Tablets before and after Apple, via our buddy Cord:
Hey guys, the thing about creative destruction is that you need to be … creative.
Or in other words, you come at the king, you best not miss.
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Tech
Adam Thierer takes a long critical look at author and activist Corey Doctorow’s definition of techno-optimism. Like most who favor strong controls and firm limits, Corey roots “optimism” in a deep and abiding pessimism:
In order to be an activist, you have to be… pessimistic enough to believe that things will get worse if left unchecked, optimistic enough to believe that if you take action, the worst can be prevented. [...] Techno-optimism is an ideology that embodies the pessimism and the optimism above: the concern that technology could be used to make the world worse, the hope that it can be steered to make the world better.
I tend to agree with Doctorow on several issues, like liberalizing copyright, and pursuing open solutions to tech and social problems. BUT (I like big ones, and must be truthful), as Adam points out:
The irony of Doctorow’s definition of “techno-optimism” is that, as he notes, it’s actually rooted in the fairly pessimistic belief that unless we do something to affect the balance between “open vs. closed” technology then “technology could be used to make the world worse,” he says. I think that view is myopic and misguided for several reasons.
First, I think it’s a mistake to tether “techno-optimism” to overly binary conceptions of “good vs. bad” / “open vs. closed” technology. I spent a great deal of time in the second of my two “Case for Internet Optimism” chapters addressing the group of thinkers that I refer to as “Openness Evangelicals,” or those who believe that “Openness” is almost always The Good; anything “closed” (restricted or proprietary) in nature is The Bad. In a sense, it’s tantamount to picking (or at least favoring) technological winners and losers regardless of what others prefer and voluntarily choose to use because it gives them greater satisfaction.
The net has made the world a more connected, more open, and diverse place. Of course it is merely a tool, to but put to whatever end the user wants. And while there are people who use tools for terrible purposes, the thing that makes me optimistic is that every day people use tools for overwhelmingly good reasons. Bad actions are, relatively, and anomaly. Goodness is banal. Consider Dan Savage’s fantastic It Gets Better campaign. Like the end of this ad says, “the web is what you make of it”. I’m optimistic because people are generally, genuinely good, and technology is far more likely to amplify, rather than pervert, our power to do good.
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My friends and colleagues Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins have a new working paper out, examining the correlation between positive economic trends and rising dress hemlines er, sorry, summertime on the brain. It’s on threat inflation in cyber security.
Threat inflation, according to Thrall and Cramer, is a concept in political science that refers to “the attempt by elites to create concern for a threat that goes beyond the scope and urgency that a disinterested analysis would justify.” Different actors—including members of Congress, defense contractors, journalists, policy experts, academics, and civilian, military, and intelligence officials—will each have their own motives for contributing to threat inflation. When a threat is inflated, the marketplace of ideas on which a democracy relies to make sound judgments—in particular, the media and popular debate—can become overwhelmed by fallacious information. The result can be unwarranted public support for misguided policies.
The run-up to the Iraq War illustrates the dynamic of threat inflation. After 9/11, the Bush Administration decided to invade Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein. Lacking any clear casus belli, the administration sought popular and congressional support for war by promoting several rationales that ultimately proved baseless.
Over the past two years, there has been a drive for increased federal involvement in cybersecurity. This drive is evidenced by the introduction of several comprehensive cybersecurity bills in Congress, the initiation of several regulatory proceedings related to cybersecurity by the Federal Communications Commission and Commerce Department, and increased coverage of the issue in the media. The official consensus seems to be that the United States is facing a grave and immediate threat that only quick federal intervention can address. This narrative has gone largely unchallenged by members of Congress or the press, and it has inflated the threat.
There is very little verifiable evidence to substantiate the threats claimed, and the most vocal proponents of a threat engage in rhetoric that can only be characterized as alarmist. Cyber threat inflation parallels what we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War.
The open diverse and creative culture fostered by an increasingly connected world isn’t in grave danger, except from those who would protect us.
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An NYU Computer Science student found a cool way to use the Foursquare API to track NYC restaurants with multiple health code violations. Blind me with science:
If a restaurant scores 28 or more points on its graded inspection, the Health Department will continue to inspect it roughly once a month until the restaurant scores below 28 or is closed by the department for serious and persistent violations.
There are 1660 restaurants that have scored 28 or more points and have not yet been closed. Do you really want to eat at a place like that?
So when you check in to someplace, DontEat.at will give you a warning. Neat! Via Jason.
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I’ve been experimenting with the Tumblr blogging platform. Click the big picture to check it out. I’ve got some brief observations. Tumblr is Facebook for people who understand the internet. Or Facebook’s wall is Tumblr for dumb-dumbs. I’ve been using my dashboard to browse what other people are finding interesting. The difference from Facebook is that I think these people are interesting, they’re not people I know or love or care for, I just find them interesting. It’s quite the little meritocracy. And let me tell you, when a total stranger likes or reblogs something, it’s quite … awesome.
The differences with WordPress are also interesting. WordPress is better for longer writing, Tumblr is better for posting videos or pictures quickly. Tumblr is easier, WordPress is more powerful, Tumblr is more focused, WordPress is more diverse. I see pluses to both system, and I think about how form shapes function. If you follow someone’s tumblr for a little while, you can get quite a sense of who they are, or think they are. It’s a form especially useful for younger users, who pour out their feelings quickly without consideration, and glom on to bits of passing fancy and try to affix it to their selves.
So for a time WaCK will be running concurrently with a tumblr feed of the random internet detritus that sparks my eye. I hope it’s interesting, or thought-provoking, or entertaining.
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If you’re like I am, you read a lot of blogs by RSS, perhaps using Google Reader. There’s a danger in reading blogs by RSS that I’ve been having to deal with for years, not necessarily “information overload,” but rather, “filter failure.”
One way of viewing the problem is thinking about how aggregating many small costs can create huge costs. It’s a problem when many individual actions appear relatively costless and aren’t viewed together. Mentally, the small costs aren’t considered together in a larger context, and they aren’t added together.
The cost of adding one more blog to your list of RSS feeds to check is a time cost. Most individual blogs seem relatively costless in terms of time. It’s not costless though. It all adds up. Trying to keep track of a hundred or so blogs is a big time sink.
The problem is similar to the problem of voting, as described by Bryan Caplan. Voting is relatively cheap to each individual voter, but because each voter pollutes the democratic process with their ignorance, systematic bias, and irrationality, the cost of bad public policy produced is substantial.
There’s an obvious difference between reading by RSS and voting. For voting, exploiting the externality is locally rational for the agent, but adding another RSS feed without weighing the time cost is an personal cognitive flaw, or perhaps just a myopically flawed preference.
Some thoughts from Tyler Cowen inspired this post.
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