Category: Uncategorized

Google Book Settlement: I think I opted out

  By

This morning I opted out of the Google Book Settlement. At least, I think I did. After going through the forms and clicking the buttons there is a generic page saying something like "your opt-out has been received".  But I have no receipt, no acknowledgement – in short, no proof that I have opted out. Very odd. I emailed Rust Consulting (the settlement administrator) and assume I will get something sometime, but it seems very amateurish for what they keep telling us is such an important change.

As for why I opted out, well I hope to write about that. But I have a deadline for next weekend and a busy time at home (never mind the day job), so I can't do that right now, and this blog will continue to be quiet for a while.

Update: After emailing the settlement administrator, I did get an email confirming my opt-out.

No Free Stuff Here

  By

A few people have asked me whether I’m going to repeat my Critical Reader’s Guide to The Long Tail with Chris Anderson’s new book Free. It’s nice to be asked, so thank you. And I am, of course, susceptible to bribes and flattery. But the answer right now is No. Three reasons:

  • I don’t have a vendetta against the guy, so there’s no particular reason to go after him again.
  • To be honest, I doubt that it will be interesting enough to spend that amount of time on.
  • I don’t think the ideas will be as destructive as I think the Long Tail has been.

Online advertising: when better is worse

  By

There I was, reading this paper called “Online Advertising, Identity and Privacy” by Randal Picker of the University of Chicago Law School, and learning quite a bit from it. He’s obviously thought hard about the conflicts (privacy) and opportunities (advertising) that arise when people provide their identity to online services, and about what kind of regulation may be needed to ensure those services behave responsibly with the data they collect. After all, as he says:

In the past, we have regulated intermediaries at these transactional bottlenecks – banks, cable companies, phone companies and the like – and limited the ways in which they can use the information that they see. Presumably the same forces that animated those rules – fundamental concerns about customer privacy – need to be assessed for our new information intermediaries.

In introducing the topic of advertising, Picker makes the standard point that “Ads in these [traditional] media are targeted to rough demographics. The Internet, in contrast, promises advertising matched to me”. And this, he claims, is a good thing: “Think about TV advertising and how many ads that you see for products that you never consume. Those ads are almost all wasted. Behavioral advertising [ie, personalized, online advertising] offers the promise of tailoring ads to individual consumers greatly increasing the efficiency of each ad dollar spent”.

And then it clicked. I’d never realised it before, but the assumption that accurate advertising is better for me than inaccurate advertising is completely wrong. 180 degrees wrong. The truth is that accurate, targeted advertising is not a good thing, it’s a terrible thing.

To be slightly more nuanced, there are two kinds of ads in the world: listings and intrusions (I’m sure there are better names out there, but that’s all I can think of), and while accurate listings are OK, accurate intrusions are a terrible thing, because they intrude more effectively.

Listings are ads that I seek out: If I’m looking to buy a second-hand chest of drawers I’ll look in the back of the local paper, or on Craigslist or on Kijiji, and here I want to be able to find what I’m looking for, just like Randal Picker says. An ad for a car is no use if I’m looking for a chest of drawers. if I were looking for a job I’d want ads that match my skills and interests. So when we’re talking about listings, accuracy is good.

But then there are all those ads that you try to ignore, because they work by getting in your way when you’re not looking to buy anything at all. TV ads, radio ads (thank heavens for the CBC), some newspaper and magazine ads are all intrusions. They work by intruding into something else that you’re doing and catching your attention. And what I want from these ads is for them to be as obviously wrong and inaccurate as possible, because then I know I can ignore them safely. The more inaccurate they are, the less they drag at my attention, and the less likely they are to pull me away from what I’m trying to do. More accurate ads are a more effective distraction. And while that may be good for the advertiser, and even for the owner of the delivery medium, it’s bad for me.

This is not some fancy rhetorical point – it’s actually how I experience newspapers and the Internet, and I suspect you do too.

Think about Adwords. When you carry out a search, you don’t want the advertised listings, you want the “honest”, unpurchased listings. Try it yourself. If you are interested in finding out more about the subject of this post you may google [online advertising]  (go ahead and click: the link opens a new window). Do you want any of those listings down the right hand side? No you don’t. Do you want to go to those top three advertised links? No you don’t. Fortunately, they are all pretty much obviously outfits you don’t want anything to do with and you can easily ignore them. But if they were closer to what you were really interested in, you’d have to look over them, wonder whether to click them, decide whether to discard them or not. It’s all effort and attention and I’m lazy enough that I really don’t need it. The closer those ads are to what I’m looking for, the more distracting they are, and the more effort it is to drag my eyes away from them to the results I actually want.

Fortunately, despite the promises of individually targeted ads that know my inner desires and motivations, we don’t have to worry about them becoming too accurate to ignore in the near future. After all, right now all we get is weight loss ads on Facebook and everywhere else and everyone gets to see those. Unless… you do see them too, don’t you?

Wikibollocks: Lawrence Lessig/Kevin Kelly Edition

  By

I don’t usually read Wired so I didn’t see Kevin Kelly’s article called “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online“. I didn’t miss much. It was a precis of Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody (my views on that are here), about how the Internet is dramatically enhancing our abilities to cooperate, collaborate, share, join and do all kinds of groupy things, prefaced by a few paragraphs in which he tried to claim that this groupiness is “socialism”. In that it’s social, or something. KK doesn’t really care if it’s socialism or not of course, but using the word in the pages of a Condé Nast-owned publication sounds daring and provocative, so why not? And what else would you expect from someone who calls himself “Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine” [link]? (In the comments section of the first link of the following paragraph, Seth Finkelstein says all this more energetically.)
Law professor Lawrence Lessig took umbrage at the dread word, because “at the core of socialism is coercion” so “I will never agree to call what millions have voluntarily created on the Net ‘socialism.’ That term insults the creators, and confuses the rest.” I didn’t read his posts when they first came out either, so I missed the sentence “No one forces Wikipedia editors to build a free encyclopedia”, which is close enough to a certain book title to catch my eye.

But I did see Henry Farrell’s fine post, calling Lessig’s arguments “a horrible, horrible mess”:

“Item one: under Lessig’s definition, when the Young Socialists League of the Socialisty Socialists of America organizes its volunteer commune in Ann Arbor, this commune isn’t a socialistic one, because no-one is being forced to join. Item two – that if you are to deplore your critics for having mysteriously misinterpreted you as associating coercion with Stalin, you probably shouldn’t have been arsing on about Stalin, collective farms und so weiter in your original post. This class of rhetorical maneuver is what we call running with the hare and coursing with the hounds in the country where I grew up.”

This sent be back to the original articles, which I read with increasing irritation. I’m eagerly awaiting Henry Farrell’s promised longer post on the subject, but there’s no sign of it yet. So as a substitute here’s what gets me pissed off about the Lessig/Kelly debate. 
It’s not what they disagree about that annoys me. Is this socialism or is this just love? At some point the label doesn’t matter: you say tomayto and I say tomahto, a rose by any other name, sticks and stones, etc.
No, it’s what they agree on that drives me spare. The idea that the technological innovation surrounding the Internet is a transformative social movement and, what’s more, a political movement in the broad sense. LL and KK ascribe explicit political consequences to open source software, the hacker ethos, Wikipedia, and so on. They adopt and share with others an implicit belief in technological determinism, in which new technology is inherently linked to a particular kind of progressive and liberating social change. Clay Shirky is another who looks at the world this way:

“The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.” [link]

KK calls the development of open source and social software “an alternative to capitalism and corporatism”, and LL sees the debate in explicitly political terms:

… sloppiness here has serious political consequences. When a founder of the movement which we all now celebrate calls this movement “socialist,” that plays right in the hand of those would attack everything this movement has built. 

Here’s the problem. 
This rhetoric of liberation has led many a talented and idealistic young person to believe that coding, especially for free, is a political statement. In the guise of an anti-establishment, scrappy, can-do underdog attitude, LL, KK and their colleagues have created an environment in which well-intentioned people really believe that the commercialization of friendship by Facebook is a democratizing force, that it’s progressive for technology entrepreneurs to make billions from the work of artists who get nothing, and that posting book reviews on Amazon and movie reviews on Amazon-owned IMDB is contributing to a public good. In which otherwise intelligent people believe that Google and Twitter are somehow morally different from Microsoft and Wal-Mart because their employees are younger and because they use phrases like “radical transparency” without living up to them.
Some of those young people have created great things. Others have been suckered into digital sharecropping efforts believing that they are doing something worthwhile, painting a fence for some Tom Sawyer with a venture capitalist behind him who makes a mint off their efforts. And others have become those rich young men (almost always men) with their private jets. As Time Magazine wrote in its portrait of Flickr founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield: “IPOs? Web 1.0. Building it and flipping it to Yahoo, Google or Microsoft? Web 2.0”.

So let’s get some things clear. 

  • The Internet doesn’t have one product, it has many products. Some of which are wonderful and some of which are politically reactionary. It has produced some admirable and exciting cultural innovations, and it has also led to a huge influx of money to the pockets of Silicon Valley billionaires and away from proprietors and employees of small-scale, independent outfits that are vital to our cultural health.
  • The Internet is not inherently anti-corporate and it is not anti-state. If you want to be part of an anti-corporate movement, simply doing your digital thing is not enough.  
  • Google is not an upstart. Anyone who can read their statement about making YouTube profitable and still think Google is run by coders, not bean counters, is kidding themselves. 
  • The open source “movement” is not a political movement and open source is not a political virtue. Open source is perfectly compatible with businesses as conservative as they come. The largest death machine on the planet has its own open source initiative [link]; anything key to IBM’s strategy is not an alternative to capitalism. Of course, Google says that in building its new Chrome OS on top of Linux “We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision” [link]. So go ahead, help them, but don’t think you’re doing something progressive.
  • I’m not saying that the Internet is inherently reactionary, any more than it is inherently progressive. Political activists are spending a lot of time building digital tools to help maintain movements and promote worthwhile causes, to promote worthwhile goals, and these are useful activities. Even I use Drupal and CiviCRM for groups I am a member of. But let’s not think that these tools make this generation of activists materially different from previous generations. Elsewhere on this blog Phil Edwards (blog here) relayed a question he asked John Curtice: “has pervasive Internet access been a force for good in terms of expanding participation, i.e. were people who wouldn’t previously have been informed & involved using the Net to get informed & involved? His answer was, um, no, not really – political activism was a minority pursuit & always had been, and the Net hadn’t made it any less of one. Afterwards I asked the Shirky/Howard Dean question – had the Net been a negative influence, in that the frictionless ease of Net activism actually attracted people away from real-world politics? His answer was, um, no, not really – political activism was a minority pursuit & always had been, and in all probability the same minority were going to the physical meetings and joining the Facebook groups” [link].
Somehow the digirati choose to ignore the fact that the major media corporations they love to knock are doing just fine in the brand new world of the Internet – but then a Condé Nast publication may be expected to believe that. LL’s talk of a “hybrid economy” is filled with optimistic assumptions about the behaviour of the new corporations and breezy acceptance, even approval, of the fact that his young children’s everyday social interactions are now a legitimate target of advertisers. Even when a cool kid shows signs of disillusionment, as Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow did recently, he wraps his claims in qualifiers:

I sympathize with companies and creators who want to keep Google or Amazon from becoming gatekeepers on culture. Not because of who runs Amazon or Google — I know senior people at both companies whom I believe to be honorable and decent — but because no one should be that gatekeeper. I’d oppose consolidation in distribution and sales channels, even if the companies involved were Santa Claus Inc., Mahatma Gandhi Ltd., and Toothfairy Enterprises LLC. [link]

Cory – you’re on the right track, but why would you think that the character of the people you know matters a damn? It certainly sounds like you think the “honorable and decent” nature of people at Google and Amazon ameliorates the impact of those companies. The problems with the mainstream institutions you have so little time for are nothing to do with levels of honour and decency among their senior people. This is not a matter of good guys and bad guys. As someone who knew a bit about socialism once said “In the social production of their existence, men [and women too] inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.”

I’m not anti-technology. But it’s time to think about the Internet and digital technology in the same way that we think of the road system or other pieces of our social infrastructure. It would be ludicrous to claim that roads have one product. I just watched my son drive off with a car full of friends to a weekend at a cottage – a form of freedom possible only because of the technology of the road. But I worry a little, as any parent does, because roads are dangerous places too (as a scar on forehead from when I was eight years old reminds me). Few people are pro- or anti-road in general any more; instead the interesting questions are about how to make the most of the benefits roads can bring and how to limit the damage they can cause. The same goes for the Internet: let’s not assume its progressive nature, let’s not assume that everyone working in an open source manner or building new technologies is somehow on the same side, let’s appreciate those who are building progressive spaces on the Internet because they are progressive spaces, not because they are on the Internet.

Googling Barbie Again

  By

My writer’s block has writer’s block. Still, I don’t want this place to be abandoned completely so I’m going to revisit an oldie but goodie: what do you see when you google barbie?

Yochai Benkler made a big deal of the Google search results for Barbie in his book The Wealth of Networks (2006), where he claimed that, whereas other search engines gave you only sales-related Barbie sites in the top ten, Google’s “radically decentralized” algorithm revealed an entirely different picture of Barbie. “The little girl who searches for Barbie on Google will encounter a culturally contested figure. The same girl, searching on Overture, will encounter a commodity toy”.

But that was in 2006. Since then things have changed in the google-sphere. I posted about this 18 months ago in Barbie slinks back to the confines of feminist-criticism symposia. Here were the Google first page results from 2006 as reported by Benkler:

barbie.com
Barbie Collecter
AdiosBarbie.com
Barbie Bazaar
If You Were a Barbie, Which Messed Up Version would you be?
Visible Barbie project (macabre images…)
Barbie: The Image of us all (1995 undergraduate paper)
Andigraph.free.fre (Barbie and Ken sex animation)
Suicide bomber Barbie
Barbies (dressed and painted as countercultural images)

and here were the results in January 2008:

Barbie.com – Activities and Games for Girls Online! (together with eight other links to My Scene, Evertythingggirl, Polly Pocket, Kellyclub, and so on).
Barbie.co.uk – Activities and Games for Girls Online!
Barbie – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Barbie Collector –     (The official Mattel site for Barbie Collector)
Barbie Girls
Mattel – Our Toys – Barbie
The Distorted Barbie
YouTube – barbie girl – aqua
Barbie – Barbie Dress up – Fashion for Barbie
Barbie.ca

and I concluded that “this search is basically owned by Mattel. Clicking the top link takes you to a pink page with “Think Pink” written in the middle of it, and the majority of the sites feature pink prominently. No more defining the cultural symbols of our day for you, nine-year-old girl! Quit the self-aware political discourse and get back to dressing that doll in gender-appropriate colours (as selected for you by Mattel).”

Every now and again I google barbie and see what’s changed as the Google search engine becomes more elaborate. So here are today’s results (from southern Ontario).

Barbie.com – Activities and Games for Girls Online! (together with eight other links to My Scene, Evertythingggirl, Polly Pocket, Kellyclub, and so on).
Barbie.com – Fun and Games
Barbie – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
News results for barbie (with several other links)
Barbie Collector –     (The official Mattel site for Barbie Collector)
Barbie.co.uk – Activities and Games for Girls Online!
Barbie.ca
Barbie Girls – and a sublink
Celebrate 50 Years of Barbie
Video results for barbie – with two links to Aqua’s Barbie Girl video
Searches related to barbie – all strictly orthodox except for one about Taiwanese actress and singer Barbie Xu.

Yes, the little girl who searches for Barbie on Google will now encounter a commodity toy.

The one big change in the last 18 months is that the remaining countercultural site from 2008 has now been pushed over the edge to page 2 of the search results, displaced by two Google-owned collections of links (News and Videos). I’m sure you’ve seen this in your own searches. Google presents more links on and around the “top ten” results, in “related searches”, and in collections of video, news, and image links. One effect of this change is that Google now often gets one more click from you before you leave their domain. Google is extending its role from pointing you vaguely towards your destination to guiding you more precisely, and more profitably, all the way along the path.

Of the other top-level links, seven are owned by Mattel (Two to barbie.com, Barbie collector, Barbie Girls, barbie.co.uk, barbie.ca, Celebrate 50 years of Barbie) and the remaining link is to Wikipedia, now the only non-commercial site on the front page. Following Nick Carr’s informal experiment we may have expected Wikipedia to move even higher in the results, but it has just held its place.

Independent sites are out there in their millions of course, but they are unfortunately being pushed to the periphery of our field of vision by commercial efforts – of Mattel in this case. It should be no surprise that as the web has become mainstream, and as corporations realise the necessity of investing in their web presence, the web begins to look more like other mainstream media. Perhaps more evidence that the Web’s counter-cultural moment is over.

Netflix Prize: Basically Won

  By

The Netflix Prize has a winning entry. There are i's to dot and t's to
cross, but there is now an entry that has achieved the 10% improvement
over Netflix's existing system that the prize demanded.

Moz-screenshot

Judging
from the team name, the winning entry is a joint effort between three
leading teams: BellKor, Pragmatic Theory, and BigChaos. 

Congratulations to
the winners!