Group items tagged

for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

a collective identity crisis. For most of human history, the idea of reinventing yourself or freely shaping your identity — of presenting different selves in different contexts (at home, at work, at play) — was hard to fathom, because people’s identities were fixed by their roles in a rigid social hierarchy. With little geographic or social mobility, you were defined not as an individual but by your village, your class, your job or your guild. But that started to change in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with a growing individualism that came to redefine human identity. As people perceived themselves increasingly as individuals, their status became a function not of inherited categories but of their own efforts and achievements. This new conception of malleable and fluid identity found its fullest and purest expression in the American ideal of the self-made man, a term popularized by Henry Clay in 1832.

the dawning of the Internet age promised to resurrect the ideal of what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called the “protean self.” If you couldn’t flee to Texas, you could always seek out a new chat room and create a new screen name. For some technology enthusiasts, the Web was supposed to be the second flowering of the open frontier, and the ability to segment our identities with an endless supply of pseudonyms, avatars and categories of friendship was supposed to let people present different sides of their personalities in different contexts. What seemed within our grasp was a power that only Proteus possessed: namely, perfect control over our shifting identities. But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion.

Here’s a thought experiment: where do you end? Not your body, but you, the nebulous identity you think of as your “self”. Does it end at the limits of your physical form? Or does it include your voice, which can now be heard as far as outer space; your personal and behavioral data, which is spread out across the impossibly broad plane known as digital space; and your active online personas, which probably encompass dozens of different social media networks, text message conversations, and email exchanges? This is a question with no clear answer, and, as the smartphone grows ever more essential to our daily lives, that border’s only getting blurrier.

our minds have become even more radically extended than ever before

one of the essential differences between a smartphone and a piece of paper, which is that our relationship with our phones is reciprocal: we not only put information into the device, we also receive information from it, and, in that sense, it shapes our lives far more actively than would, say, a shopping list. The shopping list isn’t suggesting to us, based on algorithmic responses to our past and current shopping behavior, what we should buy; the phone is

So, this moldy jail I was in was this old dot-com McMansion, out in the Permanent Foreclosure Zone in the dead suburbs. That's where they cooped us up. This gated community was built for some vanished rich people. That was their low-intensity prison for us rehab detainees.

This place outside was a Beltway suburb before Washington was abandoned. The big hurricane ran right over it, and crushed it down pretty good, so now it was a big green hippie jungle. Our prison McMansion had termites, roaches, mold and fleas, but once it was a nice house. This rambling wreck of a town was half storm-debris. All the lawns were replaced with wet, weedy, towering patches of bamboo, or marijuana -- or hops, or kenaf, whatever (I never could tell those farm crops apart). The same goes for the "garden roofs," which were dirt piled on top of the dirty houses. There were smelly goats running loose, chickens cackling. Salvaged umbrellas and chairs toppled in the empty streets. No traffic signs, because there were no cars.

The rich elite just blew it totally. They dropped their globalized ball. They panicked. So they're in jail, like I was. Or they're in exile somewhere, or else they jumped out of penthouses screaming when the hyperinflation ate them alive.

as research on “priming” shows, simply discussing race at all kicks up those effects among the racially dominant group. Or to put it more bluntly, in the US context: White people really don’t like being called white people. They don’t like being reminded that they are white people, part of a group with discernible boundaries, shared interests, and shared responsibilities

one of the benefits of being in the dominant demographic and cultural group is that you are allowed to simply be a person, a blank slate upon which you can write your own individual story. You have no baggage but what you choose

The power and privilege that come along with that — being the base model, a person with no asterisk — are invisible to many white men. Simply calling them “white people,” much less questioning the behavior or beliefs of white people, drags that power and privilege into the open

"We figured out that people have advertised so much with their online ego, that basically a kind of avatar persona has been created so actually people start talking about killing someone like it would be a real person,"

"If you are heavily active [on the internet], by disconnecting you are losing a significant relationship. Those 30 or 40 hours of time now have to be filled with real life." Dr Block says some people can find it very gratifying, while others find they are not capable of staying disconnected. However, he believes the worst case scenario is when the decision to disconnect is made by a third party. "It can be a disaster and can even lead to suicide."

If we can't live in the moment without tweeting about it, or broadcasting all of our thoughts to our 2,000 Facebook friends, are we in danger of losing our sense of identity?

“Convergence is possible only at the price of shedding identity. That is usually seen as a loss. But at the scale at which it occurs, it must mean something. What are the disadvantages of identity, and conversely, what are the advantages of blankness? What is left after identity is stripped? The generic?”

It is ironic that just as people want to see a built environment that reflects who they are, what we are seeing in much of the world is that urban planning is scarcely possible because market economies are not generating the necessary funds for it. Any major project of public interest, including even precautions against hurricanes in coastal regions of America, can’t get done.

For me, the issue is not about the inefficiency of democracies versus efficient autocracies but how and where a society wants to allocate its resources. It is really a matter of ideology, of whether the interests of the market or the society as a whole are the priority.

it's the re-packaging and transfer of this data to the U.S. Government -- combined with the ability to link it not only to your online identity (IP address), but also your offline identity (name) -- that has made this industry particularly pernicious.  There are serious obstacles that impede the Government's ability to create these electronic dossiers themselves.  It requires both huge resources and expertise.  Various statutes enacted in the mid-1970s -- such as the Privacy Act of 1974 -- impose transparency requirements and other forms of accountability on programs whereby the Government collects data on citizens.  And the fact that much of the data about you ends up in the hands of private corporations can create further obstacles, because the tools which the Government has to compel private companies to turn over this information is limited (the fact that the FBI is sometimes unable to obtain your "transactional" Internet data without a court order -- i.e., whom you email, who emails you, what Google searches you enter, and what websites you visit --is what has caused the Obama administration to demand that Congress amend the Patriot Act to vest them with the power to obtain all of that with no judicial supervision). But the emergence of a private market that sells this data to the Government (or, in the case of Project Vigilance, is funded in order to hand it over voluntarily) has eliminated those obstacles.

a wide array of government agencies have created countless programs to encourage and formally train various private workers (such as cable installers, utilities workers and others who enter people's homes) to act as government informants and report any "suspicious" activity; see one example here.  Meanwhile, TIA has been replicated, and even surpassed, as a result of private industries' willingness to do the snooping work on American citizens which the Government cannot do.

this arrangement provides the best of all worlds for the Government and the worst for citizens: The use of private-sector data aggregators allows the government to insulate surveillance and information-handling practices from privacy laws or public scrutiny. That is sometimes an important motivation in outsourced surveillance.  Private companies are free not only from complying with the Privacy Act, but from other checks and balances, such as the Freedom of Information Act.  They are also insulated from oversight by Congress and are not subject to civil-service laws designed to ensure that government policymakers are not influenced by partisan politics. . . .

People have speculated before about the idea that the Internet might become self-aware and turn into the first "real" A.I., but could it be more likely to happen to cities, in which humans actually live and work and navigate, generating an even more chaotic system?

"By connecting and providing visibility into disparate systems, cities and buildings can operate like living organisms, sensing and responding quickly to potential problems before they occur to protect citizens, save resources and reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions," reads the invitation to IBM's PULSE 2010 event.

And Cisco is already building the first of these smart cities: Songdo, a Korean "instant city," which will be completely controlled by computer networks — including ubiquitious Telepresence applications, video screens which could be used for surveillance. Cisco's chief globalization officer, Wim Elfrink, told the San Jose Mercury News: Everything will be connected - buildings, cars, energy - everything. This is the tipping point. When we start building cities with technology in the infrastructure, it's beyond my imagination what that will enable.

After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.

Iran’s government has monitored social media to identify opponents of the regime for years, Grothe says, but if government claims about the use of face recognition are true, it’s the first instance she knows of a government using the technology to enforce gender-related dress law.

Mahsa Alimardani, who researches freedom of expression in Iran at the University of Oxford, has recently heard reports of women in Iran receiving citations in the mail for hijab law violations despite not having had an interaction with a law enforcement officer. Iran’s government has spent years building a digital surveillance apparatus, Alimardani says. The country’s national identity database, built in 2015, includes biometric data like face scans and is used for national ID cards and to identify people considered dissidents by authorities.

Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems

Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one's identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.

It’s the boundaries between our various social identities that give us a sense of comfort and security: we can (and often do) project different parts of ourselves in different spaces.

When data about those roles is explicitly captured, boundaries blur at the point of analysis

“context switcher”

Silicon Valley’s go-to linguistic dodge: the collective we

“What kind of a world do we want to live in?”

Big tech’s collective we is its ‘all lives matter’, a way to soft-pedal concerns about privacy while refusing to speak directly to dangerous inequalities.

There is something thrilling about the intellectual audacity of thinking that you can explain ninety per cent of behavior in a society with one mental tool.

education, which they believe is a form of domestication

there is no moral dimension to this economic analysis: utility is a fundamentally amoral concept

Belfast Friendship Club meets every Thursday evening, and over the months and years meaningful connections and friendships have been forged, irrespective of our backgrounds or identities. The club’s strength arises from an ethos of solidarity, equity, respect and the huge, loyal and expanding membership draws newcomers into its warm and welcoming space.

In a country still wrestling with its history of intolerance and suspicion of the ‘other’, introducing the table hosts as my friends immediately sets the scene and makes way for connection on a basic, human level. As table hosts share their purely personal perspectives about how they’ve coped with their lives as migrant workers, asylum seekers or refugees, participants are prompted to wonder how they, too, might fare if placed in similar situations.

the media won’t give the same time of day or coverage to communities who are being targeted by hate violence. They are spending so much time humanizing white nationalists and humanizing white supremacy that in many ways the news media  routinely ignore the ubiquitous and every day hate that communities of color and other diverse communities experience in this country

a majority of white Americans feel they are victims of discrimination. What these white Americans have to do is unpack their own anxiety, discuss this rage, and understand that the project of civil rights, human rights, equality under the law are not an assault on their racial identity. I think for some white voters it is probably about what they perceive as waning demographic and economic power

The good news is I learned from my travels around the country that the survivors of hate, people who have lost so much, are not only rebuilding but they are coming forward and they are reclaiming their lives. These survivors are working with allies to stop the hatred, building community defense programs and are willing to engage in difficult conversations with people who see the world differently from them. And I think that is something to really admire. Given what’s transpired survivors of hate have every reason to turn their backs on this country.

The intensity of belief on the right has begun to vary inversely with plausibility. Precisely because the “threat” posed by the caravan is facially absurd, believing in it — performing belief in it — is a powerful act of shared identity reinforcement, of tribal solidarity.

Once that support system is in place, Trump is unbound, free to impose his fantasies on reality. He can campaign on Republicans protecting people with preexisting conditions even as the GOP sues to block such protections. He can brush off Mueller’s revelations and fire anyone who might threaten him. He can use imaginary Democratic voter fraud to cover up red-state voter suppression. He can use antifa as a pretext for deploying troops domestically.

Trump does not view himself as president of the whole country. He views himself as president of his white nationalist party — their leader in a war on liberals. He has all the tools of a head of state with which to prosecute that war. Currently, he is restrained only by the lingering professionalism of public servants and a few thin threads of institutional inertia.

Harassment and misogyny had been problems in the community for years before this; the deep resentment and anger toward women that powered Gamergate percolated for years on internet forums. Robert Evans, a journalist who specializes in extremist communities and the host of the Behind the Bastards podcast, described Gamergate to me as partly organic and partly born out of decades-long campaigns by white supremacists and extremists to recruit heavily from online forums. “Part of why Gamergate happened in the first place was because you had these people online preaching to these groups of disaffected young men,” he said. But what Gamergate had that those previous movements didn’t was an organized strategy, made public, cloaking itself as a political movement with a flimsy philosophical stance, its goals and targets amplified by the power of Twitter and a hashtag.

The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just “trolls” began to crumble. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.

Police have to learn how to keep the rest of us safe from internet mobs