Jay Oh - Latest Comments

Re: Influencer marketing, peers and trust: two speculative stories

onekind — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 02:37:15 -0000

Hello, just wondering if you've had a chance to read Duncan J Watts' rather trenchant critique of influencer marketing in his book, "Everything is Obvious"? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

Re: Influencer marketing, peers and trust: two speculative stories

edward04 — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:53:04 -0000

What about intrinsic interest amongst WOM participants?

Re: Seeing Like A Database: the problems with big data

hautepop — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:49:45 -0000

Ah, that's the topic of the next blog post I plan to write!

The key issue to me is, however, that there's a massive asymmetry of resources between what I (as a regular individual) can monitor and what companies and governments with much greater time, technical and expertise resources can do. It's not a level playing field, and as such is very likely to compound existing asymmetries of power more than it can disrupt them.

Then, additionally, there is @Michael's point above - by turning myself into an object of sur/sousveillance I am necessarily submitting to a process of reduction, constructing myself as an object in a database rather than a phenomenological subject. Who gains most from that? Those who benefit from an increasingly technocratic worldview - which is to say, probably not the individual subject.

Re: Seeing Like A Database: the problems with big data

Michael — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:00:46 -0000

@Sedicious

I'm not convinced that sousveillance is the solution to this problem. Decentralising the power to collect and analyse data would be a step away from central planning, but it wouldn't take us outside the mindset that makes central planning so appealing, which is the data-driven mindset.
If central planning's claim is that more data will empower the state by enabling it to make better decisions, then sousveillance's claim is that more data will empower individuals by enabling them to make better decisions. Both positions assume that what we need for better decision-making is more data.

On the surface that's a hard assumption to challenge: who could argue that less data would ever be preferable? But what the data-driven mindset overlooks is that choosing to treat the world as data excludes other forms of power-knowledge. When we ask for more data, we get less of something else. Treating the world as data - even Big Data - is an act of reduction, regardless of whether the world's reduced to database rows in a government server room or database rows in a million smartphones.

Central planning might take as its motto "When one person dies it's a tragedy; when a million people die it's a statistic." In that case perhaps the motto of sousveillance should be "When one person dies it can be a statistic too."

Re: Peak freedom?

hautepop — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:50:37 -0000

Ah little brother, but I very rarely see life deal in equilibria!

Such systems are rare and fragile beasts indeed - I would say "as we seem to be seeing with climate", although I gather you may disagree.

To take two of your scenarios - first, water. Yes, more capital will go into producing fresh water. First, this only benefits the people with the capital, which is not the 99% majority of the people living in the arid parts of the world. They will pay more and/or go without - worse outcome, vast numerical majority over those who benefit, therefore net negative. Second, that capital being spent on water is being displaced from something else, and under any likely scenario that's education or health rather than nuclear weapons programmes or the dictator's Swiss pension scheme. Another net negative.

Some water-purification technology companies become exceedingly rich - fabulous. Meanwhile, Sudan redirects the Nile tributaries, Egypt starts gathering its armies, Israel starts thinking it's starting a nuclear weapons programme, panics, and bam, WW3.

Second, Lockheed Martin. Substantial change in the relationship between the citizen and the state, with a highly asymmetric situation where no-one can custodiet ipsos custodes, plus increased levels of fear as people dread being hauled into the police station for things they didn't do (the fuzzy logic system being a bit fuzzy on faces once in a while). It all gets a bit Guantanamo-on-Thames and for what, 16 teenagers not getting mugged for their phones. Net negative.

So, firstly - your view how things change depends on your position. "Nothing has changed" since the 1800s for an affluent white male, perhaps, but those of us who've gained the vote since then regard that as a net positive. Likewise, facts of the two situations above are the same but the conclusions rather different.

Second, even a fuzzy and complicated world is probably moving in one direction or another on average. It's highly unlikely that the benefits received by the beneficiaries exactly equal the price paid by the loser...

...Unless your calculus is so purely economic that WW3 is seen as a remarkable boost to employment and industrial production.

Anyway, time will tell!

Re: Peak freedom?

nostradamus — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:26:25 -0000

People throughout history have said 'Wasn't it better way back when...', and 'Oh God the world is going down the pan', I find it reassuring nothing has changed! I think the reality normally proves to be different to what anyone expected, or predicted. The next real crisis will be something no-one saw coming, because they thought it was irrelevant, impossible or both. The 'fears' of military rule, democratic and economic collapse sound like predictable scaremongering to me.

As fresh water becomes more scarce, surely people will put more time and capital into producing it?

Climate science is pretty random...I find it unlikely everything gets worse simultaneously. While Cornwall might become an arid dustbowl, Alaska might become the most productive farmland on Earth.

Maybe an fundamentalist islamic state will rise to power and unite several African states, bringing stability, education, economic growth, huge gender inequality and a substatial increase in pollution.

Finally, police are paid to reduce crime - of course they want more power because that might help them do their job. However, they also want to go home at 5pm, and would rather read BBC news than stare at film cameras in York town centre. Maybe in 2019 Lockheed Martin deploys a fuzzy logic facial recognition system for the 5.4 million cameras across the UK (3.7 million work), 2 years behind schedule and 50% over budget, but the software is crashes a lot and none of the staff listened during training, so it results in a convincing 3.2% drop in muggings in Reading.

The term 'peak' focuses on absolutes, e.g. everything was 'better', and now it is 'worse'. I rarely see real life deal in absolutes.

Re: Seeing Like A Database: the problems with big data

Sedicious — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:08:21 -0000

Yes. Google "sousveillance" and "transparent society" for more thoughts along this line.