Category: ethics


The Rhetoric of Public Library Fab Labs

Filed Under: ethics, librarianship, philosophy by jtfburgess — Leave a comment
September 10, 2011

There is a lot to like about Lauren Smeadley‘s intriguing proposal to establish a Fab Lab in the Fayetteville Free Library. While I suspect it will yield positive fruits, I confess to being skittish about some of the rhetoric she and her supporters have used to support the idea. While I delight in the video clips featuring Captain Picard in his fully-enlightened glory, any honest Trek geek would admit it wasn’t replicators that brought about a post-capitalist society, but the fatigue for conflict following the Eugenics Wars and first contact with the Vulcans. Not a technology, but a philosophy. Anyway, tempting as it may be, it’s not Jean Luc’s rhetoric I’m here to consider. It’s just that I get a very familiar vibe off of this effort. It takes me back to the heady days of my youth, driving to my first real girlfriend’s house to dialing into the local BBS. At a respectable 1600 baud we traded software and chatted with people with clever (and not so clever) handles. Just by participating in this underground culture we were fighting the power and changing the world, as long as we didn’t get booted when her mom called home from work. Idealism should never, ever die. Nor should we ever stop trying to change the world. But if we’re going to do it, we have to make sure that we’re not letting our enthusiasm make us vulnerable. Vulnerable in particular to the agendas of folks who want to keep the world exactly the same. Mixed in with Picard’s bemused confidence has to be a little of Sisko’s realpolitik. In other words, to push the Trek references a little too far, “never turn your back on a Breen”.

There are so many cautionary lessons to learn from of the early “information society” apostles. For example, I remember reading this quasi-utopian rhetoric and being so inspired. Even this flashy corporate voodoo was exciting (and featured Anna Paquin auditioning for the part of what I can only imagine is conduit to the Senior Partners at Wolfram & Hart). The problem is that the beautiful logic was all flawed. Enthusiast believed that by the Transitive Power of Progress, if a given technology was revolutionary in one domain and was created by smart people with egalitarian intentions, it would necessarily bring about smart, egalitarian revolutions in other domains (politics, economics and society). It just doesn’t work that way. Technology doesn’t make things better, it just makes things different. People can then choose to make things better, or not. It’s so much easier to choose the path of not. Neil Postman wrote a lot about the technological determinism fallacy. Love him or hate him, he has to be accounted for. He pointed out how the internet, like so many other technologies, began with idealistic hobbyists only to come increasing under the control of just a handful ISPs and Telcos. Sure everything is digital now, but at the price of having to deal with the intellectual propertization of everything, too.

What’s my point? The point is, rhetorically overselling the power of technological progress dampens the urgency and sense of individual responsibility people need in order to change the world. And boy does the world need changing. If we don’t take responsibility for carving (or printing) out the future we want, the same people with financial power now will extend their influence to include 3D printing, dominating it, and by extension the very people who need public libraries the most. It’s not just companies doing the dominating either. The Arab Spring demonstrated the power of a highly networked society to subvert autocracy. WikiLeaks, Stuxnet and the AntiSec hacktivist movement demonstrated how vulnerable governments are to cyber espionage. How are central governments going to respond to that? Even in nominal democracies, the government pushback is going to open up millions of personal back channels. It will get harder and harder to be anonymous on the web and easier and easier for mass marketing and mass media to target you personally. No level of proxying or encrypting will protect us if we’re voluntarily participating in a hegemonic panopticon. Right?

So, if the rhetoric of progress is a dangerous way to promote the idea of adding Fab Labs to public libraries what rhetoric should be used? The one that will appeal most to other librarians is one Smeadley is already using, the rhetoric of the public library being an arsenal for democratic culture. This is a popular ideal, and one that does good in the world. Unfortunately it’s one that Michael Harris’ The Purpose of the American Public Library. A Revisionist Interpretation of History poked pretty big holes in, too. It’s not impossible to still use the foundational myth, but one has to do so very cannily in order to be persuasive. There’s also the librarian’s classic (mostly unfounded) fear of losing relevancy to yet another emerging technology approach, but that would be a very dyspeptic one to try. In the end, I’m not sure it’s a grand rhetoric that is needed, even while one is trying to secure funding. 3D printing is a powerful, emerging technology. It would be useful to get ahead of the adoption curve on it, so librarians can help shape its adoption and implementation in a way that favors free or fair access. That is enough to get me really excited, and probably many other people too.

To be clear, I admire Smeadley’s initiative (in both senses), and am not accusing her of being anything but forward-thinking and appropriately enthusiastic. I am just concerned that it is so very easy to slip into the rhetoric of progress and technological determinism, and that can lead to problems down the road. Not only might it make the local trough of disillusionment deeper than it has to be, there is the very real possibility that if left to the devices of oligarchs, 3D printing could make things worse for democracy instead of better. I sincerely hope I’m just being an old coot about all this, and this time the technology really will change things. I look forward to keeping up with developments in Fayetteville.

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21st century Epicureans eat less of the future

Filed Under: ethics by jtfburgess — Leave a comment
August 3, 2010

First, let me say that if you haven’t read Windup Girl and Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi you  should make an effort to do so soon. They are bitter to read, but in the way of the very darkest chocolates, after you’ve savored them, you won’t want anything lighter. Both novels are set in world where calories are scarce and oil has long since peaked, and most people’s standard of living are basically the same as that of sewer rats. People call Bacigalupi’s novels dystopian, but that’s not accurate. Too often a dystopian setting is just a way for an author to put her or his characters into interesting and stark situations, primarily for purposes of creating epic conflict and secondarily so that those characters actions can point out something about the human condition.

While reading Windup Girl, I got the feeling the Bacigalupi couldn’t care less about telling an epic story (although it is), or saying something about the human condition (which he does). Rather, Bacigalupi is writing you, me and everyone an intervention. We’re dancing and gorging ourselves on our grandchildren’s suffering backs, and he needs us to know how depraved and criminal that is. He’s trying hard to help us break through our false consciousness that this lifestyle we’ve achieved for ourselves is even remotely perpetually sustainable. Right now, for an all too brief moment in history, we’re able to use technology to stave off the Malthusian nightmare of too many mouths and too few calories only by burning though natural resources with desperate abandon. Once those resources are gone, no matter how clever we are, we will eventually collapse into entropic war, plague and massive starvation.

Bacigalupi manages to convey that message persuasively in his narratives more so than futurists are able to in essays because we as readers are used to being sold dystopias and apocalypses.  The genre of science fiction, even bitter and hard science fiction provides a buffer that gives the reader the mental sandbox to work through ideas that would be too overwhelming if they were forecasts of our own future. Once we’ve considered those ideas in Bacigalupi’s imaginary worlds, we’ll be more willing to look at them in our own. And we have to look at them, because we’re running out of more than just oil. Any non-renewable substance with industrial use will have peak outputs followed by ever increasing scarcity unto depletion.  We’re like bacteria in the petri dish. When we’ve consumed the agar, its game over.

Of course, we’re not bacteria, but men and women who sometimes allow ourselves to consume mindlessly like bacteria. The only reason we in the developed nations are able to consume at the rate we are is that we have oppressed the rest of the world systemically stripping them of their natural resources, period. If the whole world were Americans we would suck this world dry. I’m not excluding myself from this. I stick a straw in the world every day and get out all the juice I can.  And it’s a sick thing to do, if you let yourself think about it. If you make yourself think about it. But realistically I’m not going to leave the grid and grow kale for the rest of my life, so if I’m going to be able to look at myself in the mirror every day, I have to do something. The something I’ve decided to do is become an Epicurean.

An Epicurean, what the hell? They’re hedonists who consume the worlds finest things right? Pleasure seeking snobbery is your answer to eating the future?

No, Epicureanism  is the opposite of hedonism. Epicureanism is a philosophy the aim of which is the reduction of fear, a state called ataraxia. The path to this tranquility is moderation in all things, and a deep awareness of what it is that really makes you happy. Classically, the two things that Epicureans valued were contemplation in their gardens and friendships, but those should not be thought of as prescriptions. You can live in the polis and still be an Epicurean so long as you are dedicated to moderation and tranquility.  So often, when we don’t know what it is that we are lacking, or yearning for, we will in its place consume that which is readily available. We all have our default consumptions. It’s not our fault. We’ve been raised in a mass market economy, which has conditioned us to relate happiness with consumption.

It is, however, our fault if once we realize we are consuming as a replacement for tranquil happiness we selfishly and brutishly persist in doing so.

Epicureans do care only about the finest things in life, but that doesn’t mean the most expensive watches, esoteric sexual practices or drinking only coffee from beans partially digested by Asian palm civets. It means finding what makes you happy and doing only that, while minimizing that which will cause you to suffer. Some things would seem to give happiness, (eating a whole pie) but when reflected upon will only cause suffering (ugh, I ate a whole pie). Friendship and contemplation were deemed to be the best things because they did the most good and the least harm, but again, if you come up with different peak happinesses, that’s great. The hope is that if we stop reflexively consuming, we’ll take up fewer resources. If we focus on what really makes me happy, we’ll need less to get us through the days. This isn’t the only solution, but it think it’s a good start.

For now, why not take a few minutes to think about what it is you reflexively consume? When do you move mindlessly through your day? What makes you happiest, when you feel the more tranquil and farthest from suffering? How can you minimize your suffering, while in turn maximizing your access to the two or three things that make you happiest? If you can answer those questions, then maybe we can try together to eat less of the future.

For Further Reading:

Epicurus -http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/

Epicurus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance

http://www.betterworldbooks.com/epicurus-id-0971345961.aspx

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Inherited intelligence and childhood education

Filed Under: enhancement, ethics by jtfburgess — Leave a comment
March 18, 2009

So, findings in a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience point to inheritance as being the most important variable in the intelligence-determination equation. Specifically it is the inheritance of genes which promote optimal myelination of neural axons, and thus speeding the brain’s ability to process signals. Future research will be geared toward discovering exactly which gene or genes are responsible for producing optimal myelination. This research could possibly lead to wide-scale enhancement efforts, aimed potentially at raising the processing speed of entire populations. While this prospect is nothing short of thrilling in terms of increasing the general intelligence of the species, these findings can also be speciously applied.

If placed within the context of the nature/nurture debate, strong findings which favor the nature camp may be used to minimize the persuasiveness of arguments for nurturing children through universal education. If, as may be extrapolated from this finding, most of intelligence is determined by a child’s genes, then why should we bother to educate children in an egalitarian way? Why not just test for those children who are rich in myelination and put them into accelerated courses, and minimize our expenditures on those children who have below optimal levels? I’m not trying to set up a straw man here, if increase in intelligence were the main goal of education it really would make little sense to spend equal money without hope of equal results. All you would be doing is setting the child up for failure and poor self-esteem. The research here measures white matter levels and how they correlate to I.Q. scores, using twin studies to establish myelination trait heredity. Though I.Q. is a useful way of measuring intelligence, it is not the only way.

Even if it were the only way to measure intelligence, nurture, in the form of communal  education, serves many other purposes besides just the accumulation of information. Communal education is useful for acculturation, for promoting important social and communication skills, for promoting active healthy lifestyles, and for gaining life skills.  Basically access to education is a quality of life issue as much as it is about information access. Consider the work of the U.N. Berhane Hewan project, which promotes continued education and delayed marriage for girls in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. Without knowing the levels of myelination in any of these girls, and their subsequent probable I.Q.’s, I can say with confidence that the education they receive as a result of the program is improving their quality of life. So while knowledge of the hereditary causes of optimal myelination can and should lead us to research ways of enhancing myelination in all children, in the mean time, we must not be swayed towards believing that smart children in disadvantaged circumstances will simply educate themselves so we don’t have to worry about providing universal childhood education.

Universal childhood education is a way of affirming the humanity of a child, of affirming their worth to the greater community, and of obliging them to contribute in return to the betterment of society. The benefits of this go far beyond raising a few I.Q. scores.

(via ScienceDaily)

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What to do when you are your own Blackberry

Filed Under: ethics by jtfburgess — Leave a comment
January 6, 2009

The Boston Globe recently published an article titled, “How the city hurts your brain…And what you can do about it.” by Frontal Cortex blogger Jonah Lehrer. The substance of the article is that the chaos and complexity of dense urban environments have deleterious effects on our attention span, mechanisms of impulse control and emotional well being. In contrast, natural settings rich in biodiversity have the opposite effect. Lehrer cites research suggesting that the trade off for the loss of focus is an increase in ingenuity and creative novelty.

This is an interesting observation, that has implications for a society that is increasingly enmeshed in communication networks. The same kind of bazaar shock that overcomes mental faculties in the city center may be found in the living room, class room or board room. Wireless networked devices provide a river of information. Sports scores, political spin, celebrity gossip and stock prices wash past us in real time. We, the young information professionals, are encouraged to be baptized in this river. Washed away are not our sins, but our egos. Not egos in the sense of self importance, but egos as in grounded self. That self which is neither at the mercy of base impulses or beset by guilts for satisfying those impulses. The river is no substitute for self.

Yet, it is not possible to become unbaptized. Once you’re dunked, you stay dunked. An information professional abstaining from information is a bum. As the article suggests, going into the wild can help reconstitute a mind that is stimulated to distraction by the bazaar, but can it do the same for the mind that’s tasted of the river? Can you really be at peace in the woods when your iPhone still has edge coverage?

I have long thought that the future of information technology was to bring it closer and closer to the human body, until the access point for networked information was the body’s own nervous system. Think classic cyberpunk interfacing. Now I have to consider the implications of this internalization of the river. Having the source of innovation always at one’s whim is an intoxicating proposition, but having a perpetually diverted consciousness hardly seems worth it. The radical transhumanist approach would be to use an fMRI to find out what part of the brain responds to biodiversity, and stimulate it endogenously.  So what about the less radical proposition? Can you be an information professional in a shack in the woods? We were all promised an end to cities in the 1990s. Everyday telecommuting is now right up there with flying cars and robot butlers in the pantheon of unrealized Buck Rogers conveniences. But must it be so? If the head of the river is in our heads, who cares where the mouths are?

The upshot is, now that we know that constant overstimulation has negative consequences, and that those consequences are ameliorated fairly easily, the onus is on each of us to insist that we be given the opportunity to ease our mental burdens. It’s our well being, and we have the right to protect it.

A shack in the woods

my shack in the woods

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