Rainblog

There’s a story that the humorist W.C. Fields once asked for a drink in a bar and was told that he couldn’t be served because it was Election Day. Outraged, Fields demanded to know how this came to be a law. “Why, the legislature made this law — the people voted for it,” the barman answered. Fields responded “That’s carrying democracy too far!”

Beyond the humor of Fields’ answer, there’s a serious point. Pure democracy doesn’t protect anyone’s rights. Ninety-nine people could vote to deprive one person of rights, property, even life. In fact, fifty-one people could vote against the interests of the other forty-nine. Warren Ellis puts it like this:

You want to know about voting. I’m here to tell you about voting. Imagine you’re locked in a huge underground night-club filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pitbulls for fun. And you ain’t allowed out until you all vote on what you’re going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch “Republican Party Reservation”. They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns, and brand new sexual organs you did not even know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as your eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That’s voting. You’re welcome.

The most recent instance of this has been in North Carolina, where a majority of voters supported an amendment to the state constitution that would restrict the definition of marriage to exclude same-sex marriages. In doing so, they weren’t doing something merely symbolic. The decision to recognize a particular union as a marriage or not has real implications. It has consequences for the rights of same-sex partners to inherit property or to adopt children together, for their finances, even for the right of one partner to determine what medical care their partner should receive or visit them in hospital if they are seriously ill, and more besides. In essence, the voters of North Carolina just voted to deprive a selected group of their fellow citizens of some of the same rights that they enjoy.

Most of them seem to have done so for religious reasons. As followers of one possible interpretation of a collection of rather arbitrarily-edited and often ambiguous religious texts written more than twenty centuries ago, they believe that same-sex relationships are innately ‘sinful’ and ‘wrong’. They believe that they have the right - even the duty - to punish their neighbors for violating the moral code they have chosen for themselves. They even believe that this issue is so important that it takes precedence over the general recommendations made by the founder of their religion. On this one issue, the words of the latecomer Paul apparently trump even Jesus’s clear command to “love thy neighbor as thyself’.

The problem of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ is endemic in democracy. The reason why democracies don’t generally allow majorities to ride roughshod over the rights of minorities - or at least not overtly - is because most of them have some ground rules built in. The purpose of these ground rules - state and national constitutions in the case of the United States, common law in the United Kingdom and so on - is to ensure that the will of the people can be expressed insofar as it doesn’t trample on the rights of any group. For democracy not to devolve into tyranny, the ground rules must set limits to the power of the popular vote.

Some of the most important ground rules are framed in terms of human rights. They say that whatever else you decide, you can’t take these rights away. That’s how you avoid the tyranny of the majority in a democracy, or at least try to limit its capacity to do harm.

The problem is that the ground rules can’t be set in stone. There has to be a mechanism for updating them to reflect changing times. In the US, that mechanism is called amendments to the constitution. Amendments should be used sparingly and, in my view, they should always go in the direction of increasing rather than reducing people’s rights. The Volstead Act (and the 18th Amendment that it enabled) is an example of a change that went in the wrong direction and had to be repealed later.

In North Carolina, voters voted to change the ground rules. They also voted in the direction of reducing the rights of their fellow citizens.

In the words of W.C. Fields, that’s carrying democracy too far.

Reddit is currently hosting an interesting AMA with a botnet operator and malware coder, which begins with some useful (but obvious) tips on protecting yourself from drive-by downloads. While reading the page, the following quote caught my eye:

The ‘deep web’ is full of furfags and pedophiles, 50% of I2P deep web is furry porn, 30% conspiracy crackheads and the remaining pedophiles. TOR deep web has more pedophiles and less furfags. It’s awful.

Bear that in mind the next time you see a vendor boasting about how they can “search the deep web” …

The Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police would very much like to oust retired police captain Ray Lewis from the police union because of his involvement in the Occupy protests. The FOP has accused Captain Lewis of “not respecting” the uniform by wearing it at protests, and wants to see him kicked out and stripped of his pension and benefits.

I happened to be standing very close to Captain Lewis when he was arrested in New York last November, and took video of his arrest. During the time I was there, I never saw him act in any way that would discredit his uniform or the Philly PD, nor did he ever present himself as anything other than what he was - a retired cop expressing his personal point of view. He was a dignified, calming presence at the protests and his graceful act of civil disobedience rightly won him the immediate admiration of everyone in the crowd. There is no doubt in my mind that his actions, far from disgracing his service, actually raised it in the estimation of many people there.

Voltaire’s biographer, Evelyn Hall, famously summarized the French philosopher’s beliefs with the phrase: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The Fraternal Order of Police’s attitude might be better summed up as “I disapprove of what you say, and I intend to punish you for daring to say it.”

annieisms:

GPOYW: with a shark! Thanks Angus!

Saw this big airplane giving a smaller airplane a piggy-back ride …

I recently came across a post in which John Scalzi explains why he deleted his Klout account. To paraphrase his argument in my own words, Klout creates an artificial anxiety about your Klout score, which leads to you behaving in ways that are presumably in Klout’s interest, not yours.

I’m a little surprised that anyone takes Klout seriously, given that Klout scores are notably arbitrary. I signed up for Klout, looked at my score once and then immediately lost interest. Klout attempted to get me back by sending me emails I hadn’t asked for and from which I couldn’t unsubscribe (their software was broken) but eventually I managed to wriggle off their mailing list, and that was it as far as I was concerned.

Klout’s … let’s call it a psychic model … is a variant of what I call ‘leaderboard anxiety’. The idea is that some service sets up a metric by which you can evaluate your status. You are then supposed to obsess over this number and - the goal of the whole thing - keep coming back to the service to check on your score. Klout scores, Facebook friends, Twitter followers, Foursquare mayorships, Reddit karma, all work on the same principle: get more, improve your score, earn worthless badges, feel bad about yourself if you don’t ‘measure up’.

Closely related is ‘attention anxiety’. Again, there’s a ‘score’ to track, but this time it’s a local score linked to a specific action that you have taken: Tumblr reblogs, Twitter retweets, Facebook likes, upvotes on Digg or Reddit, Pinterest repins. You do something - tweet something witty, blog something insightful - and then you check back obsessively to find out how many people have liked or repeated what you said.

The infamous Zynga, maker of Facebook games, invented another anxiety to keep you coming back. Call it ‘tamagotchi anxiety’, or ‘spinning plates anxiety’. You have an unstable system - a Farmville farm - that requires constant attention. Unless you attend to it continuously, everything goes rapidly to hell, and your virtual pets reprove you pathetically for your heartlessness, tongues lolling and little x’s stamped on their tiny eyes. It’s rather like being a system administrator, but with less lifting heavy servers into racks.

These features aren’t accidental: they’re deliberately engineered and their common goal is to get you to keep coming back to the service and keep participating. Maybe if I do this, I can improve my Klout score. Maybe if I post a funnier tweet, more people will retweet it. It’s an artificial addiction based on our need for constant validation.

Anxieties aren’t the only tool social media has up its sleeve to keep us hooked. Another is what you might call “distraction satisfaction”. We’re drawn to look for new stimuli, for little crumbs of new information that give us something to think about or act on. Twitter and Facebook play on this. It’s very easy to think “I’ll just check my Twitter/Facebook/email/phone messages to see if anything new has come in; it’ll only take a second.” But of course it doesn’t just take a second. If there is something new, it leads us off down a procrastinatory rabbit hole. If there is nothing new, we’re left feeling dissatisfied, so we try again. If Twitter didn’t deliver, try Facebook. If Facebook didn’t deliver, there’s email, Reddit, Digg, text messages, Twitter again …

Catering to our natural urge to procrastinate might be a little more benign than deliberately inducing anxieties but it’s equally insidious. Moreover, the end goal is the same: to keep us coming back and to get us to participate. As a bonus, our own involvement makes the service more effective at dragging our friends into a similar spiral. As we send out our tweets and post our Instagram photos, we’re baiting the trap for others. When we mention someone’s Twitter handle, or tag them in a photo on Facebook, we’re passing out a little packet of distraction. The designers know this. Each new feature added to a social media service is designed not to increase the utility of the service for its users, but to increase the utility of its users to the service.

The lesson to take away? Social media is not your friend. You are being manipulated in ways that are harmful to you.

Speaking for myself, I’m mostly immune to leaderboard anxiety, but I do worry about how many people repost or retweet what I say (although based on my performance to date, I should just give up). And, I will admit it, I check my email and Twitter far more often than I should.

The odd thing is that following people on Twitter gives me a quite different anxiety, one that I don’t think has been designed by the social psychologists. It’s that all the people I follow seem to be doing such cool stuff - building web applications, staying on the cutting edge of their discipline, writing novels, taking photos, traveling to exotic places, making art. When I read about their projects and their successes, I start to feel anxious about how little I’m doing in comparison.

Maybe it’s because I spend too much time using social media …

Most programmers are familiar with this problem.

Publisher Tor Books has announced that they will begin selling their ebooks unprotected by DRM. This seems to be a consequence of something that’s been brewing for a while, and is a move that has been predicted by various observers (good call, Charlie).

If this is the beginning of the end for DRM, it’s high time. DRM is largely ineffectual in preventing piracy, but a persistent annoyance to honest readers. DRM locks you into reading the way that the vendor wants you to read, not the way you want to read. DRM’d ebooks, like DRM’d content of any kind, are hostage to changes in technology and unilateral policy changes down the line. You never really own anything that has DRM on it. While I can’t say that I never buy DRM’d ebooks, the knowledge that something comes encumbered by DRM is always enough to make me think twice. Very often, it’s enough to make me not buy at all.

Conversely, I buy very happily indeed from vendors who trust and respect their customers enough to offer them open ebooks in a choice of formats. O’Reilly have seen a lot of my dollars. When I learned, in the wake of the Tor announcement, that Nightshade Books sell their titles DRM-free through Baen Books (whose own catalog is also sold in multiple open formats), I went on a minor spending spree, picking up a number of books I’d had my eye on for a while. (Tough shit, Amazon - Baen got the sale, you didn’t).

It’s too early to tell if the publishing industry as a whole will follow suit. Still, the signs are hopeful. In the meantime, I think the onus is on readers to reward the early adopters and let them know that the experiment can work. Time to go shopping …

In the republic of Genova, a “pittima” was a person employed to try to shame debtors into paying their debts by accosting them in public [Wikipedia, Italian version]. The pittima, who was often a person incapable of performing other work, wore distinctive red clothing, attracting more attention to the debtor as the pittima followed them through the streets or the markets.

… and I go down to seek for money
from those who keep it from those who have loaned it
I ask for it timidly … but in the midst of the crowd
[”A’ Pittima”, Fabrizio de André]

The job of pittima couldn’t exist in the present-day US: the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act makes it illegal for debt collectors to “reveal or discuss the nature of debts with third parties”.

A new website called The Debtor List seems to have brought the idea of the pittima into the twenty-first century, providing a form for creditors to enter details about alleged debtors and then distribute their claims via ‘social media tools’ (the site’s tagline is “Use the Power of Social Media to Get Paid”).

Some commentators have questioned the legality of the scheme, although as the Debtor List is not itself a collection agency the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act may not apply. What’s interesting, however, is the transition that it implies. The historical pittima would accost his victims in the places where other people would see them - at church, or in the market, or the street. The modern variant, represented by sites like the Debtor List or reputation sites, does its work instead in the virtual spaces of Facebook and Twitter.

Our ‘public places’ are no longer physical spaces.

Photographs from the Good Friday procession on the Lower East Side, New York.