Theoreti.ca – Page 20 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

Time Travel and Blink (Doctor Who)

I recently finished listening to James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History. Gleick wrote the best book on The Information there is and this book is almost as good. He weaves the science together with the fictions about time travel starting with H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and using that to then look at how science started treating time as a dimension that they allowed us to seriously talk about traveling on that dimension. It is historical ontology done really well.

Near the end he talks about the brilliant Doctor Who episode Blink (Doctor Who) with Carey Mulligan where she has a conversation with Doctor Who (Tennant) mediated by Easter Eggs on DVDs and transcribed onto paper. That transcription she hands to the Doctor at the end of the episode so he can put the video onto the DVDs in the past for her to talk to. It is brilliant.

Part of what I like about Gleick is he shows the connections between science and how we imagine ideas like time through literature and film. He ends by suggesting that we have time travel in our stories and imagination.

It might be fair to say that all we perceive is change—that any sense of stasis is a constructed illusion. Every moment alters what came before. We reach across layers of time for the memories of our memories.

“Live in the now,” certain sages advise. They mean: focus; immerse yourself in your sensory experience; bask in the incoming sunshine, without the shadows of regret or expectation. But why should we toss away our hard-won insight into time’s possibilities and paradoxes? We lose ourselves that way. (Gleick, James. Time Travel, p. 308)

Addressing the Alarming Systems of Surveillance Built By Library Vendors

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) are drawing attention to how we need to be Addressing the Alarming Systems of Surveillance Built By Library Vendors. This was triggered by a story in The Intercept that LexisNexis (is) to provide (a) giant database of personal information to ICE.

The company’s databases offer an oceanic computerized view of a person’s existence; by consolidating records of where you’ve lived, where you’ve worked, what you’ve purchased, your debts, run-ins with the law, family members, driving history, and thousands of other types of breadcrumbs, even people particularly diligent about their privacy can be identified and tracked through this sort of digital mosaic. LexisNexis has gone even further than merely aggregating all this data: The company claims it holds 283 million distinct individual dossiers of 99.99% accuracy tied to “LexIDs,” unique identification codes that make pulling all the material collected about a person that much easier. For an undocumented immigrant in the United States, the hazard of such a database is clear. (The Intercept)

That LexisNexis has been building databases on people isn’t new. Sarah Brayne has a book about predictive policing titled Predict and Surveil where, among other things, she describes how the LAPD use Palantir and how police databases integrated in Palantir are enhanced by commercial databases like those sold by LexisNexis. (There is an essay that is an excerpt of the book here, Enter the Dragnet.)

I suspect environments like Palantir make all sorts of smaller and specialized databases more commercially valuable which is leading what were library database providers to expand their business. Before, a database about repossessions might be of interest to only a specialized community. Now it becomes linked to other information and is another dimension of data. In particular these databases provide information about all the people who aren’t in police databases. They provide the breadcrumbs needed to surveil those not documented elsewhere.

The SPARC call points out that we (academics, university libraries) have been funding these database providers.

Dollars from library subscriptions, directly or indirectly, now support these systems of surveillance. This should be deeply concerning to the library community and to the millions of faculty and students who use their products each day and further underscores the urgency of privacy protections as library services—and research and education more generally—are now delivered primarily online.

This raises the question of our complicity and whether we could do without some of these companies. At a deeper level it raises questions about the curiosity of the academy. We are dedicated to knowledge as an unalloyed good and are at the heart of a large system of surveillance – surveillance of the past, of literature, of nature, of the cosmos, and of ourselves.

Editorial for IRIE Vol. 29 – The International Review of Information Ethics

A short editorial I wrote for the International Review of Information Ethics (IRIE) was just published, Editorial: On IRIE Vol. 29. In it I talk about how we need to get beyond principles in the ethics of artificial intelligence as the Google Duplex story shows.

The editorial was for the second part of a collection of articles that came out of a conference that the Kule Institute for Advanced Study organized on AI, Ethics and Society in 2019.

I should add that KIAS has helped move the IRIE from its previous home to the open journal platform run by the University of Alberta Library. We are grateful for the fabulous support from the UofA Library.

International Transgender Day of Visibility

Yesterday was International Transgender Day of Visibility. This is a day in the calendar when we celebrate the living members of the community. The mayor of Calgary, Nenshi declared this back in 2013, as did the then mayor of Edmonton, Mandel.

There is also the Transgender Day of Remembrance. The TDOR was started in memory of Rita Hester who was killed in 1998.

Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) is an annual observance on November 20 that honors the memory of the transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.

What Sky Bet, The Gambling App, Knows About You

Sky Bet, the most popular one in Britain, compiled extensive records about a user, tracking him in ways he never imagined.

The New York Times has a good story about What Sky Bet, The Gambling App, Knows About You. It talks about the profile that Sky Bet in the UK built on a customer who had an addiction problem with gambling.

The company, or one of the data providers it had hired to collect information about users, had access to banking records, mortgage details, location coordinates, and an intimate portrait of his habits wagering on slots and soccer matches.

We tend to focus on what the big guys have and forget all the lesser known information aggregators and middlemen who buy and sell data. This story also provides an example of how valuable data can be to a business like online gambling that wants to attract the clients who are likely to get addicted to gambling.

Facial Recognition: What Happens When We’re Tracked Everywhere We Go?

When a secretive start-up scraped the internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit — and blew the future of privacy in America wide open.

The New York Times has an in depth story about Clearview AI titled, Facial Recognition: What Happens When We’re Tracked Everywhere We Go? The story tracks the various lawsuits attempting to stop Clearview and suggests that Clearview may well win. They are gambling that scraping the web’s faces for their application, even if it violated terms of service, may be protected as free speech.

The story talks about the dangers of face recognition and how many of the algorithms can’t recognize people of colour as accurately which leads to more false positives where police end up arresting the wrong person. A broader worry is that this could unleash tracking at another scale.

There’s also a broader reason that critics fear a court decision favoring Clearview: It could let companies track us as pervasively in the real world as they already do online.

The arguments in favour of Clearview include the challenge that they are essentially doing to images what Google does to text searches. Another argument is that stopping face recognition enterprises would stifle innovation.

The story then moves on to talk about the founding of Clearview and the political connections of the founders (Thiel invested in Clearview too). Finally it talks about how widely available face recognition could affect our lives. The story quotes Alvaro Bedoya who started a privacy centre,

“When we interact with people on the street, there’s a certain level of respect accorded to strangers,” Bedoya told me. “That’s partly because we don’t know if people are powerful or influential or we could get in trouble for treating them poorly. I don’t know what happens in a world where you see someone in the street and immediately know where they work, where they went to school, if they have a criminal record, what their credit score is. I don’t know how society changes, but I don’t think it changes for the better.”

It is interesting to think about how face recognition and other technologies may change how we deal with strangers. Too much knowledge could be alienating.

The story closes by describing how Clearview AI helped identify some of the Capitol rioters. Of course it wasn’t just Clearview, but also a citizen investigators who named and shamed people based on photos released.

What was Gamergate? The lessons we still haven’t learned

Gamergate should have armed us against bad actors and bad-faith arguments. It didn’t.

Vox has an important article connecting the storming of the US Capitol with Gamergate, What was Gamergate? The lessons we still haven’t learned. The point is that Gamergate and the storming are the visible symptoms of something deeper. I would go further and connect these with activities that progressives approve of like some of the Anonymous initiatives. For that matter, the recent populist retail investor campaign around stocks like GameStop has similar roots in new forms of organizing and new ironic ideologies.

Continue reading What was Gamergate? The lessons we still haven’t learned

What Do Gamers Wear?

With millions of fans on social media, gamers have stepped up their game, incorporating luxury, streetwear and even cosplay into their looks.

The New York Times has a nice piece on What Do Gamers Wear? I don’t think I’ve thought much about gamer clothing, but now that we are all in our homes in front of computers for long stretches of time the professional gamer furniture, desk setup, and yes, clothing is something we can learn from. Those of us who teach are all having to learn about how to light up your workspace and record yourself too. Personally, my best purchase has been a pair of Asportuguesas mules that are comfortable and keep my feet warm around the house. They were probably meant to be outdoor shoes in Portugal, but here they work as house slippers. My point, anyway, is that we can learn from professional gamers about comfortable clothing and setups.