Some Carr-inspired questions

This post is really a bunch of mini-comments inspired by the second half of Carr’s book, designed more to stimulate discussion than provide answers.

An Inevitable Monopoly?

I’d be interested in hearing more from the class about the form utility computing will or might take. One of the assumptions in much of last week’s discussion is that there will be giant centralized data centers like Google’s Dalles facility (see, for example, Ed’s discussion about the dangers of having a target-rich environment for hackers), but the example of the CERN grid on p 117 and botnets on p 174 might complicate the assumption. It was also nice to see the acknowledgment of the hybrid approach by Carr. Could a decentralized form of utility computing deflect some of the concerns that it will be a natural monopoly?

Out with the Old?

Going along with the new forms of online business, we, like Carr, should perhaps be concerned about what happens to the old line firms. Newspapers are a particularly good example (see p 134, the later chapter on “The Great Unbundling,” and Jim’s post). First of all, they’ve had to unbundle, since certain sections, notably classified ads, are displaced by free online alternatives (Craigslist, anyone? Or even more targeted versions, like the lawannounce listserv). The news coverage is also in jeopardy as revenues continue their freefall. For some further discussion on the difficulties facing print newspapers, scan the results of this Google search. The larger question though is should we care? Is the New York Times a dinosaur that should either evolve or perish, or is society losing something valuable if all our news is online and generated through “lean” providers like bloggers? This was touched on briefly in previous discussions, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover. And since we are in law school, I suppose there should be a legal question too. One is how antitrust law should operate to prop up traditional firms, if at all, by defining the market broadly to allow for monopolization of print newspapers within geographic areas. This general issue, not just the antitrust component, is perhaps analogous to the discussion in the first week. If the market doesn’t support something, why get in the way? There is inevitably a paternalistic element in any proposal for regulation or public subsidies of an undesirable good. But the increase in computing efficiency does go beyond newspapers to pressure on wages generally (see p 145-47). Does this justify intervention? What kind and to what degree? This is obviously a huge question, and given the current political season and economic forecast, one of significant interest.

Spam!

  My favorite chapter of the book was “Fighting the Net.” Not because it is the most persuasive, but because it raises such ominous concerns that it makes for good reading. But the chapter also highlights important flaws in the computing as electricity analogy. While it is true that both are amoral in their ubiquity, consumers of electricity have generally had a reasonable maximum demand so that the overall supply is not in danger (though see California and its rolling blackouts). Not so for computing, or at least the maximum is much, much higher. For example, more computing power invested in spam probably equals more revenue because the marginal cost of spam is roughly equal to zero (see p 175). Thus there is really no upper bound on computing demand, especially if the computing power is coming from a decentralized network so that the “botnet masters” never have to internalize the cost of that power. And of course Carr notes that computing is still dependent on electricity, so what happens when demand for the former outstrips the supply of the latter (p 178)? 

Indelible Prints 

This is particularly salient since Judge Kozinski just gave a talk about it last week, but to what extent do or should we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our online activities? We are a long way from Katz and phone booths to an age of Blackberries, emails, Google searches, and text messages. Carr is starkly pessimistic in “A Spider’s Web,” and I think he might be right. What interests me more is how should we respond? We’re not going to shut down the internet. So what should the legal system do, if anything? Or is the onus on individuals to avoid “public mentions” (p 189) that seem innocuous but in reality can be connected rather easily? I completely agree with Sarah that the way Ms. Arnold was “discovered” is “chilling.” But is it “chilling” in the sense that the ability to meaningfully connect these data points would have a chilling effect on internet users if widely known? It strikes me that this is more than just an education problem in which people don’t know how much their anonymity is at risk, since even after reading this book, my own internet behavior is unchanged. In fact, most people’s internet behavior is probably quite resilient in the face of privacy concerns. Does that mean that those privacy concerns are unimportant relative to the benefits of my typical internet behavior, or is something else at work? 

Where’d I put my keys? Ask Google 

The final chapter is so forward looking and speculative that it generates lots of good material for class discussion. One issue I found especially salient and less hypothetical is the outsourcing of our own memory (see p 225). For another take, see here. Who needs to store trivia when Google is always a click away? Indeed, much of my social and personal data is already online (though not widely published), whether in my email address book, Google calendar, or on Facebook. Of course, this is not exactly novel, since people have kept physical calendars and address books for a long time. But the scale and ease with which this data can be stored digitally, combined with the rapid access to information, makes human factual recall seemingly less crucial. Though, as Carr notes, what happens when the grid goes down? Will we feel like we do when the power goes out, angered and annoyed and bored? The tragicomic Blackberry outage a few months ago might be just a preview.

There might even be an interesting debate about education policy in this concept of outsourced memory, since traditional testing often requires memorization and regurgitation of material. What was once a common complaint about early mathematics / “hard” science instruction—why do we have to figure out this calculation by hand when we can just plug it into a calculator?—now seems relevant, though not necessarily valid, to all sorts of fields.

Comments

[Mario Velez]

The question of whether the lack of online anonymity, if known to the public at large, would change internet behavior is extremely important. I am fairly confident that it would. Ms. Arnold’s embarrassment at being discovered is evidence that her next search will bear in mind that someone is looking over her shoulder, effectively discouraging from doing any exploratory searches on unconventional topics she may want to learn about it. People will restrict themselves to more “acceptable” searches than they otherwise might have under an assurance of anonymity.

Lack of privacy over the internet subverts the individual’s personal life to the business adage fortune 500 companies often tell their employees: “Don’t say or do anything you wouldn’t want published in the front page of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.” Similarly, without online anonymity, people will domesticate their behavior to situations where they feel comfortable were such behavior made public. This is more likely to lead to a world where we do in fact become automatons, wary of exploring new areas because of fear that such exploration can be made public. The tragedy for the individual is that it is precisely via these explorations where the individual finds what he likes and doesn’t like and in the process gains an identity of who he really is.

There are two other major implications (related) to a world with no online privacy:

1) It inhibits our autonomy.
Part of what makes us individuals is the control to make decisions without others (or at least people we don’t trust) knowing about those decisions. Losing ability to tell people about our online activity, which may reflect more about who we are than other activities, threatens our autonomy in a significant way.

2)Danger to Democracy
Part of what traditionally distinguished democracies from authoritarian states was that the latter amassed as much information as possible about people’s political, social, and religious views without much regard or distinction between an individual’s private or public life. Authoritarian states want to know what their citizens do and exactly how they behave in order to facilitate the control and power of the state. Yet current technology allows democratic societies to amass more information than any authoritarian state ever could. What will differentiate democracies from authoritarian states that use technology to suppress freedoms is that democracies will prevent information from identifying individuals in ways that such an individual might not want the information divulged. As the online world continues to become more of our “real” world, protecting online privacy becomes essential to a functioning democratic system. The commercial benefits of amassing information can still be obtained while protecting privacy, though some modifications will have to be made.

[Nathan Richardson]

I'd like to note that I found the fact that comparative advantage in trivial knowledge might be threatened by wetware memory particularly chilling.

More seriously, I was struck not just by your individual points, but by the world they present when taken together - the world Carr predicts in the second half of his book. I could make a lot of arguments about how things might not be as bad as he predicts (and others have done so already in other posts). It seems certain, however, that a lot of people will find a lot of things they don't like in a "World Wide Computer" society - even if social welfare is greater in that society. Carr seems to say that opt-out for these people will be impossible - that we would feel "lobotomized" if we disconnect from the net. I guess I want to fight against that, and say we've been through this before. The Industrial Revolution gave us Dickensian squalor and wrenching social changes, but it also gave us a counter-movement. The Luddites were part of that, but so were Goethe, Byron, Thoreau, Muir, etc. If Carr's grim predictions come to pass, there will be a new counter-movement. It might occasionally be destructive, but it might also draw attention to the beauty of humanity.

[Dan Jones]

Concern over your trivia contest title motivated my entire post, Nathan! We can't have cybernetically enhanced Richard Epsteins running around winning these things.

I actually agree with you (and a lot of the other posters) that Carr is too pessimistic about the "World Wide Computer" society. I just wanted to ask a lot of provocative questions in my post. The idea being to generate enough comments to attract "prefab homes" and other distinguished visitors. So far I've failed in my efforts.