(X-posted on Prosblogion) My last blogpost for this year will be a preliminary report on the qualitative survey I launched last month. In this open survey, I asked professional philosophers of religion (including graduate students) about their motivations and personal belief attitudes, and how their work relates to these beliefs. I am very grateful to all who participated (an amazing 151 respondents!), and to the British Academy for funding this research.
Exactly one year ago I finished off my blogging year with a post on gendered atrocities, focusing in particular on the Newtown shooting and the widely discussed gang rape in India. At that point, the hope was that these two events would at least not have been in vain, and that they would stir changes in the right direction. It seems that this did in fact happen in India, where the horridness of rape was given much more attention in the aftermath of the event, which triggered a firestorm of protest. (As for mass shootings and gun control in the US, to my knowledge nothing much seems to have changed since last year…)
And now, looking back on 2013, what strikes me as an absolute lowlight of the year is again something gender-related, at first sight of a much lesser degree of gravity – but only at first sight. One of the biggest hits of the year, Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’, is nothing short of a badly concealed rape apology (read the lyrics for yourself here). That millions and millions of young (and not-so-young) impressionable people should be exposed to the truly disturbing message of the song is very, very worrisome. The catchiness of the song (yes, I’ll admit to its catchiness, which is really the merit of singer, co-writer and producer Pharrell Williams — who, unlike Thicke, is a talented musician) only makes it worse, as it results in millions of kids singing ‘I know you want it’, ‘good girl’, and other horrific bits of the text. (It is particularly surprising that the three singers all seem fairly adjusted, family-oriented people; but what doesn’t one do for success…) The video is equally appalling, featuring three scantily clad female models interacting in unflattering ways with the three fully clad male singers (I’ll just mention hair-pulling and puffing smoke on one of the women’s face – see the video for yourself if you have to. Oh, and there is also an uncensored version!).
In a previous post, I suggested that the concept of privacy is going to prove inadequate as a protection against big data. This is the case for structural reasons: the concept of privacy is designed to protect information (generally, either information that is thought to be inherently intimate, or in the sense of control over the dissemination of information), whereas big data operates at what one might call a sub-information level: it siphons up enormous amounts of data, which becomes meaningful information only after it is analyzed in the context of vast amounts of other data. As a result, big data knows everything about us, even though we have neither consented nor not-consented to the release of the information that condemns us.
Today I want to leave that aside for the moment, and develop some background by way of a Foucauldian reading of Judge Leon’s recent decision issuing a preliminary injunction against the NSA’s collection of vast amounts of telephone metadata on American citizens. In subsequent posts, I will offer a reading of Judge Pauley’s decision upholding the NSA program and an earlier Supreme Court decision that gets at the issue before returning to the question of privacy. Although the analysis here is based on court cases and government programs, the intention is ultimately to make a more general point.
A federal judge today ruled that some of the NSA’s broad, warrantless collection of data from American citizens, particularly of so-called ‘metadata,’ which includes routing information for phone calls (what phone numbers have been in contact with each other, and so on. This can be very damaging!) – did not violate the constitution. This ruling contradicts an earlier federal court ruling that the data collection was unconstitutional, and the issue seems likely headed to the Supreme Court.
If we set aside the details of this case for the moment, it seems to me that an important set of issues around big data is emerging. That is, to be succinct, that the concept of ‘privacy’ is absolutely no good at all in slowing it down. I don’t, however, think that the problem is either the frequently announced ‘end of privacy’ or the so-called ‘privacy paradox’ (that people say they value privacy but then act as if they don’t). Rather, I think the problem is more basic.
Today’s opinion correctly reports a fact about privacy law: if I voluntarily disclose information to a third party – any third party – I lose any Fourth Amendment claim to privacy over that information, no matter how many times it changes hands afterwards. That’s a problem, one well captured by Helen Nissenbaum’s work on privacy as ‘contextual integrity’ (or see the original paper here), which argues that moving information out of one context and into another can very well change the appropriate norms for sharing it. But the pairing of ‘voluntary’ and ‘information’ also suggests that I have some cognizance of the semantic content of what I am sharing. I may not know why information is valuable to someone else, but I at least know what that information is.
Big data challenges that. We have no idea of the meaning of this material we are providing as we go about our daily lives, or even that it is meaningful: we are providing data, not information. The NSA case is exemplary:
There was a story in today's NYT about a number of colleges that are lowering tuition, sometimes drastically. The argument is that they can do this without loss of revenue, since so few pay full tuition anyway. Thus, they are lowering tuition and cutting financial aid and making a splash vis a vis the current concern over high tuition.
The article makes a number of useful points: that colleges have done a terrible job at advertising how few people actually pay the official tuition amounts that sound so scary, or that there is a significant phenomenon of high tuition causing a perception of quality. But one obvious point goes utterly unmentioned in the NYT coverage: that cutting both tuition and aid hurts the most economically vulnerable and benefits the less vulnerable. (The NYT mentions that the college it most focuses on will retain mert-based scholarships, but fails to discuss the effects of cutting need-based.)
All of which leads me to float a suggestion for discussion – one that I once raised with our university president at a party, predictably being responded to with a chuckle and a raised eyebrow: let's raise tuition. A lot.
I was looking for the source of the following picture (see below), to find out more about it. The picture seems, to the casual observer, to be an early modern engraving, perhaps from Germany or the Low Countries. It shows a man who looks out of the confines of his world (the edge of the firmament), to look beyond, a nice illustration of the work of the metaphysician, theologian or scientist. However, a bit of poking around on the internet reveals that the engraving is probably a forgery – i.e., a late 19th century wood engraving that is deliberately made to resemble an early modern drawing. It appears first in Camille Flammarion’s L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire. The engraving was probably made on commission or by Flammarion himself to accompany the following text “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch…” This text appears in the first edition of L’atmosphère but the engraving only appeared in the second edition.
Now that I look at it again, I wonder how I could ever have believed this to be an authentic early modern illustration. The borders, for instance, do not look authentic. The anatomy and pose of the man are unusual for 16th century iconography. It seems that artistic forgeries, when they are believed to be genuine, look genuine. Once we know, however, that they are forgeries, the many inauthentic elements seem pretty obvious: how could past art critics have been fooled?
A few weeks ago I posted ‘Sua estupidez’, sung by Gal Costa but composed by Roberto Carlos and Erasmo Carlos. Roberto Carlos is known in Brazil as ‘The King’, that is the king of folk music, and is immensely popular especially among the less economically favored segments of the population. He is known in particular for his ultra-romantic, ultra-mellow songs – yes, ‘tacky’ would be an appropriate description for lots of it…
But the duo Roberto/Erasmo Carlos has also produced some real gems, such as ‘Sua estupidez’ of a few weeks ago, ‘Debaixo dos caracóis dos seus cabelos’, ‘Fera ferida’, and ‘Cachaça mecânica’, which I am posting below: the first two sung by Caetano Veloso, and the third by Erasmo Carlos. (It turns out that Roberto Carlos’ versions themselves are usually not that good, not because he is not a good singer, but because of tacky arrangements…) The first two are real classics known by everyone; the third one is much less known, but possibly the best among the three: a wonderful, sad samba. So start with the third!
(BMoF will be on a break next week.)
This Slate article* about the recent Johns Hopkins plan** is symptomatic of a seriously — and unfortunately widespread — mistaken approach to the political economy of higher education, namely, a short-term and ahistorical focus on the TT section of the entire labor system, mislabeled as "the job market."
Abstracting for the moment from the details of the Hopkins plan, the article's premise that "there aren't enough [tenure-track] jobs for PhDs" is an unfortunate reification of the multiple decisions of university administrators to produce the current situation by their hiring decisions. The endorsed conclusion "therefore we should restrict the number of PhD students," by unquestionly accepting the premise, just reinforces the dynamic that produces the current situation.***
New APPS 