Bruce Schneier is a fellow and lecturer and Harvard Kennedy School, sit on the boeard of the EFF and is generally recognised as an expert on digitsl security (see his bio here). His blog, “Schneier on Security” is a must go to learn about and keep abreast of tech security.
He recently published a post on a topic that is largely unexplored yet, but of growing importance. AI (let’s call it “AI” for now even though the word covers a wide range of different realities) makes mistakes. Despite the hype and the corporate narrative, anyone who has ever used ChatGPT or other LLMs will have been faced with this stark fact. However, a question that begs to be asked is: how does it make mistakes, and how is this mistake-making process similar or different from the human mistake-making process?
Well, that’s exactly the question Schneier asks in this post. The comments are worth reading as well.
“Yoann Bourgeois Captivates Audience with Powerful Performance About Life”
Many people seem to have seen it. It first appeared on TikTok apparently.
In any case, it’s a beautiful metaphor for life. Of course, falling and bouncing back up. That’s the obvious.
But it’s not only that. It’s the grace. The grace with which he falls and bounces back. As if falling and bouncing back was just the natural flow of life. The NATURAL flow of life.
To say “fall and bounce back” is a way to arrange reality by emphasising specific points in the flow of life: the point when we fall and the point when we bounce back. It’s giving a shape to a reality that could take a completely different shape if the narrative was different.
I was reading the French news. The first page there was a title which read « en direct : la guerre en Ukraine », of course nowadays nobody bats an eyelid when they see that kind of title in a newspaper. We have come to see the direct reporting of wars, atrocities, tragedies or death as a completely natural phenomenon. But if you sit for a second and reflect upon this very simple title, you open a whole new way to understand our civilisation.
Browsing the titles in the French press spurred a reflection about how in just one century, our media have moved from the certainty of modernity to a post-modern world of radical contextualisation. Hundred years ago, mainstream valid knowledge was scientific, linear, and absolutistic (I say “mainstream” because of course Quantum Physics opened a whole new realm in terms of ways of knowing, but the science that was taught in schools was still newtonian). I say this in the sense of Clare Graves level four (blue level), there was one truth. Today we have opened to diversity in such a way that we have gone to the other extreme. Anything goes. The notions of right and wrong have been fully turned into contextual assessments. At the peak of modernity’s trust and faith in the so-called scientific method, which in fact was really a mechanistic worldview and a belief in positivism, the world was a simple aggregation of cause and effect. In this context of course, it became necessary to counterbalance with post-modernity, the view that things were not so straightforward (to put it simply) and that context actually played a major role in the complexity of life. Today we have moved to the other extreme, when universal laws don’t exist anymore. Moving into the extreme of post-modernity has led to the tribalisation of societies, and social platforms largely contributed to this phenomenon.
I was also thinking about the vital importance of explaining that we need to become aware of how we frame what we see. What I mean is if we started to really see and experience social platforms not as neutral means of communication or connection but as environments, therefore highly designed architectures, we would probably naturally behave in different ways when we are online. In fact, we can do this as we lead our life online and off-line. Proprioception and phenomenology, i.e. awareness of self and experience (or rather knowing the world through an embodied experience), are tools to help us do this. The awareness of how built environment carry with them a manipulative agenda is the crux of the matter in this case.
I am not using the word manipulative, in a deprecating sense. Design by nature is a manipulative discipline. But manipulation happens at all levels of communication. To live as a social being means to manipulate in one way or another, “manipulate” our environment, “manipulate” others. Understood in the most primal sense of the word (the Latin term “manus” means “hand”), this kind of manipulation can also be called relationship. Manipulation can imply to “manipulate” someone so they take their medicine every day, thereby enabling them to live their life with increased well-being. The question is: what is the intention behind the design, or the architecture, or the manipulation? As I am writing this, I’m thinking that another word for design could be manipulation. Architecture and the architectural choices represent manipulation and the intention behind the manipulation.
So I was thinking that maybe an interesting provocation could be to reflect on the passage from modernity to post-modernity, and how each of us is positioning ourselves in this very long term trend in the evolution of knowledge production. Are we aware of what’s going on; what meaning do we give to what’s happening in the world at the moment?
A hacker friend sent me a number of resources that introduce and clearly but simply explain digital privacy. I am sharing these here without much comment.
And then, once the person has thought about their threat model and has a rough idea about it, then comes the part about choosing and deploying countermeasures.
Tools
This is a question people often ask me: what tools can I use? Here are some references for tools that can be used, depending on the threat model one has identified: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools
it is important to remember that it’s difficult to prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone, because each person’s threat model will be different.
Someone who is only concerned with surveillance capitalism will need to approach things differently vs. a high net worth individual or celebrity concerned about their physical and digital security vs. a political dissident or whistleblower.
Bruce Schneier’s blog “Schneier on Security” often presents thought-provoking pieces about the digital. This one directly relates to the core question of my PhD about the shifting nature of reality in the digital age.
A piece worth reading. You can also browse through the comments on his blog.
Schneier’s self intro on his blog: “I am a public-interest technologist, working at the intersection of security, technology, and people. I’ve been writing about security issues on my blog since 2004, and in my monthly newsletter since 1998. I’m a fellow and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, a board member of EFF, and the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.”
DATAFIED: A Critical Exploration of the Production of Knowledge in the Age of Datafication
This presentation by Hélène Liu introduces the main findings of her PhD critical research on the profound epistemological shift that accompanies the digital age. To a large extent, civilisations can be understood by the kind of knowledge they produce, and how they go about knowing what they know.
Inspired by The Arcades Project, the seminal work of early 20th-century philosopher and social critic Walter Benjamin, “DATAFIED” asks what civilisation is emerging at the dawn of the 21st century. The spread of algorithms -based on quantified, discrete, computer-ready data bits- to all qualitative aspects of life has far-reaching consequences.
The fanfare around the novelty aspect of social media and more recently of AI obfuscates the old paradigm ideology of quantification underlying the development of those technologies. The language used since its inception anthropomorphises digital technology and conceals a fundamental difference between datafied and human ways of knowing. As we embark in a new wave of increasingly inescapable digital architectures, it has become more urgent and more crucial to critically investigate their problematic epistemological dimension.
The video begins with an introduction of Hélène Liu and is followed by her talk that concludes with pointers toward a more regenerative ecology of knowing deeply inspired by the knowledge and insights shared during the Capra course (capracourse.net). After her presentation we hear reactions and reflections by Fritjof Capra, the teacher of the Capra Course and co-author of The Systems View of Life.
Presenter: Hélène Liu Helene holds Masters degrees from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris-University of Paris (Economics and Finance), the University of Hong Kong (Buddhist Studies) and a PhD from the School of Design at the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong. She is a long-term meditator and student of Vajrayana Buddhism. She recently produced and is releasing her first music album, The Guru Project (open.spotify.com/artist/3JuD6YwXidv7Y2i1mBakGY), which emerged from a concern about the divisiveness of the algorithmic civilisation. The album brings together the universal language of mantras with music from a diversity of geographies and genres, as a call to focus on our similarities rather than our differences.
In the early days of the commercial internet, websites just used cookies to track.
Today, tracking has become much deeper and more sophisticated. The advertising tech industry has developed new ways to track users (NB: what I call the advertising tech industry is basically Facebook, google and all these data brokers or “consumer intelligence” companies).
The key to programmatic advertising, this entire ad industry upon which the entire internet as we know it today runs off of, is IDENTITY.
It monitors and scoops up all the information about everything people do on the internet, i.e., all the big data. But then they need to associate actions and data and insight with individual identities (if you visit YouTube everyday from your home, office, cafe and gym and also do so from your MacBook, mobile, tablets and computer, those are all disparate tidbits of info that need to be unified and linked under your identity for it to be valuable information).
So the key for a data industry players now is all about managing the unique user identities/profiles, each of which they will gather and add behavioral tracking and other data to.
In their systems, I have a profile, you have a profile, etc… but not a profile in the sense that we have made an account with the data company, but rather based on the dossiers they have on all of us.
Here is an interesting article listing out some key ID data companies. They are the ones that compile and maintain shadow identities of people.
The article outlines how each company creates an ID (by email address, IP address, postal address, cookies, device software/hardware information, combination of these, etc…).
Here is a graph summarising the sources contributing to building profiles.
This graph helps you to take action to protect your privacy for each of the items listed above.
Email: for as much as a cup of coffee a day, you can subscribe to ProtonMail, the most secure email on the planet. ProtonMail even allows you to create aliases email addresses connected to your main email. So you never have to reveal your real email anymore.
Phone Number: you can subscribe to services that give you alias phone numbers that you can use for online purchases.
Name: never give your full name when you subscribe to newsletter or browse the internet. Most of the time initials will suffice.
Postal address: this one is harder to
IP Address: use a reliable VPN, and remember, if you do not pay for the service, the currency is your data! So again, pay to get reliable, secure services. ProtonMail has a very good VPN. They have a package available that bundles email, VPN, aliases etc. Check their website, they often have special promotions.
Browser activity: use safe browsers such as TOR or Brave.
Device Data: check your privacy settings, disable location services for most apps, and only enable the one that REALLy need it when you use the app.
First party cookies: use safe browsers such as TOR or Brave.
Third-party cookies: most browsers allow you to stop third party cookies (although I would not trust any browser that belongs to a big tech company).
Check the previous posts on this blog for more privacy tips.
