| | |
|
WardBensonSecondPaper 5 - 26 Jun 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
|
|
<
< |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
| >
> |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondPaper" |
|---|
| | | -- WardBenson - 27 May 2009 | | | During a recent argument I had some difficulty defending the anti-data-mining cause. Ok says the 1L, putting aside fears about abuse by employees of data aggregators, the consequences of inaccurate records, and the potential loss of autonomy that may occur depending on how much you buy behavioral economics, if the data aggregators get it right, won't that be more efficient for the economy and the nation? What if the banks really can accurately determine everyone's true credit risk? What if the health insurance companies really can predict someone's lifetime health care costs? What if New York law firms can hire only those people who will work the hardest and not leave after immediately paying off their debts? Won't everything work more smoothly? While at the time I failed to give a convincing response, as is typical, a better (in my opinion) response came to me about ten seconds after the conversation ended. Sure, it is possible that through the use of data-mining and analysis banks may be able to much more efficiently dole out credit and companies will be much better able to know who they are hiring. However, no matter how much data-mining may be good for the economy (at least in the short-term), it poses a threat to one aspect of what America stands for. Crucial to American culture and mythology is the belief that America gives people a unique opportunity for reinvention. Whether their model be an immigrant who leaves behind the role he held in his previous country or the native who puts an unseemly past behind him and becomes an upstanding citizen, many believe in the American system and accept their place in it because they take it as an article of faith that anyone, no matter what they have done in the past, can start afresh and eventually succeed. | |
<
< | Reinvention is never quite as seemless as the myth implies, though, and Americans are rightly skeptical of those with tarnished pasts who claim to have turned over a new leaf. Apart from those segments of society with a long tradition of accepting people as born again after sufficient public shaming and atonement, a person's prospects for reinvention have always partially been a function of their ability to keep their past obscure enough to be plausibly benign. Data-mining makes recasting one's background impossible, however. You are no longer the resume you choose to hand to an interviewer or the persona you choose to present to a bank's loan officer. Your entire background and everything that can be inferred from it about your future prospects as an employee or debtor are available and beyond your control to frame in a positive light. When combined with the often unspoken skepticism that belies Americans' belief in individuals' capacity for change, this loss of control over the public perception of one's past may eliminate many wayward souls' chances for redemption. | >
> | Reinvention is never quite as seamless as the myth implies, though, and Americans are rightly skeptical of those with tarnished pasts who claim to have turned over a new leaf. Apart from those segments of society with a long tradition of accepting people as born again after sufficient public shaming and atonement, a person's prospects for reinvention have always partially been a function of their ability to keep their past obscure enough to be plausibly benign. Data-mining makes recasting one's background impossible, however. You are no longer the resume you choose to hand to an interviewer or the persona you choose to present to a bank's loan officer. Your entire background and everything that can be inferred from it about your future prospects as an employee or debtor are available and beyond your control to frame in a positive light. When combined with the often unspoken skepticism that belies Americans' belief in individuals' capacity for change, this loss of control over the public perception of one's past may eliminate many wayward souls' chances for redemption. | | | Besides making it more difficult for individuals with self-imposed damaging pasts to move on, data-mining also harms those who must dig themselves out of backgrounds they did not choose to have. Generations of Americans have grown up believing that in our post-feudal society, debts reside and die with those who incurred them and are not passed on to their children. While technically still true, if it can be inferred that your parents' tendencies towards profligate spending was passed down to you, you perhaps may as well have inherited their debts if the result is higher fees and interest rates thanks to an omniscient credit rating agency. And ironically for a country in which there is so much bloviation about ``family values,'' those who will be most negatively affected are those who are deemed most likely to be loyal to and supportive of their kin because it will be inferred that they will come to their relatives' aid even at the risk of their own finances. | | | This is somewhat off-topic, but anyone who wants proof that we're heading towards a society that treats human beings as fully-modeled consumers on whom products can be 'pushed' with predictable results need only read this article in today's New York Times.
-- AndreiVoinigescu - 02 Jun 2009 | |
>
> |
- I think this is an effective and valuable essay. Like your first, and in a very different way like the essays that Dana has been writing, like the responses to Matt Eckman, this is an attempt to broaden the cultural relevance of the issues for those who are not likely to find their way to them quite so easily as we. Naturally I believe that's very important intellectual activity with significant political and social consequences.
- In reading what has been written this term, by you and your colleagues, I'm struck by the difficulty of asking people to imagine problems posed by long-term consequences when they are having a great deal of conceptual and logistical trouble just keeping up with what is already happening around them. Your recurrent task is to alert your reader to potential consequences that would ensue after many years of the further development of trends barely starting to be visible and which are not much reported or documented. Explaining concerns that depend on predictable but so far unexperienced developments is, as Kate says, the business of traditional Bradburyist science fiction. Maybe this is a genre worthy of our more serious attention.
- The weak place in your present draft, it seems to me, is the conclusion. It is logically possible, but not either intellectually or emotionally satisfying, to conclude that the good thing about this technology's incompatibility with our founding social myth and operating commitment is that it may cause us not to put too much stress on them. Your own previously-expressed commitments seem to suggest the desirability of looking elsewhere for a conclusion, including the possibility of not so easily conceding defeat. It feels to me that we owe the symbolic structure of our free society more than just a quick but decent burial. That seems to be your argument. Though not quite to the end.
| | |
\ No newline at end of file |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |