Society | writing notes

Is performance lifestyle harmful?

Many years ago while on holiday at the Versailles palace I noticed an amusing pair of tourists. He was tall, large and filming everything with his camera. She was short and slim and trying to hold the audio guide close to the camera while he panned over the ceilings – the effect was an amusing dance through the gilded halls. What struck me was that neither of them seemed to be enjoying the present but were more interested in producing a record of the trip.

When I talk about social media (which I seem to do a lot) I often refer to Performance Lifestyle. This is the documentation of our lives to an imaginary or perceived audience. One of the minor effects is to create the extra-ordinary in an ordinary life. Online people don’t (for example) simply drink coffee but they either drink terrible or fabulous coffee. Or maybe they create a special interest in coffee and create a type of art or research project around the mundane event of coffee drinking (I’m guilty of this). The point is that since we live normal lives we need to create a supernormal version of everyday events.

Some may find this silly, but silly does not make it pointless. Many find sport silly, but to those with the interest it is hardly silly. Silly is therefore not an interesting measurement. But what if our performance lifestyles could be harmful in some way? In a recent lecture I argued that

One of the interesting things about technology is the way in which it enables us to do things which we normally cannot do. But it is also interesting that technology encourages us to do things differently. For example there seems to be a change in the way in which we react today when we witness an accident or emergency.

1. Photograph the event
2. Tweet the photo
3. Update status on Facebook
4. Call emergency services

Naturally this is apocryphal but it has a sad ring of truth about it.

This is something I would like to study closer but it is difficult to find a methodology to prove or disprove this effect. But take a look at what happened during the Oslo bombing on the 22 July, 2011.

This is a screenshot portion of this page. Click view image to view full size.

Time 15:25 The bomb goes off at 15:25 and 22 seconds. At 38 seconds the blast registers on NORSAR seismic data equipment at Løten. At 45 seconds the tweet “Holy Crap did Oslo just explode?”

Time 15:26 The police receive their first notification

Time 15:28: 10 seconds tweet “Shit! Office window blew up! What happened?”, 21 seconds tweet “Loud band in center of Oslo, what was it?”, 44 seconds tweet “Bomb downtown”

Time 15:29: 3 seconds tweet “Lightning, bomb, terror? What happend at Youngstorget? Our office was crushed!”

This page has a fascinating chronological list of tweets.

This is fascinating stuff but there are several problems here. First is the time – how exact are these measurements, what could or should be the reaction times to expect? Is it fair to make generalizations from the communication of shocked people in an event of this magnitude? What about the more banal everyday accidents that occur in our lives? How could we effectively observe and measure the ways in which our technology changes the ways in which we react to everyday emergencies? It’s all good and well to say things we think to be true but how do we actually conduct research around this topic? Seriously, I’m asking you. Only then could I answer the question posed in the title.

Posted on February 29, 2012 by mklang

Looking for Orwell, missing Huxley, or Why privacy law is failing: Notes from a lecture

Being invited to talk somewhere else is always thrilling. Being asked to go to Berlin was even more so. The event was part of Internet und Gesellschaft Co:llaboratory who have been working on Internet & Human Rights. The event was a full day of talk (admittedly a lot in German but I had wifi and work to do so I was happy) followed by an open seminar with three talkers. These notes are from the presentation I gave at the seminar.

The lecture opened with a look at three historical highpoints of privacy regulation and thought. First was 1890 which was the year where Warren & Brandeis published their seminal paper The Right to Privacy which attempts to create a new right in society. Today, living in a rights-focused society arguing for rights seems natural (or banal) but what was it like to be the first to argue the right to privacy?

To exemplify the situation I showed the killer app of the 1890s. It was the Hollerith Tabulating Machine

Hollerith Tabulating Machine

The legal protection of privacy did not immediately spring to life and the next great step came in the 1970s where first the Lander of Hesse in Germany and the in 1973 Sweden created data protection legislation. The idea was to protect against the abuses of data collection but the state and large corporations.

The killer app of the 1970s is the impressive UNIVAC computer

UNIVAC image from Musée de l’Informatique

Kind of looks like the communal laundry room in my apartment building.

The next step was the European Data Protection Directive which attempted to harmonize data protection across Europe. It came in 1995 which as a killer app had the Windows95 operating system (couldn’t resist it!) and more importantly the first browser wars between Netscape and Internet Explorer (Microsoft released versions 1 and 2 in 1995). The browser wars are incredibly interesting as they show the importance of controlling the flow of information to the end user was not dependent on the hardware or operating system. It also shows that power consists of inserting oneself between the information and the end user – but I digress.

Before continuing I wanted to remind the audience that the law (and lawmaker) is behind the times so I quoted the late great Douglas Adams from his book The Salmon of Doubt

“Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Following this I added a theoretical dimension to the lecture. The regulatory pyramid is intended to show that we focus on the law – this is what I was taught at law school. But the law is a self-sustaining system that ignores (or struggles to) the realities of social norms/rules and architecture. Social norms, not law, are what control most of our behavior the law is often too expensive, too drastic, too formal to be an efficient mode of conflict resolution. When someone “steals” “your” parking space, you don’t sue or call the prosecutor. You apply social norms. Your reaction depends on your upbringing and context – you may smile sweetly, flip them off or become verbally or even physically violent. Architecture is how the world works. It controls us by the rigidity of its being.

Regulatory Pyramid

If you want to slow down cars from speeding the law could be applied (a traffic sign will remind us of a pre-existing rule), or we use social norms by reminding drivers of accidents or children playing in the area. By implementing architecture we remake the physical environment and, for example, add bumps in the road – at this all cars must slow down. It is, however, important not to confuse the equal treatment with fairness. Architecture will prevent even an ambulance that may have good reasons to drive faster in a slow area.

As an example of my theory I show this wonderful/awful park bench in Tokyo.

image from Yumiko Hayakawa essay Public Benches Turn ‘Anti-Homeless’ (also recommend Design with Intent)

The bench is an example of outdoor public furniture known as anti-homeless technology or anti-bum benches. In order to prevent an undesirable group of people from using a public space we could create a rule against it – but by creating a law we need to accept the democratic constraints in rule making. Someone could remind us that in a democracy excluding people is inherently wrong. By choosing a bench that is unsuitable for sleeping the democratic process is bypassed. Additionally the park officials can always claim to have made an aesthetic choice i.e. we like this bench, rather than being against homeless people. This is control through design choice – imagine the control that may be created in manipulating communications technology.

The next segment is surveillance theory. As individuals we constantly leak and spread information. Most of us attempt to create strategies of control for our information flows. The most common is the process of compartmentalization which means that we present different information to different groups. I.e. the information you give about what you did over the weekend may be different when presented to your boss, wife, mother, children, best friend or lover. This is not necessarily lying but it is an attempt of controlling flows of information. Technology, and in particular social media, is all about losing the ability to practice this control.

Traditional surveillance theory is based upon Michel Foucault’s developments of Jeremy Bentham’s plans for the Panopticon prison. The concept is basic – if we are unaware of being watched we will internalize our own surveillance and become our own jailers. This is the whole premise of George Orwell’s book nineteen eighty-four: Big Brother is watching you. People under constant surveillance can be controlled. But is this really true? The control by the state is under constant refinement and yet citizens still attempt to cheat and steal – violent crime in general remains constant despite cctv. Could it be that Foucault (and Orwell) got it wrong?

The next step is technology. For me it’s the radical Huxleyian shift. What Orwell feared was totalitarian control via surveillance technology. But Huxley premised a more base society. Give people enough sex and drugs and they won’t care who controls them. Enter the convenient, comfortable, entertaining world of social media.

Social Media Timeline

Our newfound joy of communications technology has already changed our behavior in a major new way. Patterns of behavior that were deemed amoral, antisocial or even illegal have now become acceptable. Spending an evening looking at pictures of your ex-partners new partner would have been a textbook case of voyeurism and stalking. Today, its just Facebook. This reminds me of this early cartoon:

Additional changes in our behavior which should concern us are the fact that we can no longer refuse, ignore or exclude social media from our lives. Many claim they don’t have time for such nonsense but this will not be an efficient information control strategy. Even individuals outside social media use are being photographed and tagged by users and therefore identities are being created of them. These “friends” will also ensure that opting out is not a viable option.

The final level of surveillance is autoveillance. This is the self-chosen role of spreading information about ourselves. This is not the fact that my telephone stores and communicates my location information and more. This is part of the performance lifestyle which has created a performance anxiety, a need to present interesting inspiring activities from an ordinary lifestyle.

This may be silly, but is it harmful? Here it is not enough to study the moves of individuals (even millions of individuals).

Basically we are being seduced by technology, locked by licenses & killed by a lack of social responsibility. This creates four harmful outcomes that need somehow to be countered: Privacy, Personalization, Information obesity, & mind control.

As with the Japanese park bench above, understanding the users will not enable us to see the intentions of the manipulators. We must look to those with influence in social media and who can be more influential than Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying privacy is no longer a social norm

Which is interesting given the fact that he has created a system which helps us to forget our inhibitions about sharing personal information and that his business model is premised on our sharing. He has a stake in the removal of protections against privacy.

Zuckerberg on the topic of personalization of technology: “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa” (Pariser NYT)

Sure there have always been gatekeepers choosing which information is important for me or not. But these gatekeepers did not create a personal information resource only for me. The daily newspaper is created to appease a society of readers. I may chose to ignore an article but at least it’s there in front of me. In a personalized world I will no longer be confronted by any kind of information that does not fit my profile.

The Holy Grail of many Internet providers is to give us this kind of personalization. The problem occurs when this kind of convenience and service removes our ability to control our flows of information. We lose the ability to read information that we may need – because we are constantly being bombarded by the information Facebook thinks we want.

Information obesity: Our bodies crave sweet and fatty foods. One way of looking at this is through the lens of evolution. Finding fatty and sweet foods was key to our survival but these were not to be found everywhere or everyday. Today we are surrounded by fatty and sweet foods so access is not the problem. The problem is overindulgence and obesity due to accessibility. This forces us to think about diet, to think about exercise. Self-control is essential to our survival.

The same is true of information. The sweet and fatty information in a long historical context was an understanding of who was allied with whom? Who is sleeping with whom? And whom can I get my genes over to the next generation (obviously just a nicer way of thinking about getting laid!). This is why we today have a fascination about gossip. Which minor celebs are attempting to sleep with each other takes up an extraordinary part of our lives. But this was all ok since the access to gossip was limited. Today, however, we are connected to the largest gossip engine ever conceived. Facebook may try to hide it in its spin, but part of our fascination is all about looking at each other. The problem is that there is only a limited amount of time in life and spending too much time on gossip limits our ability for more relevant information. We are becoming information obese and the solution is to decrease fatty information intake and go to the information gym regularly.

The final concern is of mind control. This is all about what happens when a social media is told that you are interested in a certain thing. Say, for example, you have a secret pleasure in seeing videos of kittens being kicked. You would never say this aloud – and if you did your social group would correct you by telling you this is an unhealthy impulse. You may even manage to convince yourself that you have no sadistic urges in this area. However, social media knows the truth and will continue to give priority to information about kitten kicking. You may resist some of it but if you have an urge you probably will click on some of the information. By clicking you re-enforce the information algorithm and you will be sent even more kitten kicking information. A question of moral responsibility can now be posed: While your latent sadistic tendencies are being reinforced and enhanced – what is the moral responsibility of the provider? This is akin to asking whether a drug pusher has any moral responsibility to his clients. In your answer consider that many users of social media are very young and there is no general awareness or discussion on the harms of social media.

So what about regulation? Well the problem is that we are considered to be autonomous. In other words we are old and wise enough to live our own lives. Indeed we have all agreed to the terms of use of social media sites. We may not have read them, maybe not understood them, they may have changed drastically since we read them – but legal fiction is that we agree to them.

This shouldn’t be a problem. If society deems an activity harmful enough it can, and should, legislate against it – even if some may protest this regulation. There have been protests against: motorcycle helmets, seatbelts, hitting children and the right to smoke (makes you lose faith in human intelligence) but the social cost was deemed greater than the loss of individual autonomy. The problem with social media is that the social costs are not particularly visible.

Finally on the question of gatekeepers and Orwellian or Huxleyian control it is interesting to note that typical Orwellian control is easier to see and therefore easier to protest against. Therefore the cost of maintaining it against the wishes of the people is too high to bear in the long run. But Huxleyian control is based on making me happy, fulfilling my desires. Counteracting this requires that I first become aware and then exercise self control. This is difficult on an individual level and close to impossible on a social level.

Here are the slides which accompanied the lecture.

Posted on February 22, 2012 by mklang

Democracy cannot ignore technology: Notes from a lecture

Not really sure if this should be called a lecture as it was part of a panel presentation where we were allotted 15 minutes each and then questions. The setting was interesting as it was part of the Swedish Parliaments annual conference about the future and the people asking the questions were all politicians. So for my 15 minutes (of fame?) I chose to expand on the ill effects of politics ignoring technology (or taking it as a stable, neutral given).

The presentation began with a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.

It cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times.

What I wanted to do was to explain that the law has always been seen as playing catchup. This is not a bug in the law it is a feature of the law. Attempting to create laws that are before the time would be wasteful, unpopular and quite often full of errors about what we think future problems would be. I wanted to include a quote from Niels Bohr

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

But time was short and I needed to avoid meandering down interesting – but unhelpful – alleyways.

Instead I reminded the audience that many of our fundamental rights and freedoms are 300 years old and, despite being updated, they are prone to being increasingly complex to manage or even outdated when the basic technological realities have changed. This was the time of Voltaire who is today mainly famous for saying

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it

(Actually he never said this. The words were put in his mouth by the later writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall. But lets not let the truth get in the way of a good story.)

The period saw the development of fantastic modern concepts such as democracy, free speech and autonomy may be seen as products of the enlightenment. They remain core values in spite of the fact that our technological developments have totally changed the world in which we live. For the sake of later comparison I added that the killer app of the time was the quill. Naturally there were printing presses but as these are not personal communication devices they provide easier avenues of control for states. In other words developing concepts of free speech must be seen in the light of what individuals had the ability to do.

As I had been asked to talk about technology and society I chose to exemplify with the concept of copyright which was launched by the Statute of Ann in 1710. In Sweden copyright was introduced into law in the 19th century and the most recent thorough re-working of the law was in the 1950 with the modern (and present) Swedish copyright Act entering into the books in 1960. The law has naturally been amended since then but has received no major reworking since then. The killer app of the 1960s? Well it probably was the pill – but that’s hardly relevant, so I looked at radio and tv. The interesting thing about these is that they are highly regulated and controlled mass mediums. While they are easy to access for the consumer, they are hardly platforms of speech for a wider group of people.

Moving along to the Internet, the web, social media and the massive increases in personal devices have created a whole new ball game. These have create a whole new way of social interaction among citizens. The mass medium of one to many is not the monopoly player any more. So what should the regulator be aware of? Well they must take into consideration the ways in which new technologies are changing actual social interaction on many levels and also the changes in fundamental social values that are coupled with our expectations on the justice system.

The problem is that all to often regulators (as they are ordinary people) tend to take as their starting point, their own user experience. In order to illustrate what I meant I include one of my favorite Douglas Adams quotes (it’s from The Salmon of Doubt)

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Therefore it is vital not to ignore the role of technology, or to underestimate its effects. Looking at technology as – simply technology – i.e. as a neutral tool that does not effect us is incredibly dangerous. If we do not understand this then we will be ruled by technology. Naturally not by technology but by those who create and control technology. Law and law makers will become less relevant to the way in which society works. Or does not work.

In order to illustrate this, I finished off with a look at anti-homless technology – mainly things like park benches which are specifically designed to prevent people from sleeping on benches. In order to exclude an undesirable group of people from a public area the democratic process must first define a group as undesirable and then obtain a consensus that this group is unwelcome. All this must be done while maintaining the air of democratic inclusion – it’s a tricky, almost impossible task. But by buying a bench which you cannot sleep on, you exclude those who need to sleep on park benches (the homeless) without even needing to enter into a democratic discussion.

If this is done with benches, then what power lies in the control of a smart phone?

Here are the slides used with the lecture.

Posted on January 27, 2012 by mklang

Miss you Hitch!

Buzzfeed has a collection of Christopher Hitchens 15 best quotes:

Posted on December 20, 2011 by mklang

Is Spock a Professor of ethics at Oxford?

Podcasts are the best thing since sliced bread. So why is it that so few actually know what they are or how to use them? Strange. Or is it just difficult to break ingrained behavior? But this is not about trying to persuade those who don’t get it but I just want to push the amazing series of podcast being sent now on the BBC Arts & Ideas show.

With a focus on the theme of Change the show presents lectures and a following q&a session from people like Landscape architect Charles Jencks, Neuro-scientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (listening to her now), Psychotherapist Susie Orbach & Economist Aditya Chakrabortty.

All these were great but the lecture that really blew me away was by Professor Julian Savulescu who spoke about the duty of change and the case for human enhancement and genetic selection. What I liked was the way in which he, like some philosophers seem to do, took a logical thinking to its consequences. Most of the time we find it difficult to accept a logical chain of thought. Well ok, I do… I get to the beginning where I can lay out the foundations. A is true, B is true… (and so on) but when drawing out the consequences I often shy away from the obvious as I am steered by an irrational emotion. What a philosopher can do is to dare to think the unthinkable.

With his bold logic, I suspect that Julian Savulescu may actually be Spock.

Posted on November 29, 2011 by mklang

From Words to Wordfeud: notes on a lecture

There is a strange idea that we are living in the information age and that this age is something bright, shiny and new. Now I don’t mean that we are not in the information age but my concern is the idea that information is something new and exciting.

From Words to Wordfeud & What it Means

View more presentations from Mathias Klang

When talking economics it may be true that we have been in the information age since the 1960s or 70s but this is not what people seem to mean when they use the term as an everyday concept.

“The idea is linked to the concept of a digital age or digital revolution, and carries the ramifications of a shift from traditional industry that the industrial revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on the manipulation of information, i.e., an information society.” Wikipedia

We have always been immersed in information. Information about which mushrooms are edible can be life or death knowledge but for most of us today its just trivia. However, we do not raise ourselves by trivializing their vital knowledge.

The lecture opened with a discussion of language and writing. Despite our interest and focus on writing it is relevant to remember that writing is “only” 6000 years old (Wikipedia). Which means we spent 190 000 years without writing. This means that we have evolved in speechless and oral environments. On that topic, check out the Gutenberg Parenthesis lecture by Thomas Pettitt where he explains:

… the way in which he uses the term the Gutenberg Parenthesis: the idea that oral culture was in a way interrupted by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and the roughly 500 years of print dominance; a dominance now being challenged in many ways by digital culture and the orality it embraces.

And in the same way as we have, through evolution, an interest in finding energy rich foods (high fat, high sugar) we have evolved to view stored information as scarce, important and valuable. Therefore, on an evolutionary scale, things like the Gutenberg press, telegraphs, telephones, fax machines, computers and the Internet are all recent history.

Therefore recent changes like the book and the Internet are still impacting the ways in which we act and react socially. Technology is both an agent and effect of change.

This was followed by an introduction to social media and a discussion to why it is seen as social. The argument here is that we now have an infrastructure to allow us to enact basic communication rights established 300 years ago. With the platforms available to us theoretical rights become inevitable practice. The technology is also challenging many of our legal, ethical, social, economic, political (etc) norms.

One aspect of social media is pretty obvious: Now that we have an endless supply of valuable and important information – we mainly focus on trivial stuff. Facts are a given. The comparison I make is that since we have evolved in information scarce environments we seem to be instinctively drawn to energy rich information. Entertainment and trivia is the fatty and sugary, calorie rich, version of information – the question is what do we do when we are moving towards information obesity?

I offered an example from my schooldays where the focus was on fact knowing. Questions like what is the capital of Burkina Faso (which when I went to school was called Upper Volta)? But is this useful knowledge when everyone has access to the source of information? Schools have been successful since they offered the promise of jobs once the students were done. Now the jobs are not guaranteed anymore and we have come to realize that the factory vision of schools were probably never successful.

On this theme I highly recommend the brilliant (and funny) Ted Talk by Ken Robinson called Do schools kill creativity?

He argues that we have no idea about what the future will bring and yet we are attempting to educate children to meet that future. One thing we should take home is that creating specialists is less than useful when we have no idea if that specialty is useful in the future. Another argument for the so-called “useless” humanities!

I closed with four problems. (1) are we all stupid? Actually this should be that we are unaware of what is happening around us and this is happening to our detriment. Problem (2): we don’t know what we don’t know. This is important because earlier we may have relied on teachers and librarians to tell us what we should know. But this is not going to happen with the gatekeepers online as they have no interest in social enlightenment. Problem (3): There is a difference between who I want to be and who I am… Since online gatekeepers are interested in keeping us happy through personalization they will feed us with what we want (information obesity) rather than with what we may need. Problem (4): the gatekeepers are aware of this! Their advantage lies in our ignorance and/or interest in their abilities. There have always been gatekeepers but we usually knew their motives (good or evil)

An important role for educators is to enlighten us of the gatekeeper’s desires and motives of gatekeepers. I ended up with a depressing note: You don’t have to be unconscious to be without consciousness.

Posted on November 23, 2011 by mklang

Warning! Evil People

Some people are just evil.

Posted on November 21, 2011 by mklang

Because we can: comments from a lecture

The weekend and FSCONS is now over. This year my presentation was the last talk of the final session. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it?

My presentation was on the topic of privacy and raised the question of whether it is possible to maintain ones privacy in the world of extreme technology dependencies and broad social technology adoption. The answer is, dependably & depressingly, negative.

The talk was entitled Off the Grid: is anonymity possible? And focused on different forms of surveillance that are in the hands of uncommon players today. This is not big brother society, this is not little brother society. What we have is a society were privacy is lost because our contacts inform their contacts of interesting details from our lives. These details are able to be spread further by my contacts contacts. Potentially reaching the ends of the Internet. Whether or not this happens does not depend on anything I control but the interestingness of the information.

To illustrate this I displayed this tweet:

Translation: Thing that can happen at #fscons: @Klang67 proclaims himself queen. A bit unclear over what.

This is a form of surveillance through acquaintances and therefore I have chosen to follow the French wording (surveillance is French for viewing from above) and called this connaivellance for the fascinating word connaissance or acquaintance. I find the French word more interesting than the English as its root connai is the word for knowledge. Therefore, the French connaissance (acquaintance) is someone who has knowledge of you. How very apt.

The next form of surveillance is the self-surveillance of the social media age where we tell the world of ourselves. Or as a professor I met earlier in the week protested, with absolute conviction: “Twitter? That’s only people telling each other what they had for breakfast!”

Another thing I find fascinating with social media is the way it shapes our communication. One part of this is the way in we move towards the extremes. Few people online drink coffee, read books, or listen to lectures… We all seem to read fantastic/terrible books, drink great or awful coffee and lectures are either inspiring or snooze fests. All this with a shower of smileys too.

Both this autoveillance (which I have written more about here) and this connaivellance filled much of my lecture. As the law fails to protect, and our acquaintances and ourselves enthusiastically push information the last lines of defense must be the attitudes and interests of the social media creators. What my lecture showed was that protecting us is not in their interest. Therefore we stand unprotected. The slides from my presentation:

Off the Grid: Is anonymity possible?

View more presentations from Mathias Klang

This morning I came across a further example of surveillance which needs to be added to the list. The story comes from a Forbes article by Dave Pell, entitled Privacy Ends at Burger King. The short version of the story is that a man who heard a married couple argue at Burger King began live tweeting the event and added pictures and even video clips. He began his broadcasting with the tweet “I am listening to a marriage disintegrate at a table next to me in this restaurant. Aaron Sorkin couldn’t write this any better.”

Pell’s analysis:

In that Burger King, Andy Boyle thought he was listening to the disintegration of a couple’s marriage. He was really hearing the crumbling of his own ethics and self-restraint. We can’t stand by and let an alliance between technology and poor judgement disintegrate all decency, and turn every human exchange into another tawdry and destructive episode on a never-ending social media highlight reel.

This example provided an interesting additional example to my discussion on surveillance. For me, this example shows an additional reason why any attempts to control social media (legally, socially or technically) will fail. The desire of people to communicate the interestingness in their (and others) lives makes control a difficult affair.

FSCONS continued late into the night.

Posted on November 14, 2011 by mklang

Soon time for FSCONS 2011

It’s soon time for my favorite annual Free Culture event. This time, it’s the 5th FSCONS conference will be between 11th and 13th of November. As usual it is held in Gothenburg, Sweden.

FSCONS is the Nordic countries’ largest gathering for free culture, free software and a free society. The conference is organised yearly with 250-300 participants primarily from northern Europe. The main organiser is the Society for Free Culture and Software.

This years keynote speakers will be Richard Stallman & Christina Haralanova.

This year’s track are Building Together — Manufacturing Solidarity, Development for Embedded Systems, Development in Free Software Communities, Free Desktop Environments, Free Software in Politics, Human Rights and Digital Freedoms, Social Events, The Future of Money, Universal Design — Aiming for Accessibility.

Since I am not a coder I am especially looking forward to attending Book scanning, proofreading, and advanced reuse & Bitcoin: decentralised currency & Policy issues around Free Software & Privacy or welfare – pick one: Cryptocurrencies, taxation, and the legibility of culture & WikiLeaks, Whistleblowing and the Mainstream Audience & Internet and Civil Rights In LATAM & many more. Not to mention the great discussions and beer drinking nights.

Oh, and I will be giving the presentation Off the grid: Is anonymity possible?

Registration here.

Posted on October 20, 2011 by mklang