How The Internet is Killing Intimacy

George Strait sings a song called “Check Yes or No.” It is about passing notes in class, back in third grade. Part of the lyric goes like this:

"Do you love me? Do you want to be my friend? . . .

If you want to, I think this is how love goes,

Check yes or no.”

I remember my own embarrassment when my mother discovered my fifth-grade “list of the cutest girls in class.”  And then there was the summer when I made my normal visit to my Uncle Paul’s farm. This time I was tragically separated from my first “real girl friend.” I would scan the horizon looking for the dust cloud raised by the mail carrier’s truck. Upon spying it, I would leap upon my bike and pedal furiously down the seemingly endless lane to the mailbox. All the while humming the Marvelette’s refrain - “Please, please, Mr.Postman. Look and see. Is there a letter in your bag for me?”

That was the way love went back in those innocent days before the Internet. Words on paper. Words handwritten on paper. From hand to hand, from heart to heart. 

And not just for love-struck youngsters.  Who better than The Bard?

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 

Thou art more lovely and more temperate."

Much of Shakespeare’s life remains unknown. Scholars debate for whom Sonnet 18 was written. Yet, they agree it was probably intended for a particular lady, or perhaps a young man. As I said they debate - endlessly. However, I’d be willing to bet the farm that he did not compose those lines with his thumbs.

In that seeming simple time of my high school years, love and intimacy were far more private concerns.  As close as we got to posting our "status" on social media was exchanging ID bracelets or carrying your girlfriend’s books to class. That was harder than it sounds. We didn’t have backpacks. Just humongous binders upon which you stacked a dozen textbooks - his and hers - and strolled off to class with what you hoped was nonchalance. It that wasn’t love, what was?

Then the Internet went public in 1994. Ten years later Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook” and intimacy has never been the same.  I don’t know who first said, “Privacy is so 20th century.”  Zuckerberg has been accused of being the source - but I can find no reliable data to convict him. So, unlike the renamed Facebook, I will refrain from simply laying that damning  accusation at his feet with no proof.  But his creation is the easiest target to snipe at when seeking to lay blame for the destruction of private intimacy.

When we consider privacy in their world, I ask my students “What do you do if you want to send a message to one other person, and be sure that the other person is the only person who will have access to that message?” The major social media platforms quickly fall by the wayside because those pages usually fail to employ even the existing security tools and hence are easy to hack. Furthermore, I learn from the class discussion, one contemporary version of the “exchanging ID bracelets” from the '60s has become sharing, with your significant other, the passwords to your social media accounts. No, really, I am serious. Next, the latest incarnations of "The Disappearing Message” applications like Snapchat get short shrift due to a campus-wide brouhaha last year that was fueled by the swift distribution of such “private" messages that were captured by screen shots. 

We eventually stumble our way to two options. The first is the most frightening, and the most common. They simply accept that "privacy is so 20th century,” and they try to game the system. I recently sat in on a colleague’s class and was introduced to what I have come to think of as “hiding intimacy in plain sight.” Her students knew it as “sub-tweeting.”  They thought of it as a passive-agressive form of messaging.  As I understand it, you post on Twitter or some similar site a message that does not refer to a specific "other person." However, the context allows a group of others - or a specific other - to understand that the message is directed at a particular person, perhaps themselves.

I was surprised that the students seemed to agree that this strategy was a variant of cyberbullying, a tool to attack.  It strikes me, old 20th-century romantic that I am, that sub-tweeting could just as easily be employed as a subtle form of flirting. A digital version of "Check yes or no" that carries the kind of deniability so important in the fragile early years of dating: “Huh? Me? Sub-text to whom? Are you nuts? Oh. You think she does? Really? Cool!”

So fun. Maybe. But still the "hide intimacy in plain sight" strategy is based on accepting the idea that privacy really is impossible on the Internet. You accept that there is no way on the Internet to send a love letter or a sonnet - or, for a more prosaic example, a private message exploring a possible new job at a different company. Every Internet message, it seems, runs the risk of becoming a public document that can be hacked and distributed to people who can then turn it to whatever intention may please them.   

The second - and to many of my students utterly alien - solution is to actually write a message on a piece of paper. Then you put the letter in an envelope, write the name and address of the person for whom the letter is intended on the envelope. Buy a stamp. Put the stamp on the envelope. And put the letter in a mailbox.  Actually finding a mailbox may be a bit of a challenge. If you have a physical mailbox where you get shopping flyers and political junk mail you can usually mail things from there as well. Put the letter in the mailbox and raise the little flag on the side.  That will tell the mail carrier that there is a letter there to be picked up. They will be surprised. If your mail comes to a bank of mailboxes - look for one that says “Outgoing Mail” or something like that. Put your letter in there.   

I know it sounds silly to provide those step-by-step instructions for mailing a letter, but a friend told me that he had posed a similar "how do you send a private message" question to his students. They had come to the same "snail mail" conclusion. After class a young woman came up to him and asked for more information because she had never actually mailed anything in her entire life.

Oh, and another thing to remember about this whole "put it in an envelope and mail it" thing - it all has to be done by hand.  Once you turn on your tablet, phone or computer and start typing you have created a digital version of your letter. It is harder to hack that kind of "on my own machine" message than it is to hack a post on social media, but it is far from impossible. Remember, the question was “What do you do if you want to send a message to one other person, and be sure that they are the only person who will have access to that message?” 

We find ourselves forced to the conclusion that attempting intimate communication in digital space is a risky proposition, no matter what your tech guru or personal teenage consultants tell you. To make a message digital is to make it public and hackable, as so many of our politicians and celebrities continue to discover. 

True love and deep friendship visit rarely. It seems quite sad to think that we live in a world where the "new normal" channels of expression for the sharing of those precious emotions are fragile and untrustworthy. That realization may, in itself, be sufficient to chill the urgings of a cautious heart. 

Yet there may be good news here, not to mention a dearly needed uptick in business for the US postal services. The purveyors of fine stationary, fountain pens, calligraphy teachers, and sealing wax manufacturers likewise may take heart. Remember the second option.  

You take a piece of paper. You pick up your pen .  .  .   

On Computers and Chess and Go

On Computers and Chess and Go

The latest edition of New Scientist [October 21, 2017] reports that Google's super computer DeepMind no longer needs human modeling to devise ultra-sophisticated strategies in the ancient Japanese board game Go. This comes on the heels of myriad laments regarding the apparent impotence of human chess grand masters when confronted with computers like the newly crowned Komodo which according to ExtremeTech [March 15, 2016] "can reach an Elo rating as high as 3304 — about 450 points higher than Kasparov, or indeed any human brain currently playing chess." No, I don't know what an Elo rating is, but I assume I should be impressed. 

The implications in stories such as these are that we should worry that computers in league with Artificial Intelligence will relegate humanity to the sidelines of meaningful advances in, well, in what? Confronting computers in board games? Seriously now, how often do we do that? Light a fire in the hearth, open a nice bottle of brandy and invite R2D2 over for a nice game of chess?

Our paranoia regarding man versus machine is well entranced in our folklore. The ballad of John Henry tells the tale of a "steel-driving man" who successfully raced a steam-powered steel-driving engine. The victory however was short-lived as just after having been declared the winner, John Henry "laid down his hammer and he died."  Incidentally, John Henry is declared by a number of local residents to have been a real steel driver working for the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad's Big Bend tunnel in West Virginia. But that is not the point. The issue here is what do we ask of our machines, and should we be worried when they do it?

Behind a barn on my cousins Dean and Lori's farm in southeastern South Dakota is a "horsepower gear." It is a machine to which 1 to 4 horses could be hitched. The horses would walk around in a circle. The gear would translate that circular power to rotational power that could drive belts that could power a variety of other machines on the farm - conveyor belts, mill wheels, water pumps, etc. Machines like the horsepower gear shifted the need for muscle power from humans to horses and then to engines. So machines are tools designed to do the tasks that human beings don't want to do, or if we chose to do those tasks, would be an incredible waste of human muscle or brain power.

Now, there is no denying that throughout history machines have replaced human jobs. The Luddites broke up weaving mills, not because the technology was inherently bad. Actually quite the opposite, the mills were so efficient that they would replace the less efficient human weavers. Contemporary robots are replacing assembly line workers in factories like Tesla's "secret second floor" where the robots moved at such high speeds that their arms needed to be built from carbon fiber instead of steel. [Wired Backchannel 10.18.17] Robots like these will obviously reduce the number of human workers who can safely and efficiently move about a factory floor. 

The point is that we have always built machines that perform the jobs we don't want to do, or can't do simply because of our innate physical limitations.  To begin to judge our human efforts by the capabilities of our machines stands rationality on its head. I will never be able to compute the value of pi to several thousand places in less than a second. And why would I want to? Can we outrun a car, even a bicycle? Swim faster than a jet ski? Hoist more than a forklift? And let's not even think about airplanes, rockets and ocean liners. 

Similarly, why would I want to play chess or Go against a computer? If two human beings faced off across a game board and one could look up all the best moves and strategies in a huge database while the other had to relie on just their memory and instinct would we consider that match a fair assessment of their respective abilities? Of course not. But that is essentially what goes on when a human plays a computer. So by the normal rules of fair play, the computer is cheating. The results are no contest. The victories are meaningless.

And that is the point. We should not lament the fact that our machines surpass us at doing the jobs we don't want to do anyhow. It should not depress us if human beings lose games to machines designed to be "super cheaters" capable of not only stealing our playbook, but every playbook ever written.

Perhaps a better lesson to be drawn from these human versus machine events is not a consideration of how we might design ever better game-playing machines. Instead we might consider a deeper reflection on what fields of endeavor are uniquely human, beyond the ken of the most clever coder. 

I am uncomfortable with the Turing test that measures the ability of a computer program to trick human beings into believing that they are interacting with another human being and not a computer. To what end? To make our "in home personal assistants" like Siri and Alexa sound more human? Perhaps. And there may be value there, but not if we continue to treat these powerful machines like carnival attractions: Guess your weight! Tell me what cup the pea is under!

Here is a thought. Rather than trying to build a computer that can deceive our notion of humanity, why not seek to articulate notions of humanity that are utterly alien to the computational power of these machines?  Here are a few that spring to mind.

1. The soul. Despite absolutely no data to confirm the notion, most major faith-based communities espouse something like a "soul." Something that has - as of now - no discernible physical properties but is essential for a meaningful existence.
2. Life after death. Another belief with no objective data to support it that is widely spread throughout human society.
3. Love. Again we have, at best, only indirect evidence of its existence. Yet love is universally acclaimed as, if not the most powerful of human motivations, then certainly among the most powerful emotions that shape human behavior.
4. Creativity. We are constantly pushing the origins of human creativity further back in our time on the planet. While we quickly utilize every emerging technology in service to our creative impulses, the impulse to create, to express our feelings and perceptions exists independent of our machines.

There are undoubtedly more areas of human interest and concern that transcend the ability of our machines to manage or manipulate, let alone "understand" in anything like the human notion of understanding. That is not to say that we cannot harness the impressive power of our machines in service to these uniquely human arenas. But it strikes me as imperative that we need to reassess the relationship between the machines and their makers and mentors. I really don't care too much about the raw power of chess or Go playing computers. I care very much about how that power is harnessed in service to humanity. I am all in favor of the technological advances that free me from the mundane activities of everyday. So AI,  please, go ahead. Find my keys. Better yet, drive my car. Do my taxes. Wash the dishes, do the laundry. Even diagnose illness, compound medicines, perform surgery. We have human mentors who can guide you in those important tasks.

That leaves me more time to write and draw and listen to music, to go for a walk. That frees me up to reflect on all those uniquely human concerns that, I'm sorry Alexa, you just don't understand. And Siri, with all those "in service to humanity tasks" on your plate do you really have time to be playing chess?

Walking the Peaceful Path

Dear Friends and Family  - 

I finished writing this the day before the horrific manifestation of insanity that ripped the nation from Las Vegas during the first days of October.  My initial inclination was to hold off sharing it with you as a sign of respect for those whose lives were torn apart in that eruption of violence. On further reflection it occurs to me that this might be exactly the right time to send it. We are living in a time when our culture, our politicians, even our entertainment seems to glory in violent divisiveness. Perhaps if there were more expressions of serenity to surround us, little bits of sanity, our world might slowly reconfigure itself as a more gentle and compassionate place. It is in that hope that I offer the following post. 

- Peace, 

RLS

Walking the Peaceful Path

A new “imagining” has presented itself to me over the last few weeks. Actually it isn’t completely new, it is rather sort of an extension of a previous mental construction. I have written before about using the image of the front porch of the house in which I was raised as a meditation device to get rid of the clutter of the day, easing me out of the waking world into sleep for a nap or through the night. 

For the “porch sessions" I employ either classical music or my favorite tracks from Naturespace along with noise canceling headphones to block the external world. Next, I imagine the porch with a host of tennis balls scattered about. The tennis balls are, of course, the phone calls, meetings, obligations, and irritating individuals that I have encountered during the course of the day. I take the conveniently available broom and chase the tennis balls off the porch chanting, “Get off my porch! Get off my porch!” Sometimes a ball or two prove unusually resistant. In those instances, I simply grab a new broom, which .  .  . well, you know, sweeps clean. 

One night, I had finished sweeping the porch while listening to the Naturespace track Stream of Consciousness. No big surprise there, it is a recording of a rushing but still sonorous stream. Anyhow, I had cleaned the porch and found myself at the front door of the house. I usually never go inside - not really sure why.  I’ll have to think about that. But this time I did.  Nothing terribly surprising inside. The familiar upright piano rested against the wall immediately to my left. The sofa claimed its spot between twin windows that faced the street to my right. The large oval braided rug where we would race marbles around the ridges covered the center of the floor. The cobblers bench with the drawer where playing cards, jacks, little rubber balls and other small games were stored, anchored the center of the rug.  Dad’s collection of pipes hung above the bookcase that sat next to the easy chair by the vintage gas fireplace along the far left-hand wall. Beyond the fireplace a stretch of waist-high built-in bookcases completed the wall. They held my parent's books. Weighty tomes with dark spines, titles writ in small letters. I remember none of them.  

But the wall opposite me - that should have looked out across the driveway to the neighbor's house next door - was wrong. There was a large door in the right-hand corner of the room, where no door should be. Even now I’m not exactly sure what should have been along that wall. TV set in the corner I think? Record player? Bookcase? Maybe all of those. But now there was just this door. Naturally, I opened it and stepped through.  

I’m not really sure what to call the space into which I stepped. Technically it was a loggia, which Wikipedia tells us is "an architectural feature which is a covered exterior gallery or corridor usually on an upper level, or sometimes ground level. The outer wall is open to the elements, usually supported by a series of columns or arches.” That pretty well defines it. It was a long white corridor, but quite dim since it was night. The stream ran along the open right-hand side, clearly audible, but out of sight and seemingly below the floor level. The open wall was supported by simple white pillars, every eight feet or so. Several paces down the corridor a table lamp cast a warm glow over two easy chairs gathered around a small white wicker table identical to the one behind me on the porch.  I could see that the pattern of "dark path leading to illuminated resting space” was repeated as far as I could see. "Very cool,” I thought as I wandered down the corridor listening to the stream. I would occasionally stop and sit down.  There must be some couches along the way, because sometimes I would lie down and doze off.

This mental construction is, as I said, an extension of the front porch meditation. But the effect is almost the opposite. The porch is an exercise in mindfulness.  The loggia is an exercise in mindlessness.  Let me explain.

The porch allows me to call to mind the irritants of the day, identify them with their unique tennis ball, and smack them off the porch, maybe not resolved, but hopefully out of sight and out of mind.

The loggia is simply a peaceful path. There are no books or magazines on the tables. The chairs and sofas are without resistant surfaces.  I float on them. The only sound is the stream. Beyond the loggia there is an occasional hint of light off water. There is the slight taste of cool air wafting in from the calm space beyond. The mind drifts untethered. Occasionally, a series of connected thoughts intrudes. Remnants, perhaps from the battle on the porch. Like unruly children, they seem oblivious to the rules of behavior that govern this space.  I arise and meander on down the loggia until I leave their quarrelsome yapping behind. The stream again asserts itself. The easy chairs beckon. I sit. It reclines. Calm rules. Thoughts drift off down the path. I am at peace.

Naturespace URL: [http://www.naturespace.org/]