More than just an engrossing yarn, Mr. Glenny’s book takes an anthropological approach to the DarkMarket community, elucidating its conflicting motivations, ruthless tactics and anarchist philosophy. Even though many cyber criminals have day jobs, they spend inordinate amounts of time online, mostly in a futile attempt to impress their peers and join the ranks of the digital übermenschen. Many choose cybercrime for the same reasons that disaffected youngsters choose more pedestrian forms of crime; tales of desperation, rejection and poverty loom large in this book. Faced with an unpalatable choice between a life of violent crime or seemingly victimless cybercrime, 13-year-olds in Ukraine choose the latter. This is Mr. Glenny’s most perceptive insight: Regardless of how much money governments and corporations spend on upgrading computer security, the war on cybercrime cannot be won without mastering the psychology of its practitioners.
As Twitter’s message traffic has grown explosively, so has the scientific appetite for the insights the data can yield. Dozens of new scholarly studies over the past 18 months by computer-network analysts and sociologists have plumbed the public torrents of data made available by Twitter through special links with the company’s computer servers. This research has harnessed the service to monitor political activity and employee morale, track outbreaks of flu and food poisoning, map fluctuations in moods around the world, predict box-office receipts for new movies, and get a jump on changes in the stock market. When the magnitude 8.8 Chilean earthquake hit last year, researchers found that on Twitter the truth often won out over misinformation. “When a rumor is true, it spreads faster,” said computer analyst Barbara Poblete at the University of Chile in Santiago.
That’s a big claim. Is there more than one data point to support it?
portraitoftheartistasayoungman:
Harold N. Fisk’s 1944 maps of the Mississippi River’s path over time.(via Flavorwire via Benjamin)
In sum, the NYT screwed up. Lindstrom appears to have a habit of making overblown claims about neuroimaging evidence, so it’s not surprising he would write this type of piece; but the NYT editorial staff is supposedly there to filter out precisely this kind of pseudoscientific advertorial. And they screwed up. It’s a particularly big screw-up given that (a) as of right now, Lindstrom’s Op-Ed is the single most emailed article on the NYT site, and (b) this incident almost perfectly recapitulates another NYT article 4 years ago in which some neuroscientists and neuromarketers wrote a grossly overblown Op-Ed claiming to be able to infer, in detail, people’s opinions about presidential candidates. That time, Russ Poldrack and a bunch of other big names in cognitive neuroscience wrote a concise rebuttal that appeared in the NYT (but unfortunately, isn’t linked to from the original Op-Ed, so anyone who stumbles across the original now has no way of knowing how ridiculous it is). One hopes the NYT follows up in similar fashion this time around. They certainly owe it to their readers–some of whom, if you believe Lindstrom, are now in danger of dumping their current partners for their iPhones.
I don’t think this has the effect that Facebook wants. I don’t think a frog-boiling style of slow erosion of privacy means people just continue to share in the same way except in public. It means that the people who understand what’s going on become wary, stop trusting, and eventually stop using the service. And people who don’t understand what’s happening will eventually hit situations in which something doesn’t work the way they thought it did (often embarrassingly), and the uncertainty of their mental model will result in less usage and make that usage more tentative and more careful.Ultimately, it just means less intimacy. Less signal. Less of exactly what this kind of technology is supposed to enable.
— Joe Moon
Less signal and less intimacy, yes — but only microscopically less. What percentage of Facebook’s 800 million users have any awareness of these matters whatsoever? I can’t imagine it would be more than 2 percent; I would guess less than 1. And how many of those are seriously bothered by Facebook’s campaign against privacy? Surely far less than half. Facebook is in a position where it can aggregate significantly more information at the cost of alienating a tiny percentage of its users, many of whom will get over their alienation. There’s no real downside for them.
Nobody is against empathy. Nonetheless, it’s insufficient. These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them. It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments. In a culture that is inarticulate about moral categories and touchy about giving offense, teaching empathy is a safe way for schools and other institutions to seem virtuous without risking controversy or hurting anybody’s feelings.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3PRmu0tr6k?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
One person whose work on these matters has received considerable attention lately is the British Professor of Psychopathology, Simon Baron-Cohen. (Yes, cousin of Sacha Baron-Cohen aka Borat, but highly regarded as a serious scientist.) He’s the author of The Science of Evil, which seeks to dispose of the problem of evil in part at least by changing its name. “My main goal,” says Baron-Cohen, “is replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term 'empathy.’ ” What he means is that instead of calling someone evil we should say they have no empathy. Baron-Cohen goes to great lengths to posit an “empathy circuit” in the brain whose varying “degrees” of strength constitute a spectrum, ranging from total, 100 percent empathy to “zero degrees of empathy.”
The problem with this idea is that many people wholly lacking in empathy do not take the trouble to exterminate whole populations of people they see as wholly other than themselves. Moreover, if you see only some people as requiring extermination, while you seek to elevate the status of others, then you evidently see the latter as being in some significant way like yourself — which I think suggests a degree of empathy. So it seems pretty clear that the concept of empathy doesn’t do all the explanatory work that Baron-Cohen thinks it does.
“Bruegel suggests a chart of emotions as intricate as the map-making of Ortelius. The sloped back of the kneeling Christ echoes the shape of a cliff or mountain range. The texture of the robes of the Pharisees, all fissures and geological creases, runs straight into this panel’s immediate neighbour: a Bruegel exterior, Landscape with the Flight into Egypt. At the feet of the stooped Pharisee is a pebble the size of an egg. And then another, even smaller. The tools of execution are countered by the words Christ traces with his finger in the dust: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” So this act of writing, making the ground into a page, overwhelms the rhetorical snares of speech, the ugly cut and thrust of political interrogation. The enchanted mob, literally petrified, will move again. The stick divided by the Pharisee’s gesturing hands becomes a wand. And the stage, as we remember from John, empties. The stone-throwers walk away, one by one, according to age. Until the kneeling Christ and the standing woman remain, in an awkward reversal of their established sexual status. He tells her to go, to sin no more, to pass from this narrative, and out of our knowledge. A mystery encrypted in one small panel of painted wood now hanging in a London gallery.“ — Iain Sinclair
The act of writing allows me to feel truly alive. Knowing that I have sold 140 million books worldwide (and given an average of three readers per copy, have reached half a billion people), I have always wondered who these readers were who understood so well what I was saying. How could countries with such different cultures, like Israel and Iran, for example, be interested in my books? When I started using social media, without any assistance or planning, two things guided me: the curiosity to find out who reads my work and the challenge of writing on such a different platform.
“Tell me, friends, do you understand how wonderful I am? Because I must tell you, I cannot grasp it. My magnificence has far exceeded my poor abilities to comprehend magnificence. Who am I, really, in comparison to the aura my genius has generated? I can only lower my head, gently, slowly, in a winsome combination of embarrassment and reverence, acknowledging the miracle of my achievement. Now, I regret to say, I thank you generously for your attention, but I must now return to my restrained yet elegant study, lined with lovely books and autographed photos of many famous people expressing their delight in and awe of my writing, and strive for a more accurate count of the people worldwide (and perhaps — who knows? — beyond this world) who love my writing. Ciao.”