Adventures in Egotism

NYTimes has a long article on society 2.0 (if I may coin a 2.0-ism) which is at least worth skimming. The last page, including the following two paragraphs, has the most insight.

I wonder when digital identity will become so pervasive as to transform our idea of the self à la psychology, the ego à la Buddhism and the soul à la Abrahamic religions.

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you. I had a student who posted that she was downloading some Pearl Jam, and someone wrote on her wall, ‘Oh, right, ha-ha — I know you, and you’re not into that.’ ” She laughed. “You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”

Increasingly, who you are is what you’ve done.  Not just your idea of it, or anyone else’s idea, or the idea of a group, but the ever-growing corpus of data about the life you’re living.  Not only is there always more data about you but there are increasingly powerful and handy tools to analyze it.  This week Google added face recognition (not just detection, recognition) to Picasa Web.  There was a similar face detection web site in early 2006, but now it’s just another easy-to-use feature in a popular image management application.

I’m giving up hope that technology or policy will do anything to abate this torrent of data about us rushing out into the public eye.  Getting off the grid is not an option for most people, especially me.  I expect that it’s mostly culture that will adapt.  Knowing everything about everyone is how things were for thousands of years before the industrial age.  I appreciated the observation in the article that anonymity may just be a phase of the 20th century, like the automobile.  In tribes, everyone sees and hears everything, first or secondhand.  Some might say that it’s the same online today, except now there’s nowhere to escape too because the eyes are global.  From what I know of Native American tribes, you didn’t have anywhere to escape to either.  If you left your tribe, no other tribe would accept you.  Or at least others would always be suspicious of you.  Maybe in the future we’ll have identity asylums.  E.g. for people who’ve experienced psychological trauma or damage to their frontal cortex.  (e.g. by a tamping rod)

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be vigilant about privacy.  Just that relationships will adapt.  It’s the political order that I’m really worried about.

While I was in Seattle I got a jury summons by mail here in Pittsburgh.  It’s my first summons in Pittsburgh.  I’ve been summoned before in other towns, but each time I’ve called the night before, my number didn’t come up.

Well this time it did. 

I got up all early and bused down to the City County Building.  That’s for civil trials.  The courthouse next door is for criminal trials.

It was a pleasant experience.  A nice lady named Angel guided us around and through the process.  Judge James was very charismatic and friendly.  I looked forward to participating.

But they needed a commitment of up to a few weeks.  And I have a journal article due in two weeks, not to mention 3 courses.  So they put me in the “have time conflicts” box and eventually brought me up to reschedule.  The lady had the calendars printed out for each area school.  I told her CMU and she referred to the row highlighting the end of the semester.  “October 13?”  “Did you say October?”  “Yes, that’s the end of your semester?”  “No, I think that’s the end of the minis.  Does it say ‘mini’?”  “Yeah…”  “Those are half-semester courses.  The semester ends in December.”  “I wish they’d all get their academic terminology in common.”

Then she said I could go.  “Could I have done this online?”  “Yes, sure.  Or by phone.”  So… if you have a commitment, call instead and save yourself the trip.  I would have called but I misunderstood the stated “one day / one trial” policy on the mailing.  I thought that meant I was in some pool for one-day trials and I figured today would be as good a day as any.

If I had known, I would have just gone online to postpone.  In the end though, it was an interesting experience.  I love seeing the full cross-section of the city.  Licensed voters and drivers, at least.  (The judge said they’re getting other sources of names too and intend to get everyone in.)  You don’t get to see full cross-sections much in Pittsburgh.  That’s something I still miss about the BART in the Bay Area, you’d see both crack heads and people on their way to the opera.  I got to rub elbows with a slice of Pittsburgh I don’t normally get to.  Though there was a CMU prof there I recognized.  I wonder if one CMU student and one CMU faculty there today do in fact reflect the local demographics?

Here’s a piece of advice: find your credit card in your wallet, call the 800 number on the back, press whatever you need to get a human, and tell them to never send you balance transfer checks without your request.

Mail went missing recently in my apartment building and today I received my credit card statement with a balance transfer check charge for $2000 and another for $2500. I called Citibank to challenge the charges and they said no problem. No, I won’t be responsible for the charges, but I will have to:

• cut up my existing credit card
• wait for my new card in the mail
• fill out an enclose affidavit identifying which charges weren’t mine
• send it back
• contact everyone who charges my credit card automatically (phone company, etc.) to give them the new credit card information
• and in my particular case, wait 3 weeks for any of this to happen since I am relocated for the summer and they will only send to my permanent address

All in all, this isn’t horrible. But it could all have been avoided if Citibank didn’t send me those balance transfer checks. I never requested them. Every time I received them in my mail I would be frustrated that I now had the burden of disposing of them safely. I wish I had taken the time to tell them to never send them again. Now I have.

You might want to do the same. And if you feel strongly about it, contact the FTC and ask that credit card companies not be allowed to increase your risk of theft by sending you balance transfer checks without your consent.

UPDATE: When I called my company weeks later to confirm I would not be receiving checks, the agent said I had only been removed from the “promotions” mailing list. So I requested again to not receive checks. She said I would not anymore. I’ll see. Incidentally, they also call them “convenience checks”. They are indeed very convenient for thieves. I got another one in the mail today and it says in large bold lettering on the envelope: “Part check. Part credit card. Very convenient.” How more obviously exploitable could it be?

White people like many things. One of the main things they like is to be confronted with their “whiteness”. They want to atone for the sin of being white. Note that “being white” does not include shopping at Wal-Mart or following evangelicalism. “Being white” means acting in the manner of those white people who have power and interest in exploring their role in society. All of their attempts to better themselves or society though are in order to feel moral superiority or “less white”. White people who care about the pain of animals may choose not to eat them, but ultimately this is so they can feel as though they are helping the environment AND it gives them a sweet way to feel superior to others. White people who are excited by learning about other cultures do it in order that you know how special and unique they are.

Remember that white people are not poor people. White people are those with the privileges of computers and free time that they can spend it on a web site mocking them and providing ad revenue to the person generating generalizations of them.

Remember also that people “of color” (white people do not have a color—really they are so empty as to be translucent) do not exhibit the attributes above. Black people do not like coffee, Apple products, to study abroad, bicycles, or recycling. Black, yellow, red, brown, and purple people who do like any of the aforementioned things are not acting their color or being true to their cultures.

If you see a non-white person at Whole Foods, they are probably trying to be white.

p.s. white people also love the socially pacifying power of conspicuous irony

I just got a few e-mails from the neuroling mailing list. I was once an aspiring neurolinguist. Now I study open development of educational resources at CMU’s HCII.

So I’ve unsubscribed to the neuroling mailing list. It’s liberating to let go of dreams, to pursue new ones.

University Fences In a Berkeley Protest, and a New One Arises - New York Times

In Berkeley, Calif., a protest in the trees outside Memorial Stadium at the University of California has been business, and Berkeley, as usual.

This was my problem last night while shopping for a new monitor. I ultimately went with the Dell 2407WFP-HC - over the Samsung 245BW. (So I could connect a Wii, which I still long for.)

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

This is a map from National Geographic’s February Issue.

The original post at The Creativity Exchange is worth visiting for the entertaining and thought-provoking comment thread.

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man to beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

- W.H. Auden

Economist.com - Cities Guide
While helping the homeless has become a cause célèbre, one group managed to turn it into a controversial act. For the past few years Solidarity of the French, a far-right group, has run a soup kitchen offering pork soup to Paris’s homeless. Critics complain that the organisation chose pork as the main ingredient in order to exclude observant Jews and Muslims, whose dietary restrictions preclude eating pig. On its website, the group stated it would only serve full meals to those who first accepted the soup. The city’s police chief to suspend the soup kitchen’s operation on December 28th. An administrative tribunal reversed the decision, so Mr Delanoë urged France’s highest court, the Conseil d’Etat, to weigh in. In January the court banned Solidarity of the French from serving meals.