Wired State

More Criticism on the Internet of Things -- But the Problem Isn't Just the State, It's the Coders

I discovered there's now a mini-explosion of discussion of the Internet of Things as the geek power struggle for it heats up, and fortunately, that also means some more critical discussion.

Here's a guy named Ken Craggs who followed me on Twitter because he follows this topic (I'm out of follow spots so put  him in a list with a few others in his stream) and he has published a cautionary post about the Internet of Things called "Panopticon".

The IOT (will there be an ID IOT?) has had all kinds of ominous developments that I've missed because I've been focusing on virtual worlds, social media, and occasionally augmented reality, all of which may be incorporated into IOT, of course.

When I first saw the IOT prototype put up by Babbage Linden in 2006 or 2007, it was virtualizing virtuality further by tagging all the objects so you could instantly find them on the sim, then track them, add more content to them, etc. Semantic web, I guess. So you could find "petunia" and write some message on "petunia". Remember how Babbage wanted to play petanque with pianos? I hated that, because I found it so casual and destructive. And really that was indicative of the commodification of everything. All property just becomes somebody's plaything and absurd.

Craggs notes that something called CALO has emerged at the forefront of the IOT:

The CALO project overview from Stanford informs us that, “CALO as an adaptive agent, is incredibly complex…At CALO's heart is the ability to take autonomous control…As CALO…adapts its behaviour over time, there is an underlying assumption that there will be a user in the loop whom CALO is serving”. And this document from the ‘Internet of Things’ European Research Cluster, states (p.84) that “The IoT needs to handle virtually all modes of operation by itself without relying on human control.”

Gosh, that sounds just lovely, doesn't it? It sounds like that Linden dream -- the "emergent behaviour" and "ambient intelligence."

Remember, what Philip Rosedale and the other Lindens wanted with Second Life was to make *that* the Brain -- the entire thing would be the emergent and ambient Brain. So all of us who had "invested our consciousness in a toy" as Will Wright once so stunningly explained it regarding the sim (avatar) in The Sims would be executing perfect right-angle walks around objects and having out chat logged and mined for God-knows-what and would be accommodating ourselves to the "affordances" of virtuality like flying which of course had their "deficits" like...sitting on your ass in the real world for hours at a time...

So picture the whole world like that, and your friends able to "map" you. We haven't begun to see anything like the massive debate there will be over "mapping your friends". We had it first in The Sims, where they enabled you to turn it off, but where your presence marker in the "friendship balloons" would then become a trail showing where you had been. So you went to that strip club or that other girl's house, it's in your balloons! Like spore. 

Then we saw in Second Life with the mapping which people like FlipperPAY who couldn't figure out how to tell their friends to stop IMing them, or defriending annoying people, and demanded the ability to be online, but not show as online. OK, fair enough, except there is a difference between *mapping* and "seeing online". Remember when I said the problem with point-to-point teleporting is that people would TP on your head? And the first hour they implemented it we used Philip's friendship card to TP on to his head so he "got it". Then they put in the granularity -- friendship with or without mapping (I think that was the sequence).

Right now, unlike Second Life, in real life I can't geolocate my "friends" whose telephone numbers I have in my i-phone. But soon I will, and the argument will start up. "The government" will know where you are. "The corporations" will market-data-strip you. OK, but the real problem is governance -- the freedom from *each other*. That will be much harder to deal with -- that boss who can't understand why you don't want to be mapped all day during work hours...

But what I want to say about COLA -- about which of course I have to read a lot more know -- is that I don't believe in the "autonumous nature" of the thing. Again, as I always insist, code is concretized will of human beings. It is not magic. It is not separate. It is not "other". It is not autonomous. It's just irresponsible. It's just not accountable. And getting more so. Every "emergent behaviour" is at some level planned and thought about *and enabled* and not enough thought and care put into making sure bad behaviours are *disabled*. You know, like making the default "damages" instead of "safe"?

Again, my mistake (and it came from the geeks themselves) in thinking about the risks of the IOT was that it would be done with sensors or RFIDs. Remember when I criticized David Orban and Joi Ito going around putting RFIDS on things to make the "spimes" of science fiction come to life faster? I said if I found them I'd grind them up with my shoe and drown them in cans of Coke? And Joi Ito then deliberately blocked my blog on Technorati, which he controlled, it was incredible. I had a good rating, and then suddenly my posts couldn't even be searched. After complaining and publicizing this problem, it changed, but now years later after their various "revisions" I'm completely gone from there now, I don't know why I even bother to post key words there from Typepad.

But RFIDs aren't the main thing, or at least, not know. It's that the things already wired now connect to your smart phone, and it's in your hand, not "out there"? So the IOT and the spimes are now much more intimate but also paradoxically much more individually controlled. There is less of "the geeks putting things everywhere and listening" and "me deciding I want this thing connected". Except, the push by geekland to wire things up so they can listen, too, will be enormous. Need to get those databases populated!

Craggs conceives of this problem in the classic geek fashion -- and the fashion many savvy Internet users have adopted -- as one of "the government" having its Big Brother eye on you:

Just as government agencies can monitor and filter e-mails people send, context-aware machine listening could possibly be used to listen for certain spoken words and phrases, which would indicate that an individual or group of individuals, communicating by speech, are likely to be a threat to other people and/or property and/or the state. A simplistic way to explain how this might work is that the personal details and other info of the 7billion+ people on earth would be on a database. Whenever an individual says what is considered by government to be an inappropriate word or phrase, the individual is given a negative mark. Every so often CALO (or another adaptive system) queries the database to ascertain how many negative marks each individual has. The number of negative marks that each individual has accumulated could then be used to help identify, potential criminals, activists, troublemakers, ringleaders and so-forth, based on the kind of subject matter each individual prefers to discuss.

But I have to say, that's NOT the way it will work, at least not ubiquitously, and not the way it's ALREADY working.

What REALLY happens is that coders control platforms and silence you. THEY silence you, not "the government". The community leaders (ugh) put in place to manage discussions on Facebook; the "thought leaders" who command huge followings whether a Robert Scoble or Jeff Jarvis -- they are the ones who mute, control, delete, ban. Not the government. They do. They are identifying the "troublemakers" who dissent against their IOT or whatever other gadget they are hawking, and they stifle dissent. In fact, the government is something you may come to appeal to in order to secure the secular and free space for debate and dissent under the First Amendment, because these platforms won't protect it. The problem is all the social media nerds in Gov 2.0 have those same clutchy censorious instincts as they come from the same clan, and they silence debate as well.

Craggs is imaging the government running the reputation system. You wish! They could run it under the rule of law, with standards, and it would be justiciable and subject to checks and balances.

The problem is that the systems are ALREADY run by geeks -- Klout, Facebook likes, G+ -- whatever. Those systems already have tremendous sway. The reputation system we saw in Second Life was a classic example of something gamed and misused for griefing and harassing and silencing dissent, not rewarding innovation. The government is not the problem. Facebook, which already automatically blocks posts now if they are "too long" or have key words they don't like in them like "breast" is the problem.

The Wired State, which I have constantly warned about isn't the state as we know it now -- you wish. You may come to long for the day when you'd have more or less an assurance that a neighbourhood precinct cop might come and save your from assault or harassment or enforce a judge-issued order of protection. Instead, in the Smart World, you will have Community Leaders siccing people on you -- the pizzas delivered by Anonymous to their enemies are only the tip of the iceberg.

Again, the security isn't merely about privacy, but about governance and the ability to be free from other non-state actors, not just the state or corporations.

And as per usual with this discussion, there is little awareness that private property and privacy have to remain linked, that privacy with the erosion of private property will not be possible. To the extent that we are in fact saved now from legions of greedy ap engineers and only the plaything of contracted market data scrapers on Facebook, it's due to the walled-garden nature of Facebook. Good! I'd much rather have an ad I don't like in the margins of my social network than become the "girl near me" unasked on somebody else's rapacious ap, you know? That's the reality of the IOT.

The part I find least persuasive in Cragg's useful piece is the bit about the nano-things that can "read your brain". Hmm. Really, guys? And I can't put tinfoil on my head and prevent that lol?

What's more easy to do is read intentions based on searches -- Google can predict what you will think about, search for, do, etc. just by looking at all your searches.

The problem isn't that the government is going to put a nano-device into me and monitor it and even switch it off and make me a non-citizen -- which is of course, a possibility and to be guarded against.

The real problem is that people like a Linden I once debated on this subject thought it was backward and reactionary of me to fear nanobots because it was just like medicine particles that had various chemical effects in the body. Um, right. So people like that guilty trip others to take nanobots to "improve" their alertness, get rid of oxidants, become more thin, whatever -- and then they can control them via those little critters. The government in fact will be what you turn to, in order to regulate this menace.

The nightmare that Craggs describes with the nano-implant -- cut off from food, housing, etc. by a totalitarian state -- is exactly what the Soviets implemented with their propiska or resident permit and domestic passport system, still in effect today throughout the former Soviet Union, and explaining why Tajik migrat workers can starve or be killed with impunity. And the problem isn't just the state, but all the people who then accept bribes to help you around this state which become another kind of problem.

 

 

 

Hackers Dump UDID's from i-Phones; Real Life Replicates Second Life

Your eye-phone is spying on you...  (C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

So it seems Anti-Sec (not to be confused with LulzSec, whose members are supposed to be mainly arrested), a spinoff of the Anonymous hackers' movement, is claiming that they have leaked a million unique iphone identifiers that the FBI had stashed on a laptop because....because the government is the problem, see, not anonymous unethical hackers. So in order to prove that the government is evil, these hackers had to expose what the FBI supposedly had obtained but was keeping secret -- thereby harming a million people and subjecting them to harassment, identity theft -- or perhaps just a minor nuisance, who knows.

Oh, except maybe the FBI never had these million UDIDs, as the unique device IDs are known, and it's merely the hackers (hardly a credible source) saying they took it from the FBI to frame them, and "make a point". See, the government *could* get them, so people should be, um, more aware...or something.

LAZY TECH PRESS

Half the tech press reported this straight off Pastebin as it was tweeted or IM'd them, and didn't bother to do the basic journalistic due diligence to at least check with the FBI. Slate, which is more of a journalists' outfit, although the first of the new media online publications long before Huffpo, at least asked the FBI about it -- and got the answer that no, they had no knowledge of this breach. Well, they would say that because they aren't to be trusted, right?

Except, I trust the FBI a lot more than I trust a lot of unethical hackers. The FBI has training, procedures, and congressional inquiries to face, unlike anonymous neckbeared coders who enjoy the thrill of others' suffering.

RWW took the usual hack-friendly line of all the tech press -- this big data dump was a kind of "service" that helped "get attention" to an issue that coders had "long" been warning about. Except...it's not any service to anybody. Apple already "got the message" and was slowly "deprecating" it, but obviously found it difficult to wind down because it was usual with ap functioning and market-data scraping.

AND PANIC-MONGERING GEEKS...

Chris Sogohoian-- who else? the boy darling of the privacy circuit these days -- ranted santimoniously about all this -- but wait. As the geeks will be the first to tell you, this serial number -- that's all it is, really -- is not by itself that big a deal. At the demand of a developer or a customer service agent, you use an ap or you go to i-tunes to get it. It's "there" and easy to get.

It's a big deal only in combination with other things like passwords. And how were they going to get those? Well, they would have to hack those, too, unles they happened to hack Slate.com and find that your user password there was the same as your i-phone.

THE INTERNET IS NOT SPECIAL

Truly, the UDID on your phone is like your phone number, which the FBI might easily get as well. The fact is, when they are pursuing a case, they collect data. They might get an eyewitness account that is unique; they might get a description of a suspect; they might get clues. It's just another clue or marker, at the end of the day, like "Male Caucasian, residing on Main Street". Supposedly it would take "longer" for a telecom to provide to the FBI the information that would come with a telephone number than the UDID-related info. But wait a minute. Huh? You would still have to go to the telephone service provider to link up the activity associated with that UDID. And remember, that hated and mistrusted FBI has to make its case; it has to use procedures if not warrants in gathering this intelligence for a legitimate purpose that will stand up in court. Remember? Court?

Nextweb was trying to be all "news you can use" with this, failing to report the FBI's disclaimer or to probe more about the Anti-Sec claim, and providing a "helpful tutorial" on how you could find your own UDID number and then check a list of the stolen ones. They warn this list access on their site isn't secure, but of course, tons of people *will* check it, out of paranoia. And that means that they now, on their website, have all those people's UDIDs associated with their IP addresses and cookies. So now instead of the Anonymous problem, we have also various tech blogs having the same information. You're sure they're going to dump it? You're sure it won't be hacked itself?

UNHELPFUL TUTORIAL AND HELPFUL AP

The tutorial that is supposed to be "simple" and adopts a breezy but patronizing tone with the user in fact doesn't work. It doesn't work if you don't have 10.5 or later as your i-tunes version, and if, like me, you constantly have trouble with i-tunes patches downloading and updating properly, and failing constantly, you won't be able to get the later version. If you don't have that later version, the screenshots won't look the same -- you won't have "device". In fact, you'll get an error message telling you to update your i-tuns because it can't find the device, even when plugged into your computer. Sigh.

Well, like all things tech, just Google it to see if you can find some other "helpful tutorial" and see what else is there. Surely there has to be a way to find your own UDID number without futzing around with i-tunes patches. And it turns out there are two aps that enable you to do this and email yourself. I chose the first one, called Ad Hoc Helper, developed by Erica Sadun, an i-phone app developer (if that sounds like a redundant description, it is, and that's all you often can find out about an app engineer).

I caught up with @EricaSadun on Twitter, asking her if her ap "phoned home". Did it send her or her servers or her company the same UDID it was sending me on email? Or was it just code that grabbed it off the hardware and emailed it to wherever I said, and only there?

I never worry about appearing stupid and clueless when it comes to tech, because like Columbo, you have to just keep asking questions, even seemingly stupid ones, to get answers, especially about things like this with privacy and power implications.

Erica answered very quickly that no, she "didn't see" the information, it just went to the email you yourself typed in. I pressed. I have learned to press, from dealing with the coders of third-party viewers in Second Life, which phone home, and with many other things in and around SL -- where this sort of story was first prototyped, now to be replicated and enacted in real life.

Erica's prompt and efficient answer: "‏@ericasadun @catfitz nope. I see nothing, copy nothing, serve nothing."

It's my new favourite tweet, and evidence that sometimes, dealing with girl coders is better. They answer the question and reassure the user, instead of being nasty, as a male geek would have undoubtedly been.

SECOND LIFE PROTOTYPES REAL LIFE

Like they were when we all asked this question about the avatar's unique identifier, known in Second Life as the UUID.

The early edition of Anonymous -- w-hat -- active back in 2004-2005 on this issue grabbed these UUIDs from avatars without their consent by using scripts that had code functions they probably casually obtained from Linden Lab itself, the makers of SL, which has a whole bevy of such hackers surrounding it in its open source cult.

We were told over and over again that these UUIDs were not a big deal, would not cause any harm, and we should stop fussing over them. The Internet is not special (only coders are). Um, so what was the point in grabbing and publishing them and causing panic and havoc? Well, to out people's privacy and show the power of hackers, of course.

And in fact they *could* cause harm. Because you could use them to track people's movements, their purchases, and worst of all, for some people, their proximity to others. An SL wristwatch with this reporting capacity that was popular for awhile (and much-defended by the open-source goons) also drew fury from the wider user population. They didn't care if these numbers on their avatars couldn't be used to find them in real life; they didn't want them grabbed and manipulated -- full stop.

APPLE DEPRECATES UDID

Interestingly, the geeks in real life have had to sing a different tune on this. They didn't snort and disclaim it as somehow unimportant. First of all Apple, which is a responsible computer firm and not a hacker collective, under pressure of the concerns about privacy and identity theft involved in harvesting UDIDs, decided to "deprecate" them. "Deprecate" is software-speak for "we plan to get rid of this unnecessary or outdated or disliked thing, but not right away, well, it's on our to-do list". Obviously, they're still on every new i-phone sold still and still accessible, so they aren't so deprecated, der. But the aps making use of them -- which of course, where the real bonanza was, as it always is, were told they would be "deprecated" and they would have to find new ways of capturing customers' unique data.

And all those ap engineers out there are just like the conscientious Erica, eh? They all see nothing, copy nothing, serve nothing, right? Right?

The haste with which the tech publications all put these Pastebin lists up on line -- and became part of the problem and risks themselves to privacy as they encouraged people to part with their UDID in a panic checking the lists -- lets us know just how much they really "care". They don't. As geeks, they think UDIDs are nothing, like phone numbers. In fact, they're more like social security numbers in that they tie up to people's banking, purchases online, orders, etc. etc.

BLAME THE FBI AND DISTRACT FROM THE HACKERS

Says Slate:

Even if the information can’t necessarily be used to track movements or log GPS locations, as the hackers have themselves claimed, it’s difficult to think of any justification the FBI or another government agency could have for storing it. According to Soghoian, “If the database is in the possession of law enforcement, it is quite likely that the majority of the people on it have committed no crime and have no business being on any law enforcement database.”

Oh, stop it. Of course it can be used to track movements and GPS locations if it ties to aps to do that, derr. But on the other hand, you stop it, too, Soghoian, because just like law enforcement can make use of public telephone books and the willingness of citizens to provide unique physical descriptions, so, too, will they make use of things like this. Soghoian isn't bitching about "smart city" and the "Internet of Things" or Anonymous, which caused this problem; he's bitching about the FBI, which didn't.

Look, Larry Page wants us to have brain implants (remember how we thought the problem of the Transhumanists is that they wanted to upload their brain to the Internet? well, Larry wants to first implant your brain to be wired to the Internet -- sort of the download/upload distinction.) And you're worried about the FBI, which in fact has caught LulzSec and other hackers who are the originators of this harm?

We really need to have our heads on straight about this story: the problem isn't the FBI or the government keeping information which they use in legitimate criminal investigations. If you think they don't have legitimate cases, call your lawyer or the ACLU, and let's hear the actual use cases, you know? If they have to scan through databases for key words or proximity data, which is not the same thing as perusing your individual file when you aren't a suspect, how is that different than showing a crime victim a physical book of photos? It's not. Let's get over ourselves here, please, and stop pretending as always that the Internet is special -- and affords a chance for power-mongers to have more power.

HOW REALLY WILL OUR PRIVACY BE SECURED?

Of course, there are things you can try to do to protect yourself, like going outside without your cell phone in your hand, you know? But people will not go back to those off-grid days. So eventually, we will evolve law that will treat the cell phone -- and the avatar, and the other digitalized artifacts of ourselveS online -- as part of the legal person and maybe even physical person. If we were to log on with our finger prints -- in physicality -- the entire layer owned by geeks now as the logon-o-sphere -- would disappear. No doubt there would be cries about the "government," but your email would sure have a lot harder time being hacked if it required your finger print to access it, you know?

What happened in Second Life to the list of UUIDs and the constant tracking that went with them? Some merchants who confessed to harvesting these were able to track hot spots and plan their sales and merchandising accordingly and spam people more. People lost their privacy again and again, especially with the outing of alt accounts and proximity data they didn't want revealed, not only with the UUID track but the harvesting of the IP addresses (and please don't start nattering to me about how they are "dynamic" -- they either a) aren't or b) are, but in a range, that makes them still identifiable as to place).

So yes, it was a nuisance or even real distress, but you know what? In part, this havoc depended on the ability of w-hat to maintain that webpage with all those addresses, and to keep collecting more with scripts and scripted prims they had people touch. Who knows how they got mine. But in the end, they didn't keep this site going. It cost money, it was effort, and even obsessive griefers get tired of their antics. They let it go.

Today, there are scripted objects that take avatars' UUIDs to serve them, i.e. with a vendor or a magazine subscription or a rental box, but they don't then archive or broadcast it (although some do). For example in my system with an open source rental script, an "ap" if you will, the UUID is taken to establish the payment and expiration, but it doesn't collect anywhere or send itself to me. In fact, you can go and see it on the box itself, if you go to the trouble of looking, but few would bother in a sea of millions of such items. And it could likely be scripted so it didn't do that.

Do Apple developers sign codes of ethics the way Facebook engineers have to? Surely they must -- I just haven't seen the page (Facebook has one).  Apple screens aps, and that's a good thing. They didn't let through the ap to track drone strikes (presumably merely from press reports) because they likely felt it was too politicized or even a threat to security. And that's ok. Some other service provide can provide that ap along with the Intifada ap and all the other crap. There must be diversity, and it's a good thing that Apple maintains some kind of principles and order.Does that mean they are perfect protectors of our privacy? Um, no. But then, it's Anonymous that's the problem, remember? And nobody grew "stronger" because they did this -- only they did.

 

"Internet of Things" is Getting Some More Critics

Blue moon rises over a skyscraper. What happens when this building gets smarter than you?

Here's an important article by Christine Rosen about the "Internet of Things". It appeared in The New Republic, but in fact it first appeared in another online magazine she edits which I hadn't heard of before -- The New Atlantis: Journal of Technology and Society. I was so glad to discover this magazine (new?) which seems to have a lot of good stuff of it.

Rosen's piece is a review of a book  Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things By Peter-Paul Verbeek  (University of Chicago Press, 183 pp., $25) -- free preview here. So there's lots to chew on here.

She talks about a city in South Korea that is going to be a "smart city" with lots of things in it wired up to the Internet so it can be monitored and become more "smart" and more "responsive" -- which is, as Jaron Lanier warns us in You Are Not a Gadget and which Rosen implies, starts to be more about making the human becoming dumber, and becoming a kind of battery running the gadget.

Although she mentions them in passing, Rosen doesn't dwell on the obvious privacy issues around all that "smartness" but addresses the other more complex moral and ethical issues involved in having technology mediate human will:

Drawing on technology theorists such as Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, as well as the work of Michel Foucault, Verbeek proposes a “postphenomenological approach” that recognizes that our moral actions and the decisions we make “have become a joint affair between humans and technologies.” In this affair, human beings no longer hold the autonomous upper hand when it comes to moral agency; rather, Verbeek argues, we should replace that notion with one that recognizes “technologically mediated intentions.”

It struck me that the premise that there are even such things as "technologically mediate intentions" is in fact a faith proposition. Because in fact what technology of this sort is all about is code; and code is the concretized and automatized will of human beings. The code is the problem, not the metal or gears. The code comes from humans -- online electrons, our digital lives, are more about human will than anything, really, although people don't tend to think about it that way.

Rosen mentions Philips Technology -- and I'll never forget the awful event in Second Life about wearables staged by Philips five years ago, pre-anticipating wired outfits that could also detect your real emotions and broadcast them, where the creepy Csven Concord was eagerly boosting the use of this in the virtual world as a reputation manager. How invasive! How awful! Why would anyone think this is fun like a mood ring! That is, it went way behond just indicating your preferences or moods for some benign usage or even with some worrisome implications of privacy exposure -- Csven wanted it to be the reputation marker, so that if people rated you poorly inworld, that rating would show a colour on your clothing. Gives a whole new meeting to the scarlet letter, eh?

There's a name for these new totalitarians -- the Extropians. And what I've been warning about for years about "the Internet of Things" such as in this post and this post -- in their hands, it really comes down to two things that Rosen doesn't get to, but which I feel are the substrate of the debate about privacy and morality:

o Once everything is wired and digitalized and linked to the Internet, it is no longer the property of an individual or group or corporation; it is the property of the coders -- its value is no longer intrinsic, or belonging to its owner or user, but belongs solely to the coder. Indeed, control over it is ceded to the coder. That is, once your toaster is wired and coded to know that you need a lightly-browned bagel every morning at 7:35 am, then the value of the toaster comes to reside in that code, not in the thing itself. This is the collectivization of things, and that's why I call it technocommunism.

"Progressives" worry about this phenomenon as one of "the corporations" that extract market information from users of free social media on the Internet, or they worry about "the government" getting its hands on private data, but the real problem is the coders. The coders are always the ones whose lapses or short-cuts lead to those awful SQYL injection attacks, eh?

o Once everything is wired and collectivized and "not yours" and "not really under your control" anymore and "easily broken" (think of all those broken digital things you have now, whether coffee makers or weight scales or VCRs!), it is under control of the coders. And this isn't just a problem of property -- although that is a very big problem -- it's the problem of morality and ethics of this class of people. And what we know of this class of people already is that they tend to the ethics-free hackers -- "code is law," copyright is a hindrance to "innovation" and can't be protected, privacy can't be maintained and shouldn't be contained. That is, the morality issues of technology in the "Internet of Things" aren't abstract, and aren't about "humanity" using technology -- they are literally, and very practically, about ethics-free hackers taking authoritarian control over other human beings.

In other words, i'ts aboutall the deliberate flaws welded into the Internet by Tim Berners-Lee -- no commerce and lack of private property; collaboration that tends to collectivization of knowledge; no privacy. Great for a scientific collaboration, terrible for your own life or a civil society.

Rosen is mainly concerned with the moral uses of technology and the misuses that thoughtlessly appear -- well, Verbeek's book appears to be about such moral uses:

The promoters of Ambient Intelligence and Persuasive Technologies want to identify, quantify, and track everything about ordinary experience in the hopes of improving people’s lives. But in outsourcing so many aspects of our daily lives to technology, we are making a moral choice. We are replacing human judgment with programmed algorithms that apply their own standards and norms to our behavior, usually with the goal of greater efficiency, productivity, and healthy living. It is something of a letdown to realize that while the Enlightenment’s goal was dethroning God, our post-Enlightenment technologists and philosophers are satisfied merely to get us to loosen our grips on that Big Mac.

Yet the problem of the technologists who build intrusiveness into apps along with "gamification" to get you to walk more or eat less calories is that they believe uncritically in a "Better World" and that they can perfect humanity. It's not just that this perfection is superficial and shallow -- it's that it rapidly becomes political. It's not just "eat this, not that"; it's "we will decide to hire you based on what we find on Facebook" -- and the garbage in/garbage out problem. Doesn't the diet app rely on my faithful input? What if I lie or go off the grid? Or will "smart homes" with apps telling what I bought at the store and what went in and out of my refrigerator act as a backstop? Who is going to be in charge?

Again, the problem is not that our lives are all mediated, or that "everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation" and become commodified, a la Guy Debord and Marx.

The problem is that the coders are not ethical. The debate has to start with the nature of the coders. Why are they like that?

And I remind you of the interchange I had on that past post about "the Internet of Things," where a coder named Aditya Menon wrote this:

Why are you so afraid of us "coders"? Programmers are just people like you. News flash : most of us don't want to 'own' you or take control of your stuff... we are just trying to live and enjoy our life - and we probably contribute more towards the greater good than many other professions.

Do you indeed see what the problem is!

Jeff Jarvis pointed out trenchantly in the debate about the raw Twitter news coverage of the Empire State Building shooting the other day that now, our news comes from people named @YoAssMan. Indeed. But it's worse. Our systems, our apps, come from people like @noneck who I was just remembering today -- people with completely different sets of values and norms and ethics (or absence of same) who celebrate WikiLeaks and Assange and piracy and think it's just ducky when Anonymous or LulzSec "teaches a lesson" in security to corporations or governments. The debate on technology cannot be so abstract, and has to come back to the class of people making and controlling technology.