It’s typically insightful of Schneier to connect these stories with a common thread. Independent of the primary purpose of personal data collection, which can run the gamut from necessary to useful to invasive, the secondary purposes can be much worse. It’s sometimes difficult even for thoughtful people to consider the primary and secondary purposes of data collection independently, or to consider a technology’s designers responsible for its secondary uses.
That’s why the “hygiene” metaphor is so apt. Good hygiene isn’t mandated by law, but people understand that it’s an important practice. It makes cooperation with society smoother, and reduces the prevalence of parasites as systems get increasingly complex.
One example: companies that track users across the web often defend the practice by explaining the virtues of their primary purpose. They may help monetize free content, or deliver more customized materials to users, or something else that society considers beneficial. But these arguments miss the point. Obviously, if the primary purpose is bad for society, it’s a short conversation that ends there. Even in the case of a compelling primary purpose, though, having a good security mindset means thinking about the ways a system can fail. Allowing a society to inch towards a police state is a pretty serious failure.1
For people making new technologies and businesses, it makes sense to not just consider how profitable or efficient or helpful they’re being — that’s their primary purpose — but how their developments can be abused. Skipping that step can lead to major problems for society. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal well-meaning but without understanding.”
“Harmless failures” are bad too. Ed Felten refers to those also as bad hygiene. ↩
It can be hard to point a finger at exactly what is so offensive about the way the copyright lobby pushes its agenda. The rhetoric is sometimes charged, but I don’t think the problem lies in the moral foundation of intellectual monopolies (although some people certainly object to them on ethical grounds). I also don’t think it’s a fundamental business problem. Some have argued that nobody cares about content creators’ fixed costs, and that their fixation on that number is misguided, but I think that premise falls apart a bit at the margins: when fans feel a connection to a creator, they do care about her fixed costs, and want to help her make the record or book or film.
No, the ethical and economic basis of copyright isn’t inherently so offensive. It’s kind of like any other business, at its core. As the former Warner Music CTO recently put it, recorded music (for example) isn’t diamonds mined from a secret mythical land — it’s just a thing that some people make and that other people — fans — enjoy. As in nearly any other business, those fans are willing to support the producer if they feel a human connection to her. Copyright is one model we’ve developed to facilitate that support, and though it’s wearing a bit at the edges, it’s not fundamentally evil or insane.
The list goes on and on. As much as the copyright lobby want to frame the debate around the premise of intellectual property itself, that’s really missing the point. It’s impossible to address the problems with copyright without first acknowledging its biggest supporters’ excesses at every step.
I’m really intrigued by the idea of sonic tourism — going to places to experience the acoustic landscape there. There have been a few efforts to document sound destinations, including the wonderful Sound Tourism, but nothing that feels comprehensive.
In San Francisco, though, there are a few places especially geared towards listeners. The Wave Organ, an acoustic sculpture by the Exploratorium on the bay, is one such location. It’s a beautiful little stone structure out on the jetty with a network of Seussian pipes running from under the waves up to various listening stations. The rumbles and gurgles of the incoming tides are amplified and distorted as they get routed up to the listeners. I made this recording during a visit:
Another spot in the Bay Area is the 92-foot-tall aeolian harp in South San Francisco. Aeolian harps are passive instruments played by the movement of the wind, and this one’s on a hill with a great view of the Bay. I haven’t yet been, but I’m looking forward to it. Is there another city in the world that has two major acoustic sculptures like these?
Add to that that San Francisco is the home of Audium, the world’s only “theater of sound-sculptured space,” and San Francisco seems like a global leader for sonic tourism. I’d be interested in finding more spots to visit, here and elsewhere.
If you fall into the intersection of people who have looked at this website before yesterday and people who are looking at it after today, you may notice that I’ve given it a bit of a spitshine.
It’s still on WordPress, but in place of the venerable DePo Skinny theme, it’s now using a custom theme that I built on top of the Thematic framework. The most notable differences are that I’ve pushed all of the margins outward, made all the text bigger, and pulled the information from the bottom up to a new sidebar. My 1-column days are over.
Also, I’ve used my favorite color as the hover for all of the links.
I had made and modified WordPress themes before, but I was surprised to discover how long it has been. I’d never, for example, used a “Child Theme,” which appear to have been state-of-the-art since, like, 2009. There’s a bit of a conceptual learning curve, but using one you can develop a whole theme basically only using CSS with only touches of basically copy-and-paste PHP. In addition to the WordPress Codex entry, I found the ThemeShaper tutorial really helpful.
One note about responsive design: I don’t have it. I was conflicted about that, and the next redesign may support it, but I wanted to get something finished and it seems like smartphones do pretty well with reflowing the content.
I’ll probably work out some of the kinks over the next couple of days, but if you find something that seems unusual, please let me know.
