Tuesday, March 27, 2018
Episode 98: So Many Layers of Fail
Play Now!Sadly, in my last episode, I had to gloss over many details involving Mark Zuckerberg's company that I would have loved to launch and rhetorically blast out of the sky. Consider this Episode 98: So Many Layers of Fail a follow-through on the last, giving a far-from-final blast of rhetoric toward Mark and his minions the Effin' Bees.Just a taste of what's to come. In this episode, I play: the voice of Sara Wachter-Boettcher, from an interview she gave to Chuck Mertz over at This is Hell. I quoted extensively from her book Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech. I also read from: George Monbiot's book Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis; a Guardian article titled "Facebook’s war on free will: How technology is making our minds redundant"; from Nir Eyal's book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products; and a ProPublica article entitled "Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach 'Jew Haters'".Musically, I opened once again with KMFDM's "Attack", this time backing Brian Kaller's observation about glowing rectangles and the fascination they bear; Lee Rosevere doing "We're Almost There"; and, woven into the end and playing now in the close, Visciera doing "Ceasing".I'm releasing this and all my episodes under a Creative Commons 4.0 attribution, share-alike, and non-commercial license.
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That was an amazing episode! I'm going to have to share that on... uhhhhhh, Facebook.
ReplyDelete:-(
Really gotta quit that "platform" someday soon. I'm working on it.
Meantime, let me just amplify the observation on racism -- not in personal computing, but I guess it's still tech.
We've all noticed that the existence of actual "faucets" in public restrooms has basically vanished. Instead of "faucets" with handles where the water consumer can decide how long and at what temperature to wash his or her hands, virtually all public restrooms now have what we might call "water dispensers", where you push a large round button, the water flows, but the button springs back after a certain time and the flow stops. OR, by the more high-tech version, where a sensor under the tap allegedly detects when a hand is under there, delivering again a pre-defined quantity of water and then shutting off... because our various corporate or government overlords don't trust that some idiot isn't going to leave the faucet running and rack up a huge water bill for somebody else to pay. It's certainly frustrating _enough_ for white people, if you want more than the allotted quantity of water, to have to withdraw one's hands, wait for the sensor to re-set, and thrust them in again for another dose.
But the sensors -- at least -- many sensors, are not programmed to detect black skin _AT ALL_.
I happened to be using one of the aforementioned types of public restrooms, some years ago when the rollout of the sensor tech was still pretty recent, when a black guy to whom I'd said a cordial hello, informed me and demonstrated. The very same faucet sensor detected the back of _my_ hands just fine, but it appeared completely incapable of detecting _his_. He explained that a white person has two options: either thrusting his hands under the sensor with the palms up; or else, the back of the hands facing up towards the sensor. Back-of-the-hands is a pretty natural gesture, it's the one I use. A "Person of" [sufficiently dark] "color" only has one option: to present the palms facing up, because such people usually have less melanin in their palms. _Then_ the sensor will "usually" detect them.
Just think of that [addressing white people now]... being told over and over, multiple times per day, by machines, that you are a non-person simply because of the color of your skin.
Perhaps the problem with the faucet sensors has been rectified by now; that was several years ago. But again it's an example of tech that was rolled out and distributed nationwide before anyone apparently noticed that it didn't work properly on black people.
That was an amazing episode!
DeleteThanks, Dude!
I'm going to have to share that on... uhhhhhh, Facebook.
Of course! That's where some people still are, kinda.
I'm gonna rant soon about not just F@c&Book, but our entire online lived experience. There's a problem staring us in the face, and no one seems to want to, well, face it.
And you anecdote about faucets: Perfect. Well, not perfect as in that is perfect technology, but perfect as in fitting… but you knew that.
I just posted that on F***book and one of my friends pointed out: Shirley Cards
ReplyDeleteIt's something I've heard before, and should have crammed into the episode; I guess I figured chemical photography would be pretty old-school and more naturally open to the obvious biases one finds in that school.
DeleteDad was pretty hard-core into photography while I was growing up. We had a darkroom in the house, fer cryin' in the night. (Still do, though it's unused.)
Color, though, was trickier: the water temperature affected print and negative processing, so nobody could use the water (flush, run the sink faucet) in color mode. For that reason, he mostly stuck to black-and-white.
I do remember Dad talking about film bias with subjects, but only in general terms (like what it is you want to shoot, what kind of end result you want, that kind of thing).