If Data is Currency, are we Banks?
> This piece was formed in cover letter for Facebook Privacy & Data Role <
Saving Face(book)
You hear a lot of hyperbole in regards of the death⚰️ of Facebook as a core social platform, but the reality remains that it is immense infrastructure. Much like our cars of today, we take them for granted and detach affinity to them because of the ‘blackbox’ effect of modern vehicles. We cannot fix or customise them to our own needs, people would develop respect and understanding in how to drive a machine when they repaired or altered its parts, they grew to respect the system and operate it in a unison with maintaining it. Without the means to mend, Facebook as a utility opposed to a platform will break.
If we allow people to amplify truth, and present their best selves, enabling self-discovery, the product could return to being a ‘personal platform’ — a podium to project personality.
We make our tools and thereafter they (shield) us
The excellent Cennydd Bowles, an ethical designer who once led design at Twitter UK, now tries to instil a deeper philosophical approach to modern day designers and digital product makers. The very fact that the question of ‘harvesting’ (data) is an open debate, highlights the need to to unpack deeper understanding of data ethics. Enabling society the tools to explore and sanction their data usage, we will move onto a deeper and richer mode of engagement. We are indeed at a tipping point, with many all ready on the tipped end of the scale. With the default value exchange being ‘my data is free-game’, because we get all this freemium content back. Perhaps it’s a tipping point we cannot return from much like the case of How Music Got Free¹, a very worthwhile read about the system view of how music became so cheap to obtain.
Post Privacy
Bowles points to legal scholar (most cited of all time), Richard Posner’s outlook;
people view privacy as ‘concealment of information about themselves that others might use to their disadvantage’.
Expanding from this Bowles postulates to ‘understand modern privacy as control and self-determination.’
“All knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions,” wrote Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their 1966 work “The Social Construction of Reality”
Currently the internet is littered with shards of our fractured selves, but much like an obsessed investigator, gluing line after line of shredded paper, the full spectrum of seemingly meaningless fragments becomes available once pooled together. Humans are poor at seeing into the future, worse again at tracing the trail of thoughts we project. We are far more likely listen to the echos of our social constructs — data relativity rather then objectively sift through our content. We must take care to avoid these dark whirlpools of data surplus.
“ information is not only useless, but potentially dangerous…the old saying that, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and therefore, “to a man with a computer, everything looks like data.” — Technolopoly
Neil Postman
If Data is Currency, Are We Banks?
As it stands, Privacy as Privilege is the narrative being wrote by Apple — capitalising on privacy being a luxury. Tim Cook has repeatedly expressed his ‘discomfort’ at data practises stating “Privacy in itself has become a crisis…You are not our product…Our products are iPhones and iPads. We treasure your data”. Like all commodities, the rarer the artefact, the more valuable it becomes, those of us throwing the content of our souls into the ether, will have no buying power in comparison to those that keep their cards close to their chests. Ultimately, if we enable and empower people to commoditise their data, they can engage in meaningful exchanges of value with the underlining acknowledgement in this new currency — that we understand its utility in the transparency of the transaction.
Transaction Transparency = Truth
We must learn how to spend our ‘data-coins’, if we intrust too much of it to automation, without understanding the logic of the network, we risk rouge runaway snowballing, as seen on the markets in 2010;
In the chaos of those 25 minutes, 2bn shares, worth $56bn, changed hands. Even more worryingly, many orders were executed at what the Securities Exchange Commission called “irrational prices”: as low as a penny, or as high as $100,000. The event became known as the “flash crash”, and it is still being investigated and argued over years later.
A run on the banks 🏃🏼♀️💨
As it stands, we carelessly and unknowingly give up our data, what if we started a run on the data banks? If we all up skilled our understanding, and took steps to be more careful with our data, then the endless stream of cheap ad money dries up. Of course, what becomes of the economy of the world, when this essentially lazy industry ends, like gold rushes ending, we end up with prospectors at loss with their brand new shovels digging for naught. There are those out there who think we should rise up and not just obtain the tools to defend and navigate the complexity, but directly attack with sword in hand. The book Obfuscation is worth a look for such ideology.
Age of Entanglement
Danny Hillis of MIT has speaks about about how we now live in a world of so much complexity, with our rapidly expanding and ever connecting technologies, that we cannot even phantom the possible outcomes. The unintended consequences — far too numerous to predict.
We can no longer understand how the world works by breaking it down into loosely-connected parts that reflect the hierarchy of physical space or deliberate design. Instead, we must watch the flows of information, ideas, energy and matter that connect us, and the networks of communication, trust, and distribution that enable these flows — Danny Hillis
I believe that the best we can hope for, is to create horizons of safe limits. What I mean by this is we must adopt a systems thinking approach and figure out which areas will intersect, not knowing how they interact but focusing on the interoperability of contact points, focus on making loose threads that can stitch together in the moment, rather then ‘seamless seams’ of the past decade. These seams, in regards to data and AI can become ‘deadly / dangerous’ ones, the hand-off that occurs is like jumping off a cliff with no understanding of how to channel a gust of wind. People need to be able to envision the ‘sum of the the parts’ of their digital shadows and trace those rays back to the source where the perspective lens is being cast from.
We can live in our shadows or die facing the sun
Boiling 🐸’s
Like a frog being slowly boiled alive we accepted the status quo. The rapid acceleration of technology and its thirst for progress at the expense of monetising our lives’ has brought us beyond the frog in a pot. We now keep our heads buried in the sand, almost afraid to look at the problem in the shadow. In the constant need for frictionless experiences, the cost of the smoothness of our current ‘seams’ is that eventually the ice you glide on melts away until you have nothing left. Designers must try and introduce friendly frictions into experiences with personal data transfers.
It seems people are very willing to give up their private information in return for perceived benefits such as ease of use, navigation and access to friends and information. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Understanding the flow and transformation of information
Secondly designers need to help pull our heads out of the sand, and shed light on the problem 🔦. The multidisciplinary designer Neri Oxman expands upon the ‘age of entanglement’, providing a methodology for considering such complex moving parts;
“…Science is to explain and predict the world around us; it ‘converts’ information into knowledge…
…Engineering is to apply scientific knowledge to the development of solutions for empirical problems; it ‘converts’ knowledge into utility…
… Design is to produce embodiments of solutions that maximize function and augment human experience; it ‘converts’ utility into behavior…
…Art is to question human behavior and create awareness of the world around us…”
With broader mental models like this, perhaps we can approach things like information flows and its multifaceted states of being more tangibly. This type of philosophy may help us map these complex issues and regain power.
Our digital information is inherently violate and far from inert.
Flexible Futures
So with so many possible outcomes, like a myriad of tentacles gliding over one another, an attitude I have adopted from my recent MA is that we must try to flex our minds, stretching both imagination and values. Doing this with the aid of flexible futures. Think of it as a cooked spaghetti thread in the future cone, able to change its pathway. Pressed through a bronze die it’s vector seemingly preordained but waving, changing with heat and time. The usage of Speculative, Fictional and Critical Design practises (known also as Discursive Design) could be particularly useful to invoke discursive provocation with people and their unaddressed values in regards to data exposure and transparency of our transactions.
Existing on the Ridge of Perception
McLuhan outlines in Understanding Media the role of the artist/creative is to live on the edge of society, up upon the hilltops of its valley, looking down with perspective while experiencing ‘living in the moment’ effect of a technology’s impact on us. Akin to wading through waves in water, we cannot anchor ourselves to be still nor allow us to be taken by a rouge wave 🌊, we must be able to adapt to the intensity of the sea of information. There is no on/off — there is only a slider. We must allow users to become data fluid. The sensitivity of our data is precious, and like the word itself (sensitive), describes the need to have varying degrees of pressure or exposure.
It will be difficult to adjust the levels of sensitivity needed, so as not to inhibit our own lives or become drowned in the deluge of data. What is certain is the need to see the problem more clearly, rather than consider it dark magic that we cannot wield for our own needs.
Lack of understanding leads to uncertainty and folk-theories that hinder our ability to use technical systems, and clouds the critique of technological developments — Timo Arnall
Finally perhaps remember, often the most dangerous of us are those who have nothing to lose because they may own nothing in this current technopoly.
>>> These mind ramblings are fresh and mostly jumbled and I intend to expand on some of these topics in future posts. KG <<<
