Monday Thinking

The 'A' word sure gets a lot of use these days. Pope Benedict XVI said it best when stated “there is the challenge to be authentic and faithful, and not give in to the illusion of constructing an artificial public profile for oneself.”

I have my opinion on the subject but today, as the week starts, consider that everything, including who you are behind the screen is a construct.  

#authenticity  

Floating Castle

At over 700ft in length and about 120ft tall just watching this come in this afternoon felt incredible. It very much felt like watching an entire block of flats float by. 

Balance in All Things

In Chinese philosophy the concept of Yin and Yang (http://goo.gl/ib7Y) explains not only how opposites define each other, lending identity to their antithesis but also how the existence of one becomes the very seed that brings the other into being. 

I grew up at a time when “the battle of the sexes” was the subject of both TV sitcoms like Eight is Enough (http://goo.gl/KvEHg) and practically every male bastion that labored under the institutionalized sexism (http://goo.gl/7ItVMv) that was the norm of the time. 

These are more enlightened times. Or so we would like to think. The 70s are almost half a century behind us and yet the ‘enlightenment’ gained, in that time, with so much energy and effort is a fragile one. Part of the attitude goes underground to surface perhaps in the intensity of the abortion debate in the US (http://goo.gl/EHzrw4) which itself is an expression of a dynamic between a woman’s ability to choose independently what she wants to do with her body and society’s historical view of her as a commodity. 

Funnily enough the very reason such issues are so persistent is not because women are of no value. Quite the opposite in fact. There is a tacit and complete agreement in their intrinsic value which then leads to the intellectual tangents we observe that overlay the question of who, exactly, controls that value. 

As in all things that are systemic, value = power. Power is always worth wrangling over because it ensures status, security and (arguably) greater choice of women (for men) – greater access to value. At times we seem to be no better than lab rats exhausting ourselves on a primordial biology treadmill. 

Take the conflagration that became GamerGate. A single, impassioned (and perhaps ill-advised) blogpost of a man who felt jilted enough to pour his angst on the web in what is known simply as TheZoePost (http://goo.gl/BIrw8I). Target of that angst is Zoe Quinn (http://goo.gl/VQsNu7) who found herself the lightning rod for everything that’s wrong with anonymity on the web (http://goo.gl/N6uuOP) as an all-out assault was led upon her by the 4Chan crowd and a host of forum-posters who, in their collectivity succeeded in signaling that misogyny and the wrangle for power is far from over and that ‘enlightenment’ is purely subjective. 

Depressing as the thought might be, that we appear only to progress at times, it is heartened by the fact that our times are more transparent, at least and the individual is far from powerless against the mob. Zoe came out swinging (http://goo.gl/NJqqqt) with posts of her own. The Press weighed in with the “Gamers are misogynist” issue: http://goo.gl/44V5TS. Predictably hate mobs and their dynamic came into focus:  http://goo.gl/r7QWCd. The role of the Press became key: http://goo.gl/kdkH5V and the man who sparked it all off, unrepentant (if still, somewhat unfocused) was the subject of at least one interview: http://goo.gl/RqfRnn.

Before you write all this off to the madness of the digital age, anonymity and the stupidity of not thinking about responsibility when you have the power to publish to the world from your desktop, consider that if we remove the modern setting this sits comfortably with “the mob in the village square” (http://goo.gl/xcwNFj) which, ironically led to the development of the world’s most popular sport. 

At a slightly more elevated level is the debate of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) which on G+ +Buddhini Samarasinghe  has worked for (http://goo.gl/OC06sL) and +Marisa Goudy  has supported (http://goo.gl/0A8DyQ). 

Many of the ‘arguments’ we face in the digital age, once analyzed, come down to the same root cause. There is a primal, ancient, part of us that reacts along predictable ways that are at odds with what we are trying to achieve as people and as a species. 

It feels, at times that we are sliding back into darkness, that we are losing things we value but we are not. We’re having conversations that are passionate, deep and global. We are using our ability to understand things better because we see more of what’s going on as a forensic scalpel that by degrees is stripping back layers of our society (and often times of ourselves) exposing the raw nerves running beneath. 

The pain we feel (and the horror, at what we find) are part of the healing process. We cannot progress if we do not feel what we are feeling. We cannot move forward without taking that “long, hard look” at the skeletons in our closet, the demons in our psyche. 

Which kinda leads us full circle, back to Yin and Yang as the Oxford Leadership Journal examines the impact of the Feminine Principle (http://goo.gl/W7LMnB) and studies are beginning to show that companies with more women on the Board do better: http://goo.gl/m19vk2. And this at a time when the data also shows that female CEOs make less than their female counterparts: http://goo.gl/iv5Ny7.

Today for every post that unearths yet one more part of the world that somehow refuses to move on: http://goo.gl/wuWe1E we have another that shows a problem aired can begin its journey towards a solution: http://goo.gl/xSKUVI. 

Neural science tells us that men and women are wired differently: http://goo.gl/O18TMb. The study’s researchers make a point that while if any inference can be drawn from this is just how complementary male and female brains are: http://goo.gl/Qk2mgj. When the Dutch philosopher, Desiderius Erasmus (http://goo.gl/1vRaC) compiled Adagia his collection of Greek and Latin proverbs he included the oft quoted “Women, you can’t live with them, can’t live without them) - http://goo.gl/vGop8D. Beyond its folklorist populism, the saying takes back to the dynamic of Yin and Yang: http://goo.gl/yDpB6C. One without the other cannot exist.

Balance and harmony comes not with ‘victory’, the overcoming of one by the other (as we saw with the Capitalism/Communism argument:http://goo.gl/r2SFtm), but by a harmonic tension that maintains their individual natures in a way that each completes the other. As the debate about equality, the rights of women and men’s ability to deal with their presence becomes global, gets even more complicated with questions of faith and culture, it serves us best, perhaps to remember that. 

Regardless of your sex I hope you’ve done the needed thing and stocked up on some good quality coffee, some croissants, donuts, cookies (and maybe, cake?). It’s Sunday, still, so have a great one wherever you are. 

PS. There is a Sunday Read circle for those of you who want to be notified. If you let me know I will be only too happy to include you. 

#davidamerlandsundayread  
#equality  

The Right To Be Forgotten Wrangle Continues

This is a mess. The EU "right to be forgotten" directive, when applied had little to do with "serving the public" and a lot to do with saber-rattling with Google, some ass-covering (politicos are a prime target of past-ills records) and the need to "just do something" in the face of a technology that's advancing too rapidly for them to really understand. 

Google is also being difficult here. By applying the letter rather than the spirit of the EU directive, it is exposing its flaws and it's drawing attention to the idiocy that went into its crafting.

Meanwhile the information removed from Google search is still "out there" it's just harder to find, which is fine with authorities that have: A. Made the task of finding it difficult (but have not really protected anything or anyone) B. Have applied censorship without applying it as they have not gone after the news sources or sites that carry the information C. Have come out as champions standing up to a mighty tech company that appears to be unregulated in its actions. 

Who gains in this? Apart from the political capital gained by the EU commission the primary gain is by anyone with something to hide (the list includes convicted felons and politicians, though this is not the full story). 

Who loses out? Google, in the first instance. We, primarily, as the directive creates holes in Google search (though other search engines will still find the results provided their indexing process is as good as Google's). 

There is hypocrisy in this from all sides. The EU should really have convened a panel of experts and crafted a directive that would serve its citizens in the digital age. Instead the knee-jerk reaction here only highlights their own inadequacies on this front. Google could have worked harder to educate and reach a better arrangement (though on a personal level I understand its ire with EU commissioners as I have had direct experience in dealing with EU bodies)

This is not over, of course. As time passes and the effects become apparent so will the shortcomings and we will lurch towards more dialogue, research and something that actually works. We could have foregone all of this of course and gone straight to a process that develops our digital literacy better and creates a clearer culture of cooperation without which no digital future can really come about. But that would be hoping too much when the worst of political motivations and corporate drives collide. 

Here's hope that round two (or three, or four) will start producing a little more reason. 

#googlesearch   #righttobeforgotten  

The Price of Life

What if the price of life was giving up your autonomy? Serfdom was abolished when the socioeconomic conditions changed. What if they change again? +Zoe Goodacre gives you 100 words and asks you let them unfold inside your noodle. It really is Friday. 

Why Government Cannot Be Trusted

The argument of “Trust Us, We Will Not Abuse Our Power” has never applied to government for a very logical reason: when uncertain of what to do government does everything, blindly covering every base, over-compensating for lack of precision (and at times intelligence) with a brute approach that railroads everything in its path under the justification that the “good of the many, overrides the good of the one”. 

The problem with this argument is that “the one” in this case happens to be everyone. Case in point the UK government reaction in 2011 (http://goo.gl/ocl43E) regarding social media and the London riots. The language used, at the time, reflected the exact same patterns we see in Russia and Turkey where individual freedom is a concept that exists only in the question of “how can we restrict it?”. 

In her defense of the collection of bulk data in the UK, Home secretary, Teresa May gave us the classic arguments of doublespeak that require her listeners to doublethink (http://goo.gl/ECqAj). For instance, there is an "unwritten agreement" between citizens and government on the collection of data needed to "keep us safe" but that same “unwritten agreement” does not seem to materialize into existence when it comes to government transparency and accountability as she “… categorically ruled out scrapping the convention dictating that ministers never comment on security matters.” (and ‘security matters’ is a label that can be applied to anything in a total Catch-22 scenario. One only needs to label something a ‘security matter’ to completely lockdown any kind of accountability and quash any kind of questioning, regarding it). 

In typical governmental obfuscation “She said commercial companies also collected large quantities of data to target advertising at consumers.” For this to come out of the mouth of a senior official in the UK government argues for one of two things: A. A deliberate ploy to mislead the public by introducing a fallacious argument B. A profound lack of understanding of the workings of commercial contracts. 

How else could one excuse the fact that she is suggesting that the largely symmetrical relationship one enters into with a commercial entity where we agree to provide access to specific data in return for a product or a service (an act we can reverse at any time) is the same as the asymmetrical one she is explaining where a government acts without our consent on ‘our behalf’ for unspecified reasons which will never come under scrutiny due to ‘security matters’ without our ever being informed of it?

Her words: "I think there is - not a contract entered into - but an unwritten agreement between the individual and the state that the state is going to do everything they can to keep them safe and secure." indicate that perhaps the time has come to actually enter into a contract between the citizens and the state where we shall request specific actions to take place on our behalf and hold persons accountable when they have failed to provide the desired outcome (and summarily dismiss those responsible from position and even prosecute for dereliction of duty). 

Radical notion? We ask nothing less from commercial entities and they hold way less power than the State that is asking us to provide cart blanche to engage in any activity for whatever reason without ever being held to account since it’s a “security matter”. 

The question has to be, whose security? May’s assertion that the indiscriminate collection of bulk data is not mass surveillance falls again under the obfuscation/crass stupidity question. To understand the power that resides in the semantic analysis of metadata consider my post of last January where Paul Revere and colleagues would have been nubbed without anyone snooping into any particular conversation: http://goo.gl/p1MPYB. 

I know this is not a black & white argument. And obviously we do need to feel secure in our countries. But to use vague rhetoric and weak arguments to justify a blanket trampling of individual rights without ever presenting a case for the efficacy of the approach and conveniently hiding under a label that quashes all enquiries when questioned is not the best way to tackle it. 

Catch the BBC coverage of May’s statements here: http://goo.gl/96dEhE.