Hi Jo, what did the name Boaty McBoatface symbolise for you?
Hi Soph, the name Boaty McBoatface perfectly captures the equivocal nature of scientific seafaring in the public imagination. The name has the virtue of reminding us that the object in question is a boat. Yet it also acknowledges our need to personify it, to give it a face. Perhaps on some level we recognize that the ocean is just as scared of us as we are of it: in making our vast machines in our own likenesses, we express our desire to meet monsters and gods on their own terms.
Sure. In the grand scheme of things, was "Sir David Attenborough" a better name choice than Boaty McBoatface?
I think the public are probably ahead of the curve on this one. I'm an academic researching the science fiction work of Iain M. Banks, and I'm intrigued by his approach to spaceship-naming. Different classes of warship are given nasty names - Murderer, Gangster, Torturer - as a reminder that what they DO is nasty. Banks was always suspicious of giving things dignified names. Banks was keenly aware of the complex relationships between exploration, scientific research, and military conquest. In his utopia, which is called "the Culture," spaceships always have strange and provocative names. They're called things like Big Sexy Beast and Unacceptable Behaviour and Very Little Gravitas Indeed and Someone Else's Problem. Whether or they're dignified or not, honourable or not, is a matter of what they ACHIEVE, not what they're called. Maybe on balance it's better to have silly names. I don't know.
I would definitely say that the Sir David Attenborough is probably the worst possible name. Why is nature so weird? One theory is that David Attenborough's gravel-and-syrup voice is so trustworthy, nature itself changes to conform to his delirious ramblings. Have you seen an aye-aye's thumb?
I haven't actually. If you had a boat, what would you call it?
I would be tempted by RRS Sir Jo Lindsay Walton. One of its smaller remotely operated sub-sea vehicles could be called Dave in honour of the government's suggestion. In light of the kind of data the vessel is likely to gather, another possibility would be to call it We're Fucked. Or there could be a compromise between sovereign and popular power, such as Davey McDaveface. The point is that every suggestion that I or anyone thinks of off the top of my head is better than the RRS Sir David Attenborough. Although it will probably cheer him up which is nice.
What angers you most, if anything, about the entire ordeal?
Well, it would have been good if they had actually called it Boaty McBoatface. They sure missed a trick.
But what does the government’s decision say about democracy?
As many stakeholder engagement theorists will tell you, it is no good engaging people unless you also empower them -- and you know what, that means actually figuring out how to DELEGATE some power IN ADVANCE. No backsies. I suspect people are especially cynical about government consultations of all kinds. Often the policy direction has been pretty much already decided, and the consultation is just a bit of cheap market research, to figure how best to sell it.
Actually, it can be WORSE than that -- the consultation can start to market the policy, by hinting that they're going to do even more horrific stuff, raising fears, lowering expectations, and mopping up the energy of resistance. Then they can "compromise" by doing whatever they wanted to in the first place. That's why I don't think anybody is really surprised about Boaty McBoatface, except that we probably thought they'd let us get away with a bit of trivial silliness so that we could at least feel empowered.
So what's next for the Boaty McBoatface movement? Is this the end? Or do you foresee more petitions? Protests? Etc.
Tactics must suit the context. In one sense, perhaps a name is a rigid designator which flares into existence at the baptismal moment, permanent and real. In another, a name is just what people call something - never mind what letters are printed on the side of the thing. Think about the Boris Bikes: sorry, Barclays! It's another bank that sponsors them now, isn't it? I can't even remember. Maybe they'll be Sadiqycles soon. The point is, the ship is called Boaty McBoatface, because that's what we'll call it. I'm sure if it comes up again in the news -- if it sinks or something -- VICE will respect the will of the people in its coverage.
OK, thanks Jo.
It's interesting we get this announcement just as the local election results are rolling out. Sometimes when things are opened up to a popular vote, you get bizarre results, like the continued election of Conservatives. Sometimes the public just perfectly nails it, as with Boaty. There is a lot of scary and exciting work to be done on what popular sovereignty means in a digital networked era. We know as a collective we can be brilliant or fucking stupid. To me it's pretty obvious that a secure welfare system and substantive economic equality are totally necessary prerequisites for democracy to even slightly work. Otherwise, everybody is too busy trying to stay alive and sane to work out who to vote for -- except for flashes of brilliance like Boaty, obviously.
OK.
Earlier:
SFF names #16: Alice interlude
SFF names #15: eggs interlude
SFF names #14: YA interlude
SFF names #13: Benedict Cumberbatch
SFF names #12: Luke Skywalker interlude
SFF names #11: Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver
SFF names #10: Bobby Shaftoe
SFF names #9: Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen
SFF names #8: Ged
SFF names #7: Shevek
SFF names #6: Buhle
SFF names #5: Parva "Pen" Khan
SFF names #4: Beth Bradley
SFF names #3: Rumpelstiltskin
SFF names #2: Lucy
SFF names #1: Winnie
Elsewhere: VICE: "We Spoke to Some of the People Upset about 'Boaty McBoatface' Losing to David Attenborough"
Showing posts with label e-democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label e-democracy. Show all posts
Monday, May 30, 2016
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Re-Post: My Proposed Hugo Voting System
Note: This was the system I proposed, tongue-in-cheek (I missed), last year for the Hugos (for the noms process, not the actual vote). It's the basis for what we've ended up doing with the Sputniks, although it's a little different.
Each nominator gets four slots in each category. They're not ranked, exactly, but they are classed. It might be:
Each nominator gets four slots in each category. They're not ranked, exactly, but they are classed. It might be:
BEST NOVEL
Hedgehog: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. witch
Dalek: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. hedgehog
Witch: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. dalek
Mithril Mech: 30 HP, begins in herald slot
Hedgehog: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. witch
Dalek: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. hedgehog
Witch: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. dalek
Mithril Mech: 30 HP, begins in herald slot
... so for best novel, my ballot might look like this:
Hedgehog: Jeff VanderMeer, Southern Reach
Dalek: Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem
Witch: Adam Roberts, Bete
MM: Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword
Dalek: Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem
Witch: Adam Roberts, Bete
MM: Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword
With each round of voting, each party is randomly paired with another. If the heralds are the same (i.e. in round one, if my ballot encounters another Ancillary Sword mithril mech) then both ballots survive intact and unchanged into the next round. Otherwise, a champion is randomly selected from the non-herald party members of each ballot.
Then:
(1) if the champions happen to be the same (e.g. my Southern Reach bumps into another Southern Reach) then the champions move into the heralds slots, but no damage is inflicted, and both ballots survive otherwise unaltered into the next round.
(2) otherwise, both nominations take damage according to their class. For example, say my Southern Reach hedgehog gets paired against a John Scalzi Lock In dalek. My nomination loses fifteen Hit Points, and the Lock In nomination loses ten (my quills aren't much use against the dalek's armour plating and selfie-stick).
Nominations that have fallen to zero Hit Points are eliminated, and a new round begins.
The cycle continues until all except five novels have been eliminated, comprising the short list.
Each nominator also receives an automated personalised chronicle of their ballot's encounters and deeds. Nominators may also opt to make their ballot non-anonymous, so that their names come up in the battle reports of other nominators with whom they have friendly or warlike encounters. ("I literally met Hoyt in the fourth round! Her Correia Witch kicked my Leckie Dalek's ass.")
Earlier: full post.
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
What counts as "published"?
AM I PUBLISHED YET. HOW ABOUT NOW. HOW ABOUT NOW. IS THIS PUBLISHED. IS THIS PUBLISHED. HOW ABOUT THIS.
Honestly I'm super-busy today so I hereby promise myself I will not spend more than ten minutes on this blog post. I will time myself.
What counts as "published"?
Well, obviously, you decide!
The law has to decide sometimes too. What does the real law say?
Well, something I just Googled in thirty seconds, without properly checking it out, suggests that the legal definition of publication in the USA is:
Hmm, so does that cover when you post something on a blog? Is that a "transfer of ownership" etc. which counts as published, or is it merely a "public performance"? Well, I'm assuming it does count, because the file that is downloaded onto your computer is a transfer of ownership. Ownership of the digital file, not of the rights in the work, is what matters here. That makes good sense: I couldn't get a court order for you to delete a file you've saved from All That Is Solid Melts Into Aaargh! just because I wrote the words that are in it! (But if anyone knows better, please tell me about it).
Courts can be expected to navigate through any murky territory by making regular reference to competition. If something has been maybe-published, and the courts were trying to figure out "well heck has it been published or not?" they'll usually pay attention to whether the maybe-publication hurts the commercial opportunities enjoyed by the definite-publication. If the work in question had appeared in a different version, for example, the law on originality and materiality (labour and skill or judgement etc.) might come into play.
So much for the law. But what really interests me here is the extra-legal definitions of "published" we make up -- or could make up -- for our own uses, informed by the sense that "the public" and "the market" are not self-evident incontestable realities.
That is, I'm interested in the definitions of "published" we could make up when we fully realize that we can make them up.
In making up our own definitions of "published," we should be striving to keep focused on the nitty-gritty deets of why publishing things is valuable and worthwhile -- who actually edited or proofed or typeset it, who actually read how many pages, how do they actually feel, what do they actually learn or think or forget or write or say or do as a result, and how do you actually feel about whatever it is you've done with those words? -- and of course, how much you actually get paid for it, what you can actually put on your CV or whatever? We shouldn't be thinking of publication as crossing a magic line (not to buy into the expression "of publishable quality").
From time to time you get that in writers' groups and workshops: "Oh, you're a writer. Are you published?" I understand the impulse to get a better sense of how writing fits into a person's life, but it does seem to pose the question in a misleading way. (Maybe "how do you publish?" would be better? Not sure!)
Let me take a step back. Here is a pretty intuitive pair of individually sufficient conditions for "publication," which I think a lot of magazines and sites use:
The scare quotes are because, obviously, the "anyone" isn't really "anyone alive on the planet," it's a much more narrow "anyone": shaped by literacy, digital divide, leisure time, disposable income, languages spoken, etc.
These two criteria might be important, for example, in the relationship between a magazine or a podcast and an author, if the former were trying to figure out whether to pay for first rights or reprint rights. I think using these criteria is perfectly okay, if a bit stern. In fact, I think being a bit stern with a threatening and quite possibly ultimately destructive unbundler / disintermediator like Patreon is a sensible thing to do. (Although there may be more weird & creative approaches to dealing with it too. Idk, stuff like this).
But here's a list of questions / counterexamples, which draw those two criteria into question.
I'm not posing them as some kind of attempted take-down or weird sea-lioning or whatever -- just, hopefully, bringing out the ways in which those criteria are deliberate constructs, based practical working hypotheses, with particular rationales and particular effects -- and so bringing out ways in which they could be constructed differently, if we felt like it, or could see some use in doing so.
(1) What about people who have done open calls for beta readers, e.g. on Twitter? "Anyone" could see such a call, and have been e-mailed a copy. So it perhaps meets one of those two criteria, but it doesn't "feel" published, does it?
(2) What about authors who maintain a regular pool of beta readers, e.g. on LiveJournal? Or is really prolific with review copies?
(3) What if you publish it on your blog, but your blog's private? What if it's private, but with hundreds or thousands of subscribers -- what if it gets more hits than the webzine you're submitting it to? The webzine probably won't count it as published, but it does feel published to me.
(4) What makes the difference between a private blog or e-mail list, and an online forum which requires you to register as a member? What if the forum has certain membership requirements, does it still count as published? What if they're really strict -- say it's just for members of your class -- does it count then?
(5) If the difference between "privately circulated" and "publicly available" doesn't come down to the number of readers, perhaps it comes down to the author/publisher's theoretical ability to approve access on a case-by-case basis. So what if your blog's private but you'll invite anyone who goes to the trouble of e-mailing you ("aha! the bouncer was a scarecrow!")? In fact, what if you make it a solemn oath that you will invite anyone who asks? Is it fair to say that whatever is on there is now "published"? Or what if you make a big fuss about your right to exclude somebody who looks dodgy, but in practice have never exercised it? In those cases, should the texts count as published? What if you just e-mailed it to yourself, but told everyone the password?
(6) Then there are the silly Sorites paradox-style thought experiments. What about a post that was live for one second, then deleted? What about two seconds? How many seconds is "published"?
(7) What if "anyone" could buy it, or "anyone" could see it, but your analytics tell you nobody did? Or what if hardly anybody did? What if the number of people who saw it mean its reach is comparable to something that had been circulated in a crit group, or among beta readers? (If I were an editor, and I trusted an author who told me this, I'd be very inclined to treat their work as unpublished! But I am not an editor, and I do not trust anyone, and my heart does not beat but hisses).
(8) And/or should barter, gift economy, reciprocity, non-standard currencies be treated any differently? What if there was a huge forum, a bit like a social media site for writers, where your activity got rewarded by virtual points (compare e.g. Patreon Good) -- would "transactions" denominated in WriterCoin count as money changing hands?
(9) Is the point that it's been published if people you don't know have had a look at it? Who you know and who you don't is a funny old thing, especially online. If you have a Patreon and only a few supporters, and you and they are active on your Patreon page, they may well become more like a crit group / friends. In fact they may eventually understand you better than anyone including maybe your dog? Shouldn't we differentiate between a Patreon which has a rich little community like this, and a Patreon which is operating much more like a small market? (Cf. Polanyi, disembedding etc.).
Okay! Yeah!
(PS: So the next fun thing to do might be to make up some more exotic rights and licensing arrangements. For instance, a publication could decide that it pays "Signal Boost Rights Rates" for some fiction which it really just wants to get out there: the deal with those could be, you automatically license reprint rights to anyone else who pays the same Signal Boost Rights Rates to the author as you did. It would be a way for publications to tacitly compete with each other on some stories, while tacitly collaborating with each other to signal boost others. That's kind of how the press operates: sometimes it's about an exclusive, but sometimes it's about getting a political agenda out there, and you want your competitors running the same story. Here's another one: a publication could purchase "You Get Going We'll Catch You Up Rights," which actually requires that the author to have sold a certain number of copies within a specific timeframe -- not too many and not too few, just enough to prove to the editors that the story has some traction. (Compare how translation rights tend to work now). But those are just two small and not very great ideas. Earlier I argued that the Hugo Awards voting system itself should be fantastical and/or science fictional, because why not? And the same could be done for rights. So the next fun thing to do might be to make up even a quasi-mathematical Total Possible Publication Rights Space. Now we're talking).
(PPS: One of the reasons I'm interested in that is because I've been involved in micropress poetry publishing for a few years, and I know that: (a) printing out 1600 A4 pages, folding 100 pamphlets & "binding" them with a long-armed stapler, and giving them to your friends, can be a major literary event whose reverberations permanently remake the literary landscape; (b) or you can sell 200 books and not a single one of your readers will read more than a few sentences, plus they'll hide the fact from you; (c) you can put a lot of time and effort into editing e.g. a digital magazine and never know what, if any, difference your curation has made, compared to if the contributors had simply posted their poems on their own blogs; (d) aaaand fwiw I don't always feel convinced by the distinctions usually offered between self-publishing, indie publishing, vanity publishing, boutique publishing, etc.; & (e) aaaaaand come to think of it, back in the SFF world, it all feels a bit relevant to Jonathan McCalmont's BSFA-nominated (including by me!) moan last year about the publication ecology of short SFF fiction. But maybe that's all by the by).
(PPPS: Here's Neil Clarke laying out some clear guidelines about what Clarkesworld considers counts as publication).
Yeah! Aargh!
Twenty-one twenty-four thirty-two thirty-six minutes. Not bad. Kind of bad.
Honestly I'm super-busy today so I hereby promise myself I will not spend more than ten minutes on this blog post. I will time myself.
What counts as "published"?
Well, obviously, you decide!
The law has to decide sometimes too. What does the real law say?
Well, something I just Googled in thirty seconds, without properly checking it out, suggests that the legal definition of publication in the USA is:
“the distribution of copies [...] of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental lease, or lending. The offering to distribute copies [...] to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display constitutes publication. A public performance or display of a work does not itself constitute publication.”AND THAT'S THE REAL LAW.
Hmm, so does that cover when you post something on a blog? Is that a "transfer of ownership" etc. which counts as published, or is it merely a "public performance"? Well, I'm assuming it does count, because the file that is downloaded onto your computer is a transfer of ownership. Ownership of the digital file, not of the rights in the work, is what matters here. That makes good sense: I couldn't get a court order for you to delete a file you've saved from All That Is Solid Melts Into Aaargh! just because I wrote the words that are in it! (But if anyone knows better, please tell me about it).
Courts can be expected to navigate through any murky territory by making regular reference to competition. If something has been maybe-published, and the courts were trying to figure out "well heck has it been published or not?" they'll usually pay attention to whether the maybe-publication hurts the commercial opportunities enjoyed by the definite-publication. If the work in question had appeared in a different version, for example, the law on originality and materiality (labour and skill or judgement etc.) might come into play.
So much for the law. But what really interests me here is the extra-legal definitions of "published" we make up -- or could make up -- for our own uses, informed by the sense that "the public" and "the market" are not self-evident incontestable realities.
That is, I'm interested in the definitions of "published" we could make up when we fully realize that we can make them up.
In making up our own definitions of "published," we should be striving to keep focused on the nitty-gritty deets of why publishing things is valuable and worthwhile -- who actually edited or proofed or typeset it, who actually read how many pages, how do they actually feel, what do they actually learn or think or forget or write or say or do as a result, and how do you actually feel about whatever it is you've done with those words? -- and of course, how much you actually get paid for it, what you can actually put on your CV or whatever? We shouldn't be thinking of publication as crossing a magic line (not to buy into the expression "of publishable quality").
From time to time you get that in writers' groups and workshops: "Oh, you're a writer. Are you published?" I understand the impulse to get a better sense of how writing fits into a person's life, but it does seem to pose the question in a misleading way. (Maybe "how do you publish?" would be better? Not sure!)
Let me take a step back. Here is a pretty intuitive pair of individually sufficient conditions for "publication," which I think a lot of magazines and sites use:
(1) If there was ever a time when "anyone" could buy access, then it's been published. Cf. Kickstarter and, especially, Patreon.
(2) If there was ever a time when "anyone" could see it -- if you've put it up on your blog -- then it's been published.So if either of those things have happened, you could say, you've totally published.
The scare quotes are because, obviously, the "anyone" isn't really "anyone alive on the planet," it's a much more narrow "anyone": shaped by literacy, digital divide, leisure time, disposable income, languages spoken, etc.
These two criteria might be important, for example, in the relationship between a magazine or a podcast and an author, if the former were trying to figure out whether to pay for first rights or reprint rights. I think using these criteria is perfectly okay, if a bit stern. In fact, I think being a bit stern with a threatening and quite possibly ultimately destructive unbundler / disintermediator like Patreon is a sensible thing to do. (Although there may be more weird & creative approaches to dealing with it too. Idk, stuff like this).
But here's a list of questions / counterexamples, which draw those two criteria into question.
I'm not posing them as some kind of attempted take-down or weird sea-lioning or whatever -- just, hopefully, bringing out the ways in which those criteria are deliberate constructs, based practical working hypotheses, with particular rationales and particular effects -- and so bringing out ways in which they could be constructed differently, if we felt like it, or could see some use in doing so.
(1) What about people who have done open calls for beta readers, e.g. on Twitter? "Anyone" could see such a call, and have been e-mailed a copy. So it perhaps meets one of those two criteria, but it doesn't "feel" published, does it?
(2) What about authors who maintain a regular pool of beta readers, e.g. on LiveJournal? Or is really prolific with review copies?
(3) What if you publish it on your blog, but your blog's private? What if it's private, but with hundreds or thousands of subscribers -- what if it gets more hits than the webzine you're submitting it to? The webzine probably won't count it as published, but it does feel published to me.
(4) What makes the difference between a private blog or e-mail list, and an online forum which requires you to register as a member? What if the forum has certain membership requirements, does it still count as published? What if they're really strict -- say it's just for members of your class -- does it count then?
(5) If the difference between "privately circulated" and "publicly available" doesn't come down to the number of readers, perhaps it comes down to the author/publisher's theoretical ability to approve access on a case-by-case basis. So what if your blog's private but you'll invite anyone who goes to the trouble of e-mailing you ("aha! the bouncer was a scarecrow!")? In fact, what if you make it a solemn oath that you will invite anyone who asks? Is it fair to say that whatever is on there is now "published"? Or what if you make a big fuss about your right to exclude somebody who looks dodgy, but in practice have never exercised it? In those cases, should the texts count as published? What if you just e-mailed it to yourself, but told everyone the password?
(6) Then there are the silly Sorites paradox-style thought experiments. What about a post that was live for one second, then deleted? What about two seconds? How many seconds is "published"?
(7) What if "anyone" could buy it, or "anyone" could see it, but your analytics tell you nobody did? Or what if hardly anybody did? What if the number of people who saw it mean its reach is comparable to something that had been circulated in a crit group, or among beta readers? (If I were an editor, and I trusted an author who told me this, I'd be very inclined to treat their work as unpublished! But I am not an editor, and I do not trust anyone, and my heart does not beat but hisses).
(8) And/or should barter, gift economy, reciprocity, non-standard currencies be treated any differently? What if there was a huge forum, a bit like a social media site for writers, where your activity got rewarded by virtual points (compare e.g. Patreon Good) -- would "transactions" denominated in WriterCoin count as money changing hands?
(9) Is the point that it's been published if people you don't know have had a look at it? Who you know and who you don't is a funny old thing, especially online. If you have a Patreon and only a few supporters, and you and they are active on your Patreon page, they may well become more like a crit group / friends. In fact they may eventually understand you better than anyone including maybe your dog? Shouldn't we differentiate between a Patreon which has a rich little community like this, and a Patreon which is operating much more like a small market? (Cf. Polanyi, disembedding etc.).
Okay! Yeah!
(PS: So the next fun thing to do might be to make up some more exotic rights and licensing arrangements. For instance, a publication could decide that it pays "Signal Boost Rights Rates" for some fiction which it really just wants to get out there: the deal with those could be, you automatically license reprint rights to anyone else who pays the same Signal Boost Rights Rates to the author as you did. It would be a way for publications to tacitly compete with each other on some stories, while tacitly collaborating with each other to signal boost others. That's kind of how the press operates: sometimes it's about an exclusive, but sometimes it's about getting a political agenda out there, and you want your competitors running the same story. Here's another one: a publication could purchase "You Get Going We'll Catch You Up Rights," which actually requires that the author to have sold a certain number of copies within a specific timeframe -- not too many and not too few, just enough to prove to the editors that the story has some traction. (Compare how translation rights tend to work now). But those are just two small and not very great ideas. Earlier I argued that the Hugo Awards voting system itself should be fantastical and/or science fictional, because why not? And the same could be done for rights. So the next fun thing to do might be to make up even a quasi-mathematical Total Possible Publication Rights Space. Now we're talking).
(PPS: One of the reasons I'm interested in that is because I've been involved in micropress poetry publishing for a few years, and I know that: (a) printing out 1600 A4 pages, folding 100 pamphlets & "binding" them with a long-armed stapler, and giving them to your friends, can be a major literary event whose reverberations permanently remake the literary landscape; (b) or you can sell 200 books and not a single one of your readers will read more than a few sentences, plus they'll hide the fact from you; (c) you can put a lot of time and effort into editing e.g. a digital magazine and never know what, if any, difference your curation has made, compared to if the contributors had simply posted their poems on their own blogs; (d) aaaand fwiw I don't always feel convinced by the distinctions usually offered between self-publishing, indie publishing, vanity publishing, boutique publishing, etc.; & (e) aaaaaand come to think of it, back in the SFF world, it all feels a bit relevant to Jonathan McCalmont's BSFA-nominated (including by me!) moan last year about the publication ecology of short SFF fiction. But maybe that's all by the by).
(PPPS: Here's Neil Clarke laying out some clear guidelines about what Clarkesworld considers counts as publication).
Yeah! Aargh!
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
PR under FPTP
Any Member of Parliament could be elected on the following manifesto:
The covenant would also have to set precise thresholds which, if not met, would permit the MP a degree of discretion. At least two kinds of threshold would be involved. Ideally these should be interlinked, although there are also good reasons to avoid making the covenant too complex.
At the present moment, the approach I have described might appeal to any single-issue independent candidate without a great chance of winning. It could potentially appeal to Liberal Democrat or even the Green candidates in some of their most hopeless-looking seats, and perhaps to Labour and the Conservatives in Scotland. At first it would have to varnish wonkishness with hope. If the approach were successful in winning a seat, or even in a startling gain for an outlier, it would no doubt be adopted by others at the next election.
As I see it, there are two main kinds of danger.
- "In Parliament, and in all my work with the public, and before public scrutiny, I will remain a spokesperson for my party. I will show the greatest sympathy to my party line, although I will of course take care to refine it, and to constructively criticize it, whenever my intelligence and my conscience suggest that that is necessary."
- "However, in any parliamentary vote, I will always vote according to the wishes of the majority of my constituents. Sometimes -- even often -- that may require me to vote against my better judgment. But I will do so, respecting the higher principle that I am my constituents' delegate in Parliament."
The covenant would also have to set precise thresholds which, if not met, would permit the MP a degree of discretion. At least two kinds of threshold would be involved. Ideally these should be interlinked, although there are also good reasons to avoid making the covenant too complex.
- A support threshold. The higher the proportion of constituents who support a particular vote, the more binding it should be on the MP. A very evenly split constituency should give the MP (or the MP's Whips' Office) the chance to exercise discretion. (For instance the covenant might include some provision like this: if fewer than 40% support a particular Bill, the MP must vote no, if it is 40%-47%, the MP may choose between no and abstention; if it is 48%-52%, the MP may choose between aye, no, and abstention; if it is 53%-60%, the MP may choose between aye and abstention, and if it above 60% the MP must vote aye).
- A quorum threshold. If very few constituents are interested in a particular poll, it may provide a skewed result.
At the present moment, the approach I have described might appeal to any single-issue independent candidate without a great chance of winning. It could potentially appeal to Liberal Democrat or even the Green candidates in some of their most hopeless-looking seats, and perhaps to Labour and the Conservatives in Scotland. At first it would have to varnish wonkishness with hope. If the approach were successful in winning a seat, or even in a startling gain for an outlier, it would no doubt be adopted by others at the next election.
As I see it, there are two main kinds of danger.
- New forms of voter intimidation, treating, and misinformation, new patterns of exclusion and disenfranchisement, and in particular, the rise of canny MPs who learn to filter and manipulate polling to produce whatever mandates they want. What if, after a few successful iterations, an MP "refines" this democratic practice, by introducing a short quiz prior to each vote, just to make sure that only "properly" informed constituents have their voices listened to?
- The public getting its way.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Veilbook
NHS privatisation gains its craggy taloned footing on a crucial moss-slicked stepping stone this week, in the context of under-reporting and misleading reporting by both the BBC and fully marketised news media.
"Yet, for some individual or group, the mainstream media blackout was not enough; they wiped Facebook clean of our dissent too. We must take this as a note of caution and a reminder that Facebook and other social media sites are not free spaces, they are owned by corporations. If someone came and clasped their hand over your mouth in the street, there would be avenues for redress. If Facebook does the same, options are limited" (Scriptonite).
Does Facebook censor political content?
Yes and no is my best guess. It's worth trying to imagine, in concrete detail, how censorship might be embedded in Facebook's operations. Not that there aren't Evil Corporations (there basically are), but we shouldn't lose sight of the various org hierarchies and processes and codes of conduct of that Evil, how that Evil is embodied in the lives of various individuals committing various individual acts, according to narratives which let them sleep at night. Like, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for evil people to do nothing."
(a) Say there's always somebody in a Facebook office ready to field calls from Key Stakeholders about their publicity concerns. Maybe you can get on that list by holding a lot of shares, buying a lot of FB ad space, a personal recommendation from senior management, etc. So there would be a phone call from time-to-time, raising concerns that a particular viral item is without factual basis, is libellous, or violates copyright. No proof would be necessary: just a plausible enough complaint to lead to a temporary (i.e. permanent) take-down. I can just about credit such an arrangement existing. It doesn't seem a particularly good fit for the events Scriptonite describes though. Who would have made that call? What would the pretence have been? I wouldn't quite rule it out, but ...
(b) More likely, we the public censored the article when creeps among us clicked "Report Story or Spam." We abused that function, because some of us, for a variety of reasons, get enraged by the wrong things. It is possible that Facebook employees then undertook sort of evaluation as to whether the content violated the Terms of Service. But I wouldn't be surprised if the take-down kicked in automatically, when some reporting threshold was reached.
We could try to generalise, BTW, about what kinds of item tend to get zotzed in this way. Something which is in principle incredibly divisive and vitriol-a-genic could rattle around safely inside a stovepiped network for ages, only being shared among people who can tolerate it. In other words, an exemplary risk would be an item which angers your friends, not just your foes. (I do find it difficult to get inside the psychology that wrathfully marks as spam rather than de-friends, a hint I might not have this quite right). I wonder if there were a lot of take-downs during during the 2011 riots? Also: I suspect these processes are pretty resistant, but not impervious to monetisation. Malicious reporting could be part of someone's job.
Anyway, the key thing is: it's still Facebook's responsibility to stop this from happening. But it's not a case-by-case responsibility (or not only a case-by-case responsibility). It's a matter of systems design. Facebook needs to work out the signature of political speech and/or divisive speech being misreported as spam and find ways to protect it. Their systems no doubt put a lot of weight on a list of stipulated trusted sources (The Guardian, The Mail). That's papering over the cracks. In fact it's not even paper. It's some kind of nang guacamole. Instead, Facebook need to design an architecture within which we can correctly crowdsource the initial judgment as to whether some particular item is legitimate or not, regardless of its domain. One complementary possibility is a transitional status for an item that is suspected of being spam, letting the self-identified digitally literate make up their own minds. If something is taken down, there needs to be obvious, effective appeal functionality, and there need to be swift, bold humans evaluating those appeals and giving reasons for their decisions. Of course in a crisis, Facebook is completely unreliable. But for day-to-day stuff, it's an amphitheatre worth fighting for. It's a Great Space.
(c) It's some kind of weird glitch which affected that article at random. Maybe stuff disappears all the time and we tend to notice more when we can attribute it to the actions of a vigilant antagonist. I think it's perfectly possible to prefer this option to option (a) whilst still having my distrust of corporate communications, corporate activities and corporate ideology and culture set to maximum.
UPDATE: Horrible Telegraph article by Willard Foxton makes queasy cause with me: "a small amount of code that Facebook's anti-spam algorithms recognised as spam embedded in her site; hence, people received a warning that the link was potentially dangerous by clicking on it. When enough people clicked "report spam", the post was automatically taken down."
"Yet, for some individual or group, the mainstream media blackout was not enough; they wiped Facebook clean of our dissent too. We must take this as a note of caution and a reminder that Facebook and other social media sites are not free spaces, they are owned by corporations. If someone came and clasped their hand over your mouth in the street, there would be avenues for redress. If Facebook does the same, options are limited" (Scriptonite).
Does Facebook censor political content?
Yes and no is my best guess. It's worth trying to imagine, in concrete detail, how censorship might be embedded in Facebook's operations. Not that there aren't Evil Corporations (there basically are), but we shouldn't lose sight of the various org hierarchies and processes and codes of conduct of that Evil, how that Evil is embodied in the lives of various individuals committing various individual acts, according to narratives which let them sleep at night. Like, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for evil people to do nothing."
(a) Say there's always somebody in a Facebook office ready to field calls from Key Stakeholders about their publicity concerns. Maybe you can get on that list by holding a lot of shares, buying a lot of FB ad space, a personal recommendation from senior management, etc. So there would be a phone call from time-to-time, raising concerns that a particular viral item is without factual basis, is libellous, or violates copyright. No proof would be necessary: just a plausible enough complaint to lead to a temporary (i.e. permanent) take-down. I can just about credit such an arrangement existing. It doesn't seem a particularly good fit for the events Scriptonite describes though. Who would have made that call? What would the pretence have been? I wouldn't quite rule it out, but ...
(b) More likely, we the public censored the article when creeps among us clicked "Report Story or Spam." We abused that function, because some of us, for a variety of reasons, get enraged by the wrong things. It is possible that Facebook employees then undertook sort of evaluation as to whether the content violated the Terms of Service. But I wouldn't be surprised if the take-down kicked in automatically, when some reporting threshold was reached.
We could try to generalise, BTW, about what kinds of item tend to get zotzed in this way. Something which is in principle incredibly divisive and vitriol-a-genic could rattle around safely inside a stovepiped network for ages, only being shared among people who can tolerate it. In other words, an exemplary risk would be an item which angers your friends, not just your foes. (I do find it difficult to get inside the psychology that wrathfully marks as spam rather than de-friends, a hint I might not have this quite right). I wonder if there were a lot of take-downs during during the 2011 riots? Also: I suspect these processes are pretty resistant, but not impervious to monetisation. Malicious reporting could be part of someone's job.
Anyway, the key thing is: it's still Facebook's responsibility to stop this from happening. But it's not a case-by-case responsibility (or not only a case-by-case responsibility). It's a matter of systems design. Facebook needs to work out the signature of political speech and/or divisive speech being misreported as spam and find ways to protect it. Their systems no doubt put a lot of weight on a list of stipulated trusted sources (The Guardian, The Mail). That's papering over the cracks. In fact it's not even paper. It's some kind of nang guacamole. Instead, Facebook need to design an architecture within which we can correctly crowdsource the initial judgment as to whether some particular item is legitimate or not, regardless of its domain. One complementary possibility is a transitional status for an item that is suspected of being spam, letting the self-identified digitally literate make up their own minds. If something is taken down, there needs to be obvious, effective appeal functionality, and there need to be swift, bold humans evaluating those appeals and giving reasons for their decisions. Of course in a crisis, Facebook is completely unreliable. But for day-to-day stuff, it's an amphitheatre worth fighting for. It's a Great Space.
(c) It's some kind of weird glitch which affected that article at random. Maybe stuff disappears all the time and we tend to notice more when we can attribute it to the actions of a vigilant antagonist. I think it's perfectly possible to prefer this option to option (a) whilst still having my distrust of corporate communications, corporate activities and corporate ideology and culture set to maximum.
UPDATE: Horrible Telegraph article by Willard Foxton makes queasy cause with me: "a small amount of code that Facebook's anti-spam algorithms recognised as spam embedded in her site; hence, people received a warning that the link was potentially dangerous by clicking on it. When enough people clicked "report spam", the post was automatically taken down."
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