Last week there was a vigil in Washington Square Park for the labour movement. I spoke to Manny Ness from CUNY about the context of the GSOC strike.
This week we read from Book of Lies.
Grant Morrison:: “Pop Magic!” All about how to do magic.
Best quote: “If I’d stuck with the clarinet and got nowhere would that mean there is no such thing as music?”
Mark Pesce:: “The Executable Dreamtime” All about how language obscures reality.
Best quote: “What I tell you three times is true. What I tell you three million times is civilisation.”
Hakim Bey:: “Sorcery” All about sorcery
Best quote: “A poem can act as a spell and vice versa – but sorcery refuses to be a metaphor for mere literature – it insists that symbols must cause events as well as private epiphanies.”
Hakim Bey:: “Media Hex: The occult assault on institutions” All about Immediatist organisations and their attack on traditional organisations
Best quote: “Let the bastards produce their own bad luck out of their inner sadness at being evil assholes, out of their atavistic superstition (without which they wouldn’t be such media-wizards), out of their fear of otherness, out of their repressed sexuality.”
Super stuff that made me happy in the middle of finals.
For our final for technologies of persuasion we are building a technology of persuasion: a website with a model for rating website privacy policies that makes it easy for people to share their ratings to create a community resource that is a watchdog for privacy.
The very practise of rating sites will convince people of how little their privacy is valued or protected online and if enough people are persuaded to start caring about these issues there will be an incentive for companies to take more care of our personal data.
It’s currently still being built. Will be available in the next week as it’s in the ITP Winter Show.
Last week was the last class of Primetime: the Game of Television. All in all I had mixed feelings about the class. It was fun, but it got kind of tedious towards the end. I think the main benefit was the constant idea generation when we were producers – in both Seasons 1 & 3. Particularly in Season 1, where we had to come up with lots of show ideas to pitch and try to match them against what was likely to be popular, the game felt challenging and creative. Being a network executive when we couldn’t produce was pretty boring and a lot of paper work. Perhaps it’s like the real world. I guess I like coming up with ideas a lot.
This is linked from the piece by Aaron Schwartz. A very good read.
I finished reading The Digital Person by Daniel Solove. The last section is all about government access to information stored by private companies. Database firms like ChoicePoint are making electronic profiles of us that they will sell to anyone prepared to pay for this data. Federal Agencies can buy information from ChoicePoint that they are prevented by law from gathering themselves. The government and big businesses are essentially colluding to deny us our privacy rights and any control over our own information.
I also read a superb article by David Lyon called “Everyday Surveillance: Personal data and social classifications”. He outlines the reasons we are so dependent on surveillance and looks at the possible implications for a society that classifies its citizens based on constant monitoring. A must-read for anyone interested in this stuff.
In “Privacy as a Common Good in the Digital World” Priscilla Regan argues that cyberspace is a commons and that privacy is a common good. I’m not convinced by the argument that personal information is a common pool resource because I don’t think it is in any way analogous to water or grazing pastures in that it’s not really something we all share in that kind of way. However I think her insight that privacy is something that needs to be tackled collectively is a sound one.
A Wall Street Journal article from 2001 (that you have to pay for unfortunately – you’d think after four years they could let it go) “The Privacy Officer: What’s standing between your personal information and the world? People like Benjamin E. Robinson III” describes the phenomenon whereby companies hire someone to cover their arses privacy-wise. Obviously if a company hires someone to protect my data they will totally have my best interests at heart. Sigh.
Also in the WSJ “Big Brother-in-Law: If the FBI hopes to get the goods on you, it may ask ChoicePoint”, again from 2001 and again paid. This is a really interesting article though if you can get your hands on it.
Final pay link, but Dan Savage’s Can I Get a Little Privacy? from November 16th is one of the recent articles about privacy to cause a stir online. He proposes a constitutional amendment guaranteeing privacy. I’m wary of this as a solution. It seems to me that privacy is a natural right and not something that needs to be explicitly granted by a constitution and that once you do that you could end up going places you never wanted to. Change constitutions at your peril. Learn from Ireland’s embarrassing and misogynistic mistakes.
I wrote my paper for Embedding Privacy: The Identity Fraud Fraud
I made this flowchart for the DVD I’m making for my Video for New Media final. It’s pretty simple and it turns out the DVD I’m making will be even more simple as I’ve decided not to do a long glasto or bar them entry piece. I’ll just do short pieces for each of them too and that will mean I have no need of submenus or chapters.
