Friday, March 10, 2006
Kathy's World
One of the consequences of having a not uncommon name is that you sometimes read about things that happened to you that you don't remember. Last summer, I ran a vanity search on Technorati and came across a mention of my name on something called "Kathy's World". Kathy's World, it turns out, is the Microsoft-owned "MSN Spaces" blog of a 16-year-old girl in Clay Center, Kansas named Kathy Beichter. It's pink and full of exclamation points. Several of these exclamation points appear in a statement she published in June 2005:
In his short story "Funes the Memorious", Jorge Luis Borges describes the life of a man who, paralyzed in an accident, finds himself able to perceive and recall every detail of the world around him. Funes can instantly catalog the innumerable leaves on a branch outside of his bedroom window, giving each a unique name and adding them to the list of every leaf he has ever seen in his life. He spends his days playing with his data, optimizing his ability to refer to unique objects and recreating entire days of sensation from his life. But ultimately, the narrator concludes, Funes's uncanny ability is limiting:
"With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence."
Borges's characterization of Funes is, of course, a prophecy of the database age. The horror stories of false arrests and identity theft documented by Robert O'Harrow testify to the danger of over-reliance on faithful, but stupid, memory. Mistaken identity is a real problem in our database nation, resulting every year in untold numbers of loans denied by banks, job applications rejected by employers, and kneecaps broken by protective older brothers.
But carelessness is not the only dangerous consequence of the persistence of social memory -- what happens when Kathy meets Funes? To what extent do the blogosphere and the Google cache reproduce in McLuhan's "global village" all the claustrophobia and cultural conservatism of real-world villages -- what Marx called " the idiocy of rural life"? I worry about Kathy Beichter, age 25, looking for her first job out of grad school and being passed over for someone more "responsible". Or of Kathy Beichter, age 35, explaining her youthful indiscretions to her children after their classmates come across her name in a blog archive online. Or of Judge Kathy Beichter, age 50, being asked to square her stance on abortion with her own activities as a teenager. Will Kathy ever be able to leave the suffocating confines of Clay Center? Is there no escape from Kathy's World?
And if Kathy can't escape, then what about that poor, maligned horn dog Matt Norwood?
The modern American right of privacy is an invention of two wealthy urbanites, Samuel Warren and Lewis Brandeis. But the "right to be let alone" was as aspirational in 1890 as the right to self-government in 1776 or the right to equal protection of the laws in 1866: it had been experienced by an elect few for a short period, and they had found it so appealing that they demanded its codification. But America had always been a nation of rural farmers, for whom privacy would always be a matter of physical logistics, not legal protections. Privacy in a small town comes from opaque walls and tall fences, and usually not even then. Small towns have long memories and fast communication networks. Databases and computer networks have simply brought the city back in line with the village, ending the century of social conditions that made Brandeis's privacy possible.
Can nothing be done? Is Scott McNealy right? Do we truly "have no privacy"? Surely this is hyperbole. We should be able to restrain our own government in its compulsive information-gathering. We may be able to discourage private corporations from doing the same. But if private individuals have MovableType, Google, and Freenet at their disposal, our ability to protect the citizenry from invasions of their privacy will run up against the same hard limits as our legislature's efforts to protect the music industry from its customers. People listen to each other's music, and people gossip. And that gossip, once published, will persist somewhere where it can be found, in spite of the law's efforts to send it down the memory hole.
What does this mean for democracy? I suspect that McLuhan may have something useful to tell us about the "retribalization" of mankind in the age of "electric media". His implication of radio technology in the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust is troublingly vindicated by the same technology's role in the Rwandan genocide. Surveillance cameras enforce social caste systems in the UK and, increasingly, the US. But the impact of online gossip - of the indiscrete friend with a blog - has yet to reveal its form, except, perhaps, among teenagers, where blog penetration is high enough to expose the high-school gossip network to the rest of the world. Perhaps new social norms of discretion and blogger ethics will emerge and shield the next generation from the crushing social pressures of adolescence after they grow up. But I'm concerned that we may all find ourselves living in Kathy's World some day soon.
[This is the first paper I wrote for Eben Moglen's Computers, Privacy, and the Constitution class.]
And...Then....It...Happened!!!! He kissed me!!! Matt Norwood kissed me! With tongue and everything!My immediate reaction to this surprising piece of news was defensive: "Never met the girl, your honor." But upon delving deeper into Kathy's World - reading comments from Kathy's friends characterizing my doppelganger as "nice and cool but hes a horn dog u want a nicer, guy" and learning about the pregnancy scare that followed several weeks after that fateful kiss (with tongue and everything) - I found myself deeply disturbed by the privacy implications of Kathy's blogging habits. I found some of my deep-seated convictions -- that the kids are okay, that information wants to be free -- giving way to a determination never to allow my daughters unmonitored access to the Internet. Or to allow them to learn to read. Or to venture outside unveiled.
In his short story "Funes the Memorious", Jorge Luis Borges describes the life of a man who, paralyzed in an accident, finds himself able to perceive and recall every detail of the world around him. Funes can instantly catalog the innumerable leaves on a branch outside of his bedroom window, giving each a unique name and adding them to the list of every leaf he has ever seen in his life. He spends his days playing with his data, optimizing his ability to refer to unique objects and recreating entire days of sensation from his life. But ultimately, the narrator concludes, Funes's uncanny ability is limiting:
"With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence."
Borges's characterization of Funes is, of course, a prophecy of the database age. The horror stories of false arrests and identity theft documented by Robert O'Harrow testify to the danger of over-reliance on faithful, but stupid, memory. Mistaken identity is a real problem in our database nation, resulting every year in untold numbers of loans denied by banks, job applications rejected by employers, and kneecaps broken by protective older brothers.
But carelessness is not the only dangerous consequence of the persistence of social memory -- what happens when Kathy meets Funes? To what extent do the blogosphere and the Google cache reproduce in McLuhan's "global village" all the claustrophobia and cultural conservatism of real-world villages -- what Marx called " the idiocy of rural life"? I worry about Kathy Beichter, age 25, looking for her first job out of grad school and being passed over for someone more "responsible". Or of Kathy Beichter, age 35, explaining her youthful indiscretions to her children after their classmates come across her name in a blog archive online. Or of Judge Kathy Beichter, age 50, being asked to square her stance on abortion with her own activities as a teenager. Will Kathy ever be able to leave the suffocating confines of Clay Center? Is there no escape from Kathy's World?
And if Kathy can't escape, then what about that poor, maligned horn dog Matt Norwood?
The modern American right of privacy is an invention of two wealthy urbanites, Samuel Warren and Lewis Brandeis. But the "right to be let alone" was as aspirational in 1890 as the right to self-government in 1776 or the right to equal protection of the laws in 1866: it had been experienced by an elect few for a short period, and they had found it so appealing that they demanded its codification. But America had always been a nation of rural farmers, for whom privacy would always be a matter of physical logistics, not legal protections. Privacy in a small town comes from opaque walls and tall fences, and usually not even then. Small towns have long memories and fast communication networks. Databases and computer networks have simply brought the city back in line with the village, ending the century of social conditions that made Brandeis's privacy possible.
Can nothing be done? Is Scott McNealy right? Do we truly "have no privacy"? Surely this is hyperbole. We should be able to restrain our own government in its compulsive information-gathering. We may be able to discourage private corporations from doing the same. But if private individuals have MovableType, Google, and Freenet at their disposal, our ability to protect the citizenry from invasions of their privacy will run up against the same hard limits as our legislature's efforts to protect the music industry from its customers. People listen to each other's music, and people gossip. And that gossip, once published, will persist somewhere where it can be found, in spite of the law's efforts to send it down the memory hole.
What does this mean for democracy? I suspect that McLuhan may have something useful to tell us about the "retribalization" of mankind in the age of "electric media". His implication of radio technology in the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust is troublingly vindicated by the same technology's role in the Rwandan genocide. Surveillance cameras enforce social caste systems in the UK and, increasingly, the US. But the impact of online gossip - of the indiscrete friend with a blog - has yet to reveal its form, except, perhaps, among teenagers, where blog penetration is high enough to expose the high-school gossip network to the rest of the world. Perhaps new social norms of discretion and blogger ethics will emerge and shield the next generation from the crushing social pressures of adolescence after they grow up. But I'm concerned that we may all find ourselves living in Kathy's World some day soon.
[This is the first paper I wrote for Eben Moglen's Computers, Privacy, and the Constitution class.]
