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Kitten pictures forthcoming once uploaded. Older cat is still mostly hiding under the bed.
Meg Leta Jones, Ctrl + Z: The Right to Be Forgotten: Free review copy. I was hoping for a more straightforward philosophical defense of the right to be forgotten—to remove once-public information from public view, or at least to make it harder to find—but the book was not quite that. A lot of summaries of others’ work/theories. Jones does argue for some limited right to be forgotten, because too much focus on the past prevents people from moving forward. She bases her claims in part on the idea that forgiving (and forgetting) is healthy for people (“those who forgive exhibit greater empathy, understanding, tolerance, agreeableness, and insight”), which I find … dubious, in part because of correlation/causation issues, and in part because I want to know whether the wrongdoer to be forgiven has accepted responsibility for the harm caused. Jones does note that forgiveness can itself be unjust, especially when offered by a third party, but I think that makes the right to be forgotten troubling, because that’s often exactly what it involves—Google deciding (at the prodding of European authorities) when the person whose information is at issue has suffered enough.
Jones compares American and European attitudes and concludes that the American constitutional tradition precludes an aggressive right to be forgotten, while the European tradition enables it. The US, with its extreme definitions of newsworthiness and free speech trumping most privacy claims, is now a land of choices rather than second chances. By contrast, Europe is trying harder to provide people with second chances. But not without trouble: Jones points out that in “[a]ttempting to knock Google down a few pegs, the CJEU instead further empowered the search giant by essentially putting the right to be forgotten in the company’s hands” by requiring Google to decide whether there was enough public interest to preserve information rather than by requiring right to be forgotten requests to be approved by data protection agencies in the relevant countries, who would do the balancing under their own national principles. I wasn’t aware that, under Swiss law, it’s possible to suppress information about criminal convictions even if they’re newsworthy if significant rehabilitation efforts have been made—so the courts have prevented publications about white-collar crimes, bank robberies, and even a 1980 documentary about a man sentenced to death in 1939. In 2003, meanwhile, Sweden prosecuted a citizen for “posting information about her work colleagues on her personal webpage without obtaining their consent.” And Europe wants the right to be forgotten to apply to all Google sites, so that the results will disappear for everyone (or at least will disappear even if a European uses .com).
Jones contends that the more common digital information problem is one of easy decay/disappearance, and thus we should think of digital information holistically, conceiving of the question as one of proper stewardship. “[T]he internet is a lazy historian with no principled practices of preserving or protecting knowledge.” She would distinguish data, especially data used to track and market to us, from content we create, and make it easier for us to delete the former. The right to be forgotten should be part of information stewardship, in her view, because cultural change allowing our stupidities to be forgiven despite their continuing availability won’t happen fast enough (“Adults see questionable content not as the testing ground of youths that they may have learned and grown from but as negative and stable characteristics of their personalities.”), and because humans have cognitive biases that lead them to be unable to properly discount negative information, even when it’s outdated. We need to be able to draw lines around our personas to create the “face” which is necessary for people to survive among other people. One possibility is a right of reply-like scheme where we would get to provide “context” to information about us that is too old or unrepresentative, or—particularly in the US—laws precluding the use of certain information in certain ways, such as old bankruptcies or juvenile criminal records. Ultimately, she thinks that “coding forgiveness” could be automated after there’s enough experience implementing a right to be forgotten (which seems literally fantastic to me; this isn’t like identifying full, unaltered copies of movies, and even that automation works only part of the time). I did like the concept of “good enough” privacy—information doesn’t have to be completely unfindable to be protective of a person’s privacy.
James M. McPherson, Crossroads to Freedom: History of the events leading up to Antietam and then Antietam itself in the US Civil War. Reading this led me to discover that, because humanity is a rich tapestry, there is at least one person who has studied the Civil War and not wanted to reach through time to slap George McClellan upside the head. That person, however, is not McPherson, who makes his opinion of McClellan’s dithering quite clear. Very gruesome descriptions of battlefields.
Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: British Loyalists who left the new United States after the American Revolution went on a diaspora unique in that it was internal to the Empire, and thus they remained subjects of the same crown even as they endured sometimes multiple dislocations. They played important roles in Canada and Sierra Leone, and also became involved in other British colonies, from the Carribean to India. As loyal Americans, they brought some American attitudes with them, mostly towards race (there were a lot of enslavers, as well as a lot of free and freed blacks) and political participation (see previous parenthetical: whites thought all white men should have political rights, while the blacks thought that they too were loyal subjects of Empire and deserved political rights). Jasanoff argues that the process of resettling and compensating some of the loyalists was part of the formulation of a new conception of the British Empire largely controlling nonwhite populations and recognizing certain limited obligations of crown to subject.
Ian Buruma, Year Zero: 1945, the year World War II ended (or did it?). Buruma tells the story mostly of that year, with a bit of forward-looking to explain a little more about what was set in motion, in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. There’s plenty of trauma and starvation, and also grand hopes—mostly not to rebuild what was destroyed, but to build something better, whether in nations like Japan or internationally in a united Europe and the United Nations. Also a lot of sex (a lot of it with soldiers, for tangible benefits or for relief and fun or for association with winners) and a lot of rape (particularly in Germany).
Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Robots are almost certainly coming for your job, if any part of it involves tasks that can be repeated again and again. This includes fast food work, many kinds of health care, many kinds of legal work, and arguably (though I am unconvinced) some teaching. Ford convincingly makes the case that automation will continue to improve and replace previous human workers, then spends a bit of time on total speculation about artificial intelligence (Skynet!), and finally asks what we ought to do about it. Ford argues that automation has already contributed substantially to longterm disemployment in the US, and that education and retraining will not solve the problem. But if very few people have jobs, who will buy all the stuff robots make? His proposal, which he recognizes is unviable in the US because we are all terrified and atomized, is for a basic income for everyone.
Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: Super interesting! Schatzker argues that salt, sugar, and fat are not exactly to blame for why processed food is so bad for us. After all, if you’re just handed a glob of those three things, even in attractive proportions, you’ll probably be disgusted. It’s actually flavor that makes people keep eating, and he argues that flavor science has made food that’s capable of getting us to eat, but not capable of satisfying us the way that natural flavors (which correlate with micronutrients) are. Thus we keep eating, and not in healthful ways. The science of flavor was fun to read about, and this is an instance in which—if we can keep profit-seeking megacorporations from taking over, which is far from guaranteed—we might be able to fix many of the problems. Although “dilution”—a decrease in flavor and nutrition—is broadly observable in many modern foods compared to their predecessors of six or seven decades ago, attributable to selection for ever-greater size and yield, Schatzker proposes that micronutrients/true flavors are actually not that energetically expensive for plants to produce, because they have sensory effects at parts per billion. Thus it may well be possible to produce flavorful and highly productive strains of tomatoes, apples, etc. We just didn’t bother to select for flavor for a long time.
Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing: I read a commentary on this book that struck me as true: its basic theme is that you are going to die, and therefore you should own up to that fact and stop pretending that you are going to read/use/etc. a lot of the stuff you have ever again. That being so, unless touching it brings you joy, you should get rid of it. The audience is a particularly stuff-rich socioeconomic group; she explicitly notes her assumption that, if you get rid of something that turns out to be needful, you can buy it again. I was really attracted to the idea of doing some decluttering via her method, mainly of clothes (she also has a neat idea about folding that I plan to try), but her attitude to books was almost shocking. She thinks you shouldn’t have any—twenty, maybe one hundred at most! But then, she also acknowledges that what brings us joy varies and shouldn’t be controlled by what we think we ought to like or by what other people like, and being surrounded by books gives me joy, so she might make an exception for my situation. Worth a read if you want a boost to throwing stuff away.
Meg Leta Jones, Ctrl + Z: The Right to Be Forgotten: Free review copy. I was hoping for a more straightforward philosophical defense of the right to be forgotten—to remove once-public information from public view, or at least to make it harder to find—but the book was not quite that. A lot of summaries of others’ work/theories. Jones does argue for some limited right to be forgotten, because too much focus on the past prevents people from moving forward. She bases her claims in part on the idea that forgiving (and forgetting) is healthy for people (“those who forgive exhibit greater empathy, understanding, tolerance, agreeableness, and insight”), which I find … dubious, in part because of correlation/causation issues, and in part because I want to know whether the wrongdoer to be forgiven has accepted responsibility for the harm caused. Jones does note that forgiveness can itself be unjust, especially when offered by a third party, but I think that makes the right to be forgotten troubling, because that’s often exactly what it involves—Google deciding (at the prodding of European authorities) when the person whose information is at issue has suffered enough.
Jones compares American and European attitudes and concludes that the American constitutional tradition precludes an aggressive right to be forgotten, while the European tradition enables it. The US, with its extreme definitions of newsworthiness and free speech trumping most privacy claims, is now a land of choices rather than second chances. By contrast, Europe is trying harder to provide people with second chances. But not without trouble: Jones points out that in “[a]ttempting to knock Google down a few pegs, the CJEU instead further empowered the search giant by essentially putting the right to be forgotten in the company’s hands” by requiring Google to decide whether there was enough public interest to preserve information rather than by requiring right to be forgotten requests to be approved by data protection agencies in the relevant countries, who would do the balancing under their own national principles. I wasn’t aware that, under Swiss law, it’s possible to suppress information about criminal convictions even if they’re newsworthy if significant rehabilitation efforts have been made—so the courts have prevented publications about white-collar crimes, bank robberies, and even a 1980 documentary about a man sentenced to death in 1939. In 2003, meanwhile, Sweden prosecuted a citizen for “posting information about her work colleagues on her personal webpage without obtaining their consent.” And Europe wants the right to be forgotten to apply to all Google sites, so that the results will disappear for everyone (or at least will disappear even if a European uses .com).
Jones contends that the more common digital information problem is one of easy decay/disappearance, and thus we should think of digital information holistically, conceiving of the question as one of proper stewardship. “[T]he internet is a lazy historian with no principled practices of preserving or protecting knowledge.” She would distinguish data, especially data used to track and market to us, from content we create, and make it easier for us to delete the former. The right to be forgotten should be part of information stewardship, in her view, because cultural change allowing our stupidities to be forgiven despite their continuing availability won’t happen fast enough (“Adults see questionable content not as the testing ground of youths that they may have learned and grown from but as negative and stable characteristics of their personalities.”), and because humans have cognitive biases that lead them to be unable to properly discount negative information, even when it’s outdated. We need to be able to draw lines around our personas to create the “face” which is necessary for people to survive among other people. One possibility is a right of reply-like scheme where we would get to provide “context” to information about us that is too old or unrepresentative, or—particularly in the US—laws precluding the use of certain information in certain ways, such as old bankruptcies or juvenile criminal records. Ultimately, she thinks that “coding forgiveness” could be automated after there’s enough experience implementing a right to be forgotten (which seems literally fantastic to me; this isn’t like identifying full, unaltered copies of movies, and even that automation works only part of the time). I did like the concept of “good enough” privacy—information doesn’t have to be completely unfindable to be protective of a person’s privacy.
James M. McPherson, Crossroads to Freedom: History of the events leading up to Antietam and then Antietam itself in the US Civil War. Reading this led me to discover that, because humanity is a rich tapestry, there is at least one person who has studied the Civil War and not wanted to reach through time to slap George McClellan upside the head. That person, however, is not McPherson, who makes his opinion of McClellan’s dithering quite clear. Very gruesome descriptions of battlefields.
Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: British Loyalists who left the new United States after the American Revolution went on a diaspora unique in that it was internal to the Empire, and thus they remained subjects of the same crown even as they endured sometimes multiple dislocations. They played important roles in Canada and Sierra Leone, and also became involved in other British colonies, from the Carribean to India. As loyal Americans, they brought some American attitudes with them, mostly towards race (there were a lot of enslavers, as well as a lot of free and freed blacks) and political participation (see previous parenthetical: whites thought all white men should have political rights, while the blacks thought that they too were loyal subjects of Empire and deserved political rights). Jasanoff argues that the process of resettling and compensating some of the loyalists was part of the formulation of a new conception of the British Empire largely controlling nonwhite populations and recognizing certain limited obligations of crown to subject.
Ian Buruma, Year Zero: 1945, the year World War II ended (or did it?). Buruma tells the story mostly of that year, with a bit of forward-looking to explain a little more about what was set in motion, in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. There’s plenty of trauma and starvation, and also grand hopes—mostly not to rebuild what was destroyed, but to build something better, whether in nations like Japan or internationally in a united Europe and the United Nations. Also a lot of sex (a lot of it with soldiers, for tangible benefits or for relief and fun or for association with winners) and a lot of rape (particularly in Germany).
Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Robots are almost certainly coming for your job, if any part of it involves tasks that can be repeated again and again. This includes fast food work, many kinds of health care, many kinds of legal work, and arguably (though I am unconvinced) some teaching. Ford convincingly makes the case that automation will continue to improve and replace previous human workers, then spends a bit of time on total speculation about artificial intelligence (Skynet!), and finally asks what we ought to do about it. Ford argues that automation has already contributed substantially to longterm disemployment in the US, and that education and retraining will not solve the problem. But if very few people have jobs, who will buy all the stuff robots make? His proposal, which he recognizes is unviable in the US because we are all terrified and atomized, is for a basic income for everyone.
Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: Super interesting! Schatzker argues that salt, sugar, and fat are not exactly to blame for why processed food is so bad for us. After all, if you’re just handed a glob of those three things, even in attractive proportions, you’ll probably be disgusted. It’s actually flavor that makes people keep eating, and he argues that flavor science has made food that’s capable of getting us to eat, but not capable of satisfying us the way that natural flavors (which correlate with micronutrients) are. Thus we keep eating, and not in healthful ways. The science of flavor was fun to read about, and this is an instance in which—if we can keep profit-seeking megacorporations from taking over, which is far from guaranteed—we might be able to fix many of the problems. Although “dilution”—a decrease in flavor and nutrition—is broadly observable in many modern foods compared to their predecessors of six or seven decades ago, attributable to selection for ever-greater size and yield, Schatzker proposes that micronutrients/true flavors are actually not that energetically expensive for plants to produce, because they have sensory effects at parts per billion. Thus it may well be possible to produce flavorful and highly productive strains of tomatoes, apples, etc. We just didn’t bother to select for flavor for a long time.
Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing: I read a commentary on this book that struck me as true: its basic theme is that you are going to die, and therefore you should own up to that fact and stop pretending that you are going to read/use/etc. a lot of the stuff you have ever again. That being so, unless touching it brings you joy, you should get rid of it. The audience is a particularly stuff-rich socioeconomic group; she explicitly notes her assumption that, if you get rid of something that turns out to be needful, you can buy it again. I was really attracted to the idea of doing some decluttering via her method, mainly of clothes (she also has a neat idea about folding that I plan to try), but her attitude to books was almost shocking. She thinks you shouldn’t have any—twenty, maybe one hundred at most! But then, she also acknowledges that what brings us joy varies and shouldn’t be controlled by what we think we ought to like or by what other people like, and being surrounded by books gives me joy, so she might make an exception for my situation. Worth a read if you want a boost to throwing stuff away.