Sergey Brin wearing Google Glass in the subway -- and did you know Prokofy Neva with his monacle was nearly able to sit in his lap?
I don't know whether Mike Arrington is guilty. I think any person's allegations of mental or physical abuse have to be taken seriously, regardless of whether their partner is a famous tech investor and blogger or not.
Loren Feldman and Jason Calicanis think he is guilty, based on hearsay from a phone call during an afterparty from a woman who said she was "roughed up" as Calicanis put it. Maybe she was. Loren Feldman's video on this is very powerful and persuasive. We weren't there. We don't know. They weren't either, but they trusted first her report, then each other's reports. Well, at least they talked to each other live, over a mobile phone, and didn't just paste tweets or emails around. The problem is, each of them had business or personal disputes with Arrington, so it's hard to assess.
WILL AOL MAKE A STATEMENT?
I don't know how this will end, but I noted on TechCrunch that somehow, the TechCrunch management and AOL have to make a statement about this. As Arrington will take the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt later this month (at least, he took part in it in past years even after leaving TC so I think that's the plan), many people will be whispering and AOL will have to address this. They could say that they are waiting for a court or internal corporate investigation or remain silence, but neither option will be very good. To be responsible, they would have to say at least that they take such allegations seriously. But in the tech world, allegations are made often, sometimes they are true, and even when they seem likely, the corporations don't always suspend or comment critically about their colleagues or employees -- see Reuters and the Matthew Keys case.
Is There Reason to Fear Mike Arrington?
Rebecca Greenfield doesn't think there's any reason any more to fear Mike Arrington, and thereby has ensured his enduring love. There's a lot that's creepy in her piece because she doesn't make a generic condemnation of domestic violence, and doesn't think there's a problem in the Valley. Worse, she thinks the statements of a HR administrator are somehow better sourced than the statements of the victim herself. She also makes a very thin case for claiming that this powerful VC and presider over TechCrunch and still occasional contributor to TC is somehow facing competition from "other" blogs. Which ones? Like his former colleague Sarah Lacey, a brave lady, at PandoDaily, who hasn't said anything about this?
Maybe it's just the little people and not the big people who have to be afraid of Mike Arrington? How little?
Arrington can be very charming and charismatic and brilliant, as we all know, and also very abrupt and nasty. I remember years ago, he blocked me on Twitter. I didn't care. I kept responding critically to him. Then he blocked me directly on TechCrunch. Again, I didn't care. I kept commenting anyway on my blog and linking. Interestingly, eventually I was unblocked by Arrington on Twitter (and remained unblocked) and was let through on TechCrunch where I remain. I have no idea what made them block me for a time on TC. Perhaps it was comments on that whole Leo Laporte affair, where I took Leo's side. Tech biggies blocking me is not news. Robert Scoble and Loren Feldman both blocked me back in the day, and both unblocked me. I'll live.
Some time ago, Arrington had a conversation on Facebook about what he should do with "trolls". I generally reject the concept and use of this term as it is often very broad, and for thin-skinned vain geeks, can expand to almost anything. I said he should just ignore them -- he was getting to the point where he wouldn't post on Facebook because of the problem of keeping an open, public account but having then people answer in ways he didn't like. Yet of course, he had the option to mute people not just for that thread, but to take his entire feed out of their view as if it didn't exist, and it wouldn't even show up in search (Facebook, like G+, is over-thorough that way, something I've always condemned). I pointed that out. He got into a separate, private conversation with me on Facebook explaining how large communities break down into trolling and it destroys the user experience, but he had to shut off comments on FB even if it meant losing the "smart thoughts" of people like me.
I might have been flattered, but not for long. Perhaps a year later, Arrington posted something aggressively attacking the Boy Scouts. I said I supported gay marriage rights but that I didn't think the way to getting them was by denying others their civil rights of free speech and free association. Arrington said he was no longer a libertarian on this point and while there wasn't any acrimonious exchange, he blocked me, not just from that thread, or not just from "friend" status to post, but from seeing his feed completely. So yeah -- charming, flattering even, making you feel special -- and then brutal and mean.
Arrington was the guy who first suggested there be a motorcycle contest at TechCrunch, then called on everyone to make pitches. Many people got up and made start-up pitches or poignant reasons why they needed this motorcycle. I got up and said I needed something that would keep my son from joining the Marines and going to Afghanistan. I won the contest, and Arrington came over and shook my hand and took my card. That motorcycle indeed changed my son's life -- he stayed in college and then got a job which he was able to do much better on the bike. To be sure, it began impossible to find any place to charge it, and he had to swap it for a time with a friend who had a house with a garage where he could do the charging. But it kept him from going to the army out of a sense of lack of choices. He had something to work on, a goal to achieve, first getting the licenses and other paperwork and maintaining and managing the bike and figuring out things like parking and routes and care. Every kid should have a motor vehicle when they turn 16 or 18 so that they begin to think of what is required in life to be an adult -- it gives them goals and projects -- something to polish and shine and talk about with their buddies. It might seem trivial, but a thing like a motorcycle can be the one thing that makes somebody's life gel and turn around, making commuting a joy instead of a chore and even deterrent (taking two buses for an hour to college was a grind).
Certainly Lara Kolodny of Fast Company, who believes she was the one who managed this whole motorcycle contest PR thing, expected me to be "grateful" for this and was angry that I criticized her fatuous claims -- sucking up to the tech set -- that Congress was "stupid" and didn't have technical expertise. She ended up blocking me completely, too, and acting as if somehow a personal relationship in a little village had been violated. That's how touchy strangers can get on the Internet. Arrington may have thought I should have been more grateful, too. And it's indicative of this world that I'm thinking, as I haven't gotten my press pass yet for TechCrunch Disrupt, where I did get a pass the last two years, that maybe because Arrington has me blocked on Facebook, I might not get it... That would be sad, as TechCrunch is among the most important intellectual experiences for me of the year, and without being there, it's hard to really get the good stories. I feel I had some really good original stories including even news on Marissa Meyer the last time I went, but thin skins and hurt feelings of people in power can mean your "smart thoughts" will not be welcome.
Can We Have 'Pre-Crime' Prosecution in the Future?
In any event, this brings me to the question of whether tracking activities that might turn into crimes will bring us a better or a worse world (there was a movie on this subject, "Minority Report"). And of course, I'm leaning toward thinking it will be a worse world, because it will leave no room for human remorse and change, or none of that gray area that enables human interactions to proceed in an imperfect world with imperfect people, parallel to legal systems, which of course can be corrupt or over-brutal, even though I think they mainly deliver justice in this country.
The TechCrunch people had a case of allegations of violence from Mike before, but they handled it through a private HR investigation and then both parties decided to keep it confidential and no charges were pressed or reprimands or anything were made. If those corporate confidential processes are to have any integrity, and serve as a parallel to law that is sometimes useful, and not always exonerating of those guilty, then breaking that confidence by now going to the media is wrong.
Or is it?
Of course, when the Catholic Church used that logic on pedophiles, and put notes in files and moved people around, and tried to deal with the problem "within the community," look where that ended up! And I think more and more, like child abuse, people will not tolerate domestic violence as a private matter that should be handled by private systems and not the public courts. Indeed, if a stranger threw you against a wall, or shoved you down on a bed hard, you could file assault charges; if he's your boss or an important man, obviously you're going to weigh the impact on your career.
Does That Snapshot of Bad Human Behaviour Describe the Person Fairly?
I think cases of violence have to be reported, but they aren't a cure-all. In my huge New York City apartment complex, my neighbours and I have reported domestic violence of partners or crazy parents against their children, and it doesn't always "go anywhere". In one case, the jealous boyfriend still came and shot his girlfriend despite us bringing the police to the door on multiple occasions. In another, our showers of reports to management and child welfare authorities only made the abusive mother suddenly move out with her scared children and disappear.
Then there is a story like this that makes you contemplate the morality of crime reporting forever.
I will never forget the time I was walking along by a rehabilitation hospital and saw an altercation out front between a man and his wife and their severely disabled little daughter in a wheel chair. The mother was shouting and screaming at the man, they were arguing about who was going to take the child, evidently, and he began pushing her, and somehow in the melee, the little girl's wheel chair also got pushed around, and was dangerously close to oncoming traffic. The look of fear on her little face was terrible to see -- she broke into tears. The man and women were shouting and carrying on. Another woman and I on the street witnessing all this immediately wrote down the license plate and called 911 on our cell phones. The couple ended up driving away with the child -- nothing came of it. I also called Child Protective Services -- nothing seemed to go further.
And maybe it's for the best. Several weeks later, I was walking along the same street. There I saw the same man. He was cradling the little disabled girl in his lap, and she was smiling happily. He was feeding her some ice cream, and letting her know she was the best daughter in the whole world. The little scene made me think. What if the police had arrested him? These things can go very far, very fast, and the man could still be in jail because of the city's fears of missing yet another case where a child is beaten or dies. But who else was going to take care of that little girl every Saturday? Who else was going to hold her in his arms and care about her more than anyone else in the world? It wouldn't be me or you. I happened to have volunteered in that same hospital, translating for teenagers whose legs were blown away in the Chechen war as children. But then I went home, and didn't come back every weekend, and didn't give them ice cream. My point is that as bad as that incident was where the little girl's wheelchair was dangerously pushed and her parents were shouting and it made her cry, well, that was not all there was to the relationship.
I think in dealing with human fallibility, we have to have some common sense and good judgement, but that it is hard to make alone, and hard to make without all the circumstances and evidence, and hey, that's why we have independent court systems, and not Google Glass, where the Server Does Not Lie.
Morozov's -- and Schneier's -- Legal Nihilism
Which brings me to Evgeny Morozov's shocking legal nihilism in To Save Everything Click Here. Of course, we could have expected this from him, as he was always ambivalent about WikiLeaks and very much dodged the moral question of the DDoS (which is why geeks and their fellow travellers have to be pushed on this relentlessly). He dodged it when I asked him directly, by taking the clever route of questioning harsh sentences or ruination of young lives -- instead of biting the bullet and making a moral judgement about it -- and there was no reason why he couldn't. In the end, he wanted to keep the DDoS available as an option for special situations of the political kind he'd approve. Despicable. (I explain why the sit-in is nothing like the DDoS because the former appeals to rights peacefully and non-disruptively and the latter takes them away disruptively.)
So legal nihilism (of the sort Medvedev knew all too well and pretended to condemn and wish to change) is exactly what I will call it.
Because the guidance in the little story above is "the best interests of the child" and judging the severity of the crime and whether outsiders really can serve as judge and jury and executioner. It's still human rights. Just a little more -- if the mother had been beaten, if the child really was pushed into traffic, no amount of ice cream would exonerate it, you know?
In his book -- again, not surprising, given his constant and cunning undermining of the institutions of Western civilization -- Morozov quotes celebrate security geek Bruce Schneier in his bid for a world in which we don't have "too much" security induced by intrusive security states or "pre-crime" sorts of monitoring by all kinds of smart gadgets. He thinks a little bit of latitude is needed to ensure that "change for a Better World" that all geeks -- and Morozov is no exception here -- yearn for and use to exonerate a multitude of sins.
Here's what Schneier -- that legal nihilist lawless security consultant who explains says about why we can't have too much law, and need to enable "defection" -- by which he means a suspension of the law for the particularly smart and deserving people like himself.
First, Morozov gives a very strained hypothetical re-telling of the famous Rosa Parks story, in the future, in a perfect electronic "smart world" where all the buses would be able to tell all the people planning to board them, and calculate the white people who would need to sit in the front rows, and the room left for the black people (pp. 204-205). "Equipped with sensors that know how many passengers are waiting at the nearest stop, the bus can calcualte the exact number of African Americans it can transport without triggering conflict; those passengers who won't be able to board or find a seat are sent polite text messages informing them of future pickups."
In this horrid dystopia, Rosa Parks never gets on the bus to make her famous sit-in, because the smart gadgets have locked her out way in advance with facial-recognition technology, so she never even gets a chance to rebel against this racist system (so goes Morozov's thinking).
Of course, the future isn't likely to contain racist or sexist block-outs -- or if it will, it will be in a place like George Zimmerman's community, where a black teenager running from the 7/11 with Skittles will be pre-blocked from even being able to run across a lawn. What's more likely in our future is a bus that doesn't let fat people on, because they take up more seat room or require more expenditure of gasoline to carry.
But surely Morozov underestimates the human spirit. Rosa might have staged her sit-down at the bus stop, refusing to leave until the racist system was removed. Or she could have gone to protest to the bus company. Yet he concludes that in an over-electronically-regulated future, "there's little space for friction and tension--and quite likely for change."
Security expert Bruce Schneier invokes Rosa Parks in his notion of the need for less security and a law-breaking mentality as Morozov explains:
Security expert Bruce Schneier makes a smiliar point when he celebrates "defection" -- security speak for lawberaking -- as "an engine for ninovation, an immunologial challenge to ensure the health of the majority, a defense against the risk of monoculture, a reservoir of diversity, and a catalyst for social change." Advanced security systems tend to become institutionalized and integrated into vast bureaucratic systems; when policing functions are shifted to technolgoy, with its aura of neutrality and seemingly natural origins outside human intersets and institutions, such institutionalization can happen eve quicker -- and in a far less visible manner. As Schneier points out, societies protected by such measures are not necessarily moral or desirable; they can be -- and are -- rather awful. To build a technological environment where lawbreaking is impossible is to close the important social valves through which social change happens: "Sometimes a whistle-blower needs to pubilsh documents proving his government has been waging an illegal bombing campaign in Laos and Cambodia. Sometimes a plutonium processing plant worker needs to contact a reporter to discuss her employer's inadequate safety practices. And sometimes a black woman needs to sit down at the front of a bus and not get up. Without defectors, social change would be impossible; stagnation would set in," ntoes Schneier. John Dewewy would agree.
Nonsense -- and dangerous nonsense, and here's why.
Just Law
In each one of these examples cited by Schneier and Morozov, the whistleblowers are not in fact breaking the law as it really is -- or the law as it should be if it were just law. The notion of actual law and just law are completely missing from their analysis where they just feel that certain smarter, daring people should get to change things by their anarchist and revolutionary notions.
In the case of the Pentagon Papers, the bombing can be characterized as "illegal" in the first place because it is not authorized or because the cost of civilian casualties is too high. The higher call of conscience to a greater just law involved in the Pentagon Papers is clear in ways that are completely absent in the case of Bradley Manning (in fact, as I've explained, these two cases are very good examples of the difference between the human rights or legal approach and the revolutionary or ideological approach; Manning is not a whistleblower as he didn't even see fit to publish -- nor did Assange -- the story that supposedy caused his turn to conscience).
In the case of the plutonium plant, there are regulations that the employee found were violated -- there was law, and it was violated. Her job was the restoration of the rule of law, not breaking a law.
In the case of Rosa Parks, the Constitution's "all men are created equal" had to be made good on, and the racism against slaves and former slaves had to end to be consistent with the notion of "equality before the law" which was a bedrock of American Constitutionalism (and forms the basis for the drive for recognition of LGBT rights including marriage). Here, again, it isn't about legal nihilism, as both Morozov and Schneier claim, but restoration or affirmation of the existing or higher law -- the just law. One sense that neither Morozov or Schneier have any notion of just law in their minds when they gleefully give a blessing to "defection".
So with the DDoS as "civil disobedience," the false argument is made that a higher and just law "requires" this. What would that be? The right of disgruntled former employees or bored script kiddies or anarchists to destroy companies or the capitalist system because they feel like it? They really believe it's a greater evil than communism or fascism?
Morozov's examples just aren't rising to the test to make the claim that the latitude is needed to bring about that geek religionist's "Better World". And that's mainly because it will be decided by revolutionary expediency by him and his smart friends -- the problem with legal nihilism, always.
Do We Need Room for 'Defection'?
That brings us to the problem of how we are to enable both forgiveness for humans -- looking at the sin and not the sinner, or not letting the sin overtake the sinner's capacity for change -- and also securing compliance with good laws or improving bad laws by invocation of the notion of just law above them. For example, the secrecy of drones and the drone wars can be fought on grounds of over-technology, as Morozov might, or hyper lawfaring notion of "lack of due process", but the problem with both those ideas is that the borderlines for when technology is good or bad, a tool or a weapon, can be in the eye of the beholder, and P.S., war is legal under international law. An approach that emphasizes the "just war" notion -- that drone strikes create more enemies than they remove and aren't ending wars -- or that emphasize injustice against a notion of justice -- that those injured or killed by "collateral damage" should
The problem with some of the notions that both the targets and the alllies of Morozov have with all this is that their set of propositions for change now aren't of the law-based"Golden Rule" sort but more of the ideological-based "it's good because we say so". Pot legalizers just want to legalize pot to feel good, and if you are killed in a car accident or have less parental attention as a child from them they don't care; drunk drivers feel the same way. People who want to violate copyright just want to consume media freely or without friction or use it themselves to make money -- they coat this with the notion of "innovation" but it's an old story.
Yes, I get it that in the Derrida world -- the world of a broken man who committed suicide -- yes, even "the rule of law" or the law-based approach is considered "merely yet one more constructed ideology". Sure, human legal systems are imperfect. Yet they are better than a stick in your eye. Obnoxious and dangerous potheads and drunks, like downed servers, are sticks in your eye.
Google Glassholes or People with Google Glasses Won't Throw Stones?
Technology and discussions around it move so fast that when Morozov started, Google Glass was just "Project Glass" and he doesn't have too much discussion of it; today it is what hundreds of people are buying and talking about and ads are even made using it. Morozov first seemed only disturbed that Google Glass might be bad at serving you with its imperfect machine algorithms -- it might tell you were sad at the bad phone call you just got, but it would then give you a Renoir painting to cheer you up that might merely be the one randomly available in your collection of 124 selected, and might only irritate you.
He later moves on to discussing "situational crime preventing," and contemplates the problems of technology stopping even the good guys -- the full-body turnstile meant to keep out scofflaws then prevented police who didn't happen to have metro cards from getting in the subway to help a shooting victim who then died. Not so in Berlin, with SCP. So Google Glass might pick out young males with high testosterone, note when they were drunk, and prevent them from viewing females on a gadget, writes Morozov. Or potentially in real life, in the Internet of Things? Well, this is going to get complicated.
If Meg Asha were wearing Google Glasses (especially their hidden cousins sure to come) she could film Mike Arrington. Or Mike Arrington's knowledge that she had them on would be a deterrent. Even if he broke them, the footage might be "in the cloud". Then she and he and the HR department might decide to erase it or keep it. Or she might call the police. It might be harder then for both of them to continue their careers, even if a criminal or civil case didn't develop them. Then society can decide whether that would be a benefit.
I guess what I'm saying is that even with the capacities of Google Glass for pre-crime or situational-crime monitoring and therefore potential stopping, human judgement is still required, and perhaps more than ever. The attitude of society to domestic violence in general, and its ability to forgive it in the famous, like Rhianna, will still be tested.
We are all familiar with how media can tell a story, but hide a story even while appearing to tell it. I once sat on a jury where a food worker who injured his thumb badly in a fall in an unsafe refrigerated pantry and sued his employer for damages was impugned by a wealthy hotel chain that filmed him secretly trimming his hedges while on medical leave, trying to imply that he was still able to use his hands. Of course, a mittened hand on a set of sheers tidying up some shaggy bushes, while someone is bored on sick leave with nothing to do, isn't the same as the perfect chopping of numerous salads in a restaurant.
Who will decide, and how?
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