It seems to me that corporations are playing a game-theoretic game in which they individually want to pay less money and employ fewer people while simultaneously hoping other corporations will keep employing people and paying them enough to maintain a customer base for their product. In other words, a social contract.

What we're seeing now is the result of too many corporations defecting over the past 30 years. A tragedy of the commons, where we're the commons.

The flip side of this chain reaction, of course, is that consumers demand lower and lower prices because they can't afford what they used to. In order to compete, companies are forced to send manufacturing jobs to countries where labor costs are lower, so even more people can't afford what they used to.

How do we stop it?

RT @pjrey: "Apple isn’t selling a product, it’s selling an illusion." http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/12/01/how-cyberpunk-warned-against-apples-consumer-revolution/

At the other end of the spectrum, historically speaking, was SMS. Being mobile, it was assumed that one was always connected (and therefore available) via SMS; therefore, presence was unnecessary. Yet people aren’t (or at least don’t want to be) always available.

Now that the nominal assumption is one of connectedness, connectedness and availability can no longer be assumed to be the same. And because connectedness is the assumed state, it doesn’t need to be advertised.

This, it seems to me, sets the historical context for a new (except for BBM) trend displacing presence: notifications of engagement. Rather than explicitly articulated status, action (or inaction) by the receiver signal availability to the sender. They do away with status, but provide the social transparency needed to manage sender expectations. Or, more simply, the sender can see whether their message has been received and read.

While right now this is almost exclusively used in mobile-to-mobile systems (BBM, Kik, Whatsapp, etc.), it has always bothered me that there is no desktop client for any of these systems. Finally, Apple — who pioneered FaceTime’s always-available-no-presence-like-a-telephone availability — is poised to bring such a system to the desktop (as well as iOS) with iMessage [1]. It’s instant messaging, without presence, with delivery, read, and typing notifications, that works on the desktop and mobile devices.

Personally, I can’t wait.

1. Fanboy alert

The show interleaves stories from Apple’s history (Woz calls the Vatican, Jobs asks Scully if he wants to make sugar water or change the world, etc.), tales of life inside the RDF, a brief (and questionable, but that’s beside the point) history of HCI, and stories from Daisey’s trip to China to find out how, and by whom, all of the products we lust after are made. Needless to say, as an HCI guy, Apple fanboy, and anti-corporatist (don’t think too hard about that juxtaposition), I liked it.

But thinking too hard is exactly what Daisey wants us to do. How can I justify simultaneously being an admirer, owner, user, and shareholder of Apple and its products while opposing the corporatist system that created an environment in which 13-year-old girls work 12–15-hour days assembling products just like the very one I’m typing this on?

When Jobs and the Apple team saw the Xerox Star machine at PARC, in all its WIMPy glory, they recognized that the metaphor of computing had shifted. Daisey uses this metaphor as a metaphor (metametaphor?), saying that “if you control the metaphor, you control the way people see the world.” Well, the metaphor of “Made in China”–as–black-box is a dangerous one, and one that has to change.

We think that factories in China are highly automated, using machines to do the precision work required to put together an iPhone. The scary part is that this has become true in the collective mind of the West, but only because we like to ignore the humanity of the millions of workers who assemble these products, by hand, in Chinese factories — 435,000 of whom work for FoxConn, Apple’s primary assembly contractor — pretending that they are, in fact, machines. It’s like I said about the mythology of Ford in my previous post: the assembly line is about mechanizing and menializing human labor. And in China, people are cheaper than machines. This metaphor is what has to shift.

Mike Daisey makes the point that it’s not about the money, it’s about the mindset. I think he’s right. Here’s why:

He says that the total labor cost of an iPhone is 80¢. The number I found is $6.54 [1] [2], so I’ll use that. The theoretical hourly wage of a FoxConn worker is $1.22 [3]. Going with that for the sake of argument, that means it takes

$6.54\frac{\$}{\textrm{iPhone}} \times \frac{1}{1.22}\frac{\textrm{man-hour}}{\$} = 5.36\frac{\textrm{man-hours}}{\textrm{iPhone}}$

to produce an iPhone. Now consider a US factory where a worker makes $20/hour. Even if it takes the same number of man-hours to produce an iPhone, which it wouldn’t because a US factory would be automated (with machines), the labor cost of producing an iPhone would increase to

$20\frac{\$}{\textrm{man-hour}} \times 5.36\frac{\textrm{man-hours}}{\textrm{iPhone}} = 107.21\frac{\$}{\textrm{iPhone}}$

A large percentage increase, yes, but it’s a product that costs upwards of $600. (Remember, the one you bought was subsidized by the carrier.) With a total materials cost of $172.46 [2], that means Apple would only make $320.33 per unit as opposed to $421.00 per unit.

Last quarter, Apple made $6 billion in profits [4]. Its market cap is currently almost twice that of Google, and 50% higher than Microsoft’s or IBM’s. In fact, the only two larger publicly traded companies in the world are PetroChina and Exxon Mobil [5]. As a proud AAPL shareholder, I understand that the raison d'être of a corporation is to make money, and that it isn’t a humanitarian organization. But I don’t want blood on my keyboard — or in my portfolio. Domestic manufacturing can go a long way toward that goal. (It can also increase quality and reduce the financial and environmental costs of shipping products around the world. Oh, and it could help bolster the US economy (remember, I'm a Detroiter) and create some great press.)

As Mike Daisey says, the crime isn’t exporting our jobs, it’s exporting our jobs without exporting our values. [6]

1. http://puntodigital.com/iphone-labor-cost-is-6-54-dollars/224237/
2. http://www.ipodobserver.com/ipo/article/iphone_3gs_manufacturing_cost_at_179_per_unit/
3. http://www.examiner.com/technology-in-national/ipad-iphone-manufacturer-foxconn-to-raise-employee-wages-again
4. 13 weeks ending 2011-03-26
5. As of 2010-12-31
6. http://mynorthwest.com/?nid=577&a=28888

How, then, can the Detroit car makers reinvent themselves with cultures that will help them to attract and retain talent? The Ford origin story is the mythology of the assembly line; in other words, of Ford’s ability to mechanize and menialize human labor. Is there a way for them to transform that into a culture that respects the value of individual workers, something demanded by today’s graduates?

But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I want to talk about Avatar. Yes, the movie with the blue people set on Pandora. The deep-seated appeal of this singular cultural artifact becomes clear when looked at in the historical context of the cybernetic- and LSD-Influenced counterculture as well as, later, the digerati.

Two overarching concepts from the culture Turner describes permeate the movie. First is the cybernetic view of individuals — biological and otherwise — as nodes in a network, sensing, transmitting, receiving, and reacting to surrounding conditions in a giant feedback loop, just as the control system of an electromechanical device is, in the literal, electrical engineering sense of the word, a feedback loop. This, in an explicit way, is the very structure of Pandora’s biology, spiritualized by the native people, and romanticized by humans.

The second concept is disembodiment. Whether it was through electronic music (in the 1960s sense), strobe lights, and drugs, or later with networked computing and computer-mediated communication, Turner claims that many in the communalist-counterculture–turned-technoelite sought to leave the confines of the body for “an opportunity to feel a psychic union with others”. As a modern (or hypermodern, cyberpunk) interpretation of the word “avatar” would suggest, Avatar lets us imagine what it’d be like not only to become disembodied, only to reappear in a networked, interconnected virtual reality or cyberspace (whatever those words even mean anymore), but to actually leave one’s human body for a genuine alternative reality in which such connectedness is not only the norm, but real, meaningful, and organic.

But disembodiment is a non-ideal solution to the connectedness people seek. Because human biology lacks the networking hardware of Pandora’s life (c’mon, the pairing of a hunter with his bird is exactly like trying to pair with a Bluetooth device, complete with epic struggle), people use technology to escape their bodies and connect with others. But without that limitation, the protagonist of Avatar ultimately stops experiencing the cyberbiological world through technologically mediated disembodiment, and comes to fully embody that deep, network-like connection with all beings on Pandora.

Most people, it seems, are more concerned with privacy from individuals. Who can see my information? Friends? Bosses? Potential dates? Would-be stalkers? And what info can they see? Uncertainty (and occasionally surprise) about who can see what is what people like to call air-quotes “creepy”.

But this isn’t what bothers me so much. Although Facebook likes to keep us on our toes with ever-changing privacy settings (and defaults), we at least have some control over it. I could make my Twitter account private, could take my address and phone number off the web version of my résumé, could turn off my Facebook wall. That solves problem #1. (At least in the short term, until some 1337 hax0rz publish all of Facebook’s data on 4chan.)

No, what I find far more insidious is that so much of our data is being collected by companies in which incentive arrangements are set up not to favor the users of the product, but users of the enormous datasets that are being collected. As @librarythingtim so succinctly put it, “Why do free social networks tilt inevitably toward user exploitation? Because you're not their customer, you’re their product.”

I don’t have a problem with corporations in general; what I have a problem with is the use-it-for-“free” business model in which we all pay with our data. I don’t use Gmail, but I do use Dreamhost and MobileMe because I pay not with my data, but with cash.

I know there are concerns about privacy becoming a privilege of the wealthy, and that’s a valid concern, but let’s face it: as a service, Facebook does provide a great deal of utility. At the recently-floated $50 billion valuation, each user is worth under $100. Would you be willing to pay Facebook $8/month (which would earn them far more over the life of a customer than $100) for no ads and to have them exclude your data from all aggregation? I know I would, but I don’t know where the public’s values lie.

As close ties have become weaker and fewer [1] [2] and the concept of friendship more explicitly and publicly articulated [3], I can't help but wonder if opportunities for "girl talk" have become fewer. Girls listing their real-life girlfriends on OkCupid provides a way to articulate those ties and provide a social object [4] (the profile) around which to engage in conversation about boys and dating in general.

As not-a-girl, I can't speak first hand to any of this, so comments/discussion are welcome.

1. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. 2001
2. Akst, Daniel. America: Land of Loners?". In The Wilson Quarterly. Summer 2010
3. Larsen, M.C. Understanding Social Networking : On Young People’s Construction and Co-construction of Identity Online. 2007.
4. Engeström, Jyri. Bookmarks, Babies, Barack... and other social objects. 2008.

There is nothing more irritating than a computer trying to predict what I want. (Those icons are on the desktop for a reason, whether I use them or not. And when I’m ready to make a list, I’ll let you know.) Yet most of his examples until the end involve rooms that predict your lighting and temperature preferences and other such uselessness. But today, each of these “manual” actions represents a decision, a choice that helps us shape our daily lives. In much the same way Twitter informs through awareness of the routine, our lives are shaped by the performance of the routine. Everyware threatens to deny us the everyday decisions and circumstances that make life interesting. As Malcolm McCullough once said, “I have an active role in programming the thermalscape of my domestic scene.” Likewise, though only acknowledged briefly in a footnote, everyware also has the potential to deny us the serendipitous interactions that break up everyday monotony at least, and open opportunities at most.

Not until the end of the book, perhaps feeling a little defensive after enumerating many flaws and potential hazards of everyware, does Greenfield provide useful examples of ubiquitous computing. I hope that whatever comes of this, it does not annoy, does not surveil, and does not further alienate the “users”.

For those of you who may not know, I’m a bit of a weather nerd, so when a tornado watch went up Friday afternoon, I was pretty excited. After taking Bubby out to dinner, I put on a movie (Fiddler on the Roof, just to be stereotypical), but, of course, I had to keep abreast of any potentially severe weather conditions. Out of this came my favorite interaction of the whole weekend.

As we were watching the movie, I pulled out my iPhone to check the latest watch/warning/advisory and mesoscale discussion issues from the Storm Prediction Center, the latest statements from the local National Weather Service office, and, of course, radar. I explained to Bubby that I was checking the weather, at which point she simply looked out the window, listened to a peal of thunder, and shrugged her shoulders, saying, “It’s bad,” as if to say What do you want to do about it?.

And that, to me, is representative of the difference between my data-driven generation and previous generations. On one hand, having data can be both insightful and actionable. But on the other hand, is our reliance on sensors, data, and computer modeling enabling our detachment from the observable world? What has been gained — and what has been lost — by my getting weather data that was collected by ground-based and satellite sensors, sent to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, run through computer models, and sent over fiber optic cables to servers that let me retrieve aggregate and interpreted data on my phone, when looking out the window can clearly tell us that the weather is bad?

Even today, the NWS recognizes the fallibility of sensors, relying on storm reports from thousands of trained weather spotters, most of whom use amateur radio, a technology that probably deserves its own blog post for its incredible power despite — and because — it does not rely on any large communications infrastructure.

To be sure, forecasting saves many lives. But was forecasting of acute severe weather events really that bad before humans had even urbanized? I heard it said on the BBC the other day that at one time, some people could tell what species a tree belonged to just by listening to the wind rustling its leaves. I bet those people knew when a storm was coming, too.