal donation of $1000 to support California’s Proposition 8 initiative in 2008 would attract.  His tone-deaf defense, that business and personal are distinctly separate domains of his life, failed to sway his customers, investors, or Board. 

These days, much like politicians, CEOs are expected to mirror the soft aspirations of their organizations, purpose, values, tolerance, and character, as well as embody the hard business aspects of vision, honesty, competition, and leadership.

I started experimenting with social media ten years ago.  Beginning with a personal web page and an early Facebook account, I went on to start albums on Flickr, a narrative blog to share my expat experiences, and code to push my Pocket saves to Twitter for friends to read.  I talked to my students about the difference in personal and public presence, static and dynamic content, and ways to align their content with the purposes of each combination.

I had discovered the limits occasionally.  When content spilled into the wrong bucket (a creative writing assignment, memorably), I would hear about the leak from colleagues.  I was surprised at parties when a stranger would greet me with details of my travels or activities.

And so I learned to tweak my privacy settings, cull my user lists, and moderate my content.

Once I started creating a business organization, once I became a CEO, I also found that more people, more distant from knowing me, also began drawing inferences from my social media.   An out-of-date Linkedin profile misled people about my continuing involvement with prior consulting.  The tweeted stream of article links raised doubts about my focus; the blog was too candid about some personal issues.

I have to manage my bank accounts so that personal and business money are kept strictly separate.  Cash only flows between them in particular, proscribed ways: invoices and expenses. 

A similar concept needs to be observed for social media.

Omar Ishrak’s internet presence is an instructive example. The statistic of his life are posted on his Business Week profile, but they are also reflected consistently throughout his social media outlets.   His LinkedIn is professional, a CV (not up-to-date, but professional).  His Twitter stream notes business-related articles and motivates his team: there are no indications of broader or personal interests. 

Everything supports and motivates his corporation and its mission: his online presence is a personal reinforcement of his position representing the corporation.

The contrast between Mr. Eich and Mr. Ishrak is instructive.  A CEO is a public figure representing the company to investors, employees, customers, and communities.  What is said online will be indexed, aggregated, linked, discovered, broadcast, and discussed.  So, even leading a small, young company, keep the management of your personal brand in mind:

• Separate your personal and professional presences as rigorously as you do your personal and professional finances.
• Be a resource and curator for your followers; reinforce the messages that you give to them face-to-face.
• Be honest and interesting, but do not over-share personal details.
• Keep content up to date and factual; monitor comments.
• Manage privacy appropriately, distinguishing content seen by family, friends, colleagues, followers, and the general public.
• Set triggers (Google Alerts) to notify you when content relevant to your sites and name appear.

Parking tickets and panna cotta

U sliep te laat, observed the parking policeman as I ran up to the car.  I sighed, pulling the ticket free of the wiper.  “Ik heb te lang mijn panna cotta gekookt,”I mumbled, smiling a little. 

‘Not a good start to the week.

In part, I blame working memory: there is just too much going on to keep the morning’s entire sequence of events in mind.  A late night translates to a late morning; a flood of post-Thanksgiving emails meant that I needed a bit of quiet time to organize my thoughts before stating to hammer the phones and keyboards.

What better way to think things through than with a bit of cooking?

I’d been itching to try a panna cotta recipe: an Italian custard made without eggs.  BBC Food had a good basic recipe: sugar, whole milk, cream, vanilla, and gelatine. The latter was a small challenge: gelatine leaves are just blaadjes gelatine, but neither the AH nor the oriental grocer had any.  I finally found a pack of six at Jumbo, thin textured sheets that need a few minutes soaking before use.

While the ingredients warmed, I peeled a dozen Spanish mandarin oranges and started reducing them for the topping.  The sections can have a bitter aftertaste, so I added an extra tablespoon of sugar and, for depth, some sweet wine. The result was grainy even after a good simmer, so I pureed it as though it were a vegetable soup and it settled down nicely to a rich, fruity sauce.

The gelatine folds instantly into the hot milk and the mixture filled four custard cups, ready to set.  As I was wrapping up my list, making notes on “The Most Important Six Things to Finish Today”, the cleaner stopped through for a chat.  The apartment looked good, the plants, I had a few things to bring up from the car still…The Car?!?  10:00: ‘little hope of avoiding a ticket.

And so it was that I trotted across the bridge, just in time to encounter the patrolman.

I’m in the middle of reading Clive Thompson’s book, Smarter Than You Think: How technology is changing our minds for the better.  He suggests that three Internet factors are going to enhance our cognitive abilities in the coming years: boundless memory to access facts, associative tools that connect the dots, and dense networks that build audiences.  In the past, he says, we externalized thinking to doodles and diagrams, remembering to our partners who could remind us of important appointments (and expiring parking meters). In the future, digital assistants, an aware and enhanced Google Now, will do that alongside us.

But, not soon enough for this cold morning, I’m afraid…

…at least the panna cotta set nicely, and tasted wonderful.

The un-social network

Yesterday, a friend told me that another friend of ours was being unkind to a third, mutual friend on Facebook.  I went online,but couldn’t see anything amiss.

You don’t have a problem with she wrote?  Umm, no. 

She read me a little.  You think that’s okay?  That’s not what I’m reading, though…   and it dawned on me that I was seeing a sanitized version of her timeline, not complete.  The settings had been tweaked and personalized.

I sighed and quietly removed her as a friend.  Trust matters.

Facebook wasn’t always like this.  When I first joined, it was a bulletin board system that classmates used to arrange parties and share photos. Then a wave of high school and college friends appeared, and it was a big reunion catching up with how everyone’s family and careers had evolved.  Finally, as an expat, it morphed again into a way to share bits of life with family and friends.

Increasingly, though, it feels like there’s more posing and spite. People propagate versions of their lives that are, at best, aspirational distortions, disconnected from meaningful or important events and people.  They inflict petty slights on one another, severing friendships, adjusting privacy, and setting barbs to when angered or hurt.

It’s not surprising that surveys are showing that heavy Facebook use undermines happiness.  And this is apart from the mis-targeted ads for mobility assistance and Dutch girls that incongruously clutter my timelines.  I’m not quite to the point of pulling out, but I’m definitely using it less and being a bit more particular about who I share company with.

How do we know what we know?

In Nederlands, there are two words for knowledge.  One is to know by direct experience (Denken) and the other is to know by indirect reports (Weten). 

Denken is overwhelmingly more valid but necessarily limited in scope.  I can only explore limited time and space, befriend only a small circle and learn from a few actions. 

Further, to be really useful, I have to massage experiences into knowledge by reflecting, talking, or writing about it.  ‘Which takes away from having more experiences.

Weten, tapping into the knowledge and skills of others, gives greater scope for learning.  But it also requires establishing relevance, communication, and trust in sources, whether news, experts, literature, friends or social media.

The classical model for accessing second-hand knowledge is to search for answers to questions.  So I check out a book, talk to a friend, follow recommendations,  then test the quality of the answers by their alignment with reality and the  outcomes that they produce.

When I find sources I like and trust, then I accept more of my information from them.  I attend a business class, read the Economist, share conversation over coffee.   ‘Good, but still limited in three main ways.

First, it’s hard to keep up with the flow of people and news that interests me.  My aggregator has a growing backlog of unread blog posts; old issues of magazines pile up in my tablet.  I call a friend to ask about their health,, find out that she has new vacation pictures, stories about kids, a change of job I hadn’t suspected.  I feel like I can’t keep up, much less think through, the news and conversations that fill each day.  (Even if only the ones in English!)

Second, I identify new sources using similarity searches: friends of friends.  “Find more like this” works well for music and movies, but I know that it gets dangerously constrained when applied to news and commentary.  A single point of view, endlessly reinforced, creates a brittle and embattled outlook towards life and people, nurtures homogeneous communities that feel both exceptional and victimized.  As the Economist notes, “Americans prefer talking heads because they increasingly prefer to hear opinion rather than fact.”

Finally, I am all too aware that I am taking samples from someone else’s narrative, colored with their motives and biases.   Even with the best of intentions, people pick examples by analogy, tell you whet they think you need to hear, omit context and embellish details.  I’ve had situations go horribly wrong in the past few months despite getting trusted advice  which, in hindsight, was simply misguided or malicious.

I want to keep up with people and trends that are meaningful and important  to me.  I want to be deeply informed about things that matter to me and occasionally surprised and challenged by new ideas.  I want to grow my social and professional circle.

Dave Winer talks about one alternative: rather than pulling items individually by polling trusted sources, we should embrace the flow of a “river of news”. 

He envisions sitting on the bank of the news crawl, the Twitter feed, the Facebook scroll. We become aware of new information as it becomes more prevalent, we inspect it if it’s interesting, we discern trends in the evolution of the stream.  Last week, Dave released River3, a Dropbox based aggregator implementing the principles: you can see sample output at MediaHackers.

Another idea is Curated Content: diverting streams from the river related to particular topics.  These can be crowd-sourced (Digg), organized by an editor (Paper.li)  or scrapbooked (FlipBoard magazines).  I prefer the latter: I don’t trust crowd-sourced content (selection can be superficial and self-reinforcing) and newsletters too often pile up, unread.

And then there’s the question of who is doing the curating.  As Google, Facebook, or PRISM watch us, they build up profiles leading to predictions.  They create individualized filters that constrain and, ultimately, manipulate what we see and do.

And it’s likely to be inaccurate.  To paraphrase William Buffet, we are obsessed with having our public persona being seen, but also with our private self remaining hidden.  Basing our trusted sources on our projected selves cannot yield truth.

I’m not sure that we’ve yet seen the ideal way of learning through weten.  More data is available, but it’s getting harder and harder to organize, collate, and prioritize.  And there’s no choice but to keep listening, reading, sampling, analyzing, and learning.

And even then, it still comes back around to denken.

Events, experienced first-hand, often prove how little I really do know.  The bite can be really painful but, in the end, I hope  it doesn’t make me cynical.

Insight and wisdom are best gained by simply living.

A little tech interlude

‘Just think of PRISM as your fully automatic, free, government sponsored cloud backup system.

The Guardian continues to publish information about the scope of PRISM wiretapping, it seems clear that they are caching vast quantities of data for retrospective mining.  The purpose of the Bluffdale Data Center seems suddenly obvious;  the EU is rumbling that several sovereign constitutions may have been breached. 

A TWIT interview suggests that the NSA is, in all likelihood, spitting data off the fiber optic backbones just upstream from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and others, and that would be consistent with known taps on undersea cables and satellite ground stations.

I expect that most people will eventually settle into the position of allowing anything that makes them feel safe the government echoes that I you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

<sigh> Just like in Turkey.

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Is it possible to create a startup without basing it on a supposedly ‘disruptive’ technology?

I find myself shifting tech allegiance these days.  It’s not planned, but I like keeping up with cutting edge innovation and in-depth information. 

For years, computer innovation was Microsoft, just as it was IBM a generation ago.   I used their tools, learned their languages, configured their systems, and kept up with each new release.  But the change cycle is getting longer, the improvements less compelling.  Google seems more creative, aggressive, and pervasive: if I want to be part of it, it’s time to learn Java and Android.

Similarly, TWiT was my go-to source for weekly podcasts discussing technology and society.  I’ve started following more programs from alternative 5by5, more as a supplement than a substitute.  The perspective is younger (sometimes naively so) but the news feels deeper and more current.  There are alternatives, TPN and others, that I’m still exploring.

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Gnod is a search-engine to find things you don't know about by asking what you like and what you don't like.

Similarity searches are based on finding data that most closely matches a given set of examples.  Nearest neighbor techniques which sort candidates based on the number of matching qualities are one example, but there are many others.

These are applied to problems like Find Music / Books / Movies that I would like”.  Netflix famously sponsored a contest to predict movies that people would like, and most tech companies are rolling out music services based on individual and social preferences.

In other domains similarity searches don’t work nearly so well.  Looking for news stories like “the ones you prefer” leads to an recursive chamber of single viewpoints and biased facts.  Media programming designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience ends up satisfying nobody.

I’ve been trying to figure out the difference: what problems are candidates for similarity searches and which ones aren’t.  Not much progress yet, but every time Facebook serves me a friend, or Google an ad, I know that nobody else has solved it either.

Bletchley’s heirs

I’m avidly following the Guardian’s revelations about electronic intelligence gathering, the ‘Prism’ program that is causing  embarrassment in country after country (the Dutch admitted to receiving information today).  It’s a fascinating tech story, fun to watch the shifting political and business lines, and philosophically interesting to muse on the morality of it all.

And I enjoy everyone making fun of the logo.  Who would even think that a top secret program needs a Bond-style logo, much less say Yeah, that sells it to this one (right).

It’s almost as good a question as why the UK intelligence center, GCHQ, has a headquarters in the stylish shape it does (left). But more on that in a moment.

I tend to be a 4th Amendment hawk, the way some folks are ‘right to bear arms’ advocates.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated

‘Seems clear cut.  The law recognizes two different searches within this definition.  Investigative Searches are the classic ‘Get a reason; Get a warrant’ searches for evidence, given a judge’s finding of probable cause and a police officer’s participation.  Regulatory searches are broad inspections applied indiscriminately to large groups, as in airport screening and restaurant kitchens, requiring no judicial pre-authorization an conducted by government agencies rather than law enforcement.

The Prism program likely falls under the second category, justified as a reasonable search to promote the safety and welfare of individuals and of the public.  Generally, I think that the volume of material makes any detailed inspection of my personal record unlikely, and my correlated calls and emails probably don’t trip anyone’s trigger criteria.

But there’s no protec5ion if someone did take an interest, for any reason.  They could assemble a very detailed record post hoc instantly, and I’m sure that the results could be used in a creative variety of direct and indirect ways to harass, fine, and embarrass me.  How many candidates for public office or conscientious whistleblowers will be silenced because of this information?

Coincidently, I visited Bletchley Park this weekend, home of the team of codebreakers who cracked the Enigma machine during WWII.  It’s a fascinating place, still being restored, but with working Enigma coders and BOMBE decoders, the original Colossus (one of the first programmable computers), and rich stories of how the codes were deciphered.

  

It’s a geek-paradise, lots of lights and relays (you can see how every 60’s television example of a computer started here), very good storytellers (our guide sounded a bit like Montgomery), and surprise characters (the three Polish mathematicians who worked out the original Enigma details).

A key innovation, though, was a vast filing system of punch cards that contained all of the facts discovered in the decrypted messages.  These were kept in file drawers, then collated to understand who was going where and doing what so that their plans could be inferred.

Just like Prism.

A lot parallels the Los Alamos story: brilliant scientists taken to a secret location where they work all day (and do amateur theater at night), the tensions between head scientists and military officers, the unlimited funds thrown at research, the eventual triumph and final prosecution of the lead players (Turing and Oppenheimer).

There is a fascinating crystal presented to Bletchley by the GCHQ: when you look in one side, there’s an encoded message; look in the other and it refracts to plain English.

 

And I’m convinced that the circular design of the building is a stand-in for the dials on the BOMBE.

Tech Cloud Wednesday

It’s inevitable.  I copied all of my RSS feeds into Google Reader last weekend; Google retired the service today.  The announcement is typically horrible corporate doublespeak: “As a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.” I’m not sure how they reason that eliminating the service enhances my experience unless it was somehow horrible to begin with.

I’m still in  a running exchange with Delta over similar foolishness after I spent two hours trying to (unsuccessfully) book a flight through their website and agents. First they condescended that they understand how people can be confused by computers, then that they were confused by bad weather long the Eastern seaboard.  None of which addresses the actual error logs that I sent to them.

Why can’t tech companies hire someone who can talk with, empathize with, their customers?

Back to Google.

Google promises to export feeds, and various sites are promoting to offer seamless imports into their products.  Freely is in a particularly unseemly haste to get users to post admiring comments everywhere.  For desktop, I still like NetVibes, and for tablet, gReader (unfortunately named, but actually independent of Google).  gReader has a nice magazine-style interface and is working to eliminate their dependence on Google.

CNET is recommending FlipBoard or Currents, both good, but neither are RSS aggregators.  Instead they are pushing a mix of pay magazines,  newspapers, and sponsored feeds.  It would be sad if ‘choose your eatery’ from the universe of establishments was replaced b constrained  tools that only allow choice from a single buffet.

The broader point, also made over at Forbes, is that the Cloud does not belong to users.  We are constantly being urged to move photos, data, applications, backups to the cloud rather than to local alternatives (USB disk drives are my favorite: a terebyte of space for less than $100).  At its limit, the “Chromebook model” holds that a computer should only need a high-res touchscreen, a fast processor, and a high-speed internet connection.

I’ve had cloud services shut down five times this year, taking down websites, photos, links, and contacts.  I create backups if I’m notified, but there is time and effort involved with re-establishing the service elsewhere. 

I hate to be cynical, but these services exist to mine your data and link you to advertisers  If they can’t do that successfully, you’re toast.

One last note:  I’m still trying to buy a local data-only chip.  O2 and Virgin don’t offer one; T-Mobile does.  However, unless you have a bank account linked to a UK address, they can’t sell it to you (my Barclays account with a Dutch address doesn’t qualify).  I can’t decide if this is an anti-laundering or anti-terrorism policy, but it is an absolute block.

Windshield time

“Windshield time” is the time spent lost with amidst thoughts while winding along the highways.   Sometimes there’s music on the radio (podcasts on the player), sometimes conversations, sometimes wind to stir thoughts along.

This weekend, I ended up logging articles that I wanted to read and short thoughts I needed to complete, all the way between Maastricht and Calais.

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In summer, when restaurant terraces can be a nice way to enjoy the sun, why do they have to be overrun with smokers?  (10 km)

And why is my Klout score headed south?  Is it a reflection on my life? (5 km)

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I’ve been reading The Mechanical Mind, philosophical musings on the differences between machine and human intelligence.  I used to read a lot of cognitive science and re-engaged after seeing IBM’s  Watson.  It strikes me as as a powerful search engine, not true AI: the manipulation of symbols based on categories is different than manipulation based on understanding.

David Auerbach explores this in his essay The Stupidity of Computers in n+1 magazine, noting that computers manipulate structured knowledge organized into hierarchical categories.  Thus, they excel at answering questions about things in a store (where there are departments with features, brands, and prices) but not in newspaper articles (also in departments, but without consistent tags).

Human and machine thought converges only if men think using structures computers can understand, or if computers augment, rather than replace, human thought.  The latter implies that thinking requires abilities that computers by their nature can never have.  Interesting to speculate on that (110 km)

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Are you an Order Muppet or a Chaos Muppet, Bert or Cookie Monster?  What happens if you partner with your opposite; what sort of children do combinations produce (Elmo?).  It’s always fun to play with stereotypes and metaphors, and I enjoyed this riff from Slate.  (20 km)

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I don’t know how I missed The Busy Trap, a New York Times op-ed piece from late June.  Tim Krieder asserts that “being busy” has become an end in itself, driven by ambition or drive or anxiety, simply because we’re addicted to busyness and guilty or afraid of idleness.  Guilty as charged: life is filled with opportunities that come around once, rarely, and I make the most of them.  But it was this alternative life that caught me:

Not long ago I  Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night.

Europe is not the negation of ambition, as many suspect: it’s the achievement of balance and connection.  The stores close on off hours and the trains run off to interesting places. Busyness is something we collectively force one another to do.  Windshield time is the cure (100 km).

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Extended families have elders: patriarchs and matriarchs who wield authority and pass judgments, affirming choices and granting acceptance.  I went online to see if there was theory to support the role.  Wikipedia acknowledged the definition of “patriarch”, but then ran off into a screed that male authority presumes female subjugation.

It’s not clear to me that granting authority to one person automatically diminishes the rest.  Authority may be limited and balanced in many ways, and it would be unusual for a despot to routinely emerge.  It’s unfortunate that feminist theorists take such a solipsistic view rather than a symbiotic one  (although I understand the motivations)  (35 km)

Growing beneath a plastic sky

When you shop for vegetables, what do you look for?  I have to admit that when I go to the Albert Heijn, I tend towards the vine-ripened ones: the stems suggest a fresher product and a more organic origin.

If I thought about it, the tomatoes can’t be picked by hand on some small Italian farm: there are just too many outlets for them, the price is too low, and they are available all year around.  My second guess would be a greenhouse in California, or it’s European equivalent.

Which I discovered on a recent swing through Andalucia.

The area looks a lot like California at first glance, perhaps more like Baja:  Dry brown mountains, scrub desert, brilliant white sunshine.  There’s a line of white development across the base of the hills almost everywhere you look.

On inspection, these are huge plastic tents, stained brown by the blowing dust.  They have screened sides to circulate air and seem absolutely deserted.

 

 

It reminds me of the science fiction scenes where colonists on desert planets set up fragile food factories and favor them with careful rations of water.

The reality is similar: marching rows of tomatoes, ripening beneath the glowing white ceilings.

 

 

Driving along the coast, the scene enlarges and repeats itself.  Huge tents march up the slopes of the hills, nestle between buildings in towns, and sprawl across the narrow coastal plains to the water.  They absolutely cover the landscape.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen arming this intense or widespread.  Wikipedia says that 15% of the world’s cultivated tomatoes are grown here, using this method, and the extent of the tents is growing at double digits per year.  There is a vast system of irrigation, originally drawing from aquifers and now from desalinization, that nurtures the crop, and an enormous army of people who pick and pack the harvest.

In photos from space,  above right, the white plastic tents blanket the countryside south of Almeria, completely obscuring the ground beneath.

I have mixed feelings about this: I like the miracle of having tomatoes throughout the year at my local store at reasonable prices.  But it is based on a system that, on the artificiality and scale of it, feels forced and unsustainable.  I’m reading to learn more about the ecologic and social impacts of the process, but it was a wholly unexpected and thought-provoking truth behind the simple grocery stand.