power's continuous evolution toward supple forms of control

Thomas Lord

Mon Apr 28 17:19:28 -0700 2008

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That is a fence around a prison camp.

-t

power's continuous evolution toward supple forms of control

AB3A

Tue Apr 29 04:40:37 -0700 2008

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No, in the old days when towns were smaller, people knew where the disreputable places were. The problem is that the distribution of this knowledge didn't scale up very well. Well, now we have the technology to do just that. If someone is from out of town and doesn't know where the dangerous parts of the city are, then this will help them.

On the other hand, if they're looking for trouble, it will tell them exactly where to find it. This is really nothing more than distributing the local police station's push-pin map for where the crimes have been taking place.

power's continuous evolution toward supple forms of control

rubycodez

Tue Apr 29 04:44:20 -0700 2008

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I see the potential for a variation of google-ranking advertisement revenue scheme, if done subtly enough.

power's continuous evolution toward supple forms of control

Thomas Lord

Tue Apr 29 06:01:03 -0700 2008

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This is not the same thing as knowing which side of the tracks is the wrong one in an olde-tymey towne. I'll explain:

It's true that classic cities and towns often wind up with long-lived danger zones. From past years: You don't go to Boston's Combat Zone late at night unless you mean to, uh, "shop there". Passing through Time Square in N.Y.? Better know how to protect yourself from pickpockets. Naive, stand-outish white boy? Perhaps Pittsburgh's Hill District is not the place to hang out. (All of those examples, to my knowledge, have mostly expired. Those particular places have changed and are changing.)

Now, historically, those reputations did turn out to be oppressive in ways that you can still see happening in other places today. Rents fall so the desperately poor move in. Parasitic cycles develop where crime feeds on the poor who therefore have trouble getting out of poverty but less problem producing more crime. Investment capital shuns these areas. Development doesn't happen. Job creation doesn't happen. And, yes, these places become a kind of jail with economically and socially enforced bars and walls.

Although I picked three "expired" examples, of course such districts still exist. And, yes, crime statistics are sometimes a clue: look, for example, for urban areas that have very high rates of murder. Then look closer at them and you'll find the same thing again: capital flight, no serious attempts at job creation, parasitic crime patterns, and many people trapped there by poverty.

The data being studied here is a handy clue. It's not the whole story.

But now a new question arises: how do we respond to that pattern socially and economically? How do we adjust our civic order in response? In short, what do we build in response because, never forget, We Become What We Build.

Let's contrast two alternatives:

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In one scenario, we raise money and build well designed schools that exude respect for the people who will use them. (That's a flash video. The speaker builds such schools. Entertainingly, the talk is accompanied by Herbie Hancock improvising live on piano. Also fun (for me at least) the speaker, Bill Strickland, has a pretty distinct Pittsburgh accent -- the voice of my birth-city.)

What do we become with that kind of building and that kind of investment? We become students and teachers. We become neighbors. We become celebrants of the good things in life. We become investors and entrepreneurs. We become collectively wealthier and richer. We become collectively safer and more productive.

The social and economic walls around those problematic places? That kind of investment looks at the facts like crime statistics, and seeks ways to tear those walls down. We become liberators.

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What if, instead, we invest in giving the more privileged a new tweak to their emerging immersion in "ubiquitous computing and communications". Whether it is their car navigator, their cell-phone, pda, Dick Tracey watch, heads-up display in contact lenses, or brain implants -- one way or another we want to arm these half-here half-nowhere people with Valuable Information so they will have an upper hand.

They'll be informed by a Central Service where to go and where to avoid. All in real time and highly sensitive to even feint signals in the statistics. Markets will be optimized with property values and rents following these statistics with greater efficiency. Consumer spending patterns will similarly adjust. When a district starts to get into trouble, swift social and economic collective punishment will follow quickly.

So, what do we become? We become a hierarchy (central services and users) of prison guards. We withhold and extend based on the good-for-me or bad-for-me behavior of the prisoners. We become more efficient, better organized builders of the walls.

As a whole society, we become more polarized. We become, even more, a class segregated people. We will be four: Prisoners, Consumers, Controllers, and Financiers.

And as our actions help to accelerate decline, I'll tell you, most of the growth will be in the Prisoners category.

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Effete pre-cursor technology like this car navigation "mash-up" currently happen for a couple of reasons. First, there is a boatload of hype that pushes both technical and entrepreneurial creative impulses in that direction. Second, the financiers like it because of all of the opportunities for monopoly. Perhaps your firm can uniquely own the database that collects the wisdom of a target crowd. Perhaps your firm has an exclusive contract to write the mash-up software that will run on the nav computer. Perhaps your firm has an exclusive deal with the police departments to get the data feeds. Perhaps your firm is the provider of sociological mumbo-jumbo that makes the call of what does or does not count as a "danger zone."

This economic and social pattern of ill-considered infrastructure development deserves ridicule and attack.

One of many places to start is to try explaining the problems to the engineers who will be called upon to build this stuff. Neither Mr. Kleiner or Mr. Perkins or any of the others can code this stuff up themselves. Pushback from the Technocracy (the sixth estate? :-) can help change the pattern.

-t

power's continuous evolution toward supple forms of control

AB3A

Tue Apr 29 07:54:05 -0700 2008

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I'm not sure I can do justice to your carefully written reasoning in a short message. But here goes...

The data is a matter of public record. What nobody has done until now is to make that data available to people in an automobile navigation system. There is no way we can stop this from happening. We can't unbake the cake. There is nothing wrong with publishing public data to people to use in whatever context they want.

Such data have also been used by government and private organizations to figure out where help is needed. They in turn could break those walls you described down.

Furthermore, the statistics alone are only statistics. They can't guarantee that you won't be robbed at gunpoint or assaulted in a "safe" part of town.

I guess what I'm saying is that you're presuming that this data will result in a static perception of a given area, whereas I'm suggesting that it could be used to change places for the better by acting sooner.

Flip sides of the same coin?

sober assessment vs. subliminal use

Thomas Lord

Tue Apr 29 08:35:26 -0700 2008

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No, I would not agree with "flip sides of the same coin" in this context. Here is why.

Technologically, the number of choices that we as a society can choose to pursue at any moment vastly exceeds the number of choices we as a society can afford to invest in.

For example, it is likely that millions went into the one product talked about in the top article. Concurrently, many more millions are going into similar products: put that same data conveniently on the iPhone platform; mash up that same data with real estate listings; find an ad-based model for delivering that data to an ordinary browser; on and on.

Those many millions go into that area because (a) that data is among the very small amount of interesting data that is coming free and in programmaticaly useful form from local government. (b) dumb, inexpensive coders can, in site of their lack of skill or social awareness, implement such services with only a little bit of expert oversight. (c) the hype machine has noticed that the first few ventures to go in directions such as this grew rapidly, and so now the reasoning is based around a model of exponential growth.

In other words, the entire project is exploitative, lacks engineering responsibility, is driven by greed, and repeats the pattern by which tech "bubbles" are created again and again while, in the end, producing little of lasting value and much that does harm.

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The basic point you make: that the data is valuable and that it is itself neither good or evil -- yes, of course. I completely agree.

The issue here is the premature, ill-considered, on-the-face-of-it destructive deployment of this data in "easy plays" that create the bad patterns I wrote about.

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You can't "unbake the cake". That is true. It is often invoked as a poor excuse for well-meaning but evil ventures.

Those who mean well have another choice open to them: resistance and the seeking out of alternative, productive activities.

Resistance means that for every minute those who pursue evil business spend hyping themselves, we spend two minutes ridiculing the effetes who want it -- and clearly explaining why.

Resistance means that for every dollar invested in evil crap, we try to raise two dollars for something useful.

Resistance means emboldening Technocrats to say "no", to quit jobs, to burn bridges, to speak out, to blow whistles. Nobody is more qualified than us to do such things. Nobody is more vital to evil's plans than us.

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Millions go to crap like automating the identification of "bad neighborhoods" and optimizing the rate at which that turns into economic collapse and segregation.

Not one red cent goes to alternative activities like personal web services. Fixing that is a better problem to work on than finding the next mash-up of crime data.

-t

power's continuous evolution toward supple forms of control

zotz

Wed Apr 30 19:50:54 -0700 2008

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Well, I wonder about the liability issue if the data supplier gets it wrong...

all the best,

drew

power's continuous evolution toward supple forms of control

AB3A

Thu May 01 04:28:30 -0700 2008

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You could say that about nearly every mapping endeavor. For example, Jeppesen produces charts and approach procedure documents for aviation use. Want to know their liability? It's not much. The reason is that if something is discovered to be incorrect, as long as they issue an official NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) via the FAA, their liability is limited. Airports, pilots, and many others are constantly using and reviewing these enroute and approach procedures. If anything is wrong, it will be reported.

Likewise, in any dynamic mapping environment, one should ensure the data flow goes both ways. In this case, I would presume the police would be eager to use these facilities too. With their review, I would think that any mistakes would be noticed pretty early. As long as the mapping company provides a continuous effort to collect the data with any corrections, I would think the liability would be minimal.

A footnote to that

Thomas Lord

Tue Apr 29 06:11:03 -0700 2008

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"Surveille and Punish" (Fr. "Surveiller et punir") (commonly "Discipline and Punish"), Michel Foucault, 1975

(Many other works of his as well.)
-t