The Commodification of Technological Dependence

"In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing."

—Ed Zitron, "Never Forgive Them"

Some an Hundredfold, Some Sixty, Some Thirty

All that you touch

You change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

—Earthseed: The Books of the Living

The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

There’s a break in the rain this morning, and the day is warm with a cool breeze. The furnace blast of the heat wave seems to have been washed away by the storms.

My Disability Days seem to be nearing an endpoint; it’s been a long time since I lost nearly a week to neurological issues and suffering. The suffering ended yesterday, and today I seem more able to think and read and write, even though only for short periods at a time with naps and meditation in between. I’ll take it.

The CrowdStrike outage on Friday didn’t impact me personally as much as the neurological chaos; I was already scheduled to leave after scrum in the morning, and so the Blue Screen of Death on my laptop didn’t impact much of my work. The outage seems to have been a wake-up call to the industry, though I’m not sure they have enough of the necessary perspective to be able to implement any new-found sanity. We’ve been living by the motto of “moving fast and breaking things” for so long that the treadmill’s whiplash pace seems to have run away with us. 

I’m dogsitting again for the coming week, and I have all my tools — food and books and electronics, oh my. I don’t know that I will be able to do much Philosophical reading before the meeting on Tuesday morning; I’m still having trouble getting the phrases to match up into a concept and engage with the meaning of the text. For some reason it’s still easier to work with data, which feels like building a lego as opposed to oil painting. 

Politics feels like a chapter in a near-future science fiction novel, and when I sleep I wake up wondering if I dreamed the latest headline. 

Datafication by Choice

'Datafication': making sense of (big) data in a complex world, Lycett, Mark.  European Journal of Information Systems; Abingdon Vol. 22, Iss. 4,  (Jul 2013): 381-386.  Datafication is the  “capture, representation and delivery of data to inform decision making and action.” This seems so innocent when it’s written that way, and those skeptics amongst us frequently want to take on who is doing the capturing, while the technologists (both pro and con) are talking about how the information is captured. This week’s readings are not focused on the capture of the information so much as investigating whose decisions are being informed, and this is, to my mind, the right question.

Datafication, dataveillance, and the social credit system as China’s new normal Claire Seungeun Lee, 2019  “– China’s new social credit system, which turns both online and offline behaviors into a credit score through smartphone apps” sounds like something right out of a William Gibson novel. Terms like “the social credit system,” “data-driven authoritarianism,” and “datavellience” seem plucked out of science fiction nightmares. Yet here we are, all of us, downloading apps to track our steps, tapping to log in at our favorite cafe, or using our watches to pay for everything from bus passes to movies with friends. This is the structure of how a social credit system is even possible, never mind how it’s used. 

Irresistible bargains: Navigating the surveillance society by Robert M. Pallitto, 2018 “certain aspects of the surveillance society may be irresistible in a number of ways, so that refusal to engage with them is not a realistic option.” When you install a swimming pool in your yard, you are obligated to also secure the safety of others from being injured by your pool, usually by putting up a fence of specified height, because a swimming pool is considered in legal parlance as “an attractive nuisance.” That is, that the idea of swimming is itself attractive enough to inspire risky behavior. A young child in the neighborhood might see it and be so emotionally drawn to it that they enter the pool without being able to swim, for instance. This, in legal terms, is your responsibility to manage and mitigate. But in our rush to adopt the latest, most informative, and attractively helpful technology, are we entering into risky behavior? How would we even know? Pallitto talks about the attractive smart city disabling cars when payments are late and this seems like a very Western-capitalism model for the data-driven authoritarianism that Lee describes. But there are many other ways in which we could elect to have our data used to control our mundane lives: what if your insurance policy offered a quarterly rebate or credit for anyone who walked the recommended 70,000 steps in a week? Sounds like a real win, right? But is this seeming incentive-rewards program actually a fine for those who don’t achieve it? What if insurance rates were increased for subscribers who walked fewer than 50,000 tracked steps in a year? This sounds a little outlandish, but we already have steep financial disincentives in the insurance landscape for tobacco product use. How is that any different from the steps scenario presented above? I’m not sure that it is. It’s not a difference of type so much as Pallitto and Lee show a difference in scale. How big does data have to get before it is too big? How monolithic is too monolithic? I remember in 2000 when GE promised never to sell my information as I signed up to be able to pay my electric bill online, and I thought, “They don’t have to sell it; they already own everything.” And sure enough, GE Capital sent me any number of pre-approved offers regularly in my inbox, to my phone, and to my physical house. 

    This year, GE Health Care was birthed into existence. Amazon is in the healthcare universe as well, offering me better prices on my prescriptions without even entering my insurance information than I get at CVS when billed through my coverage. How is this even possible? And, more importantly, why would I not use the Amazon pharmacy option when it can save me money as well as be more convenient? Alexa even reminds me not only to refill my prescription and alerts me when it’s delivered, she (you see how I already think of her as a person) offered to remind me twice a day to take my blood pressure medicine and at night to take my statin (I’m old; this means I’m a member of the beta blockers and statins club and also means that I’m grateful for reminders). Every morning around 7:30 and every evening around 7:30, I touch the screen of my echo show to mark the task as done. In the dataveillance model presented by Lee, it’s completely plausible to conceive of a day when Alexa reports to my doctor that I haven’t marked my tasks as complete for a week, or calls the ambulance if my monitored pulse is too low or too high. And, here’s the real rub, would I feel grateful that I had the assistance? Possibly, yes, even to the point of signing up for the service and paying for it (all rolled into my Amazon Prime annual fee, most likely). When our Amazon Prime subscription fee doesn’t go up but “now includes more” we are not given options to opt out. I cannot, for instance, opt out of having the Amazon Pharmacy and other Amazon Health menu options available in the app itself.

Kwet argues that “Software is a central component of freedom in the twenty-first century.” (p. 18) In Kwet’s analysis, the Global North is enacting digital colonialism in the Global South through economic domination, imperial control, and tech hegemony and Digital colonialism: US empire and the new imperialism in the Global South Michael Kwet, 2019 Kewt’s answer is Free and Open Source Software, which he likens to “the development of socialism within Europe as a reaction to land enclosure and industrial exploitation, and its subsequent spread across liberation movements throughout the world.” (p.18) He introduces Moglen’s pillars of digital freedom. “Moglen adds that the trio of Free Software, Free Hardware and Free Spectrum (network connectivity) form the foundation for Free Culture, whereby anyone with a device and the Internet can freely access, produce and share published works. Taken together, the core pillars of the digital ecosystem are essential components which, by their very freedom and openness, empower the public – rather than states, corporations, or any other third parties – to exercise direct and collective control over the devices and ecosystem shaping their lives.” I’m not entirely convinced that free open source alone is enough to convince us to opt-out of the attractive nuisance of digital surveillance. We continually accept all cookies without coercion because we want the integrated, convenient, tailor-made solutions that datafication and integration offers.      Pallitto metions this as a matrix of irresistibility, offers that "consumers ... find ... irresistible. There are at least five components of this irresistibility. Specific bargains can be (or seem to be) irresistible:

• in terms of convenience
• in terms of efficiency
• in terms of ubiquity
• in terms of the networked life-world
• in terms of the source of sharing being hard to pinpoint."

The Internet Changed Everything

Lupač opens his 2018 article “BeyondThe Digital Divide: Contextualizing the Information Society” with “the internet has changed everything.” Lupač isn’t wrong. In five words, he has described the quake at the foundation of society, one that shook everything loose and positioned information -- and our access to it -- into the very center of how we live our daily lives. In the five years since Lupač wrote this understatement of the century, the everyday reliance on the internet has become more entrenched and entwined than ever. For Example: Before we catch the bus to work or school, we check the weather--on our phones, or increasingly on our watches-- to see if we need an umbrella or a jacket; we expect a digital assistant or text alert to let us know if the bus is running late or if there have been changes to routes or fares; on the bus, we can pay with tokens or cards or, increasingly, tap our phones or watches for the bus fare; once at work or school, we log in to various devices to participate, either by downloading information that we will work with for the tasks at hand, or by uploading content, and frequently our work is more collaborative that ever, collaborations that take place in the digital sphere, separate from the physical space we might occupy. 

The more important and central an item is, the more likely it is to be necessarily located in the digital landscape: banking, medical, groceries, transportation. These fundamental aspects of living are inherently digital, many of them not available offline or even by telephone. 

I have a friend who runs an intentional community in the mountains. Founded in 1974, there was no electricity or other civic infrastructure such as public water. In the last decade, the community set up a small battery of solar panels specifically to run a modem and router so that there could be a small but meaningful amount of internet available. When I asked why this mattered enough to be part of the community infrastructure, he told me it was no less important to human thriving in the community than the tools collected for the large community garden: it was a necessary tool to support daily survival. 

Bridging the digital divide is essential, and libraries have always held this to be a core for their vision as well as their mission: providing information itself, but also providing access to it is a fundamental tenet of libraries and librarianship. Why? “A better understanding of the mechanisms behind the societal proliferation of ICT can serve to provide clearer insight into deeper underlying issues, such as how human societies shape their material infrastructures and how these infrastructures are interconnected with such inherently sociological issues as social inequality, social change and social structures.” (Lupač 2018, p3). As all of society has transformed from a knowledge society to an information one, the library has likewise transformed from being an information provider to a social equalizer, such as it has the capacity to do so. 

Along the way, libraries, like all social institutions, are caught in the web of how we present the tools of this new society-- are we making choices that re-present the inequalities, or possibly even entrench the inequalities we hope to eradicate? What options exist for information providers such as the library to level the playing field? Budget constraints are conversations librarians and information architects are frequently not privy to and have no voice in, yet these are the very discussions that are essential in overcoming the digital divide and presenting information as a solution and not as a weapon of inequality and disenfranchisement, no matter how innocent or well-meaning the designs might be.

As my investigation of information society issues enters its third decade, I’m more aware than ever of how physical community remains important to the landscape of human thriving. I continue to see the real-time, real-life benefits and enrichment of in-person community events and sharing. Frequently during our deployment of informational, digital tools, the landscape of the in-person reality is getting deprioritized, sidelined, and at times lost. I think of the digital solutions that were employed during the pandemic, as schools and offices scrambled to replicate normalcy and enable the work of daily life to continue during a social shutdown. The digital divide was on full display especially in education, as students who had the economic resources for high-speed internet and quality laptops were able to participate nearly fully, while less advantaged students often fell out of the curriculum altogether. 

I think it’s essential that we as information professionals keep a balance between providing information tools and using community placement and partnership to enhance and enrich in-person programming. Being an information society means we have a responsibility to address the societal needs of our communities and patrons through information, not just to deliver data. It’s also important to discern how the delivery of data connectivity carries and creates its own inherent assumptions of access and digital privilege.

Smart Money is on Smart Homes

Ottawa, Feb. 14, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The smart home market size was estimated at USD 80.45 billion in 2022. Growing customer need for simplicity and a tailored experience, rising consumer awareness of safety and security, and expanding use of cloud-based technologies are key market drivers.

Key highlights

The home healthcare segment is growing at the highest CAGR of over 31% during the forecast period.

The wired protocols segment is growing at a CAGR of over 26%.

The Asia Pacific region is poised to grow at a CAGR of over 31% over the forecast period from 2022 to 2030.

The Europe smart home industry is growing at a CAGR of around 24% over the forecast period from 2022 to 2030.

Get the sample copy of this report@ https://www.precedenceresearch.com/sample/2596

Perfect Storm Book Club

Aldus Huxley's Brave New World reinterprets Shakespeare's Tempest with a then-modern twist of displaying technology as the poisonous vehicle that spawns the new world order, a division wrought by imperious, impersonal logic, the depiction of our twentieth century unshakeable faith in the redemptive power of technology, all answers cloaked in science as we are shown "the best society." This new order is one no less hateful than Prospero's passionate machinations, and perhaps even more horrific for its sterility. Emily St. John Mandel continues the Bard's legacy in Station Eleven, leaving off of either magic or science, and giving us, instead, art and a cultish adherence to our own role in the story at hand. Mandel opens the scene onstage with King Lear, an immediate signpost to the folly of imagining ourselves kings, making divisions among those who flatter him and banishing those who loves him, courting rejection of everyone in the process, leaving us to wander alone in the storm.

In many ways, I believe Mandel's work succeeds more genuinely for placing our own egos in the middle, reflecting the post-apocalyptic mire as a snare we set for ourselves, and one we could not help but spring, with the ego at the helm. 

William Gibson continues the tempestuous theme (though with less of the Bard on display) in his Jackpot series, again returning to the ugliness and destruction that ensures after a perfect storm destroys the planet, rendering it nearly uninhabitable, and the deployment of technology to save us, all while creating a better new world, sterile and deadly and false. 

I confess that I wasn't a fan of Neuromancer when it came out; I fond it a bit predictable, unsatisfactory, and superficial. I did like Pattern Recognition,  though, and if this series makes good on the themes and depth Gibson introduced then, this will be a nice addition to works that plunge into the depths of our need to sacrifice our souls on the altar of science and technology.

It feels like today would be a perfect day to launch a Perfect Storm Book Club.

It All Makes Sense at the End

Many many thanks to Molly Lewis for this beautiful, brilliant, and funny piece about breaking up with Wikipedia. I laughed and saw every minute of my most recent (doomed) relationship, too, which made it that much better. 

Keep rocking girl.

Telecomm Prediction

I predict that the next telecom advance will be to get rid of using a number altogether for cell phones and connectivity. You will log in to your device and The Cloud will store your preferences of which phone to ring and which email address to use, which watch to buzz.

A-Muse-ing

A friend of mine has ordered a muse. This news immediately made me think of poor Calliope in the opening of the Sandman series, but then, in what is not likely a turn for the better, my mind linked it up to the (really amazing) "Connected" short.

There are a lot of connections bouncing around in my world.
I think that I would get storminess all the time.

Smart Watch Wish List

• Perfectly fine in the water. Recognizes swimming strokes and possibly evaluates them.
• Seven day battery life while in monster-tracking mode. This would give some kind blowing regular mode life, like a month or something, but how cool would that be? Go hiking for a month, tell time, record all your fitness stuff for after.
• A camera. I know I'm being silly, but hey - a camera with storage to the cloud through 4G or whispernet or smoke signals and fairy dust. Storage of a dozen or so photos on device.
• Crazy accurate constant heart monitor
• Steps, stairs, running, calories, sleep tracking: all the stuff we take for granted in a fitness tracker
• Auto recognition of activities: swimming, hiking, biking, running.
• Fitness activity database and common activities selection (yoga, martial arts, calisthenics, weights, elliptical, rowing)
• Electric nfc for locks to front door, garage, gym locker, personal fire safe, bike lock, etc.
• Check in at work or school - GPS maps
• Proximity sensor / locator for team watches 
• Scan and track others in your team (Vivian is swimming, Heidi is still, Ethan is on a run - over 3 miles so far, Graeme is listening to music)

Why?

Why is Bluetooth HDMI not real yet?

Sex and the Modern Girl

A brief discussion on how virtual reality has advanced in terms of sexuality, including statements (with links) to expert opinion about robotic sexuality in the coming decades.

I particularly liked the range of responses in the video, from one woman saying "I would definitely recommend this" to a young man saying he's probably going to sound like a geezer, "but that's f/d up." Probably the biggest kernel of truth and prophecy almost gets lost when a young man says people are never going to take this off."

If feminism ushered in the implosion of the family, what will virtual relationships do to marriage? I found it nearly ironic that when the article admits that continuing innovation in virtual sexuality will likely lead to increased isolation among humans, that the author follows the observation with the oft-repeated mantra 'technology will fix that.'