Day 321: The Late Age of Print

At exactly 12:01 A.M. on March 14, 2000, Simon & Schuster began an experiment: the publisher released best-selling author Stephen King’s first digital electronic book, or e-book, the sixty-seven-page novella Riding the Bullet, on the Internet. By 11:59 p.m. on the fifteenth, an estimated half million people had downloaded King’s story, prompting Jack Romanos, Simon & Schuster’s president, to declare the experiment a resounding success: “We believe the e-book revolution will have an impact on the book industry as great as the paperback revolution of the 60’s.” Later that year, the soon-to-be notorious accounting firm of Arthur Anderson joined the celebration of e-books. In a dubious feat of actuarial prowess, Anderson’s consultants predicted that by 2005 no less than 10 percent of all books sold in the United States would be in electronic form. It appeared that the dusty old era of printed books was finally poised to give way to a sublime digital future.

 Several years and a healthy dose of cynicism later, it seems clear that these heady claims about e-books were suffused with the same millennial hopes and dreams that had helped fuel the late 1990s dot-com boom and its accompanying faith in a resplendent technofuture. Despite the efforts of Stephen King, Simon & Schuster, and Arthur Andersen to locate themselves within the vanguard of an e-book revolution, the latter hasn’t quite reached the fevered pitch that book industry insiders had anticipated. The turning point seems to have occurred around 2001 when, in the words of Publishers Weekly, the book industry trade magazine, e-book denizens faced a “reality check.” Sluggish sales and the economic downturn following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States led many hardware manufacturers and e-book publishers to divest themselves of their interest in e-books. Their doing so followed on the heels of Stephen King’s decision, in December 2000, to discontinue writing his second e-book, The Plant, after the number of those who had downloaded installments from his Web site without paying had grown too high by his estimation.

 Still, interest in and sales of e-books have rebounded of late. A 2003 report by the Open E-book Forum found that close to a million e-books had been sold in 2002, generating nearly $8 million in revenue; the first half of 2003 saw healthy, double-digit increases in units of sale over the preceding year. A second report, compiled by the Association of American Publishers, showed more modest gains of nearly $3 million in e-book sales among the top eight trade publishers. Of course, these reports don’t account for the innumerable e-books that people acquire for free from sites such as the University of Virginia Library’s EText Center (now the Scholars’ Lab). In 2001 alone the library recorded over three million e-book downloads of works that had passed into the public domain. Moreover, major academic textbook publishers such as McGraw-Hill and Thomson Learning continue to pursue e-books in earnest, with the former reporting per month revenue from e-publishing in 2002 in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 Two other higher-profile e-book ventures not only have helped to renew public interest in the technology but have also prompted some to begin imagining a world in which the content of books—perhaps of all books now in existence—would be little more than a click away. Since 2004, search engine giant Google has been busy digitizing part or all of the printed book collections of twenty-nine (and counting) major research libraries. The company’s self-described “moon shot,” also known as Book Search, promises to make content from millions of books freely available to those with Internet access, and perhaps one day even to realize the promise of a massively cross-referenced universal library accessible to all. On November 19, 2007, online retailer Amazon.com released Kindle, a portable electronic reading device whose express purpose, according to CEO Jeff Bezos, would be to bring books—“the last bastion of analog”—into the digital realm. Onboard mobile phone technology probably makes Kindle the first portable electronic reading device to provide for ubiquitous two-way communication between bookseller and consumer (available only in North America at the time of this writing). According to Bezos, “Our vision is that you should be able to read any book in any language that’s ever been printed, whether it’s in print or out of print, and you should be able to buy and get that book downloaded to your Kindle in less than 60 seconds.”

The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control -by - Ted Striphas

Day 302: Friendfluence

Strange as it sounds, Toni Bernhard doesn’t know if one of her closest friends is dead or alive. Marilyn lives (or lived) in Sydney, Australia, about seven thousand miles from Toni’s home in Davis, California. Toni knew all about Marilyn’s ongoing treatment for late-stage breast cancer and suddenly, after a year and a half of daily correspondence, Marilyn’s name stopped popping up in Toni’s in-box. She could only expect the worst. “I felt completely cut off,” Toni says. “I don’t know Marilyn’s husband; I don’t even know if he knows how close we are. I have no other way of getting in touch with her. I went from being in constant contact with someone I just adored to a complete blackout.”

Toni, sixty-six, is virtually bedridden, and conducts most of her friendships via e-mail. After contracting what she and her husband jokingly called “the Paris flu”—she caught it while they were on a long-anticipated trip to France in 2001—Toni, astoundingly, did not recover. “My immune system never went back to normal. It’s like having the flu all of the time, or an extreme feeling of jet lag. The doctors call it ‘chronic immune system activation.’ They’re hoping that something will happen to reset it. I’m always trying anti-virals, acupuncture, and Western and Eastern modalities. So far, nothing has worked.”

A former professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, Toni had to quit her beloved job and scale her life down to fit the limitations her body imposed. She fell into a depression. Eventually, she began reading blogs by and for chronic illness sufferers. A witty comment or thoughtful observation occasionally compelled her to make direct contact with an intriguing fellow poster. Some of those exchanges mushroomed into friendships. Then Toni, who has studied Buddhism since 1992, began to write a book, How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers, about her slowly accepting stance toward her illness, inspired by Buddhist philosophy. She started a Facebook page to promote the endeavor and watched with delight as it sprouted an active community of people dealing with chronic illness. It was the book, in fact, that first prompted Marilyn to e-mail her.
Toni currently has four other close Internet friends. They are all women with chronic illnesses, but that circumstance no longer dominates their exchanges. A few have been in daily contact with Toni for eight years now. “My friends used to be people here in Davis, and coworkers. I don’t have much in common with my former friends anymore. They would do anything for me, if I called them, but we don’t have, for example, the students to talk about or complain about anymore.” She does touch base with two “3-D” friends on a weekly basis: Richard, whom she’s known since college, and Dawn, whose kids grew up with Toni’s. If she’s feeling well, she meets Dawn at a coffee shop; otherwise, Dawn, a realtor, stops by the house to chat.

“It’s interesting,” Toni muses. “My relationship with Dawn is richer because we’ve shared more experiences and know each other’s kids. But with my friend in New Hampshire, we write things like ‘I’m holding you in my heart,’ and ‘Dearest, how are you?’ or even ‘I love you.’ I would never talk to Dawn that way! It would be totally out of character. I think you’re willing to put things in writing that you don’t say face-to-face. I’m tempted to say that I’m closer to Dawn because I can call on her if I need her. But these other friends are people I e-mail either every day or every other day. With Dawn or Richard, we don’t say, ‘What happened on Monday?’ One of us raises some subject, and we discuss that. It means I know less about their day-to-day lives than those of my Internet friends.”

But couldn’t it be that Toni, who doesn’t even video chat via Skype with these friends because it tires her and she finds it awkward, is simply projecting qualities onto these disembodied souls with whom she claims such communion? “I might have felt that way in the first few months of knowing them. But all these years later, I’ve seen all sides. I’ve seen their crankiness.” One friend, Laura, initially conveyed a Pollyannaish tone in her e-mails that made Toni doubt whether they could ever truly become close, even given Toni’s efforts to cultivate a “Zen” attitude. “She had a positive gloss on everything—you know, ‘God has a reason.’ Then she had an MS flare-up, and she started to be more honest with me. At first she was apologetic and would write, ‘It’s not the right way to feel.’ I would write back: ‘But it is how you feel!’ We broke through the façade.

“I sometimes complain to my husband that I love my Internet friends, but it’s not as satisfying as being with someone in the flesh that you can touch. And there are just so many nuances that don’t come through in an e-mail.” Since she’s been married for four decades, it’s also difficult for Toni to have friends her husband doesn’t know at all. But the complementary aspect of having Richard and Dawn on one hand, and her electronic pals on the other, fulfills Toni’s friendship needs.

Toni is even grateful to have come down with her debilitating condition at this point in history. “If you’re going to get sick, it’s good to do so in the Internet age,” she says. “Many women with chronic illnesses tell me that the Internet is their savior.” To say the loss of her friendship with Marilyn is less painful than it would be had they known each other in person is to underestimate the intensity of feeling that can run through global data streams. But it would, at the same time, underestimate the benefits of the shared ties that we have with more traditionally formed friendships—because the friendship existed outside of their respective social networks, Toni likely won’t get a phone call from someone who knew Marilyn and who can grieve along with her, helping her through that process. “Marilyn was someone I had this wonderfully silly friendship with,” Toni says with audible sadness. “She would play games on her iPad. I would too, and we would take screen shots of our scores and such. I’m starting to realize that she is gone from me.”

I probably don’t need to tell you that the way we go about the business of friendship has fundamentally changed since the rise of the Internet twenty years ago. (Friendship has even become the basis of many actual Internet businesses during that time) The very use of the word “friend” has expanded—who would have foreseen ten years ago that “to friend” would be a verb? Yet the tritest comments to arise in discussions on the intersection of technology and friendship are along the lines of “I hate to break it to you, but your 1,000 Facebook friends are not your friends.” I think even social-media novices distinguish between “friends” as shorthand for online contacts and true friends. Nonetheless, in today’s media environment, real friends are commingling with other people who are less than “friends” more than ever before, on our screens, and, perhaps, in our consciousness.

~~Friendfluence -by- Carlin Flora

Day 227: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy

Some basic features of the political culture emerging out of anonymity are neither new nor difficult to grasp. Consider the anonymous leak that revealed COINTELPRO, a systematic and illegal spying program leveled against the American population. One Pennsylvanian night in 1971, a group calling itself the “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI” forced its way into an FBI field office with a crowbar. As millions of Americans tuned into their radios to listen to Muhammad Ali square off with Joe Frazier in an epic fifteen-round boxing match, the activists emptied file cabinets of more than one thousand documents. Those on the subject of political surveillance were leaked to the media and published in the March 1972 issue of WIN Magazine, a journal of the War Resisters League, and COINTELPRO was revealed to the public for the first time. The program was initiated in 1956 by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and operated successfully until 1971.

COINTELPRO’s mandate was initially narrow: to disrupt the internal operations of the Communist Party USA, which Hoover believed to be under the direct influence of Russian infiltrators. Very quickly, its scope expanded to include the disruption of home-grown political activism of all varieties, including radical, conservative, and even moderate liberal efforts. One stated goal was to

prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah”; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position … King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed “obedience” to “white, liberal doctrines” (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.

And, indeed, the documents provide clear evidence of the elaborate steps the FBI took to monitor King in particular. The illegal surveillance lasted for years, starting in the late ’50s when the program was first authorized by Hoover. When King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, William Cornelius Sullivan, associate director of the FBI, wrote to Hoover, “We must mark [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro and national security.” King was considered “an unprincipled man” who had a “weakness in his character.” Sullivan wrote, “We will at the proper time when it can be done without embarrassment to the Bureau, expose King as an immoral opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain.” Soon after King was named “Man of the Year” by Time magazine, the FBI was illegally authorized to bug his hotel room; “trespass is involved,” they wrote. The resulting transcripts were presented to Hoover, who responded, “They will destroy the burrhead.” The bugs captured evidence of King’s marital infidelity, which excited Sullivan and Hoover, since the recordings could be used to destroy the “animal.” An excerpt from the FBI letter sent to blackmail King evinces the ugly historical truth that the US government terrorized one of the nation’s most revered and peaceful civil rights crusaders:

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
...
Let’s fast forward to February 5, 2011, when Anonymous uncovered a corporate plot devised by Washington, DC–based security firm HBGary Federal to spy on and disrupt WikiLeaks. Given the digital nature of contemporary documents, there is no longer a need to leave the comfort of one’s home, much less break into some office space, to access secret documents. Working together on IRC, Anonymous hackers penetrated the HBGary computer system and downloaded seventy thousand company emails, along with other files that included a PowerPoint presentation entitled “The WikiLeaks Threat.” The tactics suggested therein are strikingly similar to those practiced and perfected during COINTELPRO. The presentation outlines a set of strategies the firm claimed could be “deployed tomorrow”...

~~Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces Of Anonymous -by- Gabriella Coleman

Day 129: Book Excerpt: Future Crimes

Black-Box Algorithms and the Fallacy of Math Neutrality

One and one is two. Two plus two equals four. Basic, eternal, immutable math. The type of stuff we all learned in kindergarten. But there is another type of math—the math encoded in algorithms—formulas written by human beings and weighted to carry out their instructions, their decision analyses, and their biases. When your GPS device provides you with directions using narrow AI to process the request, it is making decisions for you about your route based on an instruction set somebody else has programmed. While there may be a hundred ways to get from your home to your office, your navigation system has selected one. What happened to the other ninety-nine? In a world run increasingly by algorithms, it is not an inconsequential question or a trifling point.

Today we have the following:
•  algorithmic trading on Wall Street (bots carry out stock buys and sells)
•  algorithmic criminal justice (red-light and speeding cameras determine infractions of the law)
•  algorithmic border control (an AI can flag you and your luggage for screening)
•  algorithmic credit scoring (your FICO score determines your creditworthiness)
•  algorithmic surveillance (CCTV cameras can identify unusual activity by computer vision analysis, and voice recognition can scan your phone calls for troublesome keywords)
•  algorithmic health care (whether or not your request to see a specialist or your insurance claim is approved)
•  algorithmic warfare (drones and other robots have the technical capacity to find, target, and kill without human intervention)
•  algorithmic dating (eHarmony and others promise to use math to find your soul mate and the perfect match)

Though the inventors of these algorithmic formulas might wish to suggest they are perfectly neutral, nothing could be further from the truth. Each algorithm is saturated with the profound human bias of the person or people who wrote the formula. But who governs these algorithms and how they behave in grooming us? We have no idea. They are black-box algorithms, shrouded in secrecy and often declared trade secrets, protected by intellectual property law. Just one algorithm alone—the FICO score—plays a major role in each American’s access to credit, whether or not you get a mortgage, and what your car loan rate will be. But nowhere is the formula published; indeed, it is a closely guarded secret, one that earns FICO hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But what if there is a mistake in the underlying data or the assumptions inherent in the algorithm? Too bad. You’re out of luck. The near-total lack of transparency in the algorithms that run the world means that we the people have no insight and no say into profoundly important decisions being made about us and for us. The increasingly concentrated power of algorithms in our society has gone unnoticed by most, but without insight and transparency into the algorithms running our world, there can be no accountability or true democracy. As a result, the twenty-first-century society we are building is becoming increasingly susceptible to manipulation by those who author and control the algorithms that pervade our lives.

We saw a blatant example of this abuse in mid-2014 when a study published by researchers at Facebook and Cornell University revealed that social networks can manipulate the emotions of their users simply by algorithmically altering what they see in the news feed. In a study published by the National Academy of Sciences, Facebook changed the update feeds of 700,000 of its users to show them either more sad or more happy news. The result? Users seeing more negative news felt worse and posted more negative things, the converse being true for those seeing the more happy news. The study’s conclusion: “Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.” Facebook never explicitly notified the users affected (including children aged thirteen to eighteen) that they had been unwittingly selected for psychological experimentation. Nor did it take into account what existing mental health issues, such as depression or suicidality, users might already be facing before callously deciding to manipulate them toward greater sadness. Though Facebook updated its ToS to grant itself permission to “conduct research” after it had completed the study, many have argued that the social media giant’s activities amounted to human subjects research, a threshold that would have required prior ethical approval by an internal review board under federal regulations. Sadly, Facebook is not the only company to algorithmically treat its users like lab rats.

The lack of algorithmic transparency, combined with an “in screen we trust” mentality, is dangerous. When big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things merge, as they are already doing, we will increasingly have physical objects acting on our behalf in 3-D space. Having an AI drive a robot that brews your morning coffee and makes breakfast sounds great. But if we recall the homicide in 1981 of Kenji Urada, the thirty-seven-year-old employee of Kawasaki who was crushed to death by a robot, things don’t always turn out so well. In Urada’s case, further investigation revealed it was the robot’s artificial intelligence algorithm that erroneously identified the man as a system blockage, a threat to the machine’s mission to be immediately dealt with. The robot calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate the threat was to push “it” with its massive hydraulic arm into the nearby grinding machine, a decision that killed Urada instantly before the robot unceremoniously returned to its normal duties. Despite the obvious challenges, the exponential productivity boosts, dramatic cost savings, and rising profits attainable through artificial intelligence systems are so great there will be no turning back. AI is here to stay, and never one to miss an opportunity, Crime, Inc. is all over it.

~~Future Crimes -by- Marc Goodman