Sunday, December 26, 2004
The Metamorphosis: American Stage Magic, 1890-1930
When he began his career as a stage magician and escapist, Hungarian-born Erich Weiss took the stage name of his idol, Robert-Houdin, the world's most famous magician, who had broken away from the traditional Merlin-esque costume of starry robes and invented the iconic image of the magician in modern formal wear. Hungarian Erich Weiss was transformed into the Italian-by-way-of-French Harry Houdini, who travelled the world debunking spiritualism and superstition and dazzling audiences with his greatest illusion, The Metamorphosis. Over the next forty years, two other men would follow his lead in reinventing their ethnic identity before donning the coat and tails of the stage magician: Anglo-American William Robinson adopted Chinese dress and makeup as Chung Ling Soo, in homage to the great Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo, a contemporary of Houdini's; and African-American Benjamin Rucker took on the name of his magician mentor Prince Herman, invented a Zulu medicine-man origin for himself, and performed for racially-mixed audiences in Harlem as Black Herman.
Meanwhile, waves of immigrants were reinventing themselves as American all over the country, and migration from the countryside to the cities was erasing longstanding cultural and regional distinctions. Racial originalism, the theory that each of the "races" of humanity was created independently, was slowly being debunked by evolutionary theory. The myth of the Wild West was falling apart, propped up by aging Old West shows, and the last sparks of the Native American way of life went out after the failure of the Ghost Dance. Modernism was sweeping through every facet of American life, transforming everything about how people lived and how they regarded themselves. The Metamorphosis.
There's a great novel here, or a play, or an epic poem, but I'm not going to write it. Magic, performance, identity, race, immigration, ghosts, superstition, spiritualism, science, the industrial revolution, the labor movement, Manifest Destiny, carnivals, museums of curiosities, phrenology, urban squalor, Houdini, William James, "Buffalo Bill" Cody, Geronimo, H.P. Lovecraft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, H.P. Blavatsky, and P.T. Barnum. Somebody ought to get on it.
Sources:
Meanwhile, waves of immigrants were reinventing themselves as American all over the country, and migration from the countryside to the cities was erasing longstanding cultural and regional distinctions. Racial originalism, the theory that each of the "races" of humanity was created independently, was slowly being debunked by evolutionary theory. The myth of the Wild West was falling apart, propped up by aging Old West shows, and the last sparks of the Native American way of life went out after the failure of the Ghost Dance. Modernism was sweeping through every facet of American life, transforming everything about how people lived and how they regarded themselves. The Metamorphosis.
There's a great novel here, or a play, or an epic poem, but I'm not going to write it. Magic, performance, identity, race, immigration, ghosts, superstition, spiritualism, science, the industrial revolution, the labor movement, Manifest Destiny, carnivals, museums of curiosities, phrenology, urban squalor, Houdini, William James, "Buffalo Bill" Cody, Geronimo, H.P. Lovecraft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, H.P. Blavatsky, and P.T. Barnum. Somebody ought to get on it.
Sources:
- World of Wonders by Robertson Davies: stage magic and carnival life
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon: escapism and immigration
- The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand: modernism, originalism, spiritualism, legal science
- Kung Fu, the television series: the exile of Kwai Chang Cain echoes Judeo-Christian legends of Caine and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, and also deals with new cultural collisions in almost every action-packed episode
- Accordion Crimes by E. Annie Proulx: sacrifice of ethnic identity, invention of the American self
- Carnivale, the television series: I'm waiting for the first season on DVD so I can get a fix of early-1900's supernatural carnival action
- The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson: Buffalo Bill, serial killers, regional and ethnic identity as performance at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. A real page-turner, if you can stomach historical fiction masquerading as history
- Cremaster 2, directed by Matthew Barney: a performance of Houdini's Metamorphosis parallels the rituals surrounding the mythologized execution of Gary Gilmore in the film
Monday, December 13, 2004
Columbia Graduate School Dean Plagiarizes Memo On Plagiarism
On November 18, Dean David Schizer of Columbia Law School sent out an email to the student body equating file-sharing with plagiarism and labeling it a violation of academic integrity. He stated at the beginning of the message that it was being sent at the request of Lee Bollinger, President of the University. (You can read the original message here.)
I emailed my Law and the Internet Society class list with the following response:
From: mrn2101@columbia.edu
To : lis@emoglen.law.columbia.edu
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 14:22:50 -0500
Subject: Fwd: Reminder about file-sharing
Anyone up for deconstructing the message we all just got from Schizer? I'll kick it off:
2. "Original thought". What, we should make our own music instead of listening to other people's music? Somehow, I don't think that Schizer's two criteria for relating copyright law to intellectual integrity apply to file-sharing.
3. Why is Plagiarism capitalized? Is this a reference to the section of the university code of conduct or something?
And, more generally:
7. What the hell is this about? Why this message, and not an email from the Dean reminding us that threatening the life of the President of the United States is a federal offense? Or a reminder that jay-walking is illegal? Schizer talks about recently stepped-up enforcement -- the real content of the message -- but his "intellectual honesty" fig-leaf is really distasteful. This is a piece of theater designed to demonstrate the university's official opposition to file-sharing, and the audience is the MPAA and RIAA. This email was sent, not to the student body, but to the legal record in future litigation, and I wish it were labeled as such.
Yesterday John Axcelson, Assistant Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, sent out the same memo, less the disclaimer at the top about it originating from the office of the President. (You can read Axcelson's message here.) [Thanks to Timothy Waligore of the Political Science department for bringing this to my attention.]
So here we have a memo making dubious comparisons between file-sharing and plagiarism and reminding students about the importance of attributing work to its original author. And it's been sent out under several different people's names.
Irony.
Interestingly, the text is formatted differently in the two messages, and some other minor changes have been made (e.g. Axcelson's message corrects the "tools"/"works" error.) Presumably this text originated with Columbia's legal counsel, got approved by President Bollinger, and was distributed to the deans of the various schools for dissemination to the student body. Schizer was at least honest in implying that he had not composed the message himself, but it looks like Axcelson needs to re-read the part about the importance of "proper credit for others' work".
I emailed my Law and the Internet Society class list with the following response:
From: mrn2101@columbia.edu
To : lis@emoglen.law.columbia.edu
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 14:22:50 -0500
Subject: Fwd: Reminder about file-sharing
Anyone up for deconstructing the message we all just got from Schizer? I'll kick it off:
Intellectual honesty is the foundation of our academic lives. Original thought and proper credit for others' work is central to learning and teaching. Like Plagiarism, violation of copyright is a serious breach of the commitment to intellectual integrity that you made when you came to Columbia Law School.1. "Proper credit"? Is Schizer actually sending this out to remind us to attribute mp3s to the original recording artists? Most mp3s are tagged properly, so this doesn't seem like an actual problem. Which must mean he's concerned about...
2. "Original thought". What, we should make our own music instead of listening to other people's music? Somehow, I don't think that Schizer's two criteria for relating copyright law to intellectual integrity apply to file-sharing.
3. Why is Plagiarism capitalized? Is this a reference to the section of the university code of conduct or something?
As indicated in that letter, the use of peer-to-peer file-sharing programs such as Kazaa and Morpheus to make and share copies of copyrighted music and movies is a violation of copyright law and university policy.4. He slips out of his "maybe" language here. Again, fair use gets left by the wayside as a mere historical footnote, soon to be swept up by Congress and dumped into the dustbin.
Virtually any work you find whether software, music, videos or e-mail; whether on the internet, a CD, DVD, or tape, is almost certainly protected by copyright.5. Right. Free software, creative commons works, public domain material -- these things are also exceptions, annoyances, appendices, soon to go the way of the dinosaurs.
Copyright owners scan our network every day for unlawful use of their tools6. I assume this is a typo -- surely he means "... their works"?
And, more generally:
7. What the hell is this about? Why this message, and not an email from the Dean reminding us that threatening the life of the President of the United States is a federal offense? Or a reminder that jay-walking is illegal? Schizer talks about recently stepped-up enforcement -- the real content of the message -- but his "intellectual honesty" fig-leaf is really distasteful. This is a piece of theater designed to demonstrate the university's official opposition to file-sharing, and the audience is the MPAA and RIAA. This email was sent, not to the student body, but to the legal record in future litigation, and I wish it were labeled as such.
Yesterday John Axcelson, Assistant Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, sent out the same memo, less the disclaimer at the top about it originating from the office of the President. (You can read Axcelson's message here.) [Thanks to Timothy Waligore of the Political Science department for bringing this to my attention.]
So here we have a memo making dubious comparisons between file-sharing and plagiarism and reminding students about the importance of attributing work to its original author. And it's been sent out under several different people's names.
Irony.
Interestingly, the text is formatted differently in the two messages, and some other minor changes have been made (e.g. Axcelson's message corrects the "tools"/"works" error.) Presumably this text originated with Columbia's legal counsel, got approved by President Bollinger, and was distributed to the deans of the various schools for dissemination to the student body. Schizer was at least honest in implying that he had not composed the message himself, but it looks like Axcelson needs to re-read the part about the importance of "proper credit for others' work".
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Sauce for the Gander: Viral Boycotts and Collaborative Consumer Reports as Automated Moral Calculus
[This is the second paper I wrote for Eben Moglen's Law and the Internet Society class.]
My favorite Web application of all time was a little site called moviecritic.com. It was bare-bones, mostly text, and it allowed you to create a simple login account and rate movies you'd seen, from 1 to 10. The movie database was extensive and pretty frequently updated. I found it addictive to browse through lists of hundreds of randomly selected titles, picking out the ones I'd seen on TV as a kid or caught in the theater the week before, weighing them against each other, tweaking my ratings again and again to capture just how much I liked each one. Then, the payoff came: through collaborative filtering, my preferences would be compared to every other user's and the site would try to predict how much I would like each movie I hadn't yet seen. I could search by genre or by whether it was currently playing in theaters, and the site would give me a list of my top recommendations. I could even plug in a friend's login name and find a movie neither of us had seen but which we would both probably like. If I saw one of their recommended films and hated it, I would go back to the site and rate it accordingly, and their recommendations would shift to take this new nuance of my tastes into account. Simple, elegant, and wonderfully useful for me because I love going into films blind but hate sitting through bad ones.
A few years ago, Macromedia bought the site and replaced it with a notice that they'd be doing something with it real soon. Now, the domain just redirects to Macromedia's home page. Such was the fate of many a cheap-to-maintain, brilliant application with no profit potential during the Internet bubble, with only a few die-hard idealists avoiding the siren song of those dot-com millions that never materialized... long live Craigslist!
But this is not, in fact, a paper about market failures and the need for a robust commons on the Web. Instead, it's a proposal for creating satisfied, responsible economic actors out of ordinary citizens like you and me using only a handful of XML specifications and some RFID tag readers. Wow! Let's find out how!
Capitalism, Alienation, and All That Jazz
Otto von Bismarck's famous adage, that "To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making", can be applied as well to almost any product or service purchased in a capitalist economy: as markets loosen across borders and industries become increasingly interdependent, the odds increase that that apple you purchase from the corner grocery store is putting money into the pockets of people whose business practices would offend your sensibilities about the environment, labor practices, political lobbying, product safety, anticompetitive behavior, investor fraud, religious values, animal welfare, or what have you. Unfortunately, most of these links in the apple supply chain (and the bank that gave the loans to these suppliers, and the other stores with which they have contracts, and the ad agencies they hire to do their marketing, and the company that made the trucks that ship the apples) are invisible to you, so there's very little to clue you in to which of the apples in the bin are tainted with original sin... or rather, which are more tainted than others. What's a responsible capitalist to do? Adam Smith stresses that the system can only work if people vote their moral values with their spending money, but how can we untangle this web of collaboration? Boycotts against specific companies based on specific issues have been used to positive effect before, but companies with savvy PR managers can usually defeat these mini-movements, and besides, who has time to organize, much less enforce, boycotts? Corporate philanthropy is usually a token PR move that cuts a company more ethical slack elsewhere in its operations, and the recent trend of advertising responsible corporate practices like buying fair trade coffee or eschewing sweatshop labor, while a promising sign that some industries are now catering to responsible consumers, probably amounts to little more than this same kind of superficial PR exercise. Starbucks provides its part-time workers with benefits and sells free trade coffee one day a week (making it only 86% exploitative, I guess); on the other hand, it displaces small local businesses that presumably keep money in the community. Or do they? And how much do those small businesses pay their workers? And how many American Apparel stores went up in buildings whose elderly former tenants had to be evicted first? You don't know? Me neither. And even if we did, how would we perform the moral calculus necessary to decide between one cup of coffee and the other? I get so confused about it, I usually end up buying mine from the Yemeni guys on the corner with the 12-year-old working behind the counter on a schoolday. They're immigrants, they could use a break... right?
The answer, of course, is that you do the moral calculus using a moral calculator. And your friends tell you what numbers to plug in. It's like this:
1. Define a bunch of XML schema that delineate corporate power structures, supply chains, how much revenue flows from company A to company B, whether company C is a subsidiary of company D, etc.
2. Define another bunch of XML schema that apply ratings to various companies, industrial processes, or specific products in terms of their various environmental effects (e.g. deforestation, water pollution), labor practices (e.g. paying your first-year associates less than the standard $125k per year, raping and executing uppity workers in your diamond mines), anticompetitive practices (e.g. integrating browsers into OSes, cutting sweetheart government contract deals to rebuild Iraq), and so on. These can get very detailed, with sub-sub-sub-categories more byzantine than the Dewey Decimal System. Go crazy.
3. Define another set of XML schema (you'll be a champ at this by now, O nameless programmer/activist) for your own personal use that delineate who you trust, and how much, and on what issues. So I might trust A.O. Scott at the NY Times quite a bit when it comes to movies, except for high-tech thrillers, which he loves and I hate. Or I might trust The Nation a little bit on affirmative action issues, a lot on death penalty and labor issues, and not at all on environmental issues, in contrast to the Sierra Club, who I only trust on environmental issues. Or I might trust my friend Dan a lot on frisbee-purchasing advice but not on romantic partner advice. Or whatever. Again, knock yourself out with these data structure specifications.
4. Finally, define a set of schema that delineate how much you care about various issues when making a purchase. I might weight living wage considerations with a value of 4, but support for militant Israeli settlers with a -6. Or I might have no particular purchasing concerns except to make sure that the company and its allies don't employ any of those filthy homersexshuls. Whatever floats your boat: it's a free country and a free market, right? Here's where granularity and taxonomy become important: the schema from step (2) define whether my generic Environmental concern covers noise pollution, or whether that becomes a Hamilton Heights Neighborhood Conditions issue, or whether it fits under both.
(Note: Now, half the time when I said "you" in steps 1-4, I meant "some kid or a thousand with some XML experience and some free time". You know, open-source folks. They'll take care of the first four steps and get these schema distributed. A standards board would be nice, but having a few different standards floating around should still be workable for what I have in mind.)
5. Someone will need to populate the web with data in the form of XML docs from step (1). This data exists in various forms in various databases right now; the government (SEC, e.g.) really ought to do most of this work, but others would be happy to step in and take care of it.
6. Next, we need authorities to adopt the schema from step (2) and start posting them. When I say "authorities", I mean consumer groups, journalists, scholars, lobbying groups, churches, foundations, companies, individuals, Bono from U2, or whomever. Anyone who posts a set of XML docs with their ratings is an authority insofar as other people choose to trust what they have to say about a given issue. Which brings me to...
7. Post your own XML docs as detailed in (3) and (4). (And here I mean you the consumer, not you the programmer, although consumers can also be authorities, of course.) You can actually keep these to yourself or make them public, depending on whether you'd like to be an authority and whether you want people to know about your purchase-decision behavior. (Publicizing this data would put you at the mercy of targeted marketing, but you could also use it as a dating service. Think about it.)
8. When you encounter a company or a product in which you would like to invest some of your hard-earned capital (or undeserved filthy lucre, depending on whether you're a Columbia Law School grad or not), just plug the UPC code or the stock ticker into your moral calculator, listen to it churn through the Bayesian network [1] of all these interlinked XML documents, and voila! A moral value for that purchase/investment pops out. Of course, you could also rig it up to do price comparisons or product reviews or whatever else your greedy little capitalist heart desires.
Of course, unless you're shopping online and the vendor is kind enough to supply a machine-readable UPC code, typing in the UPC code isn't convenient. A few people with similar ideas to mine have come up with barcode-scanners hooked into static databases - some European design student put together one such "Corporate Fallout Geiger Counter", as did my friend James Patten up at the MIT Media Lab - but now that stores are moving over to RF tag inventory systems, we've got a much better solution in our hands. Just think: walking down the home appliances aisle at Target, watching the screen of your cellphone/PDA/shopping advisor (running Linux, of course) light up with the names of nearby products and their acceptability according to your self-defined preferences. A consumer paradise! No longer will companies have an incentive to beef up the bottom line at the expense of their moral standing! Market forces will finally work for ethical behavior instead of against it! The reversal of the original sin of capitalism and the alienation of labor! The lion shall lay down with the lamb, and we shall all return to a prelapsarian paradise of free-range eggs and fair-trade coffee prepared by well-compensated workers with health benefits for themselves and their domestic partners!
Open Bugs
1. People don't actually care about any of this stuff, they just want cheaper products. What we have here is a collective action problem. By lowering the barrier to entry into this clique of socially responsible consumers, though, we make more likely a bootstrapping into higher standards for corporate behavior. Still, there's some discouraging evidence out there: I just read a piece on Walmart's union-busting activities that quoted several ex-employees, fired by WM for trying to organize, who still shop there because it's so cheap. Hmm. Is the "responsible consumption" movement destined to remain a middle-class fad? Things look grim.
2. This tool is morally neutral and will allow the religious right (or the gun lobby, or New York Jewish liberals or whatever group personifies all that is wrong with the world in your mind) to coerce companies into supporting their agenda. It's true that minority opinions could be adversely affected by this technology (or is it a social condition?) But the fact is that the groups that often crop up in the objections I've heard (industrial lobbies, religious conservatives) are already well-organized and are able to apply tremendous economic and political pressure on the agents of production. This tool would actually level the playing field, allowing individuals to organize spontaneously and resulting in a market more representative of everyone's values, not just those groups who have multi-million-dollar PACs crafting legislation and organizing boycotts of Disney because of its domestic-partner benefit policies. Could it potentially hurt progressive causes by putting a tool into the hands of a misguided conservative majority? Yes. Freedom isn't free, dude.
3. Whatever else people on this list come up with. Criticize, please.
Footnotes
[1] Bayesian networks are tools that use graph theory, Bayesian probability, and calculus to do magical things like data mining and collaborative filtering.
[Addendum: There's another paper begging to be tacked in to the end here about how influential individuals - the "stars" of the attention economy or the "magical people" of viral marketing - could act as authorities and how this would shake out, but I'm way over the word limit as it is.]
[Acknowledgements: The bar-code scanner idea, as I said, is not mine. The designers I mentioned both conceived it as a static database of products and some undefined moral value attached to each; I came up with the Bayesian network/XML/multiple authorities approach. James Patten's Corporate Fallout Detector is here, and J. Walker Smith of the radio show "Smart City" has a blurb similar to mine here]
My favorite Web application of all time was a little site called moviecritic.com. It was bare-bones, mostly text, and it allowed you to create a simple login account and rate movies you'd seen, from 1 to 10. The movie database was extensive and pretty frequently updated. I found it addictive to browse through lists of hundreds of randomly selected titles, picking out the ones I'd seen on TV as a kid or caught in the theater the week before, weighing them against each other, tweaking my ratings again and again to capture just how much I liked each one. Then, the payoff came: through collaborative filtering, my preferences would be compared to every other user's and the site would try to predict how much I would like each movie I hadn't yet seen. I could search by genre or by whether it was currently playing in theaters, and the site would give me a list of my top recommendations. I could even plug in a friend's login name and find a movie neither of us had seen but which we would both probably like. If I saw one of their recommended films and hated it, I would go back to the site and rate it accordingly, and their recommendations would shift to take this new nuance of my tastes into account. Simple, elegant, and wonderfully useful for me because I love going into films blind but hate sitting through bad ones.
A few years ago, Macromedia bought the site and replaced it with a notice that they'd be doing something with it real soon. Now, the domain just redirects to Macromedia's home page. Such was the fate of many a cheap-to-maintain, brilliant application with no profit potential during the Internet bubble, with only a few die-hard idealists avoiding the siren song of those dot-com millions that never materialized... long live Craigslist!
But this is not, in fact, a paper about market failures and the need for a robust commons on the Web. Instead, it's a proposal for creating satisfied, responsible economic actors out of ordinary citizens like you and me using only a handful of XML specifications and some RFID tag readers. Wow! Let's find out how!
Capitalism, Alienation, and All That Jazz
Otto von Bismarck's famous adage, that "To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making", can be applied as well to almost any product or service purchased in a capitalist economy: as markets loosen across borders and industries become increasingly interdependent, the odds increase that that apple you purchase from the corner grocery store is putting money into the pockets of people whose business practices would offend your sensibilities about the environment, labor practices, political lobbying, product safety, anticompetitive behavior, investor fraud, religious values, animal welfare, or what have you. Unfortunately, most of these links in the apple supply chain (and the bank that gave the loans to these suppliers, and the other stores with which they have contracts, and the ad agencies they hire to do their marketing, and the company that made the trucks that ship the apples) are invisible to you, so there's very little to clue you in to which of the apples in the bin are tainted with original sin... or rather, which are more tainted than others. What's a responsible capitalist to do? Adam Smith stresses that the system can only work if people vote their moral values with their spending money, but how can we untangle this web of collaboration? Boycotts against specific companies based on specific issues have been used to positive effect before, but companies with savvy PR managers can usually defeat these mini-movements, and besides, who has time to organize, much less enforce, boycotts? Corporate philanthropy is usually a token PR move that cuts a company more ethical slack elsewhere in its operations, and the recent trend of advertising responsible corporate practices like buying fair trade coffee or eschewing sweatshop labor, while a promising sign that some industries are now catering to responsible consumers, probably amounts to little more than this same kind of superficial PR exercise. Starbucks provides its part-time workers with benefits and sells free trade coffee one day a week (making it only 86% exploitative, I guess); on the other hand, it displaces small local businesses that presumably keep money in the community. Or do they? And how much do those small businesses pay their workers? And how many American Apparel stores went up in buildings whose elderly former tenants had to be evicted first? You don't know? Me neither. And even if we did, how would we perform the moral calculus necessary to decide between one cup of coffee and the other? I get so confused about it, I usually end up buying mine from the Yemeni guys on the corner with the 12-year-old working behind the counter on a schoolday. They're immigrants, they could use a break... right?
The answer, of course, is that you do the moral calculus using a moral calculator. And your friends tell you what numbers to plug in. It's like this:
1. Define a bunch of XML schema that delineate corporate power structures, supply chains, how much revenue flows from company A to company B, whether company C is a subsidiary of company D, etc.
2. Define another bunch of XML schema that apply ratings to various companies, industrial processes, or specific products in terms of their various environmental effects (e.g. deforestation, water pollution), labor practices (e.g. paying your first-year associates less than the standard $125k per year, raping and executing uppity workers in your diamond mines), anticompetitive practices (e.g. integrating browsers into OSes, cutting sweetheart government contract deals to rebuild Iraq), and so on. These can get very detailed, with sub-sub-sub-categories more byzantine than the Dewey Decimal System. Go crazy.
3. Define another set of XML schema (you'll be a champ at this by now, O nameless programmer/activist) for your own personal use that delineate who you trust, and how much, and on what issues. So I might trust A.O. Scott at the NY Times quite a bit when it comes to movies, except for high-tech thrillers, which he loves and I hate. Or I might trust The Nation a little bit on affirmative action issues, a lot on death penalty and labor issues, and not at all on environmental issues, in contrast to the Sierra Club, who I only trust on environmental issues. Or I might trust my friend Dan a lot on frisbee-purchasing advice but not on romantic partner advice. Or whatever. Again, knock yourself out with these data structure specifications.
4. Finally, define a set of schema that delineate how much you care about various issues when making a purchase. I might weight living wage considerations with a value of 4, but support for militant Israeli settlers with a -6. Or I might have no particular purchasing concerns except to make sure that the company and its allies don't employ any of those filthy homersexshuls. Whatever floats your boat: it's a free country and a free market, right? Here's where granularity and taxonomy become important: the schema from step (2) define whether my generic Environmental concern covers noise pollution, or whether that becomes a Hamilton Heights Neighborhood Conditions issue, or whether it fits under both.
(Note: Now, half the time when I said "you" in steps 1-4, I meant "some kid or a thousand with some XML experience and some free time". You know, open-source folks. They'll take care of the first four steps and get these schema distributed. A standards board would be nice, but having a few different standards floating around should still be workable for what I have in mind.)
5. Someone will need to populate the web with data in the form of XML docs from step (1). This data exists in various forms in various databases right now; the government (SEC, e.g.) really ought to do most of this work, but others would be happy to step in and take care of it.
6. Next, we need authorities to adopt the schema from step (2) and start posting them. When I say "authorities", I mean consumer groups, journalists, scholars, lobbying groups, churches, foundations, companies, individuals, Bono from U2, or whomever. Anyone who posts a set of XML docs with their ratings is an authority insofar as other people choose to trust what they have to say about a given issue. Which brings me to...
7. Post your own XML docs as detailed in (3) and (4). (And here I mean you the consumer, not you the programmer, although consumers can also be authorities, of course.) You can actually keep these to yourself or make them public, depending on whether you'd like to be an authority and whether you want people to know about your purchase-decision behavior. (Publicizing this data would put you at the mercy of targeted marketing, but you could also use it as a dating service. Think about it.)
8. When you encounter a company or a product in which you would like to invest some of your hard-earned capital (or undeserved filthy lucre, depending on whether you're a Columbia Law School grad or not), just plug the UPC code or the stock ticker into your moral calculator, listen to it churn through the Bayesian network [1] of all these interlinked XML documents, and voila! A moral value for that purchase/investment pops out. Of course, you could also rig it up to do price comparisons or product reviews or whatever else your greedy little capitalist heart desires.
Of course, unless you're shopping online and the vendor is kind enough to supply a machine-readable UPC code, typing in the UPC code isn't convenient. A few people with similar ideas to mine have come up with barcode-scanners hooked into static databases - some European design student put together one such "Corporate Fallout Geiger Counter", as did my friend James Patten up at the MIT Media Lab - but now that stores are moving over to RF tag inventory systems, we've got a much better solution in our hands. Just think: walking down the home appliances aisle at Target, watching the screen of your cellphone/PDA/shopping advisor (running Linux, of course) light up with the names of nearby products and their acceptability according to your self-defined preferences. A consumer paradise! No longer will companies have an incentive to beef up the bottom line at the expense of their moral standing! Market forces will finally work for ethical behavior instead of against it! The reversal of the original sin of capitalism and the alienation of labor! The lion shall lay down with the lamb, and we shall all return to a prelapsarian paradise of free-range eggs and fair-trade coffee prepared by well-compensated workers with health benefits for themselves and their domestic partners!
Open Bugs
1. People don't actually care about any of this stuff, they just want cheaper products. What we have here is a collective action problem. By lowering the barrier to entry into this clique of socially responsible consumers, though, we make more likely a bootstrapping into higher standards for corporate behavior. Still, there's some discouraging evidence out there: I just read a piece on Walmart's union-busting activities that quoted several ex-employees, fired by WM for trying to organize, who still shop there because it's so cheap. Hmm. Is the "responsible consumption" movement destined to remain a middle-class fad? Things look grim.
2. This tool is morally neutral and will allow the religious right (or the gun lobby, or New York Jewish liberals or whatever group personifies all that is wrong with the world in your mind) to coerce companies into supporting their agenda. It's true that minority opinions could be adversely affected by this technology (or is it a social condition?) But the fact is that the groups that often crop up in the objections I've heard (industrial lobbies, religious conservatives) are already well-organized and are able to apply tremendous economic and political pressure on the agents of production. This tool would actually level the playing field, allowing individuals to organize spontaneously and resulting in a market more representative of everyone's values, not just those groups who have multi-million-dollar PACs crafting legislation and organizing boycotts of Disney because of its domestic-partner benefit policies. Could it potentially hurt progressive causes by putting a tool into the hands of a misguided conservative majority? Yes. Freedom isn't free, dude.
3. Whatever else people on this list come up with. Criticize, please.
Footnotes
[1] Bayesian networks are tools that use graph theory, Bayesian probability, and calculus to do magical things like data mining and collaborative filtering.
[Addendum: There's another paper begging to be tacked in to the end here about how influential individuals - the "stars" of the attention economy or the "magical people" of viral marketing - could act as authorities and how this would shake out, but I'm way over the word limit as it is.]
[Acknowledgements: The bar-code scanner idea, as I said, is not mine. The designers I mentioned both conceived it as a static database of products and some undefined moral value attached to each; I came up with the Bayesian network/XML/multiple authorities approach. James Patten's Corporate Fallout Detector is here, and J. Walker Smith of the radio show "Smart City" has a blurb similar to mine here]
