No, the Buffalo News hasn’t printed my letter (below) yet. Looks like they have pushed this one ahead of it: Buffalo News – Ability to procreate sets marriage apart. But of course: it’s a baby license.
Update: Meanwhile, other New Yorkers are moving forward. The mayor of New Paltz has started marrying gay couples. (Via Crooked.)
This makes me think there are some very cool people living in this country. A nice way to show you care. And as a commenter on Metafilter noted, this would be a great way for a city to put itself in the news in a positive light.
In that vein, I just heard the Buffalo News will be publishing my open letter to our mayor:
Dear Mayor,Several weeks ago, in your State of the City address, you said that Buffalo has “confronted the status quo” and “embraced change.” There is no better time than today to demonstrate that Buffalo is a forward-thinking city that cares about the happiness of its residents. The mayor of San Francisco has challenged the status quo on the issue of same-sex marriages, noting that it is his duty to provide city services in a non-discriminatory manner.
We are at a unique juncture in American history. Providing for gay marriage in the City of Buffalo would let the country know that we are a cosmopolitan and inviting city. As former UB Professor Richard Florida has noted, Buffalo has the makings of an ascendant city. To become the city we all know we can become, we must attract the arts and culture that only thrive in an environment that is open and accepting to difference and diversity. A declaration that the City of Buffalo would allow any couple a marriage license would place Buffalo in the national spotlight as an open and accepting place to live and work.
This is not a “gay issue.” I have been very happily married for more than ten years, and I want others to share in the institution and joy of marriage. If we are indeed a “city of neighbors” we should want all of our neighbors to be able to receive fair treatment from our city government. For our city and for our neighbors, issue marriage licenses to all loving couples regardless of race, age, or sexual orientation.
Your neighbor,
Alex Halavais
This is, in fact, a reply to a comment made by Rolan the Datapimp (of Orkut mapping fame) in the below thread. Go read that first, if you haven’t already.
First, I want to thank both Alan and Rolan for great comments. It will give us a nice set of things to discuss in my seminar tomorrow when we talk about ethical issues surrounding scraping.
Rolan: I tend to agree with you about people basically providing information in a quasi-public manner. I suppose your argument that it was kept within Orkut would be stronger if you provided only access to bona fide members, but even then, I think that particular issue is less important. Dissemination, say, in an academic journal could be relatively limited (to several thousand, or hundred), but always with the potential of wide public consumption.
Let’s take your example of the “sex convention taking place at the Javitts center.” (Why don’t I ever get invited to the interesting conferences!?) Your implication here, I think, is that it is a large public gathering, and therefore different rules apply. It is not, for example, a workshop for breast cancer survivors for 80 people. In the latter case, it seems that collecting and disseminating the data would be particularly invasive. But what if you were a journalist, and went to the sex conference, where there were 25 or 30 thousand people all wearing name tags. Couldn’t you write them down?
Or, to keep with the metaphor, couldn’t you set up a camera at the front door and automatically photograph each person that came in, so you had a collected database of each of the attendees. The answer to the latter question is “probably not.” If you did this, they would send a couple of guys over to remove you, and remind you that photographs are not allowed at the conference.
And that’s where the problem exists. I am not alone in thinking that the Terms of Service are crap. They are asking you to provide personal data, but requiring that you not scrape that data from the site. This is the equivalent of the “no photography” rule. And, although you (Rolan) never note how you got the data, it is presumed that it was not a gift from the Google people.
As I originally noted, I think it would be appropriate for Google/Orkut to provide this data to researchers, in the same way that a convention might allow a photographer to take pictures as long as it wasn’t for nefarious purposes. What sort of purposes? The obvious answer there is highly directed spam—in both the metaphorical case and the actual case of Orkut.
So the problem I have—and it isn’t really with Rolan: as Alan says, I am jealous of the freedom he has—is whether the ToS should apply to me, if my purposes are research. The problem has both an ethical dimension (should I be doing this? is the potential harm in doing so greater than the potential good? or, in a non-utilitarian form, is there an absolute prohibition because people have a reasonable expectation that this will not occur), a practical issue (will this pass muster with IRB? is this a violation of accepted research standards such as the ethical standards promulgated by the Association of Internet Researchers [pdf] and the research community at large?), and a legal question (are Orkut’s terms of service with regard to collecting data enforceable?).
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the instrument of my collection, rather than the collection itself, is the target of the prohibition. Again, I could pay a few students minimum wage to record this data manually. Would that be acceptable? What if I had them sit in a lab and hit each page, saving a local copy? This would appear exactly the same as a scraper to Orkut, and would yield exactly the same results, but would presumably be acceptable.
It turns out that this is roughly how I will be using the data for an upcoming research project. It will have a level of opt-in-ness from the participants, and will abide by the ToS, and will be reviewed by the IRB. I am still toying, however, with the idea that I may be able to use data from Orkut directly. Alan says it’s a clear “no,” but I think it’s a fuzzy no. One way to clear this up, frankly, would be to survey Orkut users to inquire as to their “expectation of privacy.” If it could be shown that members of the community expect their data to be used in such ways, then I think we could use the data more freely. I would expect that they approve of Rolan’s very cool work, and would not approve of a spammer using it. If we can show that this is a broad expectation, I think our use of the data would be acceptable to an IRB. Not sure how they would handle the ToS, though.
Virginia Postrel has a piece in the NYT Magazine A Prettier Jobs Picture? in which she suggests that the death of work is much exaggerated. The Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers are flawed, she says, because the hide all the new jobs (explosive growth in finishing granite countertops and giving manicures) within “boring” categories of factory work that are disappearing—either moving overseas or being eliminated via new efficiencies.
She’s right, of course. Those who manage to make the leap over to the rising ship of independence are doing fine, but the larger trend remains. In other words, it’s not a question of whether new jobs (or, rather, new categories of jobs) are being created. The issue is whether we can expect all of those who are displaced from factories to find satisfying employment, or whether instead these efficiencies in the global economy will lead to an even more radical division between the rich and poor in the US.
I was talking to one of the graduate students about this in reference to professionals, who until recently believed their position as creative elites to be unassailable. They thought it would be safe to ship off the boring, repetitive coding tasks to be done in Bangalore overnight, while retaining the creative process in the US. As Richard Florida points out, this sort of outsourcing was the nose of the camel. Call centers lead to accounting offices lead to other support systems and, inevitably where there is a concentration of skill, local entrepreneurs who can increasingly compete in a global market.
At the same time, it now takes much less to make much more. It’s not like this should be a shock to us. This is one of the hallmarks of the “information revolution” that Bell identified three decades ago. Agriculture used to employ most Americans. Now it employs two percent of the population (pdf), and much of the world criticizes the US and other Western countries for maintaining this level through subsidies and the like.
On one hand, despite the decline in agricultural jobs, followed by the loss of manufacturing jobs, unemployment in the US right now, in historical and global perspective, isn’t that bad. That is, the half of Americans working on the farm eventually found other work of some sort. The same can be said of those with manufacturing jobs. What jobs do they get? This becomes a bit more difficult: perhaps they become “knowledge workers” and perhaps they go to the service industry, depending on their skill set.
Is there an upper bound to the number of people who can work in service? Can’t we expect efficiencies there as well? Not all services are equal. I would suggest that those areas in which technical efficiencies can be more rapidly realized cleaning and maintenance of buildings and grounds, for example, are the first in which jobs will disappear. The biggest leaps in this area are in health care and in security. The direction is clearly, at least in the US, to move to the provision of services, and knowledge workers (lawyers, architects, professors) will increasingly be called to support these service industries and make them more efficient.
But what is “after services.” I am reluctant to say that the answer is “nothing,” but I don’t think the hollowing out process is infinite. We live in a period—and location—of material abundance. Despite the vast “improvements” we have made in manufacturing desires (witness the $200 sweat suit), I argue that there has to be an upper limit on these things. At some point, someone is going to realize that the emperor is wearing a cheap-ass velour sweat suit and the bubble will pop. Unlike the dot-com bubble, though, this will be the bubble—the one that keeps the US on the top of the charts for personal income. Capitalism eats itself.
There is no easy solution to this, I don’t think. Those who are part of the seeming withering “voluntary simplicity” movement will be as affected as everyone else, since they often live simply on the margins of a hyperproductive society. I think there are some blueprints for moving forward in the open source movement, but one of the reasons open source works is because of the patronage of the machine (hard & soft) owners. One path, and a path that seems very difficult to ignore, is that we will increasingly be required to bow down to our robot, er… robots’ masters.
The other side of this, of course, is that while advanced economies come down off this ride, the developing economies will in turn be taking over. Those that gain the political will to take advantage of free trade will additionally be able to free ride to a certain extent, adopting the efficiencies discovered in the advanced economies.
What to do when it becomes cheaper to use machines than grossly underpaid (and often imported) humans to do your alienating labor? Well, you could prop up the system, mandating (as they do in Oregon) that all gas stations are full serve. Eliminate grocery stores by fiat, for example, forcing the continued health of the restaurant industry. Oh, wait, that will cut into a huge labor market: kitchen updating. Or maybe not: who really uses those fancy kitchens anyway?
Alternatively, we could institute a 30-hour work week (aka the Kellog Work Week). But an inadequate minimum wage at 40 (more often 60 or 70) hours a week would be even worse under such conditions, so you would need to double the minimum wage. Wait, you say, if you do that no one will hire menial laborers, and this will encourage even more productivity from existing workers. Odd that this would be a complaint, but there is definitely the possibility that this would accelerate joblessness. So you increase employment taxes enough to provide for every citizen of the US a comfortable existence. Yes, you can sit on your butt 24/7 and have those who are working pay for you to do so. Wouldn’t everyone quit working, then? I wouldn’t, would you?
Of course, for that to happen, those who are employed, and especially those who make a lot of money, would have to allow for a change in the way our taxes work, and in the way we think about poverty and work, and success. I think that they would much sooner buy a set of $400 cashmere sweats and support the more industrious of the working class who are polishing their new granite counter tops.
Or, we could think (again) about local “communities of excess” where you—at least locally—eliminate poverty, crime, and disease, and toil…
(Updated: Now with spellchecking!)
Tom Smith writes about the use of (commercial) IM in a class setting:
At the OTHER media, when building HyperIsland School of New Media, and again in Kosova, we used Instant Messaging, as well as email of course, as one of the main communication tools. Using a “standard” tool like IM, means that as the students left the course and went to work all over the world, the network (or “crews” as they were known) continued to be maintained. Out there in new media world, in London, New York, San Francisco there is a “secret” network still talking. If we’d have given all the students an email address, then turned it off when they graduate they may have been able to maintain those links using free email accounts, but it does become less likely that the simple task of keeping in touch happens.This was a central part of the reason I started the blogs server for our school. I had students in the capstone seminar of a year-long professional masters program. My hope was that once they graduated, they would keep updating the blog, and have a place to touch base with their own cohort, other graduates, and current students. I was hoping to establish a sociotechnical Old Boys Network—with the emphasis on network rather than Old Boys.
There are a couple of people who post infrequently to their blogs since graduation. The irony is that those who took to blogging had or set up their own blogs, and those who didn’t just dropped it, leaving a very small number in the center who took advantage of the free hosting. This year, the blogs have been forced upon the students (more or less) from day one. They resisted, naturally, but some are liking them now and keeping them up. I’ll be interested to see if they continue to do so after they graduate this summer. (via Seb .)
Jamie is at the Atlantic Regional Round of the American Mock Trial Association National Competition National Civil Rights Trial Competition at St. Johns College. I just heard that her team is advancing to the semi-finals. She’s worked hard in prepping for the competition, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed during the appropriate times tomorrow.
Update: Her team took second place in the competition. Way to go!
The NYTimes has an interesting story about how Comme des Garcons is opening 1-year-only stores, and following in the footsteps of Trader Joe’s and others who rely on customers marketing the stores and products to one another. They put a shop into an empty space—an old bookstore in Berlin, for example—and then advertise its location with posters around the city. They then close the store, even if it is doing well. (Fashion thrives both on novelty and scarceness.) This isn’t the first time they have played with shop design, and I remember their shop in Tokyo to be simple, sparse, and architectural. The dressing rooms were neat little spirals in the center of the shop. But this is more than just a CdG move, it appears to be (gasp!) a trend.
All of this is part of “eventizing” consumerism. Jamie (my wife) worked in retail chains that did this to a more or less extreme degree. Illuminations, for example, drew traffic because people enjoyed being in their (very expensive) stores. The product was literally almost secondary; they were selling the expierience. I guess they might have also been suggesting you could get this experience again at home, I don’t know.
I find this interesting within the context of a recent paper suggesting that buying experiences makes people happier than buying “stuff.” That certainly rings true for me, but it puts the sellers of stuff in a the strange position of trying to filter their products through “experiences,” even when the fit may not quite be there. (via v-2)