Information Poisoning

There were several submissions of this piece: "Novelist Caleb Carr (probably most famous for The Alienist ) has written an article on Salon in which he talks about the dangers he believes information technology pose to society. His contention is that the unchecked spread of information technology will allow for increased corporate control over our lives. His proposed solution? Government regulation. (This is something that he has mentioned in interviews before, and it touches on ideas explored in his near-future SF novel Killing Time ). Overall a very interesting and thought-provoking read." I suggest you read the article without any preconceived ideas of whether you'll find it "good" or "bad", just read it and see what you get out of it.

Comments

Re:He's an economic ignoramus

[Mr. Slippery]

What he's missing is that in the race to earn profits, corporations have to please people. Only by pleasing people can corporations earn money.

Only in the ideal case where buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace with equal power, full knowledge, and no costs externalized.

Which is not to say that more government action is necessarily the answer to corporate misdeeds. We have to remember that corporations are creations of governments!

Rather than muzzling the monsters it creates, the state simply should stop creating monsters. Revoke corporate charters of misbehaving companies (that's not a new power for the state, it's an existing one that's never used). Require corporate shares to be owned by people, not other corporations. Stop treating corporations as natural persons (the Constitution defines U.S. citizens quite clearly, and corporations don't fit). These aren't increases in government regulation, they're actually decreases in the state power to create profit-obsessed artificial entities.

(Pardon me for the U.S. bias in the above; I believe the same ideas apply in other nations, but I'm most familiar with the laws here.)

But what this twit wants isn't to stop corporate abuses. If that were the goal, he'd want more freedom of discussion, making sure that net publishing remains available to the average American, not just to AOL/Time Warner and Microsoft. Like every other pro-censorship fuckhead, he's wants his opinions of what's good information or bad information to affect the rest of us, "for our own good".

"Information is not knowledge." Sure, Zappa told us that a long time ago. But I sure as hell don't need idiots like this "helping" me by forcibly filtering my data stream.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

Re:He's an economic ignoramus

[Chewie]

Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe it's the fact that the MPAA/RIAA are trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Me: "So, when I buy this CD/DVD, am I buying it or licensing it?"

Corps: "Oh, you're licensing the information on it. You're paying for the right to access that info."

Me: "So, if something happens to it, will you give me another one for free? After all, I've already paid for the right to access the info."

Corps: "No! You want another one, you pay full price."

Me: "Oh, well then, I'd better make a personal backup copy, as is allowed under copyright law."

Corps: "No! We don't want you to do that! You might distribute that copy to people who didn't pay for it! Thus, we'd better control the ability to copy any of our material."

Me: "Yeah, but isn't that punishing people who don't distribute copyrighted works? And isn't that also making it impossible for me to make my perfectly legal backup copy?"

Corps (realizing at this point I'm trouble): "You know what, screw you! We're not only going to keep you from exercising your rights under copyright law, we're going to do it insidiously, by slowly buying legislation that takes away rights you had."

Me: "What?!?! You can't do that! People will be outraged!"

Corps: "You honestly think most people will notice? We'll just use words like 'all-digital quality', and people will not only allow it, they'll welcome it! Mwahahahahahaha!"

So there. Now, I'm not saying that everyone who rips CDs to mp3 are just making personal backup copies. However, to punish everyone for those who do is just stupid.

Interesting idea, but how will it work?

[Private Essayist]

Carr makes some interesting points (essentially boiled down to: either government will regulate the Net or corporations will, and at least goverment is supposed to be on the side of the people whereas corporations exist to make profits). This point could be argued back and forth, but he at least makes a good argument for his case.

It was this statement, however, that most struck me. In talking about how government, for instance, regulates the food industry so we know what ingredients we are dealing with, he says something similar is needed for the Net. He says: "There must be strenuous efforts first and foremost to guarantee that what is represented as fact is fact, and that what is not fact is clearly labeled as such."

This parallels an idea I had a couple years ago as a possible Web business -- providing a rating system to information sites as to how factual the information really is. A 'Consumer Reports', if you will, of information.

But the problem I came across, and one that I see in Carr's proposal, is this: Who decides what is factual?

Let's use an obvious example, creation versus evolution. See the problem? If a creationist were to evaluate a scientific article talking about evolution, might he or she be tempted to mark it down as 'Not factual'? Certainly a biologist would mark creationist writings as 'Not factual.'

So whoever provides the ratings as to whether or not information on the web is factual will either bring their own prejudices to the task, or will turn off a sizable segment of the population ('Oh, he marks that site as factual, but he believes in evolution so what does he know?')

I don't know the solution to this problem. How do you get a system that marks information sites as factual or not factual when the population-at-large can't even decide on what they think is factual?
________________

He's been suckered

[Don Negro]

by the Child Porn boogeyman.

He spends the first half of the article building his case with kiddie pr0n as the raison d'etre, and the second half failing to understand the difference between information and ideas, or at least the fact that they are made available via the net in exactly the same way, and sweeping regulation of one will undoubtable stifle the other - untolerably so.

This is a shame, since his points about the historical inability of corps to self-regulate (without the fear of government regulation to motivate them) are very valid, and his concerns about the erosion of privacy are well founded.

Further, we already have laws in place which regulate to some extent what content can be viewed by which people in which circumstances, and we will undoubtably have more in the future. Requiring passwords and some form of identity checking beyond what we already have would erode privacy even further, which he seems to be opposed to overall.

In all, his arguments, while understandable, lack internal consistancy. He just hasn't thought hard enough about the parts where the edges don't quite line up.

He should spend a couple of months reading /. He'd at least have a better grasp of the arguments and technical challenges his opinions will have to reckon with.

Don Negro

I largely disagree with what he's saying...

[Malor]

I don't think his arguments are sound at all.

Consider: the very first example he uses is 'pedophiles'. At the moment, there is no more hated and reviled group on the planet. (Personally, I don't really buy most of the noise -- I strongly, strongly suspect that it is nowhere near as bad as the politicians want you to believe.) There is no button that is hotter. Feelings on this matter run so strong that (so far) I have yet to see any rational discourse on the topic at all -- and that's his leadoff example. Not a good sign.

And then he goes on to say that information is dangerous, and that the state should be in the business of prior restraint of speech. Many people, he says, are incapable of separating fact from fiction, so that's why the content of the Internet should be regulated.

Well, gee. This is news? Most people I know just take the pap they're spoon fed by the media. So far, this hasn't been enough of a reason to license news agencies (to my knowledge) or to create a review board that would approve/deny any particular story or stories. We all know how quickly that would start being abused.

Consider: what if pedophilia actually isn't as bad as it's painted? (I"m not making that assertion, I'm just positing a hypothetical case.) In a system of prior restraint, that kind of topic would be very, very likely to be suppressed, or to be forced to take a label of 'fiction' rather than 'fact'. But ideas that are close to the mainstream, like 'The Internet is full of dangerous ideas and children shouldn't be exposed to them without content restrictions' would most likely be allowed to use a 'fact' tag. (heh, [FACT] [/FACT] :-) )

I can't imagine any better way to create even more of a feedback loop than we already have. Popular ideas get repeated, and dissenting ideas tend to be ignored. This has absolutely nothing to do with their actual truth or merit, just their popularity.

Any kind of governmental board would serve only to amplify this feedback loop. I can't imagine a faster way to destroy all possibility of rational discourse on truly disputed topics. It's a great way to make sure that the fundamental values remain unchallenged and that nothing ever REALLY changes.

As an aside, this guy also pisses me off. I'm perfectly capable of separating fact from fiction, and I'm quite capable of assembling a body of knowledge from disparate bits. The fact that there are people out there who cannot is simply no excuse to cripple my ability to gather information and decide for myself. It's just censorship in a slightly different form.

We can't run the Internet for stupid people. To do so will make everyone stupid.

A much more insightful discussion...

[adubey]

..can be found here. The best part is, the essay is a comic strip.

I was going to submit this, along with the Salon article, pointing out how much more insightful the comic writer was (hmm... is this always the case?).

What SalonBoy misses (and ComicBoy gets) is that if you directly paid the artist, "corporate" interests are silently subverted.

And if there was a micropayment system, you would be more likely to pay the artist rather than demand free content.

The question becomes: is the lack of a micropayment system a technological problem, or a political one?