The Internet is Made of Demons

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is is not what you think it is.

Sam Kriss has written a longish review essay on Justin E.H. Smith’s The Internet is Not What You Think It Is with the title The Internet is Made of Demons. In the first part Kriss writes about how the internet is possessing us and training us,

Everything you say online is subject to an instant system of rewards. Every platform comes with metrics; you can precisely quantify how well-received your thoughts are by how many likes or shares or retweets they receive. For almost everyone, the game is difficult to resist: they end up trying to say the things that the machine will like. For all the panic over online censorship, this stuff is far more destructive. You have no free speech—not because someone might ban your account, but because there’s a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions. And unlike overt censorship, it’s not a policy that could ever be changed, but a pure function of the connectivity of the internet itself. This might be why so much writing that comes out of the internet is so unbearably dull, cycling between outrage and mockery, begging for clicks, speaking the machine back into its own bowels.

Then Kriss makes the case that the Internet is made of demons – not in a paranoid conspiracy sort of way, but in a historical sense that ideas like the internet often involve demons,

Trithemius invented the internet in a flight of mystical fancy to cover up what he was really doing, which was inventing the internet. Demons disguise themselves as technology, technology disguises itself as demons; both end up being one and the same thing.

In the last section Kriss turns to Justin E.H. Smith’s book and reflects on how the book (unlike the preceding essay “It’s All Over”) are not what the internet expects. The internet, for Smith, likes critical essays that present the internet as a “rupture” – something like the industrial revolution, but for language – while in fact the internet in some form (like demons) has been with us all along. Kriss doesn’t agree. For him the idea of the internet might be old, but what we have now is still a transformation of an old nightmare.

If there are intimations of the internet running throughout history, it might be because it’s a nightmare that has haunted all societies. People have always been aware of the internet: once, it was the loneliness lurking around the edge of the camp, the terrible possibility of a system of signs that doesn’t link people together, but wrenches them apart instead. In the end, what I can’t get away from are the demons. Whenever people imagined the internet, demons were always there.

Street View Privacy

How do you feel about people being able to look at your house in Google Street View? Popular Science has an article by David Nield, on “How to hide your house on every map app: Stop people from peering at your place” (May 18, 2022).

This raises questions about where privacy starts and a right to look or know stops. Can I not walk down a street and look at the faces of houses? Why then should I not be able to look at the face on Street View and other similar technologies? What about the satellite view? Do people have the right to see into my back yard from above?

This is a similar issue, though less fraught, as face databases. What rights do I have to my face? How would those rights connect to laws about Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) (or rights of publicity) which became an issue recently in amateur sports in the US. As for Canada, Rights of Publicity are complex and vary from province to province, but there is generally a recognition that:

  • People should have the right “to control the commercial use of name, image, likeness and other unequivocal aspects of one’s identity (eg, the distinct sound of someone’s voice).” (See Lexology article)
  • At the same time there is recognition that NIL can be used to provide legitimate information to the public.

Returning to the blurring of your house facade in Street View; I’m guessing the main reason the companies provide this is for security for people in sensitive positions or people being stalked.

Health agency tracked Canadians’ trips to liquor store via phones during pandemic

The report reveals PHAC was able to view a detailed snapshot of people’s behaviour, including grocery store visits, gatherings with family and friends, time…

The National Post is reporting about the Public Health Agency of Canada and their use of mobility data that a group of us wrote about in The Conversation (Canada). The story goes into more detail about how Health agency tracked Canadians’ trips to liquor store via phones during pandemic. The government provided one of the reports commissioned by PHAC from BlueDot to the House of Commons. The Ethics Committee report discussing what happened and making recommendations is here.

Why are women philosophers often erased from collective memory?

The history of ideas still struggles to remember the names of notable women philosophers. Mary Hesse is a salient example

Aeon has an important essay on Why are women philosophers often erased from collective memory? The essay argues that a number of important women philosophers have been lost (made absent) despite their importance including Mary Hesse. (You can see her Models and Analogies in Science through the Internet Archive.)

I read this after reading a chapter from Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life where Ahmed talks about citation practices and how disciplines exclude diverse work in different ways. She does a great job of confronting the various excuses people have for their bleached white citations. Poking around I find others have written on this including Victor Ray in Inside Higher Ed in an essay on The Racial Politics of Citation who references Richard Delgado’s The Imperial Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature from 1984.

What should be done about this? Obviously I’m not the best to suggest remedies, but here are some of the ideas that show up:

  • We need to commit to take the time to look at the works we read on a subject or for a project and to ask whose voice is missing. This shouldn’t be done at the end as a last minute fix, but during the ideation phase.
  • We should gather and confront data on our citational patterns from our publications. Knowing what you have done is better than not knowing.
  • We need to do the archaeological work to find and recover marginalized thinkers who have been left out and reflect on why they were left out. Then we need to promote them in teaching and research.
  • We should be willing to call out grants, articles, and proposals we review when it could make a difference.
  • We need to support work to translate thinkers whose work is not in English to balance the distribution of influence.
  • We need to be willing to view our field and its questions very differently.

Giant, free index to world’s research papers released online

Catalogue of billions of phrases from 107 million papers could ease computerized searching of the literature.

From Ian I learned about a Giant, free index to world’s research papers released online. The General Index, as it is called, makes ngrams of up to 5 words available with pointers to relevant journal articles.

The massive index is available from the Internet Archive here. Here is how it is described.

Public Resource, a registered nonprofit organization based in California, has created a General Index to scientific journals. The General Index consists of a listing of n-grams, from unigrams to five-grams, extracted from 107 million journal articles.

The General Index is non-consumptive, in that the underlying articles are not released, and it is transformative in that the release consists of the extraction of facts that are derived from that underlying corpus. The General Index is available for free download with no restrictions on use. This is an initial release, and the hope is to improve the quality of text extraction, broaden the scope of the underlying corpus, provide more sophisticated metrics associated with terms, and other enhancements.

Access to the full corpus of scholarly journals is an essential facility to the practice of science in our modern world. The General Index is an invaluable utility for researchers who wish to search for articles about plants, chemicals, genes, proteins, materials, geographical locations, and other entities of interest. The General Index allows scholars and students all over the world to perform specialized and customized searches within the scope of their disciplines and research over the full corpus.

Access to knowledge is a human right and the increase and diffusion of knowledge depends on our ability to stand on the shoulders of giants. We applaud the release of the General Index and look forward to the progress of this worthy endeavor.

There must be some neat uses of this. I wonder if someone like Google might make a diachronic viewer similar to their Google Books Ngram Viewer available?

John Roach, Pioneer of the Personal Computer, Is Dead at 83 – The New York Times

He helped make the home computer ubiquitous by introducing the fully assembled Tandy TRS-80, which was so novel at the time that it became a museum piece.

The New York Times reports that John Roach, Pioneer of the Personal Computer, Is Dead at 83. Roach was the executive who introduced the Tandy TRS-80 in the 1970s, one of the first fully assembled microcomputers. I didn’t realize how dominant the TRS-80 was in the late 1970s. At one point it held 40% of the market. We usually hear about Apple and IBM, but not about the TRS (Tandy Radio Schack).

They later released a laptop or tablet computer that I lusted after, the TRS80 Model 100. This was a keyboard and a small LCD screen and enough software to type notes or edit text. There was also a modem to send your writing somewhere. I still think this form factor makes sense. You can’t really type on an iPad (unless you get a keyboard for it) and you don’t really need lots of screen for typing notes.

People Make Games

From a CGSA/ACÉV Statement Against Exploitation and Oppression in Games Education and Industry a link to a video report People Make Games. The report documents emotional abuse in the education and indie game space. It deals with how leaders can create a toxic environment and how they can fail to take criticism seriously. A myth of the “auteur” in game design then protects the superstar leaders. Which is why they called the video “people make games” (not single auteurs.) Watch it.

Jeanna Matthews 

Jeanna Matthews from Clarkson College gave a great talk at our AI4Society Ethical Data and AI Salon on “Creating Incentives for Accountability and Iterative Improvement in Automated-Decision Making Systems.” She talked about a case regarding DNA matching software for criminal cases that she was involved in where they were able to actually get the code and show that the software would, under certain circumstances, generate false positives (where people would have their DNA matched to that from a crime scene when it shouldn’t have.)

As the title of her talk suggests, she used the concrete example to make the point that we need to create incentives for companies to test and improve their AIs. In particular she suggested that:

  1. Companies should be encouraged/regulated to invest some of the profit they make from the efficiencies from AI in improving the AI.
  2. That a better way to deal with the problems of AIs than weaving humans into the loop would be to set up independent human testers who test the AI and have a mechanism of redress. She pointed out how humans in the loop can get lazy, can be incentivized to agree with the AI and so on.
  3. We need regulation! No other approach will motivate companies to improve their AIs.

We had an interesting conversation around the question of how one could test point 2. Can we come up with a way of testing which approach is better?

She shared a link to a collection of links to most of the relevant papers and information: Northwestern Panel, March 10 2022.

Michael GRODEN Obituary

I just found out that Michael GRODEN (1947 – 2021) passed away a year ago. Groden was a member of CSDH/SCHN when it was called COCH/COSH and gave papers at our conferences. He developed an hypertext version of Ulysses that was never published because of rights issues. He did, however, talk about it. He did, however, publish about his ideas about hypertext editions of complex works like Ulysses. See his online CV for more.